Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Re: disambiguation again
From: argus@see.the.sig (T Raymond)
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GV was overheard typing about:

>>OPEN DOOR
>
> Which door do you mean, the bathroom door or the bedroom door?
>
>>BOTH
>
> Let's try this again. Which door...
>

Knowing how current parsers are apt to handle this, you can look at
it two ways:

1) You deserve the silly response you should get for trying to answer
both.

2) Someone with programming time to spare could catch this and have
it allow you to open both doors. Of course, if the window is open in
the bathroom and a gust of wind blows out your trusty latern, the
slavering grue that is hiding under the bed in the other room is
going to have you for dinner. Darn I hate when that happens. ;)


> I dislike this approach to disambiguation. I think the parser
> should keep a low profile and never 'highjack' the story from the
> narrator. There are few entities in the known universe that are
> capable of breaking mimesis in a good way and a parser is not one
> of them.

I think that is less mimesis breaking than messages about missing or
not-visible items which seem to be of the sort 'I can't see that
here'.

> What about this
>
>>OPEN DOOR
>
> Your gaze shifts hesitatingly from the bathroom door to the
> bedroom door. You furrow your brow, scrub the back of your head
> and yet you are unable to make up your mind as to which door to
> open.
>

Great idea, but it'll only work for those two doors. You'd have to
have a routine that checks each door in a location for a custom
disambig message to consider this approach.

How about a location that has several doors? Three, four custom
messages? I'm playing around with a WIP that has long corridors, with
many doors. I wouldn't want to consider this idea in such a work.
It's hard enough now.

> Why not 'blame' ambiguity on the indecisiveness of the player
> character? The player will surely get the hint and mimesis will
> remain unbroken. After all, the only thing that can be gained
> from the 'traditional' approach is the ommision of the verb in
> the next input line.

This could probably be tweaked a little if parser messages weren't
first person oriented. Fixing that is a much bigger problem.

In years of working around at IF programming, I've come to understand
that there are some things that you should take time to worry about
and some you shouldn't. Players don't always think the same things
are as important as programmers do. That probably has something to do
with why compass direction is still used, and why message of this
sort are accepted with little second thought.

But this is all congecture and opinion, so I could be wrong. You may
be right, I might be crazy, but that's another story. *L*

Tom
--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Tom Raymond                        af956 AT osfnDOTorg
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