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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: IF Conventions (was Re: [Dis]Advantages...)
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Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2002 21:09:34 GMT
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Peter Seebach <seebs@plethora.net> wrote:
>Sean T Barrett <buzzard@TheWorld.com> wrote:
>>Responding to 'LOOK' with a room description is dishonest, and
>>disallowing 'LOOK' is going to be a dead giveaway, unless you
>>can come up with some OTHER reason to disable LOOK.
>
>Why?  Blind people can refer to "looking around for something".  The
>word *normally* implies visual data, but doesn't require it.

"Look for" is an idiom. If I were in a pitch black room,
and somebody told me to "look around for a flashlight",
I wouldn't bat an eye; but if somebody put on a Pink Floyd
album in a pitch-black room and told me to "look closely",
I would think he was high--or that he thought I was.
If a magician said "I'm going to do a trick, everyone close
your eyes", then makes a bunch of weird noises, and then says
"watch carefully", everyone in the audience is going to
open their eyes, not interpret it as "listen carefully."

I think players are used to "LOOK" meaning "produce a room
description by any sense means available", but I don't think
the word means that in conventional English, and I think if
you wanted to do something like the blind-player-game-twist
right you have to confront what the English is actually saying.
("LOOK AT" is also problematic.) To do otherwise is to risk
players saying "well, that was an ok gimmick, but it was really
misleading to allow 'look', effectively cheating"; I certainly
know of one player who will react this way.

"EXAMINE" is marvelously sense-neutral; it's just unfortunate
historical baggage that the "EXAMINE THE ROOM" command everyone
uses explicitly names the visual sense.  The inconsistency between
the meaning of "LOOK" vs. "LISTEN" is actually something of a
real issue in next generation libraries that handle senses
more robustly.

If I called a blind person on the phone and said, "Look around
your apartment and tell me what you see", they might infer what
they think I really mean, and go ahead and recite from memory
or acquire the info through other senses, but they'd be "playing
along" with me--after the third or fourth time I said something
like this they might get frustrated and say "you do know I'm
blind, don't you", unless they perhaps decided to keep playing
along to prove a point or teach me a lesson. But the relation
between player and PC is normally tighter than that and shouldn't
involve such "playing along", with the PC willfully misinterpreting
commands to keep from spoiling the surprise twist--not unless you
want to decouple the PC and player explicitly, along the lines of
FailSafe.

Sean
