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iceman comments on Friendship is Optimal: A My Little Pony fanfic about an optimization process - Less Wrong Discussion
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If you think it's slow now, it was much worse before. There used another (long!) chapter between 1 and 2 which had some AI related speculation, but was really a six page Take That at Feeling Pinkie Keen. It got cut because it didn't really advance the plot.
Also, I didn't use to have a prologue. The current prologue used to be in what is now chapter 2 from the perspective of Hanna and company watching their alpha testers. I moved that scene into the prologue because a pre-reader in a previous round wondered if the way to make a brony audience buy into the story was to show some gameplay, though what I did differed a bit compared to his specific suggestion.
Do you think the current prologue's benefits outweight the lack of conflict? Removing the prologue would get the reader into the main story quicker, but I worry about not having an immediate hook.
The prologue serves an important function, so I'd leave it in. Fittingly, you've got the same problem as the tutorial level in a video game: you establish a lot of important information, but it's dull and low-stakes. It would help a lot if you rewrite the scene with a conflict. It could be in the game (you can surely have a more exciting tutorial than walking around looking at plants; maybe make the playtester settle an argument between NPCs or solve a puzzle), or better yet, in the real world (maybe the playtester is a corporate spy, or she's there with a friend who she's having a fight with, or something).
The conflict could actually really be easy: she's trying to figure out whether it's being run by AIs or not, which both explains her various musings & even lets her bring in the Turing test.
Why? Maybe a bet with a cynical geeky friend - "it couldn't possibly be as good as they're claiming; tech demos never are! It must be smoke and mirrors like an actress or really big scripts in the first level."