Quasimodo in a Pink Tutu

I bet that title brought an evocative image to mind. What does it mean?

Nothing, if the reader has no idea who Quasimodo was, of course. Nothing if the reader doesn't know what a pink tutu looks like, naturally - the image of a tulle-skirted hunchback shuffling around the confines of a wooden belfry clutching a bell rope, however vivid they might be to some, won't appear to others unfamiliar with the framework.

The topic of the moment is that framework. How do we immerse the player who has his (or her) feet rooted firmly in the 21st century into the framework of the high medieval? How does said player gain the framework, relate to it, begin to feel the lack of modern amenities one takes for granted in today's society? Do we deprive them of their Sony Playstation in order to introduce them to a realm without electricity?

Can't take away their computers, though. That's how they get to and into the game.

Such becomes the skill of authorship and immersion. Like a book that one picks up and cannot put down - The Da Vinci Code is a recent example for me. Dan Brown's pages reached from the binding and clasped inky fingers around my wrists which refused to break grasp until I fell away, exhausted yet needing to read more.

How? How does the author instill such power to mesmerize, to create and sustain momentum, to enthrall? Framework? Perhaps that, intertwined with seductive rhythm and a storyline which moves forward with the inexorable energy of the tides, provides the fuel which fans the flames of immersion.

But then comes the puzzle, or one of them at least. Books of that nature, the novel, are sequential and unidirectional. One moves forward from first to next chapter, from first to next scene, first to next tense moment in a predictable path and pattern.

Games of this nature are not sequential and unidirectional. There is no way to predict, in most cases, where the character will arrive, from what direction, having seen what rooms or creatures. There is very little room for backstory or history, and absolutely no room for telling a player how he feels about what he is seeing or encountering. To proclaim 'You are scared' is without question one of the silliest things to tell someone.

You are in a room. It is dark. You are scared. Scaary.

How lame is that, dear reader?

Framework becomes the incorporation of the known with the unknown, in photographic quality, a presentation of the quantitative sans the judgmental. We don't tell them they're scared. We provide things that would scare the stuffin' out of folks under normal conditions. We provide the plate and stack it full of pears. If the person likes pears, no amount of telling him he's petrified by them will make him scared.

Of course, if the person doesn't have a clue what pears are...