Organization: Sophomore, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
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Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Message-ID: <gf9rZh200awW5JdkYD@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1992 12:07:57 -0500 
From: Joseph S Ligon <jl8f+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: On-line Hints 
Lines: 16

Several people have commented that the problem with Infocom's on-line
hints is that questions pertaining to things that haven't yet come up in
a game are displayed and this provides information that the player does
not necessarily want.  If the game checked where the player had been and
what the player had done prior to invoking hints, it would be possible
to give the player a list of hints to choose from that included only
those things that had already been encountered.  For example, if the
game included hints involving the basement but the player had not yet
been in the basement, that category of hints would not be in the list of
hints that the player could choose from.  Each hint or class of hints
would have certain conditions that would have to be true for them to be
in the list.  The list of hints to choose from would grow as the game
progressed.
  
                                                                        
               -Scott Ligon     
