[Ann] New Game
Ross Presser
news:32b1e61d.03022...@posting.google.com:
> The game is in french.
AAaaargh.
And it was sounding like a really fun game. Why oh why did I take German
instead of French?
28 IF
So you could play "Begegnung Am Fluss"?
Bernhard B
Ross Presser schrieb:
Because of the tons of thrilling German IF :-) I guess?
http://www.niflheim.de/inform/
As a start I recommend Gunther Schmidl's translation of David Dyte's
"A Bear's Night Out" which is in German "Ein Bär geht aus".
But hey, it's never too late for learning French!
Cheers,
Bernhard
Bernhard B
jibi schrieb:
> My first game in Inform is available on : http://www.le-kaki.com/ae/
> The file is filaments.z8
>
> The game takes place in Paris as you play Margot, a girl walking
> through 4 areas of Paris (1st, 5th arrondissement, montmartre &
> belleville) with her sidekick Jonas, looking for (in a first part) a
> CD.
> Story features then an underground cave, a rememberings mine, a
> strange aircraft company named "reality airlines", air pirates,
> unknown land, a journey in a snowstorm, a (very limited) magic system
> based on sewing, a lost station under a moutain, flying whales, a
> final round against the bad guy on the roofs of a convoy running into
> the void in the middle of a storm.
>
> To fully enjoy this not well coded game, I joined a walkthough.
>
> The game is in french.
>
> Many thanks to all the people here who answered my questions and
> helped me to finish this game.
>
> JB
>
> ps : The source file is available on demand, but I am not very proud
> of it.
I tried the very beginning and it looks like fun. At least I found
a French word which the real adventurer doesn't use ...
What I found strange is that with verbs only the infinitive seems
to work: "Ouvre le sac" fails but "Ouvrir le sac" yields "Le sac
est vide".
Anyway, I took a look at your illustrations and wonder if you are
planning a graphic novel based on Filaments?
Bernhard
Cedric Knight
Looks brilliant. Shame I need a French dictionary :)
[snip spoilery blurb for game]
Kai Roos
Maybe, because you wanted to play german games?
Have a look:
www.if-de.de
and www.ifzentrale.de
Kai
----------------
http://www.textabenteuer.de
Stark Springs
>
> I tried the very beginning and it looks like fun. At least I found
> a French word which the real adventurer doesn't use ...
> What I found strange is that with verbs only the infinitive seems
> to work: "Ouvre le sac" fails but "Ouvrir le sac" yields "Le sac
> est vide".
>
Same thing here :) I've tried "prends sac" and "prenez sac" and failed
miserably. Looking at the help I learned that I have to use the
infinitive. I assume there's a good reason for that, but which?
Admitedly, my French is rusty, but it still sounds odd. Like having to
type "to take the sack" instead of "take the sack".
Thanks,
Stark
Jdyer41
>miserably. Looking at the help I learned that I have to use the
>infinitive. I assume there's a good reason for that, but which?
>Admitedly, my French is rusty, but it still sounds odd. Like having to
>type "to take the sack" instead of "take the sack".
In IF where the language has verbs that modify, I've noticed forms
across the board -- infinitive, imperative, first person, second person.
I think the best approach for authors may be simply to accept all of
them.
My own brain is trained by the standard Infocom manual, which
suggests all > prompts have an implicit 'I want to' before them, in
which case first person is appropriate.
Jason Dyer
jdy...@aol.com
LoneCleric
> Same thing here :) I've tried "prends sac" and "prenez sac" and failed
> miserably. Looking at the help I learned that I have to use the
> infinitive. I assume there's a good reason for that, but which?
> Admitedly, my French is rusty, but it still sounds odd. Like having to
> type "to take the sack" instead of "take the sack".
Interesting to note that, so far, two people have complained about the
infinitive, but that neither are native french.
The short answer to "Why use the infinitive?" is pretty much the same as
to many IF-related question:
Because it's how it's been done before.
All the "jeux d'aventures" I played when I was younger always used
infinitive. The translated book "Ecrivez vos Jeux d'Aventures pour votre
Micro-Ordinateur" (too bad I don't have the author's name at hand) made
infinitive standard. The french version of Monkey Island 1 I used to
play offered a set of infinitive verbs.
So who are we to go against the tradition of those games we played as
kids? ;-)
Seriously, it didn't even *occur* to me that english IF wasn't
infinitive until very late. The idea of "commanding the PC" was quite
alien to me. Until then, all I was doing in my mind was describing the
action I wanted to see accomplished.
[Insert commentary about how language can bring a drastic difference in
your perception of the world, blah blah...]
LC
Bernhard B
ji...@le-kaki.com schrieb:
> Hello and thank you for your comments.
>
> Indeed, I had to use infinitive, and that for the following reasons :
> - Jean Luc Pontico, who translated the libraries into french, used it, so I
> didn't have many choices at the beginning.
> - Art of Words, the company who brilliantly translated games such as Ultima7
> (using old french) or Indiana Jones 4, took the same direction in
> translating into the infinitive the standards verb of the sierra/lucasarts
> interface. (and that's why when I am playing an english IF, I think of all
> the verbs in infinitive even if I type it at the imperative)
> - If you use the imperative, you are not really in the player. (you don't
> say to yourself : "Take the sack !" but "I want to take the sack. ")
> - Using imperative, ok! But which one? Second person singular or second
> person plural? (The narrator in my game treats the player with "vous" and
> when the action or humor comes, it talks to her with "tu")
>
> JB
first, I don't care much about using infinitive or imperative, it might
indeed be my German perception which evokes the strange feeling about
the infinitive.
