An unpleasant topic in the Scott Adams games

Playing
42

From the UK too, and agreeing with you here.

Our dialect of English is polysemiotic in respect of the word rape. There is a mode where the word describes a form of sexual violence, and another which is the common name for a seed crop.

Of course, in the example reported by this thread the word is clearly a verb, which very much narrows down the sense anticipated by the parser.

I regard this as an attempt by the author to provide a default response to vexacious input by the player. I would frame this as a not very sophisticated, and slightly immature way of handling profanity.

If you don’t believe me, imagine how much more sinister it would have been had the author carefully implemented certain ways of tell [character] to [action] or put [object] into [character].

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At the risk of getting entirely off-topic for the thread — when I first encountered Pawn of Prophecy I read the whole thing in one sitting (in the back of my parent’s car, as they drove the length of the country). In fact I read the entire series in one go, and when I got to the end I turned the stack over and started again …

But I was 14 (or roughly so), and back then it seemed the best thing since Piers Anthony. Now I can look back with a certain cringe of horror, but I loved them then, and it’s hard to shake that even with the bright light of current knowledge.

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44

The crop has the same name in American English. But given that the oil isn’t labeled that way, probably most people who know it are into one or more of agriculture, botany, or word-nerdery. (Oh, brassica, is there anything you cannot do?)

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45

It’s in several Infocom games. Deadline, Zork II, and Trinity come to mind; there are likely others. Given the rather consistent level of care with which Trinity was made (cf my own series about it), it’s a bizarre inclusion. Moriarty could have just as easily implemented “cavort” or “finagle” or “frotz.” There are a lot of verbs out there to choose from!

So far as challenging material in games goes, my general thought is that a game can theoretically be made about everything, but. But. As the stakes rise, the level of difficulty rises as well. Some authors and/or works are simply not up to such challenges. Perhaps, in some cases, nobody presently is, but I think the author can try, that’s their decision. If they are open to critique, that is, whether they succeed or fail.

While I wouldn’t advocate for censoring anything, I do advocate for audiences responding to work with thoughtful honesty without worrying about anyone else’s concerns about open-mindedness or slippery slopes.

e: in a future IFDB review of Trinity, I will mention it

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46

Is it possible it derived from user testing? i.e. trying to cover each verb that users typed (without the current sensibility that it might be better not to do so)?

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47

Surely that explains some of the nonsense in the Zork trilogy. It grew organically on mainframe, then got ported perhaps too faithfully.

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I’d say “yes” in the sense that it isn’t easily disproved, but I don’t find it a satisfying answer. To get a sense of things, I think we’d need to wade through some games looking for verbs that are never productive. Then, we could get a sense for how many times authors had added verbs “just because.”

My non-exhaustive search indicates that the verb does not appear in mainframe Dungeon. It also doesn’t appear in Zork I until the Trilogy release that shares parser elements (Zork I and Zork II also contain code for deaths that are only possible in Zork III).

So I think the questions are:

  • Why Zork II?
  • What other non-productive verbs exist in Zork II?
    • If there are many, perhaps this was a common practice.
    • If there are few, what made the verb a special case?

Some of this is subjective, of course, but let’s try to get a count. I think “inherited from Zork I” is one designation, and “new to Zork II” is its opposite.

A non-exhaustive list! To preserve a sense of Zork I pre-trilogy I’ll look through Release 30 of Zork I and Release 23 of Zork II. These versions may have bugs, but avoiding cross-contamination via the Trilogy releases is my priority. Let’s see (synonyms omitted)…

Action Provenance
COUNT Inherited from Zork I
JUMP Inherited from Zork I
XYZZY Inherited from Zork I
PLUGH Inherited from Zork I
YELL Inherited from Zork I
MUMBLE Inherited from Zork I
FIND Inherited from Zork I
REPENT Inherited from Zork I
WIN Inherited from Zork I
CHOMP Inherited from Zork I
ZORK Inherited from Zork I
KICK Inherited from Zork I
SKIP Inherited from Zork I
CURSE (operates differently from in Zork I) New to Zork II
EXORCISE New to Zork II
RAPE New to Zork II

Are there other, non-productive verbs new to Zork II? I welcome corrections and additions. I don’t think that many would consider CURSE new, and EXORCISE is a reasonable thing to try with a demon (also: see below). I’ve included them for completeness’s sake.

If Infocom had only one heavily requested verb during playtesting, it’s surprising that this is the one above all others. I suppose we have problematic authors or problematic players in any case. My guess is that Zork II is simply the first Infocom game with a woman in it. From there, it kept turning up, even in places as baffling as the children’s game Seastalker. I hope nobody was asking for that.

It’s worth noting that many of these responses are customized for their specific games, so it isn’t enough to assume a mistaken copy/paste.

Before anyone imagines that I “have it in” for these games or some such thing, doing deep dives into the texts of these games is what I do. I’ve done a lot of it, and I take no pleasure in pointing out things like this. But it’s a labor of love, and I hope to deal with my loves honestly.

E: for the sake of context Zork II was released in 1981, two years after Mystery Fun House.

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49

For context, also, Zork I has a puzzle involving driving spirits away with the classic bell, book, and candle, so providing EXORCISE as a verb would have been a bit too direct.

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I have a vague memory that CURSE has something to do with the demon, but was decades ago… but this not matters.

What matters is that Drew has singled out an excellent historiographical research course; Infocom was another major actor, competing with Adams, back then, and as she pointed, make the same untasteful choice. And, also we have both actor’s corpus in the ideal format for this type of research (let’s call it (r)grep-friendly…) so, figuring out how things come from (reference to INTERCAL intentional :wink: ) should be more than feasible.

On top of it, Infocom has its share of clashes with marketing (not only the “tandy bit”, but also the “secret 1 in 1000 renaming of Spellbreaker” egg) so we can theoretically trace chronologically and technically the evo/involutionary path of the “questionable verbiage” in both corpuses…

Now, History IS a science, so let’s try to entice the creator of the best euphemism in IF history to volunteer for this scientific research work ! :smiley:

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

ps. how is that this forum don’t have underline ??

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51

No underline, you say?

[ u ] blah blah [ / u ] does the trick

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52

This topic reminded me that some Sierra dev snuck a bunch of horrifying synonyms in King’s Quest II.

https://tcrf.net/King's_Quest_II:_Romancing_the_Throne#Classy_King_Graham

I don’t think Roberta Williams knew about this when the game was shipped. An edgy Easter egg or sabotage against her? I haven’t read any of the books about Sierra, there might be something about this in the unofficial ones.

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“Edgy” is a rather charitable characterization.

I don’t think it’s sabotage, since a player without a data dump wouldn’t have reason to try the worst of those synonyms.

54

Yeah, I’m immensely curious how anyone would ever think of those—were they ever found without examining the source?

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Have you ever met Roberta Williams? Because I have, and I wouldn’t be that surprised if she had found this amusing; she’s a colourful character.

This said, I agree it’s highly unlikely Roberta ever knew, because she wasn’t involved in the actual implementation of the scripts. These shenanigans were probably either Chris Iden’s or Scott Murphy’s.

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I kept to myself my historiographical hypothesis on this new “hidden historical artifact” (ok, now I officially have delivered an entry into to the “best euphemism” field…), but I give an hint on the definitively extreme RAM (Read Author’s Mind)[1] entry: water dispenser…

[1] I don’t know much about AGI/SCI synonym handling, but seems to me that the entry table is rigid enough for requesting all four word together in the exact order of the entry for actually answering to it; that is, answering only to A B C D, not to A B C nor to B C A

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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I knew that Scott Adams had some content in his earlier games that he likely disagrees with now in his more religious years (such as, in Savage Island Part 2, you becoming a caveman and getting multiple wives, but this is a puerile new low and an unpleasant surprise for a series that seemed to be a little less crude than Adventure and Zork. (Who can forget the Zork 4 preview?)

I’m also for removing the curse words from the Inform standard library. Not only are they never useful for real adventures, instead being jokes you can program in if you want (and really, isn’t it funnier to give your own responses for jokes instead of keeping Graham’s canned responses?) but “sod” is pretty homophobic (short for "sodomite) in a similar way as “bugger off,” originating from the same era in Britain that gave us Walter the Softy

walter-the-softy-249c7317-2909-4d5f-bc31-75dd532b211-resize-750
walter-the-softy-249c7317-2909-4d5f-bc31-75dd532b211-resize-750559×700 94.3 KB

58

Is it used homophobically nowadays? I’m not English, but I’d always thought that meaning was gone by now, like how “fuck you” isn’t a threat of sexual assault but just a general expression of anger.

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59

It’s well on its way to becoming a generic expletive, but varies depending on region, and also on who you ask. Do mind that the generation that was raised while the older meaning was still prevalent is still well represented in the UK population, as that was not that long ago. This gives way to amusing misunderstandings on occasion (and not only with this word).

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60

I’m wrong or “sod” means also “dirt (soil)” ? this is a solid “mild curse”, at least applying good sense to the word (ex: troublemakers, optionally beer-propelled, trading punches on a dirt field, falling on a said dirt field, then the bobbies are right in reporting “arrested a bunch of sods for disturbing the public peace…”)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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61

There seem to be three camps in response to issues where social mores advance and literary works get re-contexualized on review.

  • APOLOGIST: That’s just how things were. Even though Lovecraft was an avowed racist, he was a product of his times. Look how his worldview has affected the horror genre! The way Edgar Allan Poe wrote Jupiter’s dialect phonetically in The Gold Bug is a historical record and shouldn’t offend anyone because everyone knows racial stereotyping like that doesn’t happen any more.
  • REVISIONIST: Lovecraft, Poe, and Twain wrote using racial stereotypes of their times, and we must erase those works from history or rewrite them to protect people from these ideas. The offensive presentation overrides and taints everything else by proxy and thus these works have nothing to teach the people of today.
  • ARCHIVIST: These works were products of their time, and while problematic are still valuable history. We should preserve them and possibly do our best to make sure anyone who accesses them understands their historical context and is aware so the problematic parts don’t overwhelm any other inherent value they might provide and contain.

ARCHIVIST: Just be aware RAP DOOR might not work out exactly how you think it might…

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