[I7] Tense Change Question in Description Text

I have part of a description that reads like this:

“A tide of baby strollers [–] or ‘perambulators’ as they [are] [call] [here] [–] [surge] north along”

Notice the substitutions there to handle tense. Here is the output:

In first person, past tense:

A tide of baby strollers — or “perambulators” as they was called there — surged north along

In first person, present tense:

A tide of baby strollers — or “perambulators” as they is calls here — surges north along

In second person, present tense:

A tide of baby strollers — or “perambulators” as they is calls here — surges north along

Basically no matter what I try, it’s not quite getting it right. So I suspect I’m missing something obvious. I have a whole bunch of examples like this from an author workshop so here I’m taking one of the simplest.

I have read the adaptive text chapter in the manual but while it’s very prescriptive, I run into lots of cases where I can’t quite figure out how to get things working the way I want, short of changing my descriptions to get around the problems.

I did notice that I could add one more substitution:

[they] [are] [call] [here]

That would create (in first person, past tense):

A tide of baby strollers — or “perambulators” as it was called there — surged north along

So it feels like the issue is that there’s really nothing to provide context for the substitution since “perambulators” in this case is just text.

I guess what I’m groping for is a way to say that “for this substitution, pretend something that was plural came before it.” Is that possible?

So this is in a description, stab in the dark - is this perhaps on the first turn of the game before the parser has recognized what noun you’re referring to that it should change tense for?

In short, tense and viewpoint switching is neat, but it isn’t magic.

The family in the previous section - “[we]”, “[us]”, “[our]”, “[ours]”, “[ourselves]” - always referred to the player. But we also sometimes want to refer to other things without naming them. For example, how should we adapt this?

EXAMINE TREE
It has no clear outline in this misty netherworld.

We can easily make the verb adapt - change the “has” to “[have]” - but the trick here is to make the “It” adapt to cases where what’s examined is plural, or animate. What we want is:

 Instead of examining in the Netherworld: 
>     say "[regarding the noun][They] [have] no clear outline in this misty netherworld."

This is within a command referring to the noun the player typed, so…

If “strollers” is a plural object in world, I think you can say

say "[regarding the strollers]A tide of baby strollers [–] or ‘perambulators’ as they [are] [call] [here] [–] [surge] north along”

Someone please correct if I’m wrong. I suspect Inform might be reading “tide” as the noun instead of “strollers”.

14.5. Adapting text referring to other things (ganelson.github.io) says,

Finally, we occasionally want to agree with a number:

“Honestly, [dud count][regarding the dud count] of these [are] broken.”

If you don’t have the strollers as an object, I guess you could do something like this?

The plural-number is a number that varies. The plural-number is 2.

Then, in the description, you could say “‘perambulators’ as they [regarding the plural-number][are] [call]” and so on.

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Ah, excellent advice! So context I didn’t bother to provide and I should have. This is a room description and it is the first you encounter. Here is that in full:

Palace Gate is a room. “Palace Gate [are] a street running north to south leading up to Kensington Gardens. It was previously part of the Gloucester Road, which [are] just to the south. According to the guidebook, Gloucester Road was named after Maria, Duchess of Gloucester and Edinburgh who apparently built a house [here] in 1805.[p]A tide of baby strollers [–] or ‘perambulators’ as [regarding the perambulators][they] [are] [call] [here] [–] [surge] north along what [become] the crowded Broad Walk. Shaded glades [stretch] away to the northeast and a hint of color [mark] the western edge of what the guidebook [say] [are] the Flower Walk.”

Notice that “regarding” bit I added based on your advice? To get that to work, I just added this:

The perambulators is a plural-named thing.

Also, @bg , much thanks on the alternative idea if I don’t have the prams as a separate object.

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It think it’s always going to be “called” in every tense

  • as they were called
  • as they are called
  • as they will be called…

So just take off the brackets!

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Yep, just noticed that after I posted! I realize we’re getting tripped up tackling too many things at once.

