Fascinating podcast that highlights a lot of differences in expectations today vs 40 years ago. Back then, “adventures” were basically puzzle games and the story took a backseat to the notion of clever puzzles. Today it’s the reverse. Unfortunately, some of the “clever puzzles” were not as clever as they were intended, due to limitations of memory, CPU and so forth.
In “The Pawn”, the game was essentially parody of itself, where the “player” was not supposed to be there at all. The “real adventurer” was meant to rescue the princess and win the esteem of the King. The evil magician was meant to thwart the adventurer. Unfortunately, the “player” intervenes and messes everything up. That’s why you can’t both “win” and also rescue the princess - because that’s not your role in the game
If you decide to feature another Scrolls’ game, I can highly recommend not using the web versions - in which a number of people have complained of bugs and save-game problems, not realising these were not problems in the originals. Instead i recommend playing the remasters which are a whole lot nicer to play. I can supply free copies to anyone sufficiently interested.
For info, the Scrolls’ parser could easily cope with words having simultaneously multiple parts of speech. For example, plant
as a verb, noun, and adjective at the same time. The problem instead was the memory to store those words
There is actually a second parser in “the pawn” that copes with conversations. If you say “john, how are you”. or some sort of question, you will get various answers from characters. Unfortunately, most of these “answers” are not helpful with the story. the second parser was removed for the later games to save memory.
But there is something you have correct;
People don’t want sophisticated parsers. They’d rather have typing conveniences. Like word completion, abbreviations and command re-editing. And today, choices with clickable words and pictures.
Best wishes with the podcasts.