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.”
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.”