IFComp 2010 - Open for Business, and You?

[Pacian]

@Finn Rosenløv

I have just run the game, very briefly. Oxblood is a male in the character setup and when you read the text it clearly states that he is a “he.” So it would be apropriate to refer to it as a he, instead of an “it”
I tried “Saddle oxblood” and then “mount him” and it worked just fine.

To be fair, the problem with he, she, it and them not necessarily referring to the last in-game object you referred to (depending on whether it’s defined as male, female, neuter or plural) is common to all the major parsers. I know I’ve encountered Inform and TADS games where I’ve got frustrated trying to use “it” on a “them” etc. As Matt says, it’s the author’s (sometimes unfair) responsibility to make sure the player knows what pronouns they can use (or to enable several when things are unavoidably ambiguous).

That said, I agree with Peter that Adrift does seem to have more problems with pronouns than I’d expect, in particular the way it sticks doggedly to what the player refers to. As an example, if I “talk to Lisa” in one room, and then go into another room with “Cathy” in it, “talk to her” should try to talk to Cathy and not Lisa. It should also talk to Cathy even if I’ve never referred to a female before in a command.

@Finn Rosenløv

I agree with you totally, that Adrift 4 has its flaws, but I have the feeling that when people are judging an Adrift game, they often attack Adrift, rather than judging the game. It’s like “if I can’t find anything on the game, I can always shoot at the generator.”

I think people do tend to separate the two. There are several Adrift games I like a lot, but playing them does mean wrestling with the parser. Playing even the best Adrift game still often means having a few anecdotes about the game asking questions you couldn’t answer, or performing unexpected actions. These complaints aren’t something the author should take personally.

@Finn Rosenløv

I’m looking forward to see what Campbell gets out of the V.5. Hopefully people will change their attitude towards Adrift when the V.5 is released, but that remains to be seen.

I hope so too, although if it’s still shareware I don’t see it uprooting Inform 7 any time soon as the non-programmer’s tool of choice.

[Juhana]

There’s an infamous example of a game where the exchange could go something like this: (paraphrasing)

You can see a parrot here.

TALK TO PARROT
The room has a strange smell.

What happened here was that the parrot was called Smelly, and under the hood the parser changed the player’s command to TALK TO SMELLY and scanned it for commands it would understand. It found SMELL in there and interpreted the command as that.

You could argue that the above example is the game designer’s fault because I’m sure there is a way to avoid this with careful programming, but it does no good to ADRIFT to pretend that its parser has no problems at all. ADRIFT has a very important place among IF development systems in that it takes a very user-friendly and unintimidating approach to game development and it’d be great to have it lose the reputation of having such a limited parser, but that’s not going to happen by pretending that there are no problems. The only solution is to acknowledge the limitations and then fix them.