At PAX East this past weekend, there were several demonstrations of a game (or perhaps more accurately a game system) called Parsely. It is essentially, as the thread title says, a kind of text adventure with a human parser. The person running the game has a sheet with a map and information about what is in each room, how various things work, the consequences of various actions – basically, the game code. The players give commands, and the game-runner interprets them based on the given information and expands on that as they see fit. I’m not sure I’m explaining this very well, but it was a really interesting combination of standard IF conventions and the kind of flexibility that a typical machine parser can never quite achieve.
I attended all the demonstrations and was sufficiently charmed by them that I picked up a couple of Parsely modules, and I’d love to try running them with a bunch of players who are familiar with the conventions of the medium. I was thinking of maybe doing it on the MUD, sort of Club Floyd style but without the need for Floyd himself (and at a different time, of course). What do you guys think? Is anyone interested?