Searching for a sense of wonder
Russell L. Bryan
looking at a puzzle, struggling with it, discovering the solution and
then saying to myself, "that was pretty logical." What I want to do is
jump up in the air, do a couple of flips and immediately call up the
author to congratulate him on a puzzle to be added to the truly great
puzzles in IF history. There are rarely opportunities to do that, and
honestly, no game ever made me feel that way until I played Trinity.
Now that I'm designing my own text adventure, I want others toave the
same sense of amazement at the puzzles, but I want to add something which
other IF is missing. There is a tendency to take monsters attacking you
and such with stride, but when it comes to suspense, most interactive
fiction lumps it all at the climcactic finish. Why not make someone
sweat in the beginning of the game? How about the middle? A good story
CAN be disguised by a facade of pulp. If I can make just one person
swear in frustration, or have someone say to a friend, "Hey, come check
this out," or receive mail from one player asking me for a hint because
"he'll die if he doesn't find out how this thing ends," then I will have
succeeded in my attempt to create the "sense of wonder" which made
interactive fiction stick around all this time in the first place.
-- Russ
Russell L. Bryan
ro...@oit.itd.umich.edu writes:
>Anyway. Chalk another vote for finding extraordinary adventures
>and plots in everyday, ordinary surroundings.
Just for the record, you don't really have to talk to the dolphin -- I
believe you only have to point at the coconut, and certainly that is an
action that would not be so extrordinary if it were your dog, right?
Well, your average dolphin is much smarter than your dog.
Yes, the origami puzzle is odd, but you seem to have accepted time travel
through mushrooms without complain. The puzzle IS intuitive, because if
you examined everything you were carrying, only one, the rice paper,
which you found folded into an origami swan, had even a hint of Asian
background. It seemed pretty basic to me, and involved little more than
applying what I know.
Now, I will admit, I would probably enjoy an interactive game without
puzzles very much, but at this moment such a pastime is impossible. The
reason that there are puzzles in interactive fiction is because the
parser hasn't been created yet that can accept any words and sentences
which you give it. Think of it this way -- if all the puzzles were
removed from your favorite game, you could walk through the entire world
in the matter of maybe ten minutes' typing. Therefore, a non-puzzle game
would have to be many, many times larger than an ordinary IF game to be
of any lasting interest. However, the parsing problem mentioned earlier
will not allow for extremely large worlds because the vocabulary would
become unmanagable, not to mention the increased number of actors with
whom you would have to have far more detailed conversations, because you
would not be limited by the actor waiting to hear key phrases -- those
key phrases are stripped out with the puzzles.
Perhaps you believe that this is too extreme an example, but really it
isn't. Perhaps you don't intend to remove ALL of the puzzles. Perhaps
you only want to make then all easier. Well, IMHO, any game which
doesn't contain at least one puzzle which will leave you thinking as you
try to fall asleep at night will be sucked dry within a day. Software is
too expensive to be used up in a single day.
What I'm saying is that the puzzles to which I refer, and which I write,
may be fantastic or odd, but they are logical in some way. They may be
frustrating, but when they're solved I make sure that there is enough
reward to make all of that frustration worth it.
Puzzles are presently a positive component of interactive fiction.
Interactive fiction could not work now without them. Why take part in
the action if you don't have to make any decisions? What is the appeal
of interactive fiction when everything is obvious and laid out before you
like a road map? I could have killed the folks at Infocom for including
hints on-line with their games! Anyway, that's all for now. Thoughtful
response is welcomed.
-- Russ
Darin Johnson
>>a lot of other people, frustration does not correlate with fun.
>
>I wholeheartedly disagree.
>
>The more frustrating a puzzle, or any undertaking in life, the more
>rewarding it is to find the solution.
Well, I guess for some people it is ok then. Generally, rather than
finding the solution, I will just stop playing the game. I'm talking
about the common case of sitting down and playing for 2 or 3 hours,
and get no further in the game and quit in disgust. Eventually if the
solution is ever discovered it tends to be something stupid (give
jalapeno to grue) or something that can't be solved because you messed
up weeks ago and don't know it (ie, rescuing the baby hungus
prematurely). I've never felt anything rewarding about figuring
things out after days of staring blankly at the screen (usually because
they were stupid puzzles with no clues or logic behind them).
All it takes to get frustration is a zork style maze. If you feel
you must put this in a game, at least put a frustration level on
the package.
--
Darin Johnson
djoh...@ucsd.edu -- How come my mind went off for lunch before I did?
Darin Johnson
>hints on-line with their games!
Oh? They forced you to read them? :-)
The only one I've seen with hints is zork zero, and it lets you
turn off hints for the rest of the game (including restored versions).
Haven't peeked yet. Although Zork Zero is giving me lots of fun
without being tedious or frustrating.
Would have been nicer to have hints in a separate data file that could
be deleted though. I gave my hint book to a friend for safekeeping
(and he refused to give me a straight answer when a later begged for a
hint on a frustrating beyondzork puzzle - although he did tell me that
I might try starting the game over, which was the correct solution)
Russell L. Bryan
writes:
>All it takes to get frustration is a zork style maze. If you feel
>you must put this in a game, at least put a frustration level on
>the package.
On this much I agree with you. Zork-style mazes can be incredibly
painful for those who aren't used to them, although once you've learned
the drop-in-room method of solving them it can be a LITTLE less difficult.
In addition, there are the Deep Space Drifter mazes. Although in general
DSD is a very good game, the two mazes, in their search for originality,
are far too tedious. The flooded caves, for example, are 100% trial and
error, and the swamp maze is pretty much the same. In addition, both of
these mazes have only ONE solution (or at least only one solution less
than fifty moves long).
I support no puzzles where no hints are offered for the solution. The
cyclops puzzle in Zork I, or the baseball maze in Zork II, are examples
of failures even in Infocom games to provide logical solutions to
problems. If I had stumbled upon the solution to the baseball maze, for
instance, without using hints, I doubt I would have caught the
significance of the diamonds regardless. However, puzzles can be
difficult and still not be obvious.
My favorite example is the metal door from Unkuulian II:
*** SPOILERS ***
First, there is a collection of small holes in the room outside of the
door. Careful reading of the descriptions, and careful examination of
the holes, will reveal that these are lasers. So how do you get through
the lasers? Clap the erasers together and the lasers are clearly visible
(anyone who has watched TV in the past twenty years can figure this out).
Then you can open the door (IF you have the labcoat and IF you have
gotten the stain out) and walk in, but you call attention to yourself by
coughing and sneezing. So how do you stop from coughing? How about that
liquid which smells like artificial grapes? And how about sneezing? How
about putting the clothespin on your nose? But they still kick you out
for forgetting your goggles. The X-ray glasses are suitable protective
eyewear -- and you're finally in.
This puzzle frustrated the hell out of me, but it was so much fun as I
conquered each step of it that I couldn't even think of complaining. It
is clever, and each portion DOES have a logical solution. This
particular game, incidentally, was solved largely while I was drifting to
sleep, when the solution suddenly struck me. Therefore, to qualify what
I consider good puzzles, I list here the three which I believe are the
most fun to solve:
1) Puzzles with solutions both logical and intuitive, such as a key
fitting a door, or a "tried and true" puzzle such as the x1-x12 cubes
from Spellbreaker.
