Talk:Purple prose

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-- How about the word novices instead of newbies? --JdBerry - 10 Sep 2002

-- Done. DGJ - 10 Sep 2002

LeeAnnKorecky - 21 Nov 2002 Added "it is." Deleted a comma. Added a period. Made the last sentence into a sentence.

Fixed the sentence fragment created by the above author's conversion of a predicate into a whole sentence. Likewise removed "it is" in order to preserve the pattern all the other definitions follow. -- DGJ - 13 Jan 2003

I find it interesting that of all the IF games created, only two could be found as an example of purple prose. Surely you can do better. Aurora 18:28, 7 October 2007 (PDT)

I guess you mean "we" can do better. Well, here are some other games that have been mentioned on r*if as having purple prose: The Ritual of Purification, Pentari, Enter the Dark, Pathfinder, Where Evil Dwells. Probably any Rybread Celsius game. I'm not adding any right now, because I'd rather get more of a consensus. -- cendare 18:54, 7 October 2007 (PDT)

1) This is an age-old phenomenon. The original Adventure and Zork II were prime examples. 2) No, I really did mean "you" (generic plural).

Aurora 04:44, 8 October 2007 (PDT)

I agree that the Examples section of this page is far from satisfying! I also understand that being listed as one of only two typical examples of bad writing may seem insulting to the authors of these games.
Anyway, I'm not sure an Examples section is a good idea here; I suspect a consensus is almost impossible, because it's so subjective. "Some have claimed that the following games contain purple prose": "Some"? Maybe (but who, by the way?), but maybe others have claimed they didn't. (And did they talk about the entire games, or just excerpts?)
This R*IF thread: Prose style in 'Losing Your Grip' is a good example of different tastes about prose. Other links: Emily Short - SPAG Specifics of The Act of Misdirection; Here, someone accuses an excerpt from Metamorphoses of purple prose. I guess Kallisti could be seen as an extreme case of purple prose, although it was intentional. --Eriorg 03:30, 9 October 2007 (PDT)
I'm not the best person to talk about this, maybe, since I wrote a review specifying some of the prose in Aurora's game as purple! Maybe we could find some prose from non-IF that is generally considered purple (like "a dark and stormy night") and either link to or quote from that? Or, as you sort of imply, we could drop the examples altogether. --cendare 06:03, 9 October 2007 (PDT)

Example from "WorldWiki"

I found this sample at http://quest.wikia.com/wiki/WorldWiki_1:10 , part of an online CYOA that never got finished:

A heavy stone tower rises into the lush canopy, figments of light glancing among the thick foliage. A heavy shadow lurks in the depths of the tower, abandoned and aloof, inviting, seducing. Silence hunts here, and Confidence flees.

Is this a good example? I can see several points-of-interest, shall we say, even in a passage this short. -- David Welbourn 00:43, 8 May 2008 (PDT)