Steve E writes about the efficiency and purpose of language and how this is reflected in the poetry of Li Po. He further compares this to writing for interactive fiction – a subject that he and I have been discussing in regards to students learning Inform 7 in our New Media Perspectives course. The content of recent discussion is about what he so aptly states:
The writer doesn’t try to recreate reality, but writes with an efficiency that they think best reflects the world.
At my The Foyer is a Room page, I introduce the site with the comment about how students always ask the question how do I…? when working on their first IFs. While this is the point where learning begins, it is usually where problems begin. Let’s have an example…
Recently a student (working on their interactive fiction project using Inform 7) approached me with a question. They wanted to implement a coat rack on which would be hanging two coats; in one of these coats an important note will be hidden that the player needs to find. But, typically, they did not tell me any of this first, they simply asked me how to create a pocket in a coat. I explained the logic and the process and they cheerfully went back to work on it.
The next time I spoke with the student they complained about having a hell of a time with this. Their issue was it wasn’t behaving as they wanted/expected. The code was OK but it was producing responses like this:
>examine pocket
Which do you mean, the right pocket of the blue coat, the left pocket of the blue coat, the right pocket of the red coat or the left pocket of the red coat?
After looking at the source code, I learned what he was really trying to do: allow the player to search each coat in order to find a folded piece of paper. It really had nothing to do with pockets but the student got hung up in recreating reality and had not thought about the essence of this “puzzle.”
So, I showed him something simpler that produced this result:
>examine red coat
A thorough search of the red coat reveals a folded-up piece of paper in one of the pockets which you promptly take.
In this particular example, there was no reason for the player to have to go through all those pockets nor any reason for the writer to have to create all those pocket objects. The pocket only needed to mentioned after the correct coat has been searched and the paper has been found. But even then, does the pocket have to be explicitly mentioned?
>examine red coat
You find a folded-up piece of paper!