2) Puzzles with solutions which are illogical but intuitive, such as the
afore-mentioned origami bird puzzle from "Trinity"
3) Puzzles with solutions which are logical but not intuitive, such as
the fourth floor puzzle from Hollywood Hijinx or the egg-opening puzzle
from Zork I
4) EXCEPTIONAL CASES: Puzzles with solutions both illogical and
non-intuitive, such as the "run away" climax of Unkuulian I and the
shears-and-weed trap from Spellbreaker.
This is only my own opinion, and I enjoy and welcome the comments being
presented. Perhaps tomorrow I will present one of the puzzles from my
own adventure to see what you all think of it, and if you can solve it.
-- Russ
Roger Espinosa
About that time travelling in Trinity: we could probably argue forever
that you start an irrational act (time travelling) by a fairly simple process,
just walking through a white door (that other animals are entering). And
sure, there are enough clues at the bomb shelter (the origami birds scattered
everywhere, the rice paper) that it makes sense that the rice paper and
the little girl hold some game significance, but the puzzle of "how to get
to the white door" doesn't readily connect with origami birds flapping
their wings skyward. At least, not to me it didn't. :-)
And I doubt that IF could ever really get anywhere without some *type* of
puzzle embedded in it -- I never said to make "ASCII Virtual Reality", where
you do day-by-day stuff, forever, and in exact real-life detail. Ack. I'm
still searching to understand what kind of puzzles do grab me. The puzzle
dilemma in IF is the same thing as plot machinations in writing: sure, there's
usually an easy way to resolve everything, but then there's no story. The
sense of wonder I'd kill to implement is the kind that seems important
to advance the story, but is subtle enough that you don't see "PUZZLE"
written all over it. I'm not sure I could give examples one way or the
other...I *am* hoping that going through LTOI's less-sci-fi-type stories
(and less fantasy-type stories) will give me a better clue.
Roger
David Librik
>>>Can do with a lot less of this, thank you. To me, and hopefully
>>>a lot of other people, frustration does not correlate with fun.
>>
>>I wholeheartedly disagree.
>>
>>The more frustrating a puzzle, or any undertaking in life, the more
>>rewarding it is to find the solution.
>Well, I guess for some people it is ok then. Generally, rather than
>finding the solution, I will just stop playing the game. I'm talking
>about the common case of sitting down and playing for 2 or 3 hours,
>and get no further in the game and quit in disgust. Eventually if the
>solution is ever discovered it tends to be something stupid (give
>jalapeno to grue) or something that can't be solved because you messed
>up weeks ago and don't know it (ie, rescuing the baby hungus
>prematurely). I've never felt anything rewarding about figuring
>things out after days of staring blankly at the screen ...
HURRAH! I'm not the only person who feels that way. I don't like
frustration at all! I realize that puzzles are the only way we have to
keep people from discovering the whole game, and giving some point to gameplay,
but I don't play Adventures in order to bang my head against really tough
problems. That's why the Babel Fish puzzle was fun -- you made progress,
you went somewhere. Just trying things over and over and having nothing work
for hours isn't fun at all. (And yeah, Russ, I feel the same way in real
life: I like to be doing things. Remember that, in Physics, just pushing
against a wall isn't considered "Work" unless you're moving the wall. Same
principle for Adventures.) What I like in an Adventure game is the setting,
and the way you can work with stuff and get results. You cause interesting
things to happen by manipulating objects in locations: what I tend to think
of as "Adventure Physics". Cause and effect. (You have an axe, there's a
tree, you can chop down the tree. The tree falls across the street, a car
smashes into it. Now you can cross the street in safety.)
I don't know about you all, but I loved ZORK 1, and hated ZORK 2. The first
one was incredibly cool to explore, and was full of neat objects -- the Dam,
floating down the river, the grate covered by leaves, the whole geography.
The second was where all the "oo, you think you're such a great Adventurer,
solve this! ha ha ha!" puzzles went. The Bank of Zork, the Baseball maze,
the Carousel room -- they weren't fun, they were just Real Tough.
I'll be heretical here and say: I like mazes. I know how to map a maze,
and so it's just a matter of time and making progress before you discover
the maze's secrets. It makes you feel like you are doing something --
methodically exploring somewhere. I used to play these TRS-80 games called
"Asylum" or "Labyrinth", which were Adventures set in huge, complex mazes.
Most of the game consisted of mapping and exploring these gigantic and unreal
networks of passages. It was loads of fun and I still have the several-page
maps I painstakingly assembled. (What you found in the mazes was just as cool,
of course: the Hall of Twenty Doors, a drag strip, an axe murderer, falling
pianos, and some very odd games with the nature of Time and Space.) There
were plenty of puzzles, but they didn't count on the puzzles to make the game
worth the price (which, at $15, guaranteed you at least three weeks of
continuous play.)
Argumentatively,
David Librik
lib...@cory.Berkeley.edu
Greg Ewing
Realistic vs. fantastic settings: Seems to me it doesn't matter
as long as there is a certain amount of internal consistency.
A universe where anything can happen doesn't make for good stories.
There need to be some restrictions, and those restrictions have to
be logical. In this regard, a fantasy-based adventure is probably
harder to create because there is more for the author to invent.
Using the computer better: One way is to make the games less linear,
less preprogrammed. In a typical adventure game, the player can't
do anything useful that the author hasn't thought of in advance.
Most puzzles have a single "right" solution which must
be deduced or guessed, and nothing else can possibly work.
E.g. getting through a locked door typically involves finding the
right key to unlock it.
In real life, faced with a locked door, there are many courses of
action available such as picking the lock, kicking the door,
removing the hinge pins, attacking it with an axe, etc. which are
perfectly feasible ways of addressing the problem.
I'd like to see an adventure system that *really* allowed you to
use your intellect to find novel solutions to problems, rather
than pre-arranged solutions to puzzles.
Such a game becomes more of a simulation, of course, and opens
up a whole canning factory of worms, as the discussions about
"naive physics" etc. show!
It would certainly deserve the title "interactive", though...
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, Canterbury Univ., Christchurch, New Zealand
Internet: gr...@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------
Spearnet: gr...@nz.ac.canterbury.cosc | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a
Telecom: +64 3 667 001 x6367 | wholly-owned subsidiary of Japan Inc.
Russell L. Bryan
gr...@huia.canterbury.ac.nz writes:
>In real life, faced with a locked door, there are many courses of
>action available such as picking the lock, kicking the door,
>removing the hinge pins, attacking it with an axe, etc. which are
>perfectly feasible ways of addressing the problem.
This is a tough one, because yes, these are all perfectly logical ways to
open a door. The programmer's standard solution to preventing this is to
make the door too heavy to kick or to preach on the immorality of
destroying such a beautiful door. Personally, I just wouldn't put an axe
in the game.
When my game is finally finished, I will welcome my beta-testers to
suggest ANY solutions which are not implemented in the adventure. These
solutions WILL BE implemented before the game is released. In fact, I
want to start listing my puzzles HERE and NOW, to see if all of you will
make suggestions, but that would make the game worthless in the end.
However, here's a taste for you all to comment on (keep in mind that this
takes place in the 30th anniversay, and some of the ridiculous objects
are MEANT to be ridiculous. The following description is NOT verbatim.):
--
You are looking down yet another deep chasm, with a river of lava
bubbling far below (by this point of the game, you've probably seen
enough lava to scrap your vacation plans to the volcano planet of
Bubblyhotrock Centauri). A rope spans the chasm from just above the
entryway here to just above the entryway of an opening at the other side
of the chasm. On the other side of the chasm is a carriage of some sort.
