Small I7 Extension: Possession and Ownership

Authoring Inform 7
21

I’m definitely not going to force any assemblies in the extension. I have simply noted the possible issue in the documentation and indicated that adding a couple of assemblies can fix it.

Yes, if an object is owned by one person and held by another, both possessives can be used to refer to it. That’s actually sort of deliberate - possession is nine points of the law :slight_smile:

(Example: The player sees that Draco is carrying a wand. He types “X DRACO’S WAND”, and gets “Draco seems to be using Harry’s ten-inch holly wand.” and the same when typing “X HARRY’S WAND”, which is much better than “You don’t see any such thing.”

Of course, if both Harry and Draco are in the same room, carrying each other’s wand, then the parser will have to ask for disambiguation.)

(Honestly, I expect ownership to mostly be used for non-portable items, with some rare exceptions where an item is strongly iconic - e.g. Gandalf’s staff, Harry Potter’s wand, Sherlock’s deerstalker cap.)

22

Yeah, I guess it’s short enough that anyone who wants different behavior can customize it.

23

Posting a note here in case others run into the same issue.

If you have an object actually called “Sherlock’s hat” or whatever, the game will not be able to understand the word “Sherlock’s” as referring to it (since this extension splits off the possessive 's). Call it just a “hat” and use the ownership relation instead.

This isn’t likely to come up if you’ve been using this extension since the beginning, but it gave me some grief when I added this extension into Scroll Thief (with the object formerly called “Frobar’s spell book”), and it took a while to figure out why it wasn’t working.