Re: Ouch! (was Re: [Seattle IF: 476] Immersion.)

[ems...@mindspring.com]

-----Original Message-----
>From: Dave Howell <groups...@grandfenwick.net>
>Sent: Nov 4, 2010 8:53 PM
>To: seatt...@googlegroups.com
>Subject: Re: Ouch! (was Re: [Seattle IF: 476] Immersion.)
>
>
>On Nov 3, 2010, at 17:08 , Emily Short wrote:
>>
>> The core problem here is a pretty fundamental one (and Lucian acknowledges it later on, but you snipped that part). If the parser assumes that all player input is valid roleplaying,
>
>I probably snipped it because nobody's ever said that the parser should assume all player input is valid roleplaying. I believe, actually, that I suggested at one point that /[A-Za-z]+!/ might work as a way to identify expletives, assuming it didn't match a more specific entry in the dictionary.

Okay. I must have missed that part of the conversation.

If you're content with adding a marker to the input that means "I'm typing this thing 'cause I want to, feel free not to parse it meaningfully," then it's easy to solve -- but it's also another convention that has to be taught to the player. For instance, in that example >OUCH! would be understood because of the !, but >OUCH would not -- and surely the latter is just as valid, in theory?

So if we're analyzing to pick out places where the parser shouldn't be failing, I'm not sure I'm persuaded that ">OUCH!" represents a category where the parser should never fail. If what we mean is "there should be some affordance for roleplaying," that's a slightly different topic that is no longer strictly a parsing issue.