There is a lever on the wall.
--
Now, examining the chasm more closely reveals another cave about seventy
feet down the cliff face on the other side. Examining the rope reveals
it to be about a hundred feet long. The player decides to cross the
chasm on the rope, requiring that he goes hand-over-hand and that he
drops everything that can not fit in his utility belt. If he attempts to
cross all the way to the carriage in this manner, he finds that the
carriage has no windows -- he will have to climb on top of it. If he
climbs on top of it, the carriage overbalances and swings him right off
the side and into the river. If (after restoring) he climbs part of the
rope and then cuts it (with the knife which fits in his utility belt),
then if he has gone thirty feet across the rope he will swing right into
the cave, and the carriage will come down with him, landing on the cave's
ledge. If he cuts the rope at any other length, he swings safely to the
wall only to have the carriage land on his head from above. That is only
the first part -- I haven't even gotten around to how he gets back.
OK, it's yours to cut apart. What's the verdict on this puzzle?
-- Russ
Darren Giles
>When my game is finally finished, I will welcome my beta-testers to
>suggest ANY solutions which are not implemented in the adventure. These
>solutions WILL BE implemented before the game is released. In fact, I
>want to start listing my puzzles HERE and NOW
Okay, I'll bite.
> You are looking down yet another deep chasm, with a river of lava
> bubbling far below (by this point of the game, you've probably seen
> enough lava to scrap your vacation plans to the volcano planet of
> Bubblyhotrock Centauri). A rope spans the chasm from just above the
> entryway here to just above the entryway of an opening at the other side
> of the chasm. On the other side of the chasm is a carriage of some sort.
Attached to the rope, I gather... More detail on the carriage & attachment
would be very helpful.
> There is a lever on the wall.
Does it do anything?
>If he climbs on top of it, the carriage overbalances and swings him right off
Why? Presumably it's hanging from the rope; if he could get this far hand-
over-hand, what's to say he can't keep holding onto the rope that the
carriage hangs from? [Or perhaps I don't have a good enough image of the
carriage to know why this is impossible.]
> If... he climbs part of the rope and then cuts it... then if he has gone
> thirty feet across the rope he will swing right into the cave
Unhurt by the 70' plummet? Players might rule this out as "surely lethal
even if allowed"
Also, it is necessary to allow for all other objects that could be brought
to this location. For example, if I had a 80+ foot rope, I might try tieing
it to the first rope just before the carriage, climbing down it, and then
swinging until I reached the ledge. I might also try to use the knife or
other tool to release the carriage from the rope so I could get past it.
To be fair, I haven't seen many games that are as realistic (or even
plausible) as I'd like. I find the "you can't do X because I don't understand
it / the author didn't think of it / you just can't" syndrome to be the #1
problem in adventure games. Frustration in that department is the main reason
I don't play many of 'em.
Best of luck in your adventure!
- Darren "no nickname" Giles
Russell L. Bryan
>> You are looking down yet another deep chasm, with a river of lava
>> bubbling far below (by this point of the game, you've probably seen
>> enough lava to scrap your vacation plans to the volcano planet of
>> Bubblyhotrock Centauri). A rope spans the chasm from just above the
>> entryway here to just above the entryway of an opening at the other
side
>> of the chasm. On the other side of the chasm is a carriage of some
sort.
>Attached to the rope, I gather... More detail on the carriage &
attachment
>would be very helpful.
As was mentioned in the post, this is not verbatim. More detail IS
available, of course, if you take the trouble to look at the carriage or
the attachment. For your own info, you have to guess about the inside of
the carriage (no windows) , but if hollow it could probably fit four
comfortably. It is made of some lightweight material you have not seen
before. The rope passes into the carriage through a small hole about a
foot below the roof of the carriage. You assume that the rope continues
through the carriage to the other side, and that the carriage is somehow
suspended by the rope.
>> There is a lever on the wall.
>Does it do anything?
No. A lot of things in the adventure don't work because the place hasn't
been visited for at least a century.
>>If he climbs on top of it, the carriage overbalances and swings him
right off
>Why? Presumably it's hanging from the rope; if he could get this far
hand-
>over-hand, what's to say he can't keep holding onto the rope that the
>carriage hangs from? [Or perhaps I don't have a good enough image of the
>carriage to know why this is impossible.]
See description of the carriage above.
>> If... he climbs part of the rope and then cuts it... then if he has
gone
>> thirty feet across the rope he will swing right into the cave
>Unhurt by the 70' plummet? Players might rule this out as "surely lethal
>even if allowed"
I neglected to mention that gravity on this planet is lower than on Earth
by nearly a factor of two. The cave is actually a balcony for a very
comfortable bedroom, and your fall is easily broken by cushions / bed.
The carriage is pretty strong, but is quite dented from impacting with
the rock ledge.
>Also, it is necessary to allow for all other objects that could be
brought
>to this location. For example, if I had a 80+ foot rope, I might try
tieing
>it to the first rope just before the carriage, climbing down it, and then
>swinging until I reached the ledge. I might also try to use the knife or
>other tool to release the carriage from the rope so I could get past it.
Actually, you have a 50 foot rope. That doesn't cut it. I can't
envision in my head a way to cut the carriage loose without cutting
yourself loose, as well. Well, there is ONE way -- your 50 foot rope
tied around your waist, the other tied to a protrusion (which does not
EXIST) in the rock wall, then slice away, but you wouldn't be able to get
back -- you need about sixty-six feet of the ninety-six feet you cut away.
Phil Goetz
>Now, I will admit, I would probably enjoy an interactive game without
>puzzles very much, but at this moment such a pastime is impossible. The
>reason that there are puzzles in interactive fiction is because the
>parser hasn't been created yet that can accept any words and sentences
>which you give it. Think of it this way -- if all the puzzles were
>removed from your favorite game, you could walk through the entire world
>in the matter of maybe ten minutes' typing. Therefore, a non-puzzle game
>would have to be many, many times larger than an ordinary IF game to be
>of any lasting interest. However, the parsing problem mentioned earlier
>will not allow for extremely large worlds because the vocabulary would
>become unmanagable, not to mention the increased number of actors with
>whom you would have to have far more detailed conversations, because you
>would not be limited by the actor waiting to hear key phrases -- those
>key phrases are stripped out with the puzzles.
Well, let me throw a bit of heresy at you which I believe: Parsing is not
a problem for adventure programs.
I don't have much data here to support my view. I am presenting an opinion
based on years of struggling with parsers, knowledge rep, and reasoning,
especially studying CASSIE, the "cognitive agent" of the SNePS system (basically
a dialogue program).
If you take stories, instructions,
conversations, etc., and try to get a computer program to "understand" (i.e.
answer questions about) them, you will find you get stuck on almost every
sentence because you don't know exactly what information is being conveyed,
or how to represent it.
In reference to the above post:
1. Vocabulary. This is not a technical problem. You could have every
word in the English language in your game's vocabulary and still have no
noticeable delay looking each word in a sentence up, provided you use
intelligent methods for searching the lexicon (the most basic of which,
binary search, requires time lg(# of words)). Size of the lexicon becomes
unwieldy much slower than size of the world representation does.