In case the imperative is used I regard the actor I'm representing in
a game as my representative in the virtual word and would therefore
prefer second person singular. I talk to my buddy in this world.
A matter of taste, I agree.
But you don't really want to compare the clumsy language interfaces
of graphical RPGs or adventures with current IF interpreters, do you?
Besides that, I didn't mean to criticise you for using the infinitive,
your game instantaneously sparked my interest.
Bernhard
Cedric Knight
> My own brain is trained by the standard Infocom manual, which
> suggests all > prompts have an implicit 'I want to' before them, in
> which case first person is appropriate.
'I want to' (and 'you want to') would be followed by the infinitive.
'Witness' asks 'What should you, the detective, do now?' 'Should' is
also followed by the infinitive, not the first person present.
(Someone might protest that 'to' is actually part of the infinitive in
English, but that is a rather old-fashioned point of view.)
Now all we have to do is remember our 'er' or 'ir' or 're' endings...
CK
Adam Thornton
Cedric Knight <ckn...@gn.babpbc.removeallBstosend.org> wrote:
>> My own brain is trained by the standard Infocom manual, which
>> suggests all > prompts have an implicit 'I want to' before them, in
>> which case first person is appropriate.
>'I want to' (and 'you want to') would be followed by the infinitive.
In designing Latin.h for the eventual, if ever, _Mentula Macanus:
Apocolocyntosis_, I have been using the imperative. IF has always
seemed to me to be about giving orders to a puppet-character. If
consensus is that I'm wrong, and that I should use the infinitive rather
than the imperative, please say so. I'm soliciting active participation
from raif posters, here, and it's probably the only time you're going to
see even a pretense of democratic process in one of my projects.
Adam
Stark Springs
>
> Indeed, I had to use infinitive, and that for the following reasons :
> - Jean Luc Pontico, who translated the libraries into french, used it, so I
> didn't have many choices at the beginning.
>
> LoneCleric a écrit :
>
> >
> > Interesting to note that, so far, two people have complained about the
> > infinitive, but that neither are native french.
> >
> > The short answer to "Why use the infinitive?" is pretty much the same as
> > to many IF-related question:
> > Because it's how it's been done before.
> >
It wasn't a complaint as such. As I said, I was sure there's a good
reason. I was just curious what it was :)
And I guess the reason why the non-native speakers brought up this
point is that I (we?) don't have much experience with IF in French.
JB's trick of thinking of the prompt as "I want to" makes perfect
sense, but I just didn't think about it :)
Thanks,
Stark
Matthew Russotto
Cedric Knight <ckn...@gn.babpbc.removeallBstosend.org> wrote:
>> My own brain is trained by the standard Infocom manual, which
>> suggests all > prompts have an implicit 'I want to' before them, in
>> which case first person is appropriate.
>
>'I want to' (and 'you want to') would be followed by the infinitive.
I treat commands as imperatives, which are IIRC second person present.
--
Matthew T. Russotto mrus...@speakeasy.net
"Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in pursuit
of justice is no virtue." But extreme restriction of liberty in pursuit of
a modicum of security is a very expensive vice.
Florian Edlbauer
> >And it was sounding like a really fun game. Why oh why did I take German
> >instead of French?
>
> So you could play "Begegnung Am Fluss"?
Thanks for the plug. Actually, there is more:
http://www.edlbauer.de/textadventures/adeste.html
About the use of infinitive or imperative: I've always felt that I was
speaking in the first person, without the "I"/German "ich":
> NEHME SCHWERT
for: Ich nehme das Schwert.
I am considering to allow players to type
> ICH NEHME DAS SCHWERT
[> I TAKE THE SWORD]
in my future games.
Florian
Stark Springs
> "Jdyer41" <jdy...@aol.com> wrote
> > My own brain is trained by the standard Infocom manual, which
> > suggests all > prompts have an implicit 'I want to' before them, in
> > which case first person is appropriate.
>
> 'I want to' (and 'you want to') would be followed by the infinitive.
>
> 'Witness' asks 'What should you, the detective, do now?' 'Should' is
> also followed by the infinitive, not the first person present.
>
Definitely. It's just that the first game I played long ago (I think
it was with Bugs Bunny), had a prompt like "Tell me what to do next".
I've always thought imperative.
Stark
Jon Ingold
"Jacques" but
> he calls himself Ingmar because it sounds cool) who introduce them to the
world of
> the role-playing games. They play a little bit, (mainly doing stupid thing
with
> weak characters) and Margot creates a character with a strange birth mark
on her
> leg. The morning after, she discovers that she got a strange mark on her
own leg,
> and Jonas observating it deduces it some kind of labyrinth he tries to
resolve
> with a pen. Not long after, Margot is kidnapped by some big industrial who
> explains that computers are made of chinese food (nems make great
semi-conductors
> and chips baked in nuoc-mam go 3 times faster) (and this explains why all
> computers are made in asia) and the design of the main chip is given by
psychics
> that see "strange marks" appearing, and Margot holds perchance on her leg
the key
> of the design of the latest generation of computer. She escapes after they
had a
> chance to get a copy of the design and finds out that there is a huge
underground
> computer factory linked to every chinese restaurant of Paris. The design,
> corrupted by the pen of Jonas, gave birth to a sentient, fun computer who
calls
> itself Heisenbergamote (bergamote is a candy) and spent its time creating
modern
> art by hacking the traffic lights system.
