[NTLUG:Discuss] re:Hilcrest idea

[cbbrowne@godel.brownes.org]

On Mon, 04 Oct 1999 21:21:32 CDT, the world broke into rejoicing as
Steve Baker <sjbaker1 at airmail.net>  said:
> * Loss: It restricts what you can do.  When you click on the lamp, do
>   you mean "Light Lamp", "Get Lamp", "Smash Lamp"?
> 
> Some games have a hybrid scheme where clicking on the lamp *always*
> means
> "Get Lamp", and for anything else, you have to type.
> 
> The snag is really just that the pictures have to be a lot more exact,
> and the game has to know where on the picture the west door is.

How to optimize expressiveness is a problem...

A "point'n'drool" interface is liable to make it too easy to determine
methods of manipulating things, as it forcibly has to either:
  a) Provide hieroglyphics to present methods, or
  b) List methods exhaustively.

On the other hand, the use of language to manipulate things has both
the merit that it encourages knowing language and the demerit that the
poor student may be left stuck if there's a critical word that they need
to use that they just don't *know.*

In the long run, it may be desirable to have the students literate enough
that they can cope with having to look to a thesaurus or dictionary to
try to figure out what kinds of bizarre things one might use a feather
for.  But if they're having a hard time coping with basic English, it may
be early to challenge their vocabulary...

> > >It would be pretty easy to add still pictures - but only if we have a
> > >talented
> > >artist somewhere who could paint 100+ images. (Maybe we could get some
> > >of
> > >the kids to do this?  Given a verbal description of a location.)
> > 
> > I've got kids for that...
> 
> Cool!
>  
> > >> What type of interface would you be interested in?  With a web browser y
ou
> > >> could have the cross platform aspects easily, but you'd be limited in wh
at you
> > >> could do.  Do they all have newer browsers, say Netscrape 4.x?  If so yo
u
> > >> could probably do some interesting this with the DOM and JavaScript.
> > 
> > We can specifiy when it comes to Netscape.  I'm going to start another
> > message with some more ideas I've come up with.
> 
> Perhaps it's time to take this off the discuss at ntlug.org list - it's
> getting
> rather off-topic.  Didn't you mention that you could start up a mailing
> list?

Those that want to participate should take this off the main list, as the
work of making this work isn't really a "general discussion" matter, but
rather the business of those that are going to make it happen...

> > >Using a web browser is certainly do-able - there is an online version of
> > >"Colossal Cave" (the classic Crowther & Woods adventure).  If you did
> > >that,
> > >you could probably run ALL the games on the server - those kinds of
> > >game use almost zero compute time and are easy to run as CGI programs.
> > 
> > That would be very neat.
> 
> Then perhaps we should ask the person who put up the "Collosal Cave"
> site if we can steal his/her code?

Take a look at the Interactive Fiction page:
<http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/wsr/Web/IF/homepage.html>

There is a section that discusses "Interactive Fiction Authoring Tools"
that include Inform and TADS.

Most of these systems are text-oriented, although there *does* exist
something called HTML-TADS that may be relevant to the "quest."
<http://www.tela.bc.ca/tela/html-tads/>

For something completely different, take a look at
<http://www.erasmatazz.com/index.html>, perpetrated by Chris Crawford,
*long* of computer gaming fame, and author of some Thoughtful Games...
--
"Consistency is the single most important aspect of *ideology.*
Reality is not nearly so consistent." - <cbbrowne at hex.net>
cbbrowne at ntlug.org- <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>