2. Conversation. This is not a parsing problem, it is a knowledge
representation and reasoning problem. If you give me a good representation
for the concepts in a sentence, I can write a parser for it quickly.
Syntactic structure is easy.
The first problem is, we cannot represent most of
the information in sentences precisely because _we are not aware of_ much of
the information in our sentence. Try translating a story into predicate
calculus someday, then examine the results. You'll find some very hairy
problems that are not evident on the surface! For instance, take the frame
problem: How do you know which things change/{represent transitory states}
and which things are constant?
I am sick.
vs.
I am tall.
You wouldn't call me on the phone and say, "So, Phil, are you still tall?"
unless you knew I had an appointment with Procrustes.
(I have heard claims that Black English distinguishes between these two cases
this way:
I am sick
vs.
I be tall.
where "be" indicates a long-term state. Or maybe it was the other way around.
I don't know if this is true.) This, you say, can be resolved by commonsense.
OK, but commonsense knowledge is a knowledge representation & reasoning (KR&R)
issue, not a parsing issue.
If you say, "Two blue bugs lived in a jar", how do you represent the two bugs?
As one indiscriminate collection, or as two separate objects? What if it is
"The average German cockroach lays 1 million eggs a year."? You don't represent
1 million different eggs.
When you are given an ambiguous sentence, do you assume some interpretation
and keep hold of it till forced to revise it, or use a "lazy evaluation" method
that represents the knowledge in something near surface structure and doesn't
try to disambiguate it until necessary?
Just today I heard a man say, "I had two brothers. One died when he was a baby.
The other was killed in World War II. ... Rob was the one who lived." Rob did
not live; he died in WWII. "He lived" applies to Rob only if you can construct
a context referring to childhood and embed the proposition "he lived" in it.
These aren't even good examples.
The second problem is, once you've got a logical representation of a sentence,
what do you do with it? That is the reasoning problem. It is probably worse.
3. (You're going to scream at this one.) Adventures just don't present you
with situations where you even WANT to use most grammatical constructs.
Observe a 2-year old baby. This baby gets what it wants in the world with
2 or 3-word utterances, i.e. "Go! Get egg!" or "Want more doggie!" You, in
the adventure, are like that baby. The ways you want to interact with the
world are quite restricted. You are giving orders to a puppet.
Phil Goetz
go...@cs.buffalo.edu
Greg Ewing
Bryan <rbr...@Mail.trincoll.edu> writes:
|> The programmer's standard solution to preventing this is to
|> make the door too heavy to kick or to preach on the immorality of
|> destroying such a beautiful door.
My point is that the author shouldn't *have* to go out of his/her way
to make every other solution impossible, nor think of all possible
solutions in advance. Somehow the framework needs to make plausible
things work automatically.
Very hard, I know, but it's an example of how the computer might be
used to make the game more interactive and less linear-story-like.
|> If he cuts the rope at any other length, he swings safely to the
|> wall only to have the carriage land on his head from above.
Seems more like if he cuts the rope at any other length he splats
into the wall.
|> The cave is actually a balcony for a very
|> comfortable bedroom, and your fall is easily broken by cushions / bed.
Is this visible from outside? If not, then anticipating a very
substantial horizontal velocity after swinging in a 90 degree 70 foot
radius arc (even in 1/2 earth G) I would be very apprehensive about
attempting such a trick!
Mark 'Mark' Sachs
>brought
Might I just interject that this is probably one of the hardest things
to take into account in an adventure game, IMHO.
For example. If you give the player a ladder, say, you're just asking for
trouble. In addition to using the ladder to get up to that little hole in
the wall in the Rock Room, it can also be used to climb up and down any
short enough incline, it can be used to cross any chasm shorter than it is,
it can be used to get through the transom of a door, if you get a good swing
in with it you can damage nearly anything, you can chop it up and use it for
firewood... you get the picture. And don't get me started on what an
enterprising player might do with a coil of rope...
If the writer tries to take into account the many places where a ladder,
rope, knife, or whatever would come in handy, then it's a major plus for
the game. It's just something to watch out for.
Second, semi-unrelated point:
All deaths should be avoidable. That is -- and this tends to be forgotten
a lot -- if the adventure is supposed to have even the slightest relation
to reality, then ideally, a sufficiently observant and cautious protagonist
would be able to wend their way through it without dying once. IE, no
invisible sudden traps, no auto-death rooms, no ropes that unexpectedly
break and drop you into the Fiery Pit of Doom, etc.
I've been designing puzzles for the game I'm thinking of, and trying very
hard to avoid these senseless deaths. Near the end, for example, you must
get through an entrance hall into an alien spaceship, but guarding the
entrance is a gunpod consisting of a machine gun and energy cannon mounted
in the ceiling. Both weapons track and behave differently and I've been
working out how to subtly clue the player in on how they work, so that
s/he can successfully solve it -- it involves a robot holovid set, a Kevlar
vest, and a Lazy Susan and is somewhat complex... it's tough going, but
worth the thought.
Of course, the player will probably get killed a dozen times ATTEMPTING
to solve the puzzle, but what's important is that it is possible to figure
it out the first time.
"But Dr. Radium, was that necessary?" "Rez, _everything_ I do is necessary."
[Your blood pressure just went up.] Mark Sachs IS: mbs...@psuvm.psu.edu
DISCLAIMER: If PSU knew I had opinions they'd probably try to charge me for it.
Russell L. Bryan
go...@acsu.buffalo.edu writes:
>3. (You're going to scream at this one.) Adventures just don't present
you
>with situations where you even WANT to use most grammatical constructs.
>Observe a 2-year old baby. This baby gets what it wants in the world
with
>2 or 3-word utterances, i.e. "Go! Get egg!" or "Want more doggie!"
You, in
>the adventure, are like that baby. The ways you want to interact with
the
>world are quite restricted. You are giving orders to a puppet.
Yes! This is the reason why true interactive fiction is impossible.
Puzzles are really the simplest challenge possible to implement within a
game. I can think of no puzzle which can not be solved with simple
sentences. Take Towers of Hanoi -- the best algorithm is about nine
lines of code long, and to represent it in English it is no more
difficult than "Move A to C, Move B to C, move C to A," etc. I apologize
for my loose word of the use parser -- I've written a number of syntactic
parsers myself, and I admit they are extremely simple once the basic
principles are known. It's the semantics which can be hell, and you just
tapped the surface. Try to teach a computer to know that "the king is
pregnant" is a ridiculous premise. Try to inform a computer that when
you say "I saw the golden gate bridge flying into San Francisco," you are
not trying to redefine the meaning of "suspension bridge."
-- Russ
Darin Johnson
>in the game.
Well, if in the MUD world, or at least those with multiple builders,
someone else may put the axe in without telling you :-) That's why a
lot of the commercial British MUDs have a better reputation - a
smaller set of coders leads to more coherency.
>OK, it's yours to cut apart. What's the verdict on this puzzle?
Yikes! Wouldn't have thought of the cutting the rope part unless
there was some sort of (you are x feet across). And you won't swing
into the cave gently, probably shoot a few rooms further in. More
description on carriage. I would have thought it was hanging from the
rope (like a funicular), making it very difficult for it to tip over
by climbing on top.
Personally, I would have thought that the carriage was mechanical and
that pulling the lever might do something. Maybe find another rope
somewhere, crawl across, tie rope to carriage, crawl back, then pull
carriage across. Then perhaps if there are no controls inside
carriage, can cross over to opening normally without carriage in the
way.