That's !!..genius..!!
Jon
Stark Springs
Hmm... In some Romance languages (Romanian for instance - this one I
know), if you treat the prompt as "I want to", the following verb
won't be in infinitive form. In Romanian it will be in a form called
"conjunctive". I think in Latin it should be subjunctive. Maybe. Maybe
not. And then you have to take the first/second person into account.
Anyway, why not implement /both/ forms? Imperative and infinitive.
Just curious,
Stark
Cedric Knight
> Cedric Knight <ckn...@gn.babpbc.removeallBstosend.org> wrote:
> >'I want to' (and 'you want to') would be followed by the infinitive.
>
> In designing Latin.h for the eventual, if ever, _Mentula Macanus:
> Apocolocyntosis_, I have been using the imperative. IF has always
> seemed to me to be about giving orders to a puppet-character. If
> consensus is that I'm wrong, and that I should use the infinitive
rather
> than the imperative, please say so.
I wrote here on 20 Nov 01 suggesting it's much easier to use the
imperative for Latin because it's the form where the verb begins the
sentence.
I only pointed out that the Infocom model apparently says that
English-speaking players have unknowingly been typing infinitives all
these years. Graham Nelson said otherwise (DM4 p245 (2)), and David
Welbourn's Esperanto library, for one, uses imperatives; it seems to
vary with the language.
If you're playing with a dictionary (or a dictionary program I use
called Ergane - either can be done if you're dedicated enough), using
the infinitive means a bit less trouble for non-native speakers who have
to do the conjugating because it's the standard dictionary form. So, to
make it less accessible, I expect you'll want to use the imperative.
> I'm soliciting active participation
> from raif posters, here, and it's probably the only time you're going
to
^^^^
> see even a pretense of democratic process in one of my projects.
Well, why are you polling rgif, then? This isn't Florida.
CK
Bernhard B
> Many thanks, and to answer your previous question, I would like to write a
> graphical adventure using AGS (I wrote a mini-demo that you can find on
> http://www.le-kaki.com/ae/ours.exe (only on windows nt)) but not using the same
> characters.
Talking to the polar bear was really nice. Is there already more to do?
It would be nice if you could run the game in a separate window and
adjust the resolution.
>
> If you are interessed in what happens to Margot in her next adventures, I can pass
> you the 3 short stories the game was inspired from.
>
After reading the summary I became very interested. Heisenbergamotte
ensures you
don't get Bohred :-).
Bernhard
Adam Thornton
Stark Springs <st...@null.net> wrote:
>Hmm... In some Romance languages (Romanian for instance - this one I
>know), if you treat the prompt as "I want to", the following verb
>won't be in infinitive form. In Romanian it will be in a form called
>"conjunctive". I think in Latin it should be subjunctive. Maybe.
Optative subjunctive would work, I think.
>Maybe
>not. And then you have to take the first/second person into account.
>Anyway, why not implement /both/ forms? Imperative and infinitive.
Because I am fundamentally lazy.
Adam
Adam Thornton
Cedric Knight <ckn...@gn.babpbc.removeallBstosend.org> wrote:
>"Adam Thornton" <ad...@fsf.net> wrote
>> I'm soliciting active participation
>> from raif posters, here, and it's probably the only time you're going
>to
> ^^^^
>> see even a pretense of democratic process in one of my projects.
>
>Well, why are you polling rgif, then? This isn't Florida.
Oh, man. I should learn to put down the crack pipe before I post,
shouldn't I?
Adam
Simon Baldwin
Does indeed look impressive, but I'm a little puzzled about its use of fonts.
Is it just me, or is most of the game text output in a monospaced font? The
room titles and passages in italics display proportionally, but at least on
Nitfol 0.5 running on Linux, everything else is courier. This is the only
game I've seen do this, though it could still be something about my setup, or
about Nitfol, rather than the game.
Anyone else notice this?
David Kinder
It's not just you, the game does use the fixed width font, which does make
it harder to read.
David
Andrew Plotkin
> David Kinder a écrit :
>> > Is it just me, or is most of the game text output in a monospaced font?
>>
>> It's not just you, the game does use the fixed width font, which does make
>> it harder to read.
> I am sorry I don't really understand what you mean.
> All the tests were made under Winfrotz, and everything was fine.
> Should I change something inside my source file to make it more
> convenient for you to play?
I can't tell without seeing the source code, but I think you have a
"font off" command (possibly to bring the game's title) with no "font
on" command after it. This causes the entire game's text to appear in
a fixed-width font, instead of the interpreter's default font.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
* Make your vote count. Get your vote counted.
Benjamin Fan
> If
> consensus is that I'm wrong, and that I should use the infinitive rather
> than the imperative, please say so. I'm soliciting active participation
Could I please second this request? If you have an opinion
about what verb form should be used in IF command grammar, please
speak up. I am very interested in knowing what verb form
non-English speakers feel is the correct one to use. The
question that I would like to ask is, "In an ideal world, what
verb form should be used for IF? This is ignoring all historical
precedent and ignoring what is currently supported by the existing
IF systems."
FYI, below are some L10n notes I previously posted to
r.a.i-f for the Spanish and French versions of Cloak of Darkness
(for the yet-unreleased JIGSAW IF system). As you can see, I
decided to use the second-person, formal imperative verb. (I
hadn't even considered using the infinitive.) If there is
consensus to use a different form, I would like to correct my
translations.