The workshop is having a lot of fun with this stuff.

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If I remember right, adaptive text can handle the passive voice, so you can say [are called] as well as [are] [called]. I don’t know what the benefit of that would be, though.

If you want to force the plural case you can just say “[regarding 2]…” (and “[regarding 1]…” for the singular case).

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Or if you’re doing this often enough, add say-phrases like [plural] and [singular] for readability!

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Just a follow up for those curious, my workshop decided that trying to do adaptive text was just not worth it in the long run. To give an idea of where we ended up with just one room:

Palace Gate is a room. “This street [singular][run] north to south leading up to Kensington Gardens. It was previously part of the Gloucester Road, which [are] just to the south. According to the guidebook, Gloucester Road was named after Maria, Duchess of Gloucester and Edinburgh who apparently built a house [here] in 1805.[p]A tide of baby strollers [–] or ‘perambulators’ as [regarding the perambulators][they] [call] them [here] [–] [surge] north along what [become] the crowded Broad Walk. Shaded glades [stretch] away to the northeast and a hint of color [mark] the western edge of what the guidebook [plural][say] [are] the Flower Walk.”

That last part was actually challenging. In first person, past tense that last part of the description shows this during pay:

…marked the western edge of what the guidebook said were the Flower Walk

In first person, present tense:

… mark the western edge of what the guidebook say are the Flower Walk.

In short, verb handling worked extremely well. But the use of [are] proved to be very problematic. Lots of oddities would crop up. For example, originally Palace Gate started like this:

Palace Gate is a room. “Palace Gate [are] a street north to south leading up to Kensington Gardens.”

In first person, past tense this would always come up as:

Palace Gate were a street north to south leading up to Kensington Gardens.

Notice the “were”, which is not correct. Yet the very same structure for another room:

Black Lion Gate is a room. “The Black Lion Gate [are] at the northern end of the Broad Walk.”

Would correctly produce:

The Black Lion Gate was at the northern end of the Broad Walk.

Notice the “was”, which is correct.

No doubt there are things we could do to correct this but everyone felt the constructs were getting a bit baroque at best.

From an authoring standpoint, the focus with my workshops over many years has always landed on first person, past tense. It seems every year or so we have to revisit this idea of allowing for tense and viewpoint changes only to come to the same conclusion.

It’s always been interesting to me how authors of traditional fiction are most intrigued by the idea of switching tense/viewpoint even though, to a person, they all agree that first person, past tense seems to be the ideal form for interaction fiction, notwithstanding that the vast majority of such has NOT been that!

Adapting verbs is meant to be in the context of some particular (grammatical) subject. These would work fine in any tense:

Palace Gate is a room. "[Palace Gate] [are] a street north to south leading up to Kensington Gardens.".
The Badlands is a plural-named room. "[The Badlands] [are] just misunderstood."

If one has neither been explicit with regarding nor has said a game-object within the same text before the verb to be conjugated, then the grammatical number used to conjugate the verb is determined by whatever values happen to be lying around in prior named object (prior_named_noun in I6) and prior_named_list (no I7 equivalent).

So it’s just a matter of bad luck for the Palace Gate / good luck for the Black Lion Gate that whatever was most recently assigning those in the game made it consistently wrong for one and right for the other.

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Ah, I get it! Interesting. So in this case, since I had Palace Gate clearly defined as a room I could just bracket it, similar to what I did with the perambulators earlier.

Much thanks!

Lots of little tips combined, with a fully working example, are starting to bring my workshop class back around to experimenting with this more.

For those still perhaps burning with curiosity as to how this ends up looking, here’s an example of Palace Gate that seems to work well for both past and present tense.