--
Darin Johnson
djoh...@ucsd.edu
Macintosh - you can buy better, but you can't pay more!
Jacob Solomon Weinstein
>>>Also, it is necessary to allow for all other objects that could be
>>brought
>>>to this location. For example, if I had a 80+ foot rope, I might try ...
>
>Might I just interject that this is probably one of the hardest things
>to take into account in an adventure game, IMHO.
>
>For example. If you give the player a ladder, say, you're just asking for
>trouble.
Tell me about it. In my soon-to-be-released game "Save Princeton"
there's a pair of earplugs. After I had coded most of the game, I
realized I had to go back and put an "if-then" clause in EVERY SINGLE
event involving sound so that it wouldn't tell you, "The jock says hi to
you" when you had plugs in your ears. Ugh. Still, now that it's all
done, I feel it was well worth it.
I also originally had a can of glue, but I decided I just didn't feel
like programming in the ability to glue everything to everything else,
so I modified the puzzle and got rid of the glue.
This, I think, is one of the reasons why so many more people start
adventure games than finish them. It's really easy to put off all the
grunge work until the end, and then you're faced with the task of coding
in the four billion things you mentioned in descriptions to add flavor.
Ugh, again.
Russell L. Bryan
>there was some sort of (you are x feet across). And you won't swing
>into the cave gently, probably shoot a few rooms further in. More
>description on carriage. I would have thought it was hanging from the
>rope (like a funicular), making it very difficult for it to tip over
>by climbing on top.
Nope -- inside the carriage is a ton of useless trinkets and junk, all of
which is hanging from the ceiling. This provides for a VERY high center
of gravity which is only balanced when someone is actually inside the
carriage. The principle is similar to a squirrel-proof birdfeeder I once
saw.
>Personally, I would have thought that the carriage was mechanical and
>that pulling the lever might do something. Maybe find another rope
>somewhere, crawl across, tie rope to carriage, crawl back, then pull
>carriage across. Then perhaps if there are no controls inside
>carriage, can cross over to opening normally without carriage in the
>way.
Actually, the carriage WAS mechanical once, but as I said, a lot of
things are not operating (at least, not when you find them). The
carriage itself contains a pulley system, and can be drawn across from
within by pulling on the rope.
However, I may have to seriously rethink the puzzle for another reason.
I have to give the carriage a door. It struck me that a carriage is
pretty useless if it only had one entrance on one side. Well, back to
the drawing board.
-- Russ
David Baggett
>Well, let me throw a bit of heresy at you which I believe: Parsing is not
>a problem for adventure programs.
Heresy? Well add me to the list of heretics. *Syntax* parsing is
almost solved. We have principles-and-parameters parsers here that do
extremely well and can parse up feeds off the news wires in real time.
(Other places have similar things too.) Of course, they have no clue
what the sentences are *about*, but they can sure make pretty trees for
you, and they can tell you what all the lexical categories are.
No, it's not a parsing problem. And when you point out that you
wouldn't *want* to use most complex sentence types in a game,
you're dead on the mark. Purely for playability reasons, we
would NOT want to add, say, adverbs to our parser. Can you *imagine*
the following:
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
>get the book from the troll
The troll sees your lame attempt from a mile away. He laughs in your face.
>get the book from the troll very quickly
You snatch the book away with a lightning-fast jerk.
*** Your score just went up ***
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
I have one thing to say: "NOT!"
>2. Conversation. This is not a parsing problem, it is a knowledge
>representation and reasoning problem. If you give me a good representation
>for the concepts in a sentence, I can write a parser for it quickly.
>Syntactic structure is easy.
Again, right on the mark. Syntax is really hard, but it (again) is
pretty well-understood. But *reasoning*, that's not undertood at all!
Do you think Deep Thought plays chess the way Kasparov does? Not a
chance. Most AI to date has consisted of clever programs, IMHO, and
not anything like reasoning, or even a lame approximation thereof. It
is no coincidence that every major upset in the computer chess world
has been accompanied by a significant hardware advance.
My personal view is that we should be working more towards
understanding the fundamental elements of intelligence in animals, and
then see how we could go about applying this knowledge in machine
settings. Until that happens, we are left with, as Phil said, a VAST
language *understanding* problem, but a minimal (syntactic) parsing
problem.
Dave Baggett
--
d...@ai.mit.edu MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
ADVENTIONS: interactive fiction (text adventures) for the 90's!
d...@ai.mit.edu *** Compu$erve: 76440,2671 *** GEnie: ADVENTIONS
David Baggett
>a lot -- if the adventure is supposed to have even the slightest relation
>to reality, then ideally, a sufficiently observant and cautious protagonist
>would be able to wend their way through it without dying once.
Just because you saw Indiana Jones do it in the movies doesn't mean any
real person could do it. The point that *I* think tends to be
forgotten is that what we see on TV and in the movies isn't realistic.
So when we talk about a realistic game we say, "well, you *should* be
able to get past the complex maze of gun turrets without getting killed
the first time, because I've seen that sort of thing happen." But you
haven't! You only saw it in an unrealistic movie or TV show. Judging
from such things you'd think human beings were made of die cast
aluminum. In reality we are terribly fragile, and when put in any
dangerous situation (like exploring the Colossal Cave) we would
likely be smooshed, swekered, or otherwise terminated in mere seconds.
(Which is not to say that I don't think you have a good point about
making puzzles that are *potentially* solvable the first time through.
For playability's sake that seems like a good rule of thumb to me.)
Palmer T. Davis
In a previous article, rbr...@Mail.trincoll.edu (Russell L. Bryan) says:
>
>Try to teach a computer to know that "the king is
>pregnant" is a ridiculous premise.
Ever read _The_Left_Hand_of_Darkness_?
--
Palmer T. Davis ___
<pt...@po.cwru.edu> \X/ cthread. cthread_fork(). Fork, thread, fork!
Darin Johnson
>I have to give the carriage a door. It struck me that a carriage is
>pretty useless if it only had one entrance on one side. Well, back to
>the drawing board.
Door or the latch could be rusted shut. Or perhaps it is just
locked (although allow them in from the other side so they
don't spend 2 weeks figuring out how to get in).
Volker Blasius
writes:
>... Purely for playability reasons, we
>would NOT want to add, say, adverbs to our parser. Can you *imagine*
>the following:
>*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
>>get the book from the troll
>The troll sees your lame attempt from a mile away. He laughs in your face.
>>get the book from the troll very quickly
>You snatch the book away with a lightning-fast jerk.
>*** Your score just went up ***
>*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
>I have one thing to say: "NOT!"
To be honest, I can and I saw it in WORLD: some things you had to do slowly
or cautiously or some such, and it seemed quite natural to me - life isn't
just a binary do-don't. Where is the problem? Does it complicate the game
too much? To use your example, should 'snatch the book from the troll' work,
just because it is orthodox syntax? I just don't understand your argument.
Volker
---
Origin: a maze of twisty little passages, all different (2:243/50.37)
Damien P. Neil
>In article <1ea71u...@life.ai.mit.edu> d...@xbar.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett)
>writes:
>>>get the book from the troll
>>The troll sees your lame attempt from a mile away. He laughs in your face.
>
>>>get the book from the troll very quickly
>>You snatch the book away with a lightning-fast jerk.
