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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: IF Cliches I would like to not see any more of, thank you
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Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 06:08:33 GMT
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Today's rant: the crack so narrow that you can't get through if you're 
carrying anything.

It was in Adventure, it was in Zork, and it *never made any sense.* 
Picture it, folks. You're squishing through a narrow crack. You're holding 
a lantern. What gets stuck -- the lantern, or your butt? *Visualize*. 
Very good. Your typical brass lantern is smaller in every dimension than 
my torso, and I'm 155 pounds stretched six feet tall.

Show me a hole that I can wiggle through, and I will wiggle through it 
holding a flashlight in one hand. It's just not a problem. I bet I could 
push my backpack through ahead of me, too.

A human-sized gold sarcophagus in one thing. (I won't get into the
question of what such a thing would weigh, mind you.) A flashlight is
quite another. And what about those games that force you to drop a *gold
coin*?  Or an emerald the size of a bird's egg? (Plovers aren't
ostrich-sized, you know.)

As many a physics professor has put it: "This is a non-physical 
solution." 

But somehow those narrow cracks just keep getting programmed. One at 
least in the '96 competition; one in Unnkulian Zero; probably more I've 
forgotten or blocked the memory of.

Oh, another thing. "PUT LANTERN THROUGH CRACK." It makes perfect sense to 
*me*, but somehow the parser never manages to understand it. Bleah.

Footnote: No, I am not a spelunker. Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe a 
*long* narrow tunnel, with lots of climbing, would require you to have 
both hands free. But even if this were what Crowther&Woods were 
visualizing, imitators often miss the point. The competition entry I'm 
thinking of, for example, has a "crack" which is an ordinary hallway 
door, which is blocked so that it can only be opened a few inches. That's 
no climbing chimney.

--Z

-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
