Message-ID: <3B86566E.124233B1@csi.com>
Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 09:28:14 -0400
From: John Colagioia <JColagioia@csi.com>
Organization: No Conspiracy Here...
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Subject: Re: Limited vocabulary for better gameplay?
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Stuart Allen wrote:

> Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@eblong.com> wrote in message news:<9m3ar4$d9g$1@news.panix.com>...

[...]

> > Once a brute-force solution presents itself to me, my enjoyment of the
> > game is pretty much done for.
> So how is this different to any other game where the player is presented
> with a known set of possible moves? Can you imagine sitting a person down
> at a chess board and not telling them exactly how all the pieces can move
> before they start? Perhaps in the near future when IF becomes more popular
> than chess they will introduce new secret moves for the Bishop that only
> a few people know about.

How do you know this already hasn't happened...?

More seriously, chess is a bit different than IF.  The chess equivalent of listing the verbs
would be to give every chess player a copy of some "famous chess moves" book, and ONLY let them
choose attacks and defenses listed in that book.

You can still play the game, and some people (possibly even many people) may even enjoy it
more, but it changes the nature of the game, significantly enough that it wouldn't really be
"chess" anymore.  Not that IF-with-verblist would be different than IF-without-verblist, but
the game would be significantly different in both cases.

For the record, I hate those games, simply because, when I hit a dead end, I start taking the
brute force approach.  "attack bag?"  No?  How about "close bag"?  Still no.  What if I "drop
bag"?  No good.  "eat bag"?  Lather, rinse, repeat, until I happen on the right verb/noun
combination or I start cursing the author.

Oh, and not to mention games where there are verbs which might literally spoil the game.
Consider what "The Meteor, The Stone And A Long Glass Of Sherbet" would have felt like if you
were given a list up-front telling you that "cast (spell name)" was a verb, which could be
abbreviated to just the name of the spell...and games which (somehow) use dynamically-generated
verbs (perhaps for some sort of language-barrier problem) are right out.

Again, a fine game can be written within these constraints.  I just prefer games without them.