>
>>*** Your score just went up ***
>>*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
>
>>I have one thing to say: "NOT!"
>
>To be honest, I can and I saw it in WORLD: some things you had to do slowly
>or cautiously or some such, and it seemed quite natural to me - life isn't
>just a binary do-don't. Where is the problem? Does it complicate the game
>too much? To use your example, should 'snatch the book from the troll' work,
>just because it is orthodox syntax? I just don't understand your argument.
If you give a command to the actor, you expect it to carry it out to the
best of its ability. When you tell it so take a book away from the troll,
you assume that the action will be carried out in the most appropriate
fashion, i.e. very quickly. If you get a message telling you that you were
not able to steal the book, a logical conclusion would be that the troll is
faster than the actor.
Problems that require an adverb to work are syntactical juggling rather than
logical puzzles. Now, if a clue was given at some point that an adverb was
required, that would be a different matter. However, such usage should still
be discouraged since it has not been customary in the past.
A puzzle should have a logical solution. The old game of "guess what the
author _really_ wanted you to type" grows old very quickly...
+-------------+------------------+---------------------------------+
| Damien Neil | dp...@po.cwru.edu | Case Western Reserve University |
+-------------+------------------+---------------------------------+
Neil K. Guy
>To be honest, I can and I saw it in WORLD: some things you had to do slowly
>or cautiously or some such, and it seemed quite natural to me - life isn't
>just a binary do-don't. Where is the problem? Does it complicate the game
>too much? To use your example, should 'snatch the book from the troll' work,
>just because it is orthodox syntax? I just don't understand your argument.
I've thought about the adverb thing, and I suppose it would be rather
nice sometimes to permit adverbs. But they do open a particularly
large and wriggly tin of worms. It's bad enough having to code in
everything silly that a player might do without having to worry about
adverbs as well. There's also the danger of making needlessly nitpicky
puzzles. (ie if: "GENTLY LIFT THE RUBBER CHICKEN OFF THE MANTELPIECE"
worked but "TENTATIVELY LIFT..." didn't I think the player would have
good reason to be annoyed.
Of course, I think it would be nice if TADS (since I use TADS) had a
class of words that were simply ignored. You could type in unnecessary
adverbs if you felt like it, and the game would just cut them out.
Just another way of getting rid of that irritating "SORRY, I DON'T
KNOW WHAT 'OBSEQUIOUSLY' (or whatever) MEANS." error message.
Anyway, now that I think about it I think that adding adverb support
might be complicated but could add an interesting new dimension.
Perhaps you could set up a class of adverbs that are all ignored, and
only certain key adverbs for specific verbs would be parsed. Then you
could have intelligent responses to commands like DROP FRAGILE CRYSTAL
CHANDELIER. Always kind of bugged me that you could drop anything in a
text adventure instead of, say, PUT DOWN, and not break anything.
- Neil K. (n_k...@sfu.ca)
O.J.W. Betts
bedroom ledge, why not rig it up as follows:
| chasm | ie there is one door
| | on the side, and ledges
------+ +------ which stick out a bit
| |ledge 2
ledge 1| |
------+ +------
| door-> / \ |
|------------------|cab |-|
| \__/ |
-- Olly Betts
David Baggett
>>>get the book from the troll
>>The troll sees your lame attempt from a mile away. He laughs in your face.
>
>>>get the book from the troll very quickly
>>You snatch the book away with a lightning-fast jerk.
>
>too much? To use your example, should 'snatch the book from the troll' work,
>just because it is orthodox syntax? I just don't understand your argument.
My point was just that making puzzles where you *have* to use an adverb
to get "credit" for the solution seems like a bad idea from a
playability standpoint. Can you image the player's response upon
hearing the solution? "Oh, of course, I didn't 'take book from troll
*deftly*'!"
If you never rely on the extra syntax, you might as well not have it,
because it only serves to make the player's guess-the-vocab search
space bigger. (And this is not how we want to make puzzles harder.)
David Baggett
>A puzzle should have a logical solution. The old game of "guess what the
>author _really_ wanted you to type" grows old very quickly...
>get book from troll
>get book from troll quickly
>get book from troll while he's not looking
>get book from troll cleverly
>get book from troll sneakily
>get book from troll after confusing it with the old "shell game."
>get book from troll with great finesse
>get book from troll by being very aggressive and threatening
>get book from troll by pretending to be merely reading over his shoulder
>get book from troll in any way you see fit
>get book from troll in the way that the programmer of this game expects
me to.
...
:)
John West
>>>get the book from the troll
>>The troll sees your lame attempt from a mile away. He laughs in your face.
>>>get the book from the troll very quickly
>>You snatch the book away with a lightning-fast jerk.
>>I have one thing to say: "NOT!"
>To be honest, I can and I saw it in WORLD: some things you had to do slowly
>or cautiously or some such, and it seemed quite natural to me - life isn't
>just a binary do-don't. Where is the problem? Does it complicate the game
>too much? To use your example, should 'snatch the book from the troll' work,
>just because it is orthodox syntax? I just don't understand your argument.
The problem (as I see it) is that this approach gives the character
absolutely no intelligence of its own. The player has to do *all*
the thinking, even the fiddly little details that you would normally
expect to be done on 'auto-pilot'.
Its the same as having to open doors before you go through them. If I
tell you to go through that door, you aren't going to say 'I can't. Its
not open', are you? And if I tell you to go and get the book from that
troll, you won't casually stroll over the the troll, say 'excuse me,
could I have that book?'. You're going to rush up, grab the book, and
get out. As fast as you can. You know what trolls can do if they catch
you.
If I tell my character to get the book, I expect him to use a little
common sense. If the game then tells me that it didn't work, I'm
going to try to find another way of doing it. It just wouldn't occur to
me that I have to tell the character what to do in ridiculous detail.
John West
--
For the humour impaired: Insert a :-) after every third word
Nathan Torkington
played have been reluctant to automatically open doors for you, and I
have just followed suit. But given the (convincing) argument that the
character you control should be responding to your commands as if you
had issued them via voice to a sensible human being (eg "waldo -- go
north"), any sensible human being would try the door to the north
before saying "I can't go north from here, Dave."
Do we:
--> open doors?
--> try all the keys we have in locked doors?
--> refuse to do things that would get us killed ("jump off ledge")?
Nat
--
Nathan.T...@vuw.ac.nz is the Electronic Text and MS-DOS archivist
for the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Work mail to:
[(msdos-archive),(etext-archive),(wais-admin),(gopher-admin),(roget-admin),
(compose-faq),(pratchett-faq),(douglas-adams-faq),(games-list)]@vuw.ac.nz
Damien P. Neil
>Do we:
> --> open doors?
Generally, I would say yes. Definately yes if there are many doors around --
Moonmist is a good example of this. If you have just a few doors, and you
want the player to take notice of them, you may want to have the player do
it the hard way.
> --> try all the keys we have in locked doors?
Probably not. Using a key in a door is a puzzle, even if it is a minor one.
> --> refuse to do things that would get us killed ("jump off ledge")?
"Jump off ledge" is fairly specific -- if the player really wants to do it,
they should be able to. However, the player should not (IMHO) be able to
type "go north" and accidentally walk off the ledge.
Mark 'Mark' Sachs
says:
>"Jump off ledge" is fairly specific -- if the player really wants to do it,
>they should be able to. However, the player should not (IMHO) be able to
>type "go north" and accidentally walk off the ledge.
