Handling player-typed profanity

I recall that older editions of Inform intercepted profanity typed by the player as a certain category of erroneous action. I believe “swearing mildly” and “swearing obscenely” were the default actions invoked at the time. Were these actions replaced by something new which I haven’t found yet, or were they removed altogether? A glance at the actions index suggests the latter, but I could just be looking in the wrong spot.

Somewhere in the changelog:

The “swearing strongly” and “swearing mildly” actions have been removed from the Standard Rules, and by default, Inform story files no longer respond to swear-words at all. This change is made partly because they weren’t useful enough actions to belong in the Standard Rules core set, and partly because of concerns about the use of Inform in education.

http://inform7.com/changes/CI_8_1.html

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Thank you, Florian! I suspected something along these lines, but it is gratifying to receive confirmation.

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…so now the Standard Rules contain nothing any less wholesome than murder and torture.

Understand the commands “break”, “smash”, “hit”, “fight”, “torture”, “wreck”, “crack”, “destroy”,
“murder”, “kill”, “punch” and “thump” as “attack”.

Swearing Reloaded puts the swearing actions back if anyone really misses them.

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well, here in EU consider censorable the american pruderie, esp. when accompanied about their hypocrysy on violence. that in american movie one see all gore and blood but no sane sex nor mild or strong words.

so, mr. Zed Lopez, I guess that in reintroducing the mild & strong AND doing noting about violence-related verb you committed the two sins of american society, pruderie and hypocrysy.

N.H. dottor Piergiorgio Maria Fede Pasquale d’ Errico.

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I’m not a doctor, just a guy in Internet, but… What about a little politeness?

Thank you anyway for talking in the name of all of us, EU citizens ¬.¬

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sorry, I can’t parse your reply :wink:

the “politeness” is ambiguous, do you mean, my politeness or the politeness in an IF work ? :slight_smile:

I’m not speaking for all EU people, of course. there’s 27 different cultures here.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Well, looking at the changelog, it appears those actions were taken out before 2014, so the change was made by an EU citizen. Perhaps Brexit made the British retroactively adopt American standards of prudishness, though from what I see in the papers about what the Tories have got up to these last few years that doesn’t appear to be the case!

(I suppose many of Inform’s design features are responsive to American hegemony - or at least said hegemony as instantiated in the Infocom games at the root of it all - for all that I find there’s an essential whiff of Englishness about it. Anyway if there were a crusade to de-Americanize the thing I’d start with putting the Oxford comma in as a default, not curse-words)

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I confess that I cut out many OT political consideration in my original post, but I prefer to quickly dispose of the core intra-atlantic issue here prior of returning to talk IT about interactive fictions.

The core divergence in the West, is that the Continental, graeco-Roman sphere’s concept of Empire is one of amalgation when the anglosphere’s concept of Empire is one of assimilation; but Inform should and must be kept out of this cultural disagreement between the western and central part of this disagreement, esp. now that the eastern part of the western civilisation is in open, and sadly violent, disagreement. (for me, western civilisation is from Anchorage in the West and Vladivostok in the East, perhaps “northern” is a more correct term for our civilisation ?)

end OT for me, let’s talk Inform…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Graham’s original Inform parser didn’t use the serial (Oxford) comma at all. I remember hacking it into the I6 library for my own games.

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Well, Graham’s a Cambridge man at heart.

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Just when I thought I couldn’t love you any more…

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Seconded!

Oxford comma for victory!

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I believe the original swearing rules were in there to kind of replicate what Infocom did in many of their games but was deactivated along the time that more neutral library response messages became generally preferable to standard parser-snark.

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The changelog said it’s related to Inform’s increasing usage in educational settings, and as someone who spent a bunch of time typing curse words and anatomical references into my sixth-grade classroom’s copy of Wishbringer, I take the point.

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They were also specifically undocumented—the index would list “swearing mildly” and “swearing obscenely” but would refuse to tell you what verbs mapped to them, insisting their only synonyms were “none that I wish to tell you about”.

This meant if you wanted to remove them from your game (or even figure out if you wanted to remove them from your game or not), you’d need to open up the Standard Rules to discover what Graham considered “swearing”—which turns out to include “drat”, “darn”, and “bother”.

I think their removal from the Standard Rules was a fine change. In the era of I7, “understand as a mistake” makes it easy to add out-of-world responses to individual words like this without needing to define a new action, and (though I suppose this may immediately mark me as an American rather than a Brit) the program outright refusing to tell you about the word “bother” because it considered it too profane always seemed a bit absurd to me.

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Oh man, this has radically shifted my understanding of Winnie the Pooh!

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Also “poot”, if I remember correctly.

Edit: but maybe I don’t since Curses doesn’t recognise it. (I’m sure I remember playing a game that did though, some time in the distant past.)

on british vs. american english, back then in the NG era I discussed UK bother vs. US bother (IIRC, US bother is “insist, pester”, a non-mild word (whose can be used as solution of an hypothetical “PC as annoytron jr.” puzzle, BTW)

not that pruderie stopped I7 for being used in the largest-ever IF, whose is indeed an AIF, ever produced (last time I checked was a 256 Megabyte gblorb story file… but what is interesting to me is the source (it’s unbelievable the variety and ingenuity of code about, well, adult actions, not only for I7)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.