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From: "John Colagioia" <JColagioia@csi.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Object Searching
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2002 09:34:38 -0400
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Joao Mendes <public.email@anywhere.invalid> wrote:
>Hi, :)
>"John Colagioia" <JColagioia@csi.com> wrote in
>news:3d395942@excalibur.gbmtech.net:
>> Joao Mendes <public.email@anywhere.invalid> wrote:
>>>The setup is that I have a pen hidden in a sofa. But I do not want a
>>>player that goes randomly searching and looking everything to find it.
>> Let's say I'm playing "IF: The Home Edition."  I'm wandering
>Not applicable to what I'm trying to do. I'm putting the player in an
>unfamiliar environment.

I meant the mindset; move me to the doctor's office, the
local high school, or a friend's house.

>> my house, picking up anything that's not nailed down, trying
>> to ask my cat questions about the novel I found on the
>That's just the thing. You might even do that to your cat, but what about
>someone else's' ;)

Again, I meant that I'm following the "standard IFer"
mindset, where you show everything you've found to
anything that looks remotely animate.

But, to answer your question, if a cat shows some
interest in something I have, I will present it and
ask the cat what it thinks; the cat probably won't
understand English, but a gentle voice goes a pretty
long way with animals...

>> coffee table, and trying to figure out which !@#$%^& verb I
>> need to check my e-mail (the guy who implemented my house
>> wasn't very good, apparently).  I decide, because I'm that
>> kind of guy, to search the sofa.
>Again, it's your sofa. But how many times have you done this while in your
>bank, waiting to be called?

Honestly?  I don't bother to search *my* sofa, either,
unless I've got something to look for.  And if I'm on
someone else's sofa, and have something to look for
(which I suspect to be in the sofa), I'll *probably* be
nice and not make a big deal (tossing cushions across
the room), but I may stoop to the floor and look under
those same cushions.

Heck, in the bank, I'd probably go all out; I have
little respect for my local bankers...

Now, I see your point.  However, my preference is for a
game to let me make a fool out of myself and be a jerk,
rather than to be Jiminy Cricket ("my conscience," for
anyone missing the reference) as well as the narrator.
If another *character* stops me, or if I go through with
the action, and there are *consequences*, that's fine--
wonderful, even.

But I've never liked, to move to a different, though
similar, example, "Violence isn't the answer to this
one," when violence certainly *could* darn well be an
answer.

[...]
>Yes, but the player would have absolutely _no_ reason to look for change
>and/or insects, but the pen will be clued. I would have no problem with a
>reply like "the word 'change' is not necessary in this story" in that
>situation.

If there's a sofa, there's a reason to look for change.
It's an unspoken rule of the universe...like lost socks
in the dryer.

>> *Or*, you could actually fill the couch with useless junk,
>> and present it to the player whenever he searches for
>> something else:
>Eh... No, there is nothing else in the couch. :)

They don't have to be actual "things," but just names of
things that get discarded immediately.

I was actually only being semi-serious.  My point is that
stopping the player's action (in my very biased opinion)
is OK at the level of the game world ("The receptionist
asks you what the hell you're doing to the sofa, and
threatens to call security"), acceptable at the level of
the parser ("I don't know the word 'search'"), but an
awful thing to do at the "metaphysical" level ("You're
not that kind of person").

This last stinks of "here, just type in the commands in
this walkthrough, and save us both some trouble."  While
I'm sure it can be done well, I haven't seen it.

And, yes, before you ask, I've played "Photopia."  I'll
probably make enemies (from those darn Imperial IFers, of
course) by saying this, but I didn't really care for it;
I found it more...what's the word I'm looking for?  I
found it to be more sentimental than emotional, and more
manipulative than interactive.  It also came off as (not
to be confused with it being this way) pretentiously
"artsy," to me.  It's something that worked OK as an
experiment, but not something I'd like to see consistently
emulated in general.

[Note, incidentally, that I think this is the only bit of
Mr. Cadre's work that I've disliked.]

[...]
>I do like this little exchange, though, and I might use it in a different
>setup, sometime.:)

Heh.  It's all yours...