I agree with both of those two sentences. If you really want to do something
(in a game), even if it's stupid, it should be allowed. (f'rexample, in
Unnkulian Unventure I, you can eat nearly everything. Most of it's very
bad for you, of course, but some stuff, like the Acme Dam Bounsee Basketbawl,
is actually nutritious...) On the other hand, a general statement like
"go north" should have some common sense applied to it.
For some astoundingly dangerous actions I think a confirm is a useful device...
----------------------------------------------------
You're flying just above an old, ruined castle. The enclosed courtyard looks
big enough to land your 'copter in.
> land the helicopter in the courtyard
As you decrease altitude you notice that the castle's courtyard, while big
enough to accommodate the helicopter, is full of the rubble from collapsed
towers, and two more of the towers stick out directly in the way of your path.
Are you sure you want to do this?
> yes
Mistake, mistake, mistake... the helicopter blades clip one of the towers on
the way down. The 'copter does an amazing midair 180-degree flip and explodes
with you in it.
*** You have died... ***
----------------------------------------------------
What is the net.opinion on confirms in adventure games, anyway? While they
do warn the player of some unobvious deaths, on the other hand they can almost
always be rewritten out (ie, "You are flying above a castle courtyard, full of
sharp and dangerous-looking debris from collapsed towers." If the player then
proceeds to try to land in that, they have no one to blame but themselves when
the 'copter crashes; alternatively, the computer could just state that the
courtyard is too dangerous to land in.) Nevertheless, rather than just being
presented with a message like "It's too dangerous," if the player REALLY
wants to land in the courtyard, then... Thoughts?
The Apathist
>Do we:
> --> open doors?
I say yes. If the player's intent is to go through the door, you can
be sure he'd try to open it, and he'd have a reasonable expectation of
success.
> --> try all the keys we have in locked doors?
Probably not. The clever player would likely just try the key whose
description matches the door. ("A piece of well-worn masking tape is
wrapped around the large end of the key; you can just make out the
word "garage" in faded blue letters.")
But once the player has tried the key in the door and found it to
work, I think the game should remember that it works. If the door
gets locked again, it should unlock it automatically the second time.
For a compelling argument, I refer you to the elevators in Planetfall.
> --> refuse to do things that would get us killed ("jump off ledge")?
Don't flatly refuse -- I jumped off a ledge in Zork Zero just to see
what I'd hit when I landed. But I think it's good to warn people when
a command that would ordinarily be safe is now dangerous. The player
might, for example, have lost track of what room he's in.
(Also, an undo command that works when you're dead can make the game
much more pleasant in these situations.)
--Tom Lippincott
lip...@math.berkeley.edu
"Please do not defeat this important safety feature."
Alan Mead
>What is the net.opinion on confirms in adventure games, anyway? While they
>do warn the player of some unobvious deaths, on the other hand they can almost
>always be rewritten out [...]
>presented with a message like "It's too dangerous," if the player REALLY
>wants to land in the courtyard, then... Thoughts?
My opinion as player and author is to give people the right to do stupid
things. For TADS users, v2.0 makes this moot, I believe, with its new undo
feature (supposedly up to 100 levels under "most conditions" whatever that
means). Somehow this seems the best of all possible worlds. People are free
to do dumb things (ie, experiment) and yet they won't get hung up saving their
position every five minutes.
I Mean look at the puzzle posted by Russell Bryan a few days ago. The player
has to swing 70 feet (on a .5-.6 G world) into a cave. I might hesitate
because I would feel sure that would be a sure death (or at least I wouldn't
try that first).
My $0.02.
-alan
John P. Mechalas
>Mark 'Mark' Sachs <MBS...@psuvm.psu.edu> writes:
>
>>What is the net.opinion on confirms in adventure games, anyway? While they
>>do warn the player of some unobvious deaths, on the other hand they can almost
>>always be rewritten out [...]
>>presented with a message like "It's too dangerous," if the player REALLY
>>wants to land in the courtyard, then... Thoughts?
>
>My opinion as player and author is to give people the right to do stupid
>things. For TADS users, v2.0 makes this moot, I believe, with its new undo
>feature (supposedly up to 100 levels under "most conditions" whatever that
>means). Somehow this seems the best of all possible worlds. People are free
>to do dumb things (ie, experiment) and yet they won't get hung up saving their
>position every five minutes.
As far as I know, you can't UNDO being dead... If you die, you have to restore.
I don't know if this is true for TADS 2.0, but it is for Infocom games that
support undo...or at least all the ones I have played..
--
John Mechalas "I'm not an actor, but
mech...@gn.ecn.purdue.edu I play one on TV."
Aero Engineering, Purdue University #include disclaimer.h
Damien P. Neil
>----------------------------------------------------
>
>You're flying just above an old, ruined castle. The enclosed courtyard looks
>big enough to land your 'copter in.
>
>> land the helicopter in the courtyard
>
>As you decrease altitude you notice that the castle's courtyard, while big
>enough to accommodate the helicopter, is full of the rubble from collapsed
>towers, and two more of the towers stick out directly in the way of your path.
>Are you sure you want to do this?
>
>> yes
>
>Mistake, mistake, mistake... the helicopter blades clip one of the towers on
>the way down. The 'copter does an amazing midair 180-degree flip and explodes
>with you in it.
>
>*** You have died... ***
>----------------------------------------------------
>
>What is the net.opinion on confirms in adventure games, anyway? While they
>do warn the player of some unobvious deaths, on the other hand they can almost
>always be rewritten out (ie, "You are flying above a castle courtyard, full of
>sharp and dangerous-looking debris from collapsed towers." If the player then
>proceeds to try to land in that, they have no one to blame but themselves when
>the 'copter crashes; alternatively, the computer could just state that the
>courtyard is too dangerous to land in.) Nevertheless, rather than just being
>presented with a message like "It's too dangerous," if the player REALLY
>wants to land in the courtyard, then... Thoughts?
Kill 'em! :-) Seriously, flying a chopper can't be that easy in the first
place, can it? If someone decides to get wild and crazy with it, they really
shouldn't be that surprised when things go wrong. Just toss in some
description to give fair warning.
I really don't like confirms...they interrupt the flow of things too much. I
would rather be prevented from doing some actions without some reasonably to
the point syntax -- i.e. "Jump off cliff" rather than "go north". "Land the
helicopter in the courtyard" is really specific enough that the game should
go ahead, IMHO.
Besides, just think of what the game would be like with too many confirms...
------------------------------------------------------------
You are standing on the edge of the Pit of the Demon Who Giveth Really
Cool Wishes. From the depths of the pit, the Demon cries, "I'm hungry! Give
me some food!"
> i
You are carrying a trumpet, a moldy sandwich, a loaf of bread, and a blood
sausage.
> throw trumpet in pit
You really might want that trumpet someday. Are you sure?
> no
> throw sandwich in pit
Demons have been known to do Really Nasty things to people who displease
them, and the one down there might not take too kindly to being given moldy
food. Are you sure you want to throw it in?
> no
> throw bread in pit
The Queen under the Mountain told you that you should bring her the makings
of a Really Good Sandwich to replace the moldy one she gave you. Are you
sure you want to throw away the bread?
> no
> throw sausage in pit
Good idea! You hear munching noises from below as the demon devours the
sausage. He bellows, "Take this jar of mayonnaise with my gratitude,
mortal!" A jar of mayonnaise appears before you, accompanied by assorted
neat special effects.