This is a general localization comment. In English, the
first-person and second-person forms of verbs are most often the
same ("I look." "You look."). In other language, these forms are
often different (plus, in French there are two forms of the
second-person verb, formal and informal). So, when I translate the
IF command "look", I need to determine whether I mean to tell the
game what I want to do or whether I am giving the game an order.
Do I want to use the first-person verb "I look" or the
second-person verb "You look"? This question basically comes down
to the questions, "Am I, the player, the protagonist of the game?
Or, am I just directing another entity who is the protagonist of
the game?" (JIGSAW uses the second-person formal verb.)
look=regardez
If you want to see my localization files, you can find them at:
http://www.geocities.com/bfan2/if/l10n.0.1.1.tar.gz
Ben
--
To get my current email address, concatenate these three strings:
1. "benjamin_fan" 2. "_2002a" 3. "@yahoo.com"
It will look a lot like: xxxxxxxx_yyy_zzzzz @ yahoo . com
Rikard Peterson
news:9ea00d5e.03030...@posting.google.com:
> Do I want to use the first-person verb "I look" or the
> second-person verb "You look"? This question basically comes down
> to the questions, "Am I, the player, the protagonist of the game?
> Or, am I just directing another entity who is the protagonist of
> the game?" (JIGSAW uses the second-person formal verb.)
> look=regardez
But even if I am talking to myself, isn't it still the second person
form? If I decide to look at a salmon, I tell myself "Rikard, look at
the fish!" and then I look at it. It's still in the form of an order.
Using another form feels weird to me.
Rikard
L. Ross Raszewski
>But even if I am talking to myself, isn't it still the second person
>form? If I decide to look at a salmon, I tell myself "Rikard, look at
>the fish!" and then I look at it. It's still in the form of an order.
>Using another form feels weird to me.
David Hume cries!
John W. Kennedy
In Latin, and some other languages, there is a 3rd-person imperative.
But it would be awkward to use the nearest English equivalent.
> Let the mailbox be opened.
> Let the leaflet be read.
> Let me go north.
> Let me go east.
> Let the window be opened.
--
John W. Kennedy
"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly;
the rich have always objected to being governed at all."
-- G. K. Chesterton, "The Man Who Was Thursday"
Jdyer41
>form? If I decide to look at a salmon, I tell myself "Rikard, look at
>the fish!" and then I look at it. It's still in the form of an order.
>Using another form feels weird to me.
My own feeling while playing IF is that I am adding to a text,
not "giving orders". So I think writing "I want to" at the beginning
of each prompt but in terms of writing out the sentence
"I want to enter the door", not in terms of giving an order.
Jason Dyer
jdy...@aol.com
Esa A E Peuha
> ad...@fsf.net (Adam Thornton) wrote:
> > If
> > consensus is that I'm wrong, and that I should use the infinitive rather
> > than the imperative, please say so. I'm soliciting active participation
> > from raif posters, here...
>
> Could I please second this request? If you have an opinion
> about what verb form should be used in IF command grammar, please
> speak up. I am very interested in knowing what verb form
> non-English speakers feel is the correct one to use.
If you want to support input in the form of NPC, DO SOMETHING (which I
think you most definitely should), you will have to be able to parse
imperatives anyway, no matter what language you use. If you want to
accept infinitives (or some other form of verbs) as well, that's your
choice. (In Finnish, it wouldn't really make much sense to use anything
other than second person imperative, but then again, it wouldn't make
any sense to try to parse Finnish anyway. :-)
--
Esa Peuha
student of mathematics at the University of Helsinki
http://www.helsinki.fi/~peuha/
Jdyer41
> (In Finnish, it wouldn't really make much sense to use anything
>other than second person imperative, but then again, it wouldn't make
>any sense to try to parse Finnish anyway. :-)
I only know of one Finnish IF game, and it is for the Amiga.
http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/info/www/dirs/game_role.html
look for ZhandulinHelmi.lha at the bottom.
Jason Dyer
jdy...@aol.com
Benjamin Fan
command grammar is the Infinitive.
I will now think of IF commands as:
"I want {infinitive phrase}" or
"Computer, I want the protagonist {infinitive phrase}" or
"I want you, the protagonist, {infinitive phrase}" or
"{NPC actor,} I want you {infinitive phrase}".
For English, the "to" is dropped from the infinitive such
that the resulting sentences are:
"I want to {infinitive verb} [rest of phrase]"
"Computer, I want the protagonist to {infinitive verb} [rest of
phrase]"
"I want you, the protagonist, to {infinitive verb} [rest of
phrase]"
"{NPC actor,} I want you to {infinitive verb} [rest of phrase]"
For English IF, there is no real advantage to adopting this
guideline because the infinitive verb is exactly the same as the
second-person imperative, the first-person present, and the
second-person present. As a result, in English, one tends to
mentally adapt the infinitive verb to fit different verb forms
and tenses, as appropriate.
In other languages, such as Spanish, this guideline is
helpful because then the reader does not have to figure out
"What verb tense should I use? Who is the subject of this IF
command sentence? If this is second-person imperative, do I
use the formal or informal form?" For non-Spanish IF writers,
the advantage is that they avoid having to conjugate verbs (which,
in my opinion, is a difficult task).
(Drat. Babelfish claims that in Spanish, the Imperfect
Subjunctive is the correct verb form-- not the Infinitive! Are
my guidelines invalid? Perhaps I should change the IF command
sentences to read "The action that {I want to do, I want the
protagonist to do, I want you to do} is {infinitive phrase}".)
If you know that using the Infinitive will not work for a
particular language, could you please let me know? Otherwise,
using the Infinitive appears to be the best, most
globally-adaptable solution.
Thanks,
John Colagioia
> In designing Latin.h for the eventual, if ever, _Mentula Macanus:
> Apocolocyntosis_, I have been using the imperative. IF has always
> seemed to me to be about giving orders to a puppet-character. If
> consensus is that I'm wrong, and that I should use the infinitive rather
> than the imperative, please say so. I'm soliciting active participation
> from raif posters, here, and it's probably the only time you're going to
> see even a pretense of democratic process in one of my projects.
The data points that come to mind are both from Infocom. The manuals
tell you to concoct your command as if it were preceded by "I want
to..." This suggests the infinitive is standard.
However, people who should know these things have informed me that
the German translation of Zork I used the imperative.
As someone mentioned, imperative makes some sense, since orders must
be given in the imperative form (unless it's an unspoke assumption
that "NPC, do this" means "NPC, I want you to do this."
On the other hand, infinitives have the advanatage of being easier
to look up when you're at a loss for the proper word.
John W. Kennedy
> On the other hand, infinitives have the advanatage of being easier
> to look up when you're at a loss for the proper word.
That depends on the language. (Actually, it depends on the dictionary,
but there seem to be established de-facto rules on a per-language
basis.) Latin verbs, for example, are usually entered in 1st-person
singular present indicative form.
--
John W. Kennedy
"Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only
the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots
would fight a war on twelve fronts"
-- "Babylon 5"
Andrew Plotkin
> Adam Thornton wrote:
>> In designing Latin.h for the eventual, if ever, _Mentula Macanus:
>> Apocolocyntosis_, I have been using the imperative. IF has always
>> seemed to me to be about giving orders to a puppet-character. If
>> consensus is that I'm wrong, and that I should use the infinitive rather
>> than the imperative, please say so. I'm soliciting active participation
>> from raif posters, here, and it's probably the only time you're going to
>> see even a pretense of democratic process in one of my projects.
> The data points that come to mind are both from Infocom. The manuals
> tell you to concoct your command as if it were preceded by "I want
> to..." This suggests the infinitive is standard.
No, it suggests that the infinitive is easier to explain to the IF
newbie.
> However, people who should know these things have informed me that
> the German translation of Zork I used the imperative.
Interesting.
Me, I've decided that Crowther and Woods accidentally invented a new
verb form, the complicitive. In English, it's indistinguishable from
the imperative. Unfortunately this doesn't help us decide what it
should look like in other languages.
Magnus Olsson
John Colagioia <JCola...@csi.com> wrote:
>The data points that come to mind are both from Infocom. The manuals
>tell you to concoct your command as if it were preceded by "I want
>to..." This suggests the infinitive is standard.
All that it suggests, really, is that some people at Infocom thought
about it that way; since English infinitives and imperatives look the
same, I'm not sure that there even *is* a "standard" interpretation.
My personal feeling is that it depends on how you view the
player-computer interaction:
Some people (me included) view the interaction as the player giving
commands to the game. The natural mood for this is the imperative.
Some people find this a bit silly, as if they were ordering themselves
around; however, to me, it is more a matter of giving commands to
the parser, which are then interpreted and result in the PC doing
things.
Others prefer to think of the interaction as the player and the
computer cooperating on writing a text; to these people, the
"I want to <infinitive>" interpretation is perhaps more natural.
>As someone mentioned, imperative makes some sense, since orders must
>be given in the imperative form (unless it's an unspoke assumption
>that "NPC, do this" means "NPC, I want you to do this."
It would seem so, but the situation is complicated by the fact
that you can in fact give orders in the infinitive in German
(and IIRC in French as well).
--
Magnus Olsson (m...@df.lth.se)
PGP Public Key available at http://www.df.lth.se/~mol
Mike Roberts
> Me, I've decided that Crowther and Woods accidentally
> invented a new verb form, the complicitive. In English, it's
> indistinguishable from the imperative.
Interesting idea. A quibble, though: doesn't Advent use the puppet metaphor
of a lot of the early games? From the instructions (at least to some
versions): "I will be your eyes and hands. Direct me with commands of 1 or 2
words." This is at odds with the second-person narrative, certainly, but
the early Infocom games had similar inconsistencies ("You are in a cave" but
"I don't know the word 'foo'").
The impression I've formed is that the early designers didn't have an
entirely clear model in their own minds of the player/parser-narrator/PC
relationship, and that consciousness of that relationship didn't really
develop until the mid-to-late Infocom days. Without talking to the Infocom
designers this is pure speculation, of course, but the games seemed to
evolve in their treatment of the roles in ways that suggest emerging
awareness on the part of the designers. As a data point, when I played
Zork: TUU (which returns to the old Zork way of thinking, perhaps quite
intentionally), I found it jarring when the parser-narrator explicitly
referred to itself as such; it really called attention to the shift that's
occurred in the narrator's role.
I suppose you could still credit Crowther and Woods with the invention of
this "complicitive" to some extent; they might not have been entirely clear
about whether Advent was a first-person VR experience or a chat session with
a puppet, but that very ambiguity might have been seminal to later
elaboration of the roles.
