Re: The contraversy of Mallenche, and its creator, Howard Sherman
I assume you mean by "cheating" when choices in a gamebook use a form of shorthand with your choices, eg "do you go through the forest or the mountains? You walk through the mountains for three days and find two caves, do you go in the right or left?" Ie, skipping major parts of the decision process and the story in time. I can understand why that makes you feel more like participating in a story than being a character in a coherent world at large, however there is another side to it as well, that being the ability to make time pass and to let you make choices over larger scale events such as the commanding of an army in battle, rather than everything be of the "open box with key" variety.
I also confess that for me as I've said, the parser is more like playing a game and not knowing the controls, than having complete freedom. If I had complete! freedom, as say you do when your rping with a human gm, you don't need to worry about eith er how you phrase what you do, or more crytically, whether the author of that game has thought of the action you took and factored it into the game he/she is writing, otherwise you get the dreaded "I don't know how to put" type message.
For example in Andrew Plotkins' Shade, your character was complaining about being thirsty and I believe the first action needed was to get a drink, however whenever I turned the tap on to get some water the message came up "yeah, the water's still on, you flick the tap off", this frustrated me for it's pure stupidity!
This is why I personally prefer limited parser to the inform completely open natural language parser system, sinse by limiting commands you don't pretend there is a freedom there that isn't, and really what is the point of having say a smell command if there is nothing to smell in the game and if the examine command can give you any important odorous information anyhow?
I will agree that in gamebooks I do miss the exploration side of the traditional If directions, though better classes of gamebook can include this too just by having recursive choice structure albeit it's more common in ff style books than in Choiceofgames style ones, though again you don't need the full natural language parser for this, as even if north or n as abbreviation will do the job, what is the point in having a hole bunch of "go north, proceed north, travel north" type redundent synonims.
Likewise, I always enjoyed the basic examine command to use on the environment or objects, but having a hole bunch of slightly different examine commands, especially those that applied to other senses just seems redundent to me, and occasionally confusing.
Lastly, my major problem of course with object manipulation is lack of logic. Sinse to me, there is a point when I just get sick of trying random combinations of actions and verbs and just want to ge t on and progress and see more of the world, not be stuck on some random puzzle, and usually my reaction on hearing the solution I failed to guess isn't "oh [[wow]]! I should've thought of that" but "for god's sake, that's just plane obscure and frustrating!"
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
