From: johnf@apollo.hp.com (John Francis)
Subject: Re: What words to use and recognize
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1992 22:27:09 GMT
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Corporation, Chelmsford, MA

In article <62856@mimsy.umd.edu> avjewe@.umd.edu (Andrew D. Jewell) writes:
>I would like to hereby assert the Two Fundamental Laws of Parsing
>
>The First Law of Parsing :
>
>	Any word displayed by the game should be recognized by the parser.
>
>The Second Law of Parsing :
>
>	One should be able to "win" the game using only words displayed
>	by the game.

        [ . . . . . .]

>So the question is :
>How can we inform users WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE GAME of the verbs and
>adverbs available to them. To force players to think about the right thing
>to DO while freeing them from thoughts about the right thing to SAY.
>

I agree with the first law as an ideal.  Most of the complaints my wife has
about Infocom games boil down to the fact that the game does not let her use
adjectives (or even object names) contained in the long descriptions of the
locations and items she finds.

For your question, however: I don't think that letting the user know what
adverbs are available is a laudable goal.  This is because I don't think
that adverbs are a desirable addition to game syntax.  In my opinion, any
sentence requirements more complicated than

      "Put coal, red book and firelighter in the large brass scuttle"

is going to turn playing the game into an extremely frustrating case of
"guess how the game programmer wants you to express the concept".  It's
hard enough already to decide what to do - you don't need to add in the
extra complication of adverbs.  Displaying a list of available words (as
is done in the Legend Spellcasting games) solves the problem presented
in your "Second Law", but this is not the major problem many of these
games exhibit.  What is far more important is that any & all reasonable
paraphrasings of the desired concept will work.  I wasted a lot of time
on one particular problem in "Spellcasting 201" because I thought I had
tried everything.  My wife breezed through that particular problem with
no difficulty because she expressed basically the same idea, only using
slightly different wording.  Her phrasing worked; mine didn't.

Finally, I would like to add one further suggestion.  The solutions to
puzzles in the game should be suggested, however obliquely, by the game
itself.  I gave up on Dave Baggett's UU2 because although the solutions
(given in the walkthrough) to several of the puzzles were each in and of
themselves reasonable [from the viewpoint of an omniscient observer],
there was no indication or hint in the game to steer you towards that
particular solution.  I don't particularly like guessing games (be it
"guess the word" or "guess the concept").  In fact, for a long while I
felt that the "right" solution to the cyclops problem in mainframe Zork
was unfair because there was nothing in the game that suggested this as
a way of solving the problem, and there were hints steering you towards
the "wrong" solution of feeding him. (It was the "wrong" solution because
you wouldn't get the extra 25 points, but there would be no indication
that there was anything else you needed to do).  Eventually somebody
showed me that there was, in fact, an obscure hint to the right solution.
-- 
John Francis                                 johnf@apollo.hp.com
with 9 cats to feed, I don't have time to think up a clever .sig
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction