Which is actually done in a few games. 
Good to know!
Blue Lacuna isn’t talked about much these days, but it tried very, very hard to offer the best of both worlds. I don’t think it got enough praise for that. Then again, neither did it get panned as a failed experiment, which is what happens more often than not!
Check out the “Regional Travel” and “Permission to Visit” extensions.
There’s also Distant Movement and its ilk, for moving directly to certain rooms. (I’m of course going to mention my own first 
but they all have different interfaces and feature sets, depending on your preference.)
“Go to [room name]” (with “go through [door name]” for unvisited rooms) is absolutely the gold standard, in my opinion, especially if you allow pathfinding to rooms that are more than one move away. You can still have the compass directions to help folks understand the layout, but unless navigational difficulty is supposed to be part of the story, why not just let people do the thing they want to do without having to recall the abstract instructions for how?
Some other implementations of that interface are how Emily Short implemented it in Bronze and the extra-fancy stuff she did in Counterfeit Monkey (Book 4, Part 3), although both do contain some spoilers for the games.
I don’t know if I like the idea of the player being able to ‘teleport’ directly to the kitchen. Sounds more like an efficient program than a game. I think the spatial navigation in itself lends some solidity to the narratives physical world.
Overworld-navigation in the form of a train, car or teleport is fine, though.
I remember a mechanism from a Short game where the player did not teleport directly to the kitchen. I think it was Bronze. You got a list of all the rooms you went through.
It got to be a bit of a mouthful, but it did prevent that “teleport” effect. Also, some text along the lines of “You leave [location] and soon arrive at…” is usually sufficient.
Finally, the mechanism I think is being talked about really isn’t teleporting, it’s pathfinding. So that if there are obstacles, the player will be halted at that obstacle.
Counterfeit Monkey also had text about how you got from place A to place B. It’s so much nicer than having to type “w.s.sw.u.n.e.n” when you want to get a place seven rooms away (I’m thinking of Metamorphoses, I guess, where I kept hopping back and forth between the puzzle rooms and the rooms with the tools in them, and I eventually started chaining together the navigation commands. Excelsior was another game with a lot of travel between widely separated places and it didn’t even let you chain commands together, though it also had a good excuse for not allowing fast travel.)
To me, this is a great convenience. Counterfeit Monkey did a great job of it. I seem to recall a similar but maybe rather simpler system in Nightfall by Eric Eve, where IIRC “GO TO” only ever took you one step of the way, but that still avoided the need to map. Adv3Lite has it built in as standard – you can go to locations and to places where there are objects of which you are aware.
I don’t think any of these systems just “teleport”; they all reckon with the possibility that something may happen en route which either blocks a path or requires the player’s attention and therefore interrupts travel.
You’re right, and the example you provided is the most obvious one. It’s also one of the examples in the Recipe Book for I7. I7 is able to easily pathfind a way to your goal and proceed to move you (or attempt to) one room closer to your destination. For NPCs in particular it’s a very good thing.
Something I never bothered to check was whether the turn count increased for every room that you went through in games like the Short games - whether you could effectively cheat a timer by looping together commands. I know that you can GET ALL to get 5 items in a single turn, for instance.
Most of the obvious ways to do this it would take one turn. In order to have it take more than one turn you’d probably need to set up the fast-travel commands so they ran the advance time rule after each room you went to, as in the examples that implement “wait for one hour” and the like. Or if you were using some kind of modified timekeeping you could just set the timers so their advance depended on how many rooms you’d traveled through, rather than the number of rooms. (That’s what I wound up doing in Terminator–the turn sequence got so messed up that I just set the timed events to a counter that I advanced manually.)
Counterfeit Monkey doesn’t have timed events for which this would matter, that I can remember. Excelsior was chock-full of sequences which required precise timing, which is why it couldn’t implement a fast-travel system. And IIRC, Castle of the Red Prince which really did have a teleportish system (“x foo” would take you to the foo’s location if you’d seen it before)
actually had a timed sequence at the end that required you to exploit fast travel in this way. I found this aspect of it unsatisfying.
But even being limited to just going to rooms one move from here is an easier to use navigational interface than compass directions. I’m going to remember that the ballroom is through the entry hall from here, and remembering which compass direction those were in is certainly possible, but one extra step of effort.
This may be predicated on having a style of map which is based on narrative sense, but, well. 
It’s so fun to read this sort of testimonial, because I’m exactly the other way around! Possibly because I’m USED to compass directions. I visualize an IF map in grid-fashion. In my head, it’s how I see it. I visualise a 3d-space, of course, but that 3d-space is, overall, like a bunch of snapshots pasted on a piece of paper in a grid.
So I remember that, in Plundered Hearts, the ballrom is to the south of the entry, and to the northeast of the ballroom - though you have to go east first, and then north - is the library. It’s totally how I memorised it, and how I played it.
I’m veering off into something else now, but if I master the mechanics of what I’m doing - and if there mechanics are as straightforward as cardinal directions and a grid-like map - I’ll be free to explore the story on a higher level. Mileage here will DEFINITELY vary. I welcome a fixed, conventional interface because it frees me from thinking about how to communicate; rather, I’m thinking what to communicate.
