should be able to type "pick up pebble"
Opened this issue · 5 comments
it may be natural for players to type "pick up pebble" or other items instead of typing "take" or "get". is there a way we can support this? at the moment i dont think it works
I think it's pretty natural for a game mechanic to have inherent
limitations. I remember when playing Zork for the first time, it took me a
little while to figure out that the only thing it understood was
. Even in Zork II when you could talk, you could only "say hello" to
the troll. We could, eventually, introduce the kids to the Python NLTK
http://www.nltk.org/ and let them build a more natural interface :-)
I was just wondering if the Zork team struggled with this, and I found a
really long, personal, history of the development.
http://inside.warren-wilson.edu/~jblocker/IntFic/Ashes/For%20The%20Curious/The%20History%20of%20Zork.txt
It's clear that a lot of work was focused on dealing with hardware
limitations, and the impact that code size had on the game design was
profound, particularly around the management of possibilities:
The first major addition to the game, done in June 1977, was the river
section, designed and implemented by Marc. It survives largely
unchanged in Zork
I, but illustrates very well the problems of building reality. There were
minor problems of consistency -- some parts of the river were sunlit (and
even reachable from outside), but others were dark. The major problem resulted
from the new concept Marc introduced: vehicles. In the original game, there
were rooms, objects, and a player; the player always existed in some room.
Vehicles were objects that became, in effect, mobile rooms. This required
changes in the (always delicate) interactions among verbs, objects, and
rooms (we had to have some way of making "walk" do something reasonable
when the player was in the boat).
In addition, ever-resourceful Zorkers tried to use the boat anywhere they
thought they could. The code for the boat itself was not designed to
function outside the river section, but nothing kept the player from
carrying the deflated boat to the reservoir and trying to sail across.
Eventually the boat was allowed in the reservoir, but the general problem
always remained: anything that changes the world you're modeling changes
practically everything in the world you're modeling.
On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 11:15 PM, Michelangelo Capraro <
notifications@github.com> wrote:
it may be natural for players to type "pick up pebble" or other items
instead of typing "take" or "get". is there a way we can support this? at
the moment i dont think it works—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#23.
Gever Tulley, Founder, Education Architect
Brightworks: An Extraordinary School
Tinkering School: Think, Make, Tinker
(415) 701-8700 | sfbrightworks.org | cell: (415) 218-0812
That's really interesting. The kids might find some of that interesting as well especially as they start building worlds and running into some of these challenges themselves.
-andrew
(sent from my phone, apologies for brevity)
On Jan 4, 2015, at 11:15 AM, Gever Tulley notifications@github.com wrote:
I think it's pretty natural for a game mechanic to have inherent
limitations. I remember when playing Zork for the first time, it took me a
little while to figure out that the only thing it understood was
. Even in Zork II when you could talk, you could only "say hello" to
the troll. We could, eventually, introduce the kids to the Python NLTK
http://www.nltk.org/ and let them build a more natural interface :-)I was just wondering if the Zork team struggled with this, and I found a
really long, personal, history of the development.
http://inside.warren-wilson.edu/~jblocker/IntFic/Ashes/For%20The%20Curious/The%20History%20of%20Zork.txt
It's clear that a lot of work was focused on dealing with hardware
limitations, and the impact that code size had on the game design was
profound, particularly around the management of possibilities:The first major addition to the game, done in June 1977, was the river
section, designed and implemented by Marc. It survives largely
unchanged in Zork
I, but illustrates very well the problems of building reality. There were
minor problems of consistency -- some parts of the river were sunlit (and
even reachable from outside), but others were dark. The major problem resulted
from the new concept Marc introduced: vehicles. In the original game, there
were rooms, objects, and a player; the player always existed in some room.
Vehicles were objects that became, in effect, mobile rooms. This required
changes in the (always delicate) interactions among verbs, objects, and
rooms (we had to have some way of making "walk" do something reasonable
when the player was in the boat).In addition, ever-resourceful Zorkers tried to use the boat anywhere they
thought they could. The code for the boat itself was not designed to
function outside the river section, but nothing kept the player from
carrying the deflated boat to the reservoir and trying to sail across.
Eventually the boat was allowed in the reservoir, but the general problem
always remained: anything that changes the world you're modeling changes
practically everything in the world you're modeling.On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 11:15 PM, Michelangelo Capraro <
notifications@github.com> wrote:it may be natural for players to type "pick up pebble" or other items
instead of typing "take" or "get". is there a way we can support this? at
the moment i dont think it works—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#23.Gever Tulley, Founder, Education Architect
Brightworks: An Extraordinary School
Tinkering School: Think, Make, Tinker
(415) 701-8700 | sfbrightworks.org | cell: (415) 218-0812
—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.
This is awesome!
Is there a different link to the zork recap? Would love to read that
And yes, that sounds good about the limits, gever. Makes good sense