--Mike
mjr underscore at hotmail dot com
Andrew Plotkin
> I suppose you could still credit Crowther and Woods with the invention of
> this "complicitive" to some extent; they might not have been entirely clear
> about whether Advent was a first-person VR experience or a chat session with
> a puppet, but that very ambiguity might have been seminal to later
> elaboration of the roles.
This is more or less what I actually think. I think.
J. Robinson Wheeler
> John Colagioia wrote:
> >The data points that come to mind are both from Infocom. The manuals
> >tell you to concoct your command as if it were preceded by "I want
> >to..." This suggests the infinitive is standard.
>
> All that it suggests, really, is that some people at Infocom thought
> about it that way; since English infinitives and imperatives look the
> same, I'm not sure that there even *is* a "standard" interpretation.
>
> My personal feeling is that it depends on how you view the
> player-computer interaction:
>
> Some people (me included) view the interaction as the player giving
> commands to the game. The natural mood for this is the imperative.
> Some people find this a bit silly, as if they were ordering themselves
> around; however, to me, it is more a matter of giving commands to
> the parser, which are then interpreted and result in the PC doing
> things.
My first reaction on reading this thread was that I agreed with
Magnus and others. I would have claimed that the way I interact
with IF games is by picturing giving commands to -- well, to the
parser, which in turn moves the little PC around in accordance.
So, basically still the puppet theory as Adam Thornton called it.
However, on further reflection, I realize this isn't true. My own
view seems to be slightly different from what everyone else has
said so far.
I believe that the commands I enter into the game are not concocted
as if they were preceded by "I want to...", but simply by "I."
I do this, I do that. I examine it, I drop it. I go north. I
look behind the sofa. I unlock the gold door with the gold key.
The reason I picture this is because the story is told to me in
2nd person, as if there is a storyteller sitting there with me.
He tells me what my situation is, I tell him what I do next.
If it were a situation where I was playing a role playing game
and the GM was sitting there at the table with me, he'd say,
"Okay, you're standing at the entrance to a cave." And I'd say,
"I enter the cave." And he'd say, "Inside the cave you see a
treasure chest." And I'd say, "I examine it." Etc.
Which looks to me like, if there is only an implied "I" at the
beginning of all my commands, they're neither imperative nor
infinitive, but first-person present.
--
J. Robinson Wheeler Games - http://raddial.com/if/
j...@jrwdigitalmedia.com Movie - http://thekroneexperiment.com
Mark Musante - Sun Microsystems
> Which looks to me like, if there is only an implied "I" at the
> beginning of all my commands, they're neither imperative nor
> infinitive, but first-person present.
The only complication comes in when you consider the parser's responses.
If it were first-person present, "I unlock the door" could an incorrect
statement ("The door remains unlocked as you haven't got the key").
This is probably why Infocom's "I want to unlock the door" is more accurate.
Considering my own thoughts on the matter, I don't think of the parser as a
puppet I'm controlling. Instead, I imagine that it really is me in the
game, attempting to do things, much as when playing D&D. The parser is the
GM (as you used in your example), and I'm really just attempting different
actions.
So I submit that it's not merely a *desire* to perform actions ("I want to
unlock the door"), but rather an *attempt* to perform those actions ("I try
to unlock the door").
In both cases, we're talking about the infinitive, so I'm not sure the
distinction is worth making. But in my mind the distinction is there
nevertheless.
-markm
L. Ross Raszewski
<mmus...@Sun.COM> wrote:
>
>So I submit that it's not merely a *desire* to perform actions ("I want to
>unlock the door"), but rather an *attempt* to perform those actions ("I try
>to unlock the door").
>
>In both cases, we're talking about the infinitive, so I'm not sure the
>distinction is worth making. But in my mind the distinction is there
>nevertheless.
Perhaps there's yet another way to look at it. While we've of late
been coming at it from the model of RPG'ing, how about from the notion
of collaborative storytelling: you and the game are telling a story
together. The narrative of the story is in the second person present,
so when it's your turn to add some, you speak in the second person
present just as the game does when it's its turn. Then the '>' has not
an implied 'I' or an implied 'I want to', but an impled 'You'.
(One might present a hypothetical in a sort of second person generic:
"So, you're walking down the street, and you see a bunch of sad
kittens that have been abandoned. What do you do?" "Why, you pick them
up, of course." (Though this is a sort of bending from the grammar;
the pronoun that's really called for in formal writing is 'One', not
'you'))
Sophie Fruehling
<JCola...@csi.com> wrote:
...
>However, people who should know these things have informed me that
>the German translation of Zork I used the imperative.
When I started playing IF, I always assumed that I was using the
infinitive, without ever thinking about it, and I found it quite
jarring to have to use the imperative the first time I played a
German game. But in German, only in the imperative, the verb is the
first word in a sentence. If you used the infinitive, you couldn't
say 'nehmen das ding', you'd have to say 'das ding nehmen'. I don't
know if this is harder to parse, because, AFAICT, the verb then would
always be the last word, but then you'd need a different syntax for
ordering NPCs, I guess.
...
>On the other hand, infinitives have the advanatage of being easier
>to look up when you're at a loss for the proper word.
Or to remember, if you can't think of the right verb form. ;)
-- Sophie
John Colagioia
> John Colagioia wrote:
>> On the other hand, infinitives have the advanatage of being easier
>> to look up when you're at a loss for the proper word.
> That depends on the language. (Actually, it depends on the dictionary,
> but there seem to be established de-facto rules on a per-language
> basis.) Latin verbs, for example, are usually entered in 1st-person
> singular present indicative form.
Argh! You're right. I forgot about that.
John Colagioia
> Here, John Colagioia <JCola...@csi.com> wrote:
>>This suggests the infinitive is standard.
> No, it suggests that the infinitive is easier to explain to the IF
> newbie.
I'm not sure that's the case. Surely, an Adventure-like "type simple
commands as if you were ordering around another person" would be an
easier explanation. Or, "state what you wish to do. Since you are
only controlling yourself, omit 'I,' the sentence's subject."
OK, the second is more complex, but you see my point.
We have one published datapoint where a distinct decision was
definitely made. Since most people have followed Infocom's lead, I'd
say that represents at least a de facto standard, whether or not it
evolved from a deep consideration of "who" the parser is, and whether
or not it's an accurate reflection of the game environment.
[...]
>>However, people who should know these things have informed me that
>>the German translation of Zork I used the imperative.
> Interesting.
> Me, I've decided that Crowther and Woods accidentally invented a new
> verb form, the complicitive. In English, it's indistinguishable from
> the imperative. Unfortunately this doesn't help us decide what it
> should look like in other languages.
Other than the German Zork translation, has there been non-English,
commercial IF?
Err...I'm sure there must be. What I'm really asking, I guess, is
whether anyone has access to such and can check the verb casing.
The documentation, too, if it's available, to see if there's a
counterpart to the "I want to..." concept.
John Colagioia
[...]
> But in German, only in the imperative, the verb is the
> first word in a sentence. If you used the infinitive, you couldn't
> say 'nehmen das ding', you'd have to say 'das ding nehmen'. I don't
> know if this is harder to parse, because, AFAICT, the verb then would
> always be the last word, but then you'd need a different syntax for
> ordering NPCs, I guess.
Ah. That's interesting. The game doesn't accept infinitive forms
(nor does it accept "nehmen" in any form), but it requires the verb
to come first:
]die haustuer halte
Was für ein Plan!
]halte die haustuer
Ein braver Versuch.
Matthew W. Miller
>> If consensus is that I'm wrong, and that I should use the infinitive
>> rather than the imperative, please say so.
> tell you to concoct your command as if it were preceded by "I want
> to..." This suggests the infinitive is standard.
I suspect that the manuals' standard "I want to..." phrasing was simply
chosen for convenience, to make explaining things simpler without having
to ask the player to understand technical terms of grammar, and that the
intended form really *is* the second-person imperative, which is the
same as the infinitive in all cases.
Confirming example: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (a
fairly late game, of course) accepts the command "Don't panic" (a quote
from the books, of course), where the infinitive would be "Not panic"
or, if you want to be Victorian about it, "Panic not".
Contradictory example: Can't think of any. Oops.
--
/) Matthew W. Miller
( \ <mwmi...@columbus.rr.com>
||
| PLD Linux - "May the penguin be with you."
Jdyer41
commercial IF?
My current database (which isn't even close to
comprehensive yet) lists 262 games with a
"Company" name attached. Not all of these are
commercial, of course, and some of them are
commercial in the sense of one guy programming on
a C64 and sealing disks in a Ziploc bag.
Referring to German sepcifically, the games by
Weltenschmiede probably are the best known
commercial ones. Try _Das Stundenglas_ or
_Die Kathedrale_.
Incidentally, I wouldn't call the Zork I German translation
a good model to follow. The translation is incomplete
and badly done.
Jason Dyer
jdy...@aol.com
Magnus Olsson
Mark Musante - Sun Microsystems <mmus...@Sun.COM> wrote:
>> Which looks to me like, if there is only an implied "I" at the
>> beginning of all my commands, they're neither imperative nor
>> infinitive, but first-person present.
(...)
>Considering my own thoughts on the matter, I don't think of the parser as a
>puppet I'm controlling. Instead, I imagine that it really is me in the
>game, attempting to do things, much as when playing D&D. The parser is the
>GM (as you used in your example), and I'm really just attempting different
>actions.
>
>So I submit that it's not merely a *desire* to perform actions ("I want to
>unlock the door"), but rather an *attempt* to perform those actions ("I try
>to unlock the door").
I also tend to think of the player-parser interaction as analogous to
the player-GM interaction in an RPG. But in an RPG, I (and the other
players in my group) tend to use the simple present indicative: "I
open the door". If I say "I try to open the door" or "I want to open
the door" the implications are different. In the first case, I'm
anticipating that the door may be locked, perhaps to avoid a snide
comment from the GM to the effect that I can't open a locked door. In
the second case, the GM (at least our GM) will probably wonder whether
I just *want* to open the door, or if I actually do it :-).
As for adventure games, I just did a thought experiment that shows
that I'm actually thinking in terms of imperatives, not in the present
indicative as in RPGs: I've never seen a game where "be quiet" would
be a command, but if it were, I would definitely phrase it as "be quiet",
not as "(I) am quiet" (as I would in an RPG).
And for me it is imperatives, not contractions of phrases like "I want
to be quiet" or "I try to be quiet".
So why do I use imperatives when I'm not ordering anybody around?
Well, I suppose I'm just generalizing from other command-line
interfaces, where I really am ordering somebody (the computer) around.
And, come to think of it, there's an analogy with the first-person
imperative in those languages that have one: when a Frenchman says
"Allons!" (first person plural imperative), he isn't really
ordering himself around, but just saying "Let's go!" (it could of
course still be an order to the other people included in the implied
"we").
Magnus Olsson
John Colagioia <JCola...@csi.com> wrote:
>Other than the German Zork translation, has there been non-English,
>commercial IF?
There's "Stugan", in Swedish. Unfortunately, I don't have access
to a copy. However, IIRC the Swedish IF that I've played used the
imperative, not the infinitive.
Hmmm. Now that I forced myself to think about it in Swedish (where
many verbs have different forms in the imperative and the infinitive),
I think I have an answer for why the imperative would be preferable:
Even though the imperative command "ät svärdet" ("eat the sword")
raises uncomfortable questions (such as who I'm ordering around), it is
at least a complete, grammatically correct clause.
The infinitive "äta svärdet" simply sounds wrong. I have to force
myself to think of an implicit "What do you want to do now?" question
for it even to make sense; ellipses such as "I want to eat the sword" ->
"eat the sword" simply don't seem natural.
But that's just me. I wonder what our French friends think in the
same situation.
Magnus Olsson
Matthew W. Miller <mwmi...@columbus.rr.com> wrote:
> Confirming example: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (a
>fairly late game, of course) accepts the command "Don't panic" (a quote
>from the books, of course), where the infinitive would be "Not panic"
>or, if you want to be Victorian about it, "Panic not".
Good example!
John Colagioia
[...]
> Incidentally, I wouldn't call the Zork I German translation
> a good model to follow. The translation is incomplete
> and badly done.
The way it was described to me (by a native of Germany) was that it
was a decent job, but "off, somehow." My guess is that it's related
to the story that they used technical translators, rather than their
prose counterparts.
I've also heard people call the translation quality "surprisingly
good."
John Colagioia
> In article <3E6A3689...@csi.com>,
> John Colagioia <JCola...@csi.com> wrote:
>>Other than the German Zork translation, has there been non-English,
>>commercial IF?
> There's "Stugan", in Swedish. Unfortunately, I don't have access
> to a copy. However, IIRC the Swedish IF that I've played used the
> imperative, not the infinitive.
Is that those few modern games?
[...]
> The infinitive "äta svärdet" simply sounds wrong. I have to force
> myself to think of an implicit "What do you want to do now?" question
> for it even to make sense; ellipses such as "I want to eat the sword" ->
> "eat the sword" simply don't seem natural.
Would it seem more natural, though, if (like in the Infocom manuals)
the implied "I want to" was suggested in the documentation?
Or (an uglier possibility), perhaps, at the prompt?
> But that's just me. I wonder what our French friends think in the
> same situation.
I can't speak for the native French-speakers, obviously, but I had it
drilled into my head in my French classes that all orders, requests,
and desires are phrased as "I would like (you) (to)..." under
(apparently) penalty of death or somesuch thing...
This may be why I have little difficulty envisioning the infinitive.
Magnus Olsson
John Colagioia <JCola...@csi.com> wrote:
>Magnus Olsson wrote:
>> In article <3E6A3689...@csi.com>,
>> John Colagioia <JCola...@csi.com> wrote:
>>>Other than the German Zork translation, has there been non-English,
>>>commercial IF?
>> There's "Stugan", in Swedish. Unfortunately, I don't have access
>> to a copy. However, IIRC the Swedish IF that I've played used the
>> imperative, not the infinitive.
>
>Is that those few modern games?
Depends on what you mean by "modern", but I haven't played any
Swedish IF for several years.
>[...]
>> The infinitive "äta svärdet" simply sounds wrong. I have to force
>> myself to think of an implicit "What do you want to do now?" question
>> for it even to make sense; ellipses such as "I want to eat the sword" ->
>> "eat the sword" simply don't seem natural.
>
>Would it seem more natural, though, if (like in the Infocom manuals)
>the implied "I want to" was suggested in the documentation?
Difficult question. If I'd had it suggested before playing any IF at
all, perhaps, but I doubt it.
>Or (an uglier possibility), perhaps, at the prompt?
At the prompt, yes. If the prompt explicitly says "What do you want to
do now?" answering with an infinitive would feel more natural, just
as a prompt "What did you do then?" would make a command in the past
tense seem more natural.
But I think such things are largely irrelevant once the player has
acquired a set of conventions for player-game interaction. Once that
has happened, the player isn't conversing in English (or Swedish, or
French), but in what Graham Nelson calls Informese (or the equivalent
for other development systems): a formal language that is similar to,
and shares a vocabulary with, natural language. But this language
is *not* natural language, and I think many of the typical newbie
problems when playing IF are caused by the mistaken assumption that
the parser understands natural language.
>> But that's just me. I wonder what our French friends think in the
>> same situation.
>
>I can't speak for the native French-speakers, obviously, but I had it
>drilled into my head in my French classes that all orders, requests,
>and desires are phrased as "I would like (you) (to)..." under
>(apparently) penalty of death or somesuch thing...
Requests and desires, perhaps, but hardly commands. Can you envision
a French drill sergeant kindly expressing a desire to see his recruits
at attention, and doin so in the conditional mood? :-)
Obviously, your teachers were trying to teach you to be polite -
ordering people about using unadorned imperatives simply isn't very
polite, in French or in English - but this is not a matter of
grammar. French imperative works almost the same as English
imperative; it is perfectly grammatical to say "Donnez-moi des
allumettes!" ("Give me some matches!"), but it's not what most people
would actually say in a shop; "Je voudrais des allumettes, s'il vous
plaīt" ("I'd like some matches, please") is more like it.
But fortunately we don't have to be polite to the parser.