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Start of Chapter 23: Figures, Sounds and Files |
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Back to §23.1. Beyond text |
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Onward to §23.3. Virtual machines and story file formats |
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§23.2. How IF views pictures
Looking around a bookshop, perhaps half of all the books published have illustrations. The proportion may be lower for novels, but if we count maps or other occasional diagrams, even the fiction section turns out to be surprisingly pictorial. Illustrations do not suit every book, but they are an option we would like to have available.
In the cultural history of IF, graphics in text adventures have sometimes been looked at with suspicion. Mostly this is because attempts in the 1980s were not very successful, because computer graphics were so poor then (by modern standards). It may be that some people also felt that the takeover of computer games by graphical interfaces was the death knell of IF. But pictures are now rendered in superb quality by computers, and the death of IF turned out to be an exaggeration, so it is time to move on.
Whether to have illustrations ought to be an artistic choice, like whether to include a romantic sub-plot or how much of the back story is revealed. But there are practical considerations too. The most successful illustrated books are those whose pictures are well-chosen, have a sense of design to them, and above all are consistent. Consider how much worse off Winnie the Pooh would have been if a selection of random teddy-bear drawings had been used, instead of E. H. Shepherd's beautifully conceived world; or a cookery book in which the recipes are all photographed at different distances and light levels. IF writers may want to look for collaborators with a visual eye, just as most novelists do not draw their own illustrations.
Another consideration is that displaying images is more complicated for computers than displaying text. Not all devices can show pictures (consider handheld gadgets) and if they do, they may use different colour ranges or resolutions. So IF with pictures is always just a bit less portable than IF without, and because of that we must next look again at IF story file formats.