<< Your score just went up! >>
------------------------------------------------------
:-) :-) :-) :-)
Damien P. Neil
>As far as I know, you can't UNDO being dead... If you die, you have to restore.
>I don't know if this is true for TADS 2.0, but it is for Infocom games that
>support undo...or at least all the ones I have played..
Really? All the ones that I played allowed you to UNDO death.
You have died. Do you want to RESTORE, RESTART, UNDO, or QUIT?
> Sue the implementor.
:-)
Mike Threepoint
> restore. I don't know if this is true for TADS 2.0, but it is for Infocom
> games that support undo...or at least all the ones I have played..
Not so. When you die in an Infocom game with UNDO enabled, when you
die, you get the choices RESTART, RESTORE, UNDO, or QUIT.
David Librik
> (John P. Mechalas) writes:
> >As far as I know, you can't UNDO being dead... If you die, you have to restore.
> >I don't know if this is true for TADS 2.0, but it is for Infocom games that
> >support undo...or at least all the ones I have played..
> Really? All the ones that I played allowed you to UNDO death.
> You have died. Do you want to RESTORE, RESTART, UNDO, or QUIT?
> > Sue the implementor.
I haven't seen this before. My immediate reaction is negative: what is the
point of death if it has no effect on the game? Does this change the way
you design your game? I try to make death a bad thing: at least you have
to have saved the game, or start over from the beginning, or something.
If you can UNDO death, what's the point of combat, for instance? You'd always
win the first time through.
- David Librik
lib...@cory.Berkeley.edu
Erik Max Francis
> As far as I know, you can't UNDO being dead... If you die, you have to resto
> I don't know if this is true for TADS 2.0, but it is for Infocom games that
> support undo...or at least all the ones I have played..
I don't know what TADS 2.0 does specifically, but I believe that an UNDO
feature is very useful, but you should be able to UNDO if your actions
cause your character to die. Otherwise it's just too easy to get out of
some situations.
So you can UNDO to your heart's content _until_ you die. Then you have
RESTORE (or give up). That's the way _I_ would do it.
----------
Erik Max Francis Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt. Coming soon: UNIVERSE _ | _
USmail: 1070 Oakmont Dr. #1 San Jose CA 95117 ICBM: 37 20 N 121 53 W _>|<_
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Roger Espinosa
>cause your character to die. Otherwise it's just too easy to get out of
>some situations.
>
>So you can UNDO to your heart's content _until_ you die. Then you have
>RESTORE (or give up). That's the way _I_ would do it.
Why does "undoing" death make life any easier than doing a restore? Seems
to me that the only thing stopping anyone from doing a "save" was the slow
disc access times (and extremely limited number of saves allowed with
Apple II Infocoms, at least! ;-), which isn't the case now.
I don't see, either, how undoing a death situation gives the player any
advantage -- you've only got one more clue, and if we're about to have doors
open up automatically (which is a great idea to me; I'm getting sick and
tired of closing the microwave in "Lurking Horror," let me tell you), why
make someone retrack a game, *just* to get to the same point? Especially if
it's possible that there's a lot more backtracking to do from the point
before death, possibly.
Another voice from the camp that wants to see IF move away from implementation
puzzles (save restrictions, parser conundrums, the toils of ASCII VR, etc).
Roger
:-)
John Eras
>>My opinion as player and author is to give people the right to do stupid
>>things. For TADS users, v2.0 makes this moot, I believe, with its new undo
>>feature (supposedly up to 100 levels under "most conditions" whatever that
>>means). Somehow this seems the best of all possible worlds. People are free
>>to do dumb things (ie, experiment) and yet they won't get hung up saving their
>>position every five minutes.
TADS 2.0 has a default undo buffer of 16k (as I recall). It tracks all
the objects and things that you've changed in its undo log, so the number
of turns that can actually be undone depends on what you've done, if you
see what I mean. The 100 levels is just an approximation, but whatever
the number really is, it's still one helluva lot more than the Infocom
games which supported maybe one level.
In article <1992Nov20....@gn.ecn.purdue.edu> mech...@gn.ecn.purdue.edu (John P. Mechalas) writes:
> As far as I know, you can't UNDO being dead... If you die, you have to restore.
>I don't know if this is true for TADS 2.0, but it is for Infocom games that
>support undo...or at least all the ones I have played..
Sure you can undo being dead (isn't that the main reason for having undo?),
at least in all the Infocom games that *I* have played. An UNDO option
was added to the SAVE, RESTORE, or QUIT question in ADV.T for TADS as well.
[By the way, you may be wondering how I know so much about TADS 2.0. I'm
not a member of High Energy (although I play one on TV), I'm just a friend
of the author's. These posts, of course, are made without his consent or
approval. :) ]
Jonathan R. Ferro
> From the tinkling keys of gn...@kauri.vuw.ac.nz (Nathan Torkington):
>
> Don't flatly refuse -- I jumped off a ledge in Zork Zero just to see
> what I'd hit when I landed. But I think it's good to warn people when
> a command that would ordinarily be safe is now dangerous. The player
> might, for example, have lost track of what room he's in.
As many people who have played Loom and/or LGOP II can attest, flatly
refusing to let people dig their own graves can make the game very
boring quite quickly. I found that discovering novel ways to die in
Zork II was often very interesting and possibly quite informative. My
favorite, other than the standard trip through the spheres, was
overheating the balloon and popping out of the top of the volcano shaft
to the sight of a somewhat familiar landscape before crash-landing.
-- Jon Ferro Einsprachigkeit ist heilbar
Phil Goetz
>dp...@po.CWRU.Edu (Damien P. Neil) writes:
>
>> (John P. Mechalas) writes:
>> >As far as I know, you can't UNDO being dead... If you die, you have to restore.
>> >I don't know if this is true for TADS 2.0, but it is for Infocom games that
>> >support undo...or at least all the ones I have played..
>
>point of death if it has no effect on the game? Does this change the way
>you design your game? I try to make death a bad thing: at least you have
>to have saved the game, or start over from the beginning, or something.
>If you can UNDO death, what's the point of combat, for instance? You'd always
>win the first time through.
>
>- David Librik
>lib...@cory.Berkeley.edu
Exactly - what is the point of combat? The fact that these games are played
in a mode where UNDOing is desirable indicates to me that the players are
exploring the world and their interaction with it, perhaps searching depth-first
along a tree of possible events, and hence combat or other random-outcome events
are inappropriate.
Phil Goetz
go...@cs.buffalo.edu
Jonathan M Lennox
>In article <1992Nov20....@gn.ecn.purdue.edu> mech...@gn.ecn.purdue.edu (John P. Mechalas) writes:
>> As far as I know, you can't UNDO being dead... If you die, you have to restore.
>>I don't know if this is true for TADS 2.0, but it is for Infocom games that
>>support undo...or at least all the ones I have played..
>
>Sure you can undo being dead (isn't that the main reason for having undo?),
>at least in all the Infocom games that *I* have played. An UNDO option
>was added to the SAVE, RESTORE, or QUIT question in ADV.T for TADS as well.
As I recall, you could undo death-by-blunder, but not combat...which
makes sense, if you could undo death-by-combat, then you could just
keep retrying random events until you got one you liked.
--
Jonathan Lennox
jm...@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu