Ha ha, no foot-swallowing here–it’s an obscure corner of parser experimentation that happens to be one I’m interested in.
I don’t know about Enchanter, but in I7 asking someone to try a queue of commands gets converted into a queue of requests, which get evaluated in turn. Example:
[code]Lab is a room.
Taylor is a person in Lab.
Persuasion rule when asking Taylor to try jumping or asking Taylor to try waving hands: persuasion succeeds.
Every turn: say “One turn has elapsed. Number of turns elapsed: [turn count].”
Test me with “actions/jump then wave then kiss taylor/taylor, jump then wave then kiss me/taylor, kiss me then wave then jump”.[/code]
output:
As you can see, the requests get processed in turn, and whether persuasion succeeds with one doesn’t affect whether the next one gets tried–it’s just as though you’d entered “Taylor, jump” and then “Taylor, wave” and then “Taylor, kiss me.” Each action seems to take one turn (on preview: as Vince points out), as with multiple queued actions you perform (which I’d forgotten about–I guess I had to hack queued commands out of Terminator because I’d already done something weird to prevent the Every Turn rules from running after every robot’s action, and I had the timer tied to the Every Turn rules rather than the turn count, so queued actions would’ve messed up the timer).
(By the way, the multiple-actors thing ultimately goes to a question someone had about Suspended, but Infocom’s solution there appears to have been something of a kludge.)
Oh! I forgot to add a particular piece of trivia about collective actions that may be of interest only to me. Spoilers for the third room in Faithful Companion (that’s after you get through the three-latch door):
One of the first things I coded in Inform was something for two people to move a couch together. I think this had something to do with a very early draft of Jim Aikin’s Inform handbook where he had some code for switching the PC near the beginning. Anyway, it turned out to be non-trivial to code this, because Inform’s world model is not that big on having an object that’s carried by two people at once. Then after I had the idea for the mimicking ghost in Faithful Companion, I thought it might be cool to have a puzzle where you and the ghost work together to move a heavy coffin lid, so I dropped that in… but instead of all the tricky stuff, I just had it check whether you and the ghost were trying to lift the lid on the same turn, and if you were the game put it in the right place for you.
Also, I meant to write a 10,000-word Lukascian rant on how the impossibility of collective action and collective report in these games is a reflection of our atomized bourgeois consciousness, which presents us always as individuals interacting with others as mere machines. Watch this space! (Don’t watch this space.)