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Stuff: Introduction If you play a multi-player game like Federation, or hang out in chat rooms, you can have a great deal of fun. Sometimes you want to remind yourself of the fun times by taking a capture or log file that records everything that happens to you. If you take part in, or observe, a particularly exciting, amusing or entertaining event you may wish to show the capture to your friends so they can see what a great time you had. You might email the capture to a whole bunch of people. If you have a web site you can even publish it so everyone can read it. It might be your responsibility to record some kind of official event or meeting for posterity. But if you really do want other people to read the capture then it pays to do a little work on it first, to make it more readable. How much work you do depends on how many people you want to read the capture. The more exposure you want it to get, the more it pays you to tidy it up. If you get as far as putting it on a web site then you are publishing it and should take the time to do a lot of editing on it. Why should you bother? Because the raw capture which shows everything as it happens will contain all kinds of stuff that isn't relevant. There will be people entering or leaving, people talking about other things that aren't relevant to the events you thought were fun, people greeting each other, hugging each other, and doing all the social things that are a necessary part of any interactive community. None of this is central to the fun stuff you want people to read. If you look at a raw capture you'll probably find that for each screenfull of text, there are only one or two lines that relate to the event; the rest is irrelevant stuff. But a reader can't tell what's relevant and what isn't without reading everything, or at least skimming it. People are pretty soon going to get bored with reading a lot of uninteresting stuff in order to find the good stuff, and many of them just won't bother. Besides, if you take out all of the extraneous and unnecessary text, leaving just the important parts, then it will make the document far smaller, which reduces download times. Think of the difference between the footage a film director shoots, and the way it is edited to produce the final film. Or think of a secretary taking minutes of a meeting, that note down all the relevant discussions and decisions, but don't detail absolutely everything that everyone said. Important Note I am specifically talking about captures you are taking for entertainment purposes and that you want people to read because you think they will enjoy seeing what happened. If you have a capture which you intend to submit as part of an official complaint about someone's behavior, you should NOT edit it in any way. You should send the whole capture with your complaint. Preparing for a Capture Editing a capture can be a lot of work, but you can make it easier by doing a bit of preparation at the time you take the capture. That isn't always possible, of course. Some of the most entertaining situations are completely spontaneous and you don't know in advance that you're going to witness anything worth saving. But if you are setting out to capture a known event, such as a party or other social occasion, or an official event such as a talk or lecture, you can prepare in advance. Use a camera If you plan to actually take part in the event then you will save yourself a lot of work by using a neutral third party to record the proceedings. Sit an alt quietly in the corner, not saying anything or doing anything, just behaving like a camera. Having said that, if part of the event involves people looking at something like a room description or someone's clothes, you will have to make sure the alt looks at them too. Eliminate noise Make sure you, or the camera alt, tunes out as much unnecessary communication as possible. In Fed, turn off comms, XTs, spynet notices and so on. Try not to do anything unnecessary If you're not using a camera alt, try not to do anything yourself that isn't central to the events you are recording. In Fed, don't check your planet, or hold private conversations. If you do, you should edit the text out later, but if you don't do it in the first place you save yourself some work. Editing the Capture After the event you need to do some work on the capture to make it presentable. The more preparation you do at the time, the less work you'll have to do afterwards, but there will always be something that needs attention. If you have a full-blown word processing program such as Microsoft Word then use that to edit the capture - a proper word processor has a lot of useful commands that will take some of the work out of it. Entrances and Exits When Fred walks into a room containing 17 people, the capture will show his entrance. It will show him saying hello to everyone there - sometimes one general comment, sometimes separate greetings to all 17 people. Each of the 17 people will say hello back. Fred will kiss or hug some or all of the 17 people. Many of them will kiss him back. That's something like 70 different actions, just because one person walked into the room. It's the same when someone leaves. Fred says he's got to go. Everybody says goodbye. He kisses everybody. They kiss him. Another 70 actions. That's a lot of text. In amongst all that, there might be one comment or action that's relevant to the event you want people to read about. Anyone trying to spot that one important line of text is probably going to miss it. So take all that stuff out. Be ruthless. The exception is where Fred's exit or entrance is relevant to the event, or has some genuine entertainment value. But only leave it in if it adds something to the capture. Personal Commands In Federation, and in some other games and chat rooms, when you issue a command it is echoed back to your screen before the result of the command is displayed. If you're talking or doing an action, this usually means that the text shows up twice. You need to take out the command and only leave the result. If you were taking the capture and taking part in the action, then in a game like Fed anything you did will look different from the things other people did. Instead of "Fred says..." or "Fred smiles...", the text will be "You say..." or "You smile...". Anyone reading the capture will have to constantly remind themselves who "you" is, which breaks the flow of reading about the events. It's far better to go through the capture and change all of the occurrences of "You say" to "Fred says" (or whatever your name is). This is where a full-blown word processor can come in handy because you can use the search and replace function to partly automate this. Partly, not fully, because you cannot simply change every "you" to "Fred" because sometimes the word "you" gets used as part of a sentence. You also need to change "say" to "says" and "smile" to "smiles". The way I change a Fed capture is to search for "you say" and replace it with "Fred says", then search for "you ask" and replace it with "Fred asks", and then the same with "you smile", "you frown" and "you exclaim". If you used a camera alt then you won't have to do this, unless the alt performs commands to look at clothes or descriptions - in which case you should probably just remove the command entirely and just leave in the result of the command. Irrelevant Chat In a scrolling text situation like Fed or a chat room, people get used to concentrating on more than one conversation at a time, and because there are often gaps while people type things, they chat amongst themselves. The capture is going to be littered with odd remarks that are not really relevant, or people having a conversation on the side about something completely different. Take all of those things out, unless they are witty or entertaining enough to be worth saving. Extraneous Actions If you did check your planet, or if you were taking part in irrelevant conversations, or receiving messages on a comms channel, take the details out of the capture. It is even more important to remove any private messages you sent or received. It can be quite embarrassing to find that you've accidentally sent details of your private business to everyone. It's even more embarrassing if you were making snide comments about the event! You can use the word processor's find function to search for key words that indicate a type of message you want to eliminate - in Fed, search for "comm unit" to pick up all COM and XT messages, "tight beam" for private messages sent to you, and ">" for any commands that you issued. Fixing Typos When people type in a chat room or game, they sometimes make typos. When editing a capture, should you fix those typos? Really, it's up to you. It depends on the purpose of the capture. If it's an official capture taken of an event, to be published in some official capacity, then there is a case to be made for fixing any obvious mistakes the person typing made. On the other hand, a capture isn't quite the same as a written document because it is supposed to be a record of events that actually happened. If the typo makes it hard to understand what the person was saying then I generally fix it, but I don't go looking for mistakes to fix. If you do choose to fix typos then make sure that's all you do. Don't be tempted to change the sense of what people said, or to change their actions to something that never happened. That is misrepresentation and can get you into trouble. Conclusion It might seem like I'm advocating a great deal of work, and it's true that it does take time to edit a capture in this way. But it really is worth it, because you will increase the value of the capture. More people will take the time to read it, and after all, that's what you want! |
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