But isn’t it more annoying having to run across the map six times to fetch the hams one by one? The way I see it, the main problem with your example is one of puzzle design. If you don’t want the player to run around with six hams, design the game so there’s no need for it. (Add a puzzle for getting access to a small forklift to transport the hams.)
Thinking some more, I realised this has mostly to to with the presentation (text) and method of interaction (the parser).
In a graphical point and click game, one way to handle large objects is to show the thing being carried and remove all actions except moving and putting the thing down. Nobody will have a problem with that.
But if you try the same in text, your only way of limiting the available actions is with an error message. (Or changing the interface completely, but that’s far from uncontroversial too. Just look at any discussion on conversation menus.) An error message can never be immersive, so you have to design the thing differently.
(“Can never be” is a bold claim - feel free to prove me wrong. Come to think about it, I think I enjoyed a game a bit that was in the comp a few years ago where you were a vase, and thus couldn’t do anything. But as a general rule, I believe it to be true.)
Error messages can be immersive, the first time you see them. Maybe the second. That’s why it’s important to rewrite them; in Broken Legs, when you try to take something that isn’t there, and Lottie complains about how the school doesn’t even have that, it’s great and gives you insight into her character. But the fourth or fifth time it happens, it’s just the that thing isn’t there error message. (I assume; I was too intimidated to play long enough to get it that many times. I need to go back to it now that we know there won’t be a post-comp release.)
By the way, if a point-and-click designer made it so that when you pick up a large object everything else in your inventory returns to the main screen, and you have to go around and pick it up again, I think players of the game would find him and do actual harm.
Oh, error messages can be immersive, as long as it’s in character for the protagonist, and draws from a pool of random responses each time so it doesn’t get (too) repetitive. Either that, or have every little thing have a unique error message. In “Varicella”, for example, the game tells you at least 900 times that you can’t do/take/attack/kiss/eat something because it’s “unseemly”. Instead of being annoying, it slowly becomes hilarious, since it reveals to the player just how many things Varicella finds “unseemly”.
I guess that’s the difference – MUDs became more story-based (in the form of roleplaying, which often includes flexible plotlines controlled by players and/or administrators) without really getting too far away from the fundamental D&D-like rules that text adventures began with. In fact, RPI MUDs have much stricter simulationist code and worldbuilding than more conventional MUDs that don’t require being in-character.
I think there’s sometimes a disconnect in story-driven IF between immersive characterization of the protagonist and immersive simulation of the model world. If the work of IF is the kind that filters all descriptions through the distinctive personality of the protagonist, then I think it is a little inconsistent for the player character not to complain about carrying miscellaneous objects without a specific purpose – unless that PC really is either a kleptomaniac or a Standard Adventurer.
But I’m sure some of the most story-immersive IF games are sensitive to simulation through their error messages, as has been pointed out. Also, I don’t think all IF should necessarily be this immersive. I think there may also be a place for heavily simulation-immersive games that are not extremely story-immersive, as well, but I think I might be the only person who would like them. 
Reminds me of the lucasarts ‘Zak mcKracken and the alien mindbenders’ in which you also carry a s@*tload of items. Heck they even made a pun on it in the cover art of the box. (on it the player is pictured with almost all of the items you need either stuffed in his pockets or stacked in his arms)
imo. Having something like a bag to put stuff in with a limited capacity makes it all realistic. Will maybe add a little strategy as well. (i have seen people wondering about the world collecting all the items and a lot of money first and then flying through all the puzzles and challenges) And you could make the bag just a bit too big to be true to avoid serious inventory management.
But then again… Everybody is, at least I am, used to it. Only when it takes on absurd proportions. (like an inflatable rubber boat AND an oxygen tank for example) I think I would notice. But 43 notes, 87 coins and 32 keys. Well… I could stuff that away in real life too. 
I’ve been working on a game that has a lot of objects in it too, and I was worried about preserving the realism as well. It didn’t make sense that you could carry 25 things constantly in your arms. So I made a system where if you have more than 2 items it gives you a message that you’ve dumped everything into an “inventory pile” on the floor. It mentions this twice then ignores it. Taking things from the inventory pile lets you know that you’ve got the objects handy enough. Here’s the code:
Carry out taking something:
if the player is carrying the noun:
say "You already have that[if more than two things are held by the player] in your pile.[end if]." instead;
if the player is carrying more than 1 thing and the player is carrying less than 3 things:
say "You take [the noun] and put it with [a list of things carried by the player] into an accessible pile near your feet."
Inventory pile is part of the player.
Instead of examining the inventory pile:
if fewer than 3 things are carried by the player:
say "You're not carrying enough stuff to have to drop it into a pile, just [a list of things carried by the player]." instead;
say "You've got [a list of things carried by the player] in a pile, but really they're all so accessible it's as if you're holding them.[paragraph break][run paragraph on]".
Instead of taking the inventory pile: say "You've already set those items apart as important to carry around."If you have any NPCs in your game, I hope they note that behaviour.
And I hope it’s a one-room game.
In what way is it realistic to dump items in an inventory pile on the floor?
There’s no juggling, and when you move from room to room it just tells you (once) that you pick everything up and move it with you. It’s more realistic to haul stuff in an armful and dump it before searching through desks/whatever than to carry 20+ objects while you’re opening drawers or lighting torches or whatever.
Would you do that in real life though? Pick up 20 items, walk into another room, drop them on the floor, have a look around, pick all the items up again and walk into another room with them? Rinse and rinse for every room. By the time you do that a couple of times, you might as well throw any attempt at realism out of the window.
Yeah, I also don’t think that sounds very realistic. If you had too many objects to hold easily, you wouldn’t take them all with you from room to room, you’d just take the ones you needed. And of course there’s no way to determine the things the player thinks s/he will need except to just let him/her pick them up.
The great virtue of allowing the player to hold everything is that it doesn’t draw any particular attention to your inventory. Every special way of handling inventory, particularly one that prints messages, is going to draw extra attention to the inventory and its unrealistic aspects.
But if you really felt that you need to take an armful of objects from Place A to Place B, because you really believed you would need to use at least most of them in Place B, EEAtheist’s model would be perfectly logical. Also, the IF player is perfectly free to chose to “just take the ones needed” if that’s what he or she wants to do. Most real people in a real situation wouldn’t choose to walk around everywhere with their arms loaded with miscellaneous things that they don’t know if they are going to need, which is what happens in an IF game with no inventory limit.
I think the problem is that players often want to have an immersive story and a detailed, realistic setting without being willing to contribute to the immersion/realism by roleplaying the player character’s motivations. If players really commanded the PC to act like a real person in such a situation, they would either simply refrain from carrying an unrealistic number of objects or else would accept a simulation model like the one EEAtheist proposed, which allows for circumstances in which the PC really would want to take armfuls of stuff from place to place.
The thing is, no one in real life is going to take 20 items with them from room to room on the off chance they might need them. They’d leave them where they are then come back for them later on. When I leave my office at work, I take a pen with me, but do I take a teacup, a notepad, a calculator, an eraser, a pair of scissors, a stapler, a diary, a stack of forms, my coat, etc, etc? Nope.
Right, because in real life the hassle of carrying twenty things is greater than the effort of ducking into another room to grab one. In the IF interface, by default, the reverse is true – unless the designer specifically adds hassle to the inventory-management experience.
That’s an artistic decision. Just be aware of what you’re doing: adding hassle (effort, frustration) for the sake of artistic effect.
(All game design is about frustration for artistic effect. The design part is knowing where to put it.)
And (maybe repeating myself here), forcing the player to type in every action that they would perform in real life does not aid immersion and even “realism,” as we use that word in describing (read-only) fiction. I just got a drink of water. Suppose I were to describe it thus in fiction:
This isn’t a passage that you’d see in any realistic novel. It’s a lot more like something from Samuel Beckett’s Watt than from, say, Ann Beattie. It’s just absurd and alienating to describe the process of getting a drink of water in such detail; a realistic writer would write something like “Matt got a drink of water” if she felt the need to note it at all.
Well, it’s equally alienating to force the player to type this:
I can’t even bear to type out the responses that an IF would give to this. Now, a friendly IF will automate some of this – have you automatically stand before you go south, and turn the faucet on when you fill the glass – but that still leaves eight commands to drink a glass of water. In real life it just doesn’t take that much attention and care to drink a glass of water, so why should it in IF?
(If we’re looking for something more simulationist without forcing fine-grained inventory twiddling, the thing to change is probably the requirement that you have to be holding something before you do anything with it. And that it has to be in the same room, maybe, depending on your design. But the convention that you can carry lots of things and use them seems like a handy way of working around that. And the conventions of realism are often just that, conventions to avoid drawing the reader/player’s attention to the wrong things.)
Just out of curiousity, how hard would it be to hack things so that your inventory consists of things whose location you know rather than things that you physically carry? If you combined it with some scope-hacking, you might get a reasonable compromise: something behind a locked door would be inaccessible without unlocking the door, but going back to the kitchen to get a knife from the drawer could be fully automated.
I don’t think it would be all that hard - i.e. you could do it all in I7 without any weird hacks or dynamic memory usage. But it would be a decent chunk of code. I think it would make for an interesting set of puzzles.
…
Sorry, I didn’t mean to be ignoring your point; I just don’t have much to say about it. It’s definitely a good point. Not everything that happens in “real life” is relevant in any kind of storytelling, I’m sure. I’m just not sure where the line should be drawn in IF. I’m sure manipulating inventory may be irrelevant in many IF situations. Maybe you guys are right that the solution is to simply ignore realistic inventory limits; I just wish I didn’t have to see a list of twenty items when I type an “INVENTORY” command. 
I feel like there’s got to be a better solution out there. Has any text IF game actually implemented a “memory inventory” where the PC goes back and retrieves a remembered object if the player tries to use that object in a command when the PC isn’t carrying right now? Or is that system still purely hypothetical?