That said, I love me a good gimmick. Give me an unusual interface and I’ll have fun too!
I speculate that a lot of parser IF people underestimate how much their familiarity with using compass directions affects their experience of compass direction navigation vs. alternatives. Players without that parser IF familiarity often express confusion about the weirdness of navigating with compass directions.
I think GO TO ROOM has a lot of merit, with or without conventional compass navigation. Compass directions let you build a detailed mental map of the space you’re in, certainly - but in most games that mental map is only necessary for navigation anyway. Not many IF games include, e.g. spatial puzzles. Knowing that the clock tower is north of the courtyard, as opposed to east or south or west or on the opposite side of the building, rarely contributes much to your understanding of the story/characters. I agree that it’s not right for all games (it wouldn’t have worked in my game It, for instance) but I think a lot more games could stand to experiment with it.
I would generally suggest implementing this as well as, rather than instead of, compass directions, precisely because they are familiar to many (and also, for those who find them handy, short: N.N.E.N.W.D. may be quicker to type than “GO TO WINECELLAR” and get you there just as surely). I know some have regarded them as “anti mimetic”, but that’s not really my concern. It’s just that however much I play, I’m afraid my mind doesn’t find it easy to visualise 3D spaces, and wherever a map is large enough to warrant it, and there isn’t some game-specific reason to avoid them, I’d like to see GO TO … as pretty much standard, not a gimmick, just as I expect to see automatically unlocking doors and a reasonably robust system of implicit actions.
(Incidentally, if you do like games where there is positive value to working out how different spaces relate to each other on a map, Koustrea’s Contentment in the current IFComp would be worth a play.)
Yeah, Peter, I freely admit that that’s my experience and opinion and hardly universal.
I think for me the problem is not that I don’t imagine the rooms spatially – I have a background in architecture and have spent plenty of time working with maps and plan drawings and such – but that the words for the directions take that extra bit of effort to come to me, east/west in particular. For me personally, it might almost be more effective to map the WASD keys to N/W/S/E. (I also have a problem sometimes where for some reason, whichever direction I go in first gets mapped in my head to north. It’s best for me for a game to have a northward exit from the first room! And let’s not even talk about the asymmetric directions in the Zork opening sequence.)
I always think of the compass directions as shorthand for moving along the x and y axes, like you’re moving around on a map, rather than literally meaning magnetic north or whatever. It’s a lot easier to visualize the layout if you know where rooms are in relation to on another (I am bugged by directions that aren’t the same in both directions, or that don’t fit together into a map). GO TO feels a lot like fast travel in an open-world sandbox game: probably better to have than not if the game is really large, but you’re sacrificing some of the illusion of reality to get there.
Everybody probably figures this out pretty quick about writing room descriptions, but the most important thing for me (that I still slip up on and have to fix later sometimes) is to write them to be universal, so they work no matter what direction you enter from and whether the player has been in the room before or not. (Unless of course you’re writing different descriptions to cover all the possibilities)
Yeah, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t being ironic or anything - I really found it amusing how different our experience was. It really nails home that what can be self-evident even about the most basic premises of IF isn’t necessarily the same for the next person, and that’s always worth being reminded of.
Ditto. Magnetic north? Couldn’t find it to save my life. Nautical directions? I get totally messed up. X/Y axes on a grid? Straightforward and obvious. But that does require that the player is used - as so many of us are - to the standard IF mapping paradigm.
I often lump directions together that way. I find it natural. In fact, I specifically missed the ability of doing that in A Colder Light.
This is exactly what ADRIFT games do. In any game using ADRIFT 5 you only need to click on that location on the automatically generated map and it will pathfind the quickest route to get there, generating the movement commands and printing the description of each of the locations you pass through.
This is what makes pathfinding systems tricky. It’s relatively easy to implement GO TO KITCHEN (there’s at least one example in the Inform Recipe Book). It’s a bit more complicated to make sure that time passes the same way as if you had typed N. E. NW. N. If something interesting happens along the route, or even if a description has changed since the last time a room was visited, do you notify the player? Do you pause and give them the option to stop or keep going? Some events would stop the player regardless: you have to make sure the game knows what those events are and reacts accordingly.
It also profoundly affects how you design the map: Inform’s built-in pathfinding assumes no connections more complicated than a standard two-way door. Anything beyond that becomes a design problem you have to solve. Consider an elevator implemented as an enterable container, which moves between two parts of the map when a button is pushed. How does your pathfinding routine handle GO TO PENTHOUSE when you’re in the lobby, and vise versa?
These things can be handled, certainly, but it’s something you have to think about if it’s in your game.
I have found a site which gives detailed descriptions of photographs of various locations. One example:
Hope you can use it. I find this really inspirering when I write my own room descriptions.
Interior photograph descriptions: (680 results)
digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/searc … /conn/and/
Exterior photograph descriptions: (3565 results)
digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/searc … /conn/and/