Over on Twenty Sided, Shamus Young posted a blog today on, of all things, interactive fiction. Seems he’s been playing “Phantom of the Arcade” lately, an Inform-based text adventure written recently by Susan Arendt, his editor at The Escapist, and made available online. This spurred him to ponder the familiar issues and frustrations related to the IF parser, and particularly how the parser handles unknown or unacceptable input. “Feedback itself,” he states, “is a reward” — feedback that shows that, even though the command entered is invalid, the author and/or parser has anticipated it enough to provide useful information rather than a generic “I beg your pardon?” response.
One idea he came up with for this involves modifying the IF environment (particularly one that [More...] Read the rest