Justin Achilli

Often, one of the biggest problems with communicating immersive world lore is its density. With many very detailed worlds, the developer or writer bludgeons the player or reader with a dense block of text or long, unskippable cutscene that renders the world in a painstaking degree of detail that works more as a barrier to participation than it does a gateway into an environment.

You've seen this before. You've read novels in which the events of the tale don't happen until Chapter Two, because the writer spent Chapter One talking about the gods and the perilous political timber of the fractured nations and how blah blah blah happened even though it doesn't have anything to do with the what's happening now. That's all fine and good, maybe, for the writer to know, but does the reader need to know it? Hell, no. Look at Robert E. Howard's kinetic Conan stories -- the world emerges from the details we see in the story, not from breakaway paragraphs that get all up their own ass with intricacy and detail not at immediate stake. Beautifully concise and function, and it lets Howard commence to telling the story at hand. Look at Bioshock: Oh, shit; plane crash; things burning; there's a place I could save myself, maybe. And there it is. The story begins.
These are wonderfully simple introductions to the worlds at hand. The density of information is light, which means little obstruction to the player or reader entering the world.

Compare that with, say Dragon Age's intro video that's a passive history lesson, or Oblivion's introductory prison scene in which the emperor comes down and rails at you with another history lesson. Yes, history can be cool, but in an interactive environment, it needs to be interactive... I've said all this before.

Anyway, the density of information, especially in a video game, can (and perhaps even should, depending on the genre or game type) increase as the player gains experience with the game. The more facility the player gains with the game itself, the more engrossed with the story a fiction reader becomes, the more the developer or author can "turn up" the quantity of information delivered. The player/ reader gains more buy-in to the experience the more time he spends with it -- arguably, the player or reader Is "leveling up" his involvement in the experience.

The cool blue gradient is a symbol of your comfort. Enjoy.Ethan described this on Monday as a triangle. Upon your introduction to the game or story, you're at the narrowest point of the triangle. The more time or play you spend with the story or game, the greater the density of information you're able and wanting to handle. The reader learns more supporting detail, as does the player while she simultaneously assimilates more game features until the game reaches its full density.

The red indicates your boiling rage at being asked to master all this information at once, especially when a lot of it is crap that doesn't really matter to what you're doing.The alternative is the rectangle, in which the information density starts as heavily as it's ever going to appear in the game or story. This might be considered "hardcore," as you need to know all of the game features or story depth from the outset... but "hardcore" is the antithesis of "finding as many people as possible to play your game or read your story." It's not necessarily bad, it's just a limitation on how many people you're going to reach, because that entry point is so difficult to surpass. It's harder to assimilate all the information you're expected to understand immediately, and there's not even any guarantee that all of it is applicable.

Someone might be able to make an argument for a circle- or diamond-shaped experience, in which the player or reader gains easy entry, the game or story gains experiential density through the body, and then the experience tapers off. Now that I think of it, Twilight was like this for me: Easy to pick up, started gaining unwieldy mass, and then I finally put it down when I quit caring about it because the experience offered me nothing, no rewarding density. It was the most difficult "easy" 150 pages I've ever read. And then I gave up.