I’m curious if anyone has put any thought into this. Either in your own design, or you’ve come across a game that tried this out. The idea is that the game accepts both imperative commands and declarative also.
Imperative
“look at the shelf”
Declarative / Descriptive
“I look at the shelf”
“I’m looking at the shelf”
Some of the earliest (80s) IF would use “I WANT TO…” as the command prompt, to get people into the right frame of mind for verb-noun syntax.
People are lazy. Once someone realizes that you accept both “I TAKE THE LAMP” and “TAKE LAMP”, they will switch to the short form and never think about the other version again. Supporting the long form is generally viewed as a “kindness to newcomers” feature which gets very little use overall.
Yes, it would be purely for friendliness to newcomers. ‘I want to’ is clever, I didn’t even rememeber the old games did that! I’m actually not working on something that would normally be thought of as IF, but rather designing a MUD. I want to lean more heavily into IF space than MUDs traditionally do, however.