Interesting, that’s not what I thought it did - I thought the second part of the action was interpreted as BOB, TELL ALICE TO JUMP (i.e. as if Bob had entered the commands “JUMP” and then “ALICE, JUMP”, which is at least consistent albeit weird. Converting it to a tell is probably less useful (is this because Inform treats any instance of “>NPC, [indecipherable text]” as telling it to?
From a programming perspective, my answers to some of these questions are probably nonsensical. But I rarely even think about turns versus actions.
In an ideal world, assuming I’m a parser novice who doesn’t know what’s happening under the hood, my thought process is: I’m probably commanding multiple NPCs simultaneously because I want them to act simultaneously. (Otherwise, I would type separate commands.) Therefore, ideally, they would act simultaneously, not sequentially.
It gets muddy (well, muddier) when you’re commanding NPCs and commanding the PC. That seems to split the focus, perhaps change the player’s intent, and potentially divide one action into multiple turns. Depends on the context, I’d imagine.
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Hmm, now that I think about it, I don’t think my reasoning for voting the way I did actually makes sense…
BOB, JUMP. JUMP
I voted that this would mean telling Bob to jump twice, so there’s no issue here—Bob should jump, then jump again.
JUMP. BOB, JUMP.
Here, I (the PC) will jump, then I’ll tell Bob to jump. Two turns.
BOB, TAKE ROCK. ALICE, TAKE APPLE.
Here, I imagined it basically as the PC saying “Okay Bob, you take the rock, and Alice, you take the apple.” But in practice, if I can’t jump at the same time that I’m telling Bob to jump (which my thinking on the previous example implies), I shouldn’t be able to tell both Bob and Alice to do things at the same time, either…
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