Palace Gate is a room. “[Palace Gate] [are] a street that [run] north to south leading up to Kensington Gardens. It was previously part of the Gloucester Road, which [are] just to the south. According to the guidebook, Gloucester Road was named after Maria, Duchess of Gloucester and Edinburgh who apparently built a house [here] in 1805.[p]A tide of baby strollers [–] or ‘perambulators’ as [regarding the perambulators][they] [call] them [here] [–] [surge] north along what [singular][become] the crowded Broad Walk. Shaded glades [plural][stretch] away to the northeast and a hint of color [singular][mark] the western edge of what the guidebook [if the story tense is present tense]says[otherwise]said[end if] [singular][are] the Flower Walk.”

Here’s a slightly simpler example with the Broad Walk:

Broad Walk is a room. “A brooding statue of Queen Victoria [face] east, where the waters of the Round Pond [plural][sparkle] in the afternoon sun. [It’s] possible to follow the very long, and very crowded, Broad Walk north and south until the walk’s border [are] lost amid the bustle of perambulators. Small paths [plural][curve] northeast and southeast between the trees.”

As you can tell if you know the game Trinity, we’re clearly expanding the descriptions a bit beyond what was in the game.

You start to learn the little micro-decisions to make and it gets easier. For example, here’s Flower Walk:

Flower Walk is a room. “Flamboyantly colored flower beds [line] the walks that [bend] north and west, filling the air with a pleasant, if sometimes overpowering, fragrance. A little path [lead] northwest, between the trees.[p]The spires of the Albert Memorial [plural][are] all too visible to the south. Passing tourists [hoot] with laughter at the dreadful sight; nannies [hide] their faces and [roll] quickly away.”

Worth noting that we do have an object called Albert Memorial but square-bracketing that would not matter because the sentence is referring to the “spires” (plural). So that’s why we have the “[plural][are]”. Notice too that “filling” doesn’t really require parameterizing since it works in either tense.

Here’s a Grassy Area (which was the Wabe in the original game; we don’t reveal that name until some events happen):

Grassy Clearing is a room. “This grassy clearing [singular][are] only twenty feet across, and, unless [our] eyes [deceive], almost perfectly circular. Paths [wander] off in many directions through the surrounding thicket.[if unvisited][p]Oddly enough, this location [don’t] appear in the guidebook at all.[end if]”

This one does have one bit that changes based on the story viewpoint.

Once you have some working examples like this, I find it’s a whole lot easier to reason about.

My general rule is to never use a bracketed verb unless I’ve got a bracketed noun or a [regarding…] in the same piece of text. It’s just easier for me not to rely on previous text to regard the right thing.

Or in other words, if I’m bracketing a verb, I should also be bracketing its subject.

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If the subject is not an object in the world model, you can write [adapt the verb are from the third person plural] (from memory, you should check the syntax) to conjugate it from an arbitrary viewpoint.

I think you can also use [regarding nothing] and it will default to the third person singular.

(I only skimmed the messages, so sorry if it has already been mentioned.)

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Yes, I believe [regarding nothing] is meant to be used for impersonal verbs, like “there is a cat” or “it is raining”. In English that’s third person singular but other languages might do it differently.

That works exactly. I had just submitted a bug last week about how you couldn’t use verb be as a literal. I did not see coming that verb are might work.

(As a sayable value, it advertises itself as verb be, i.e., if you say verb are the output is “verb be”. )

The form used (in English, the first person plural like “are”) is supposed to be defined by the adaptive text viewpoint property of a natural language. That’s the kind of thing you learn when spending a lot of time translating Inform!

(I’ve also reported a bug regarding this, but it was closed due to a misunderstanding. I’ve also argued there that it would be more natural to use the infinitive for verbs as values, but no answer so far.)

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Since “be” is the only English verb where the third plural is different from the infinitive, there used to be a very funny bug where you had to write [might are] instead of [might be]—the compiler was programmed to recognize the third plural form rather than the infinitive, for the sake of [are], without noticing this one exception.

This sounds like a new iteration of that.

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hunh. Doesn’t help with the other verbs you can’t use as literals in v10 – everything else beginning with to be – be able to, be able to see, be able to touch (also translate into, though verb translate as works).