Re: Announcing: Fyleet, Crobe, Sangraal

["Adam Atkinson" <ghira@mistral.co.uk>]

On 28-Aug-99 23:14:06, Andrew Plotkin said:

>> In the particular case of the Warden of Crobe, I think he tells you
>> the syntax the first time you meet him. "give wombat" is no big
>> surprise. Who else are you going to be giving it to? Not a problem.

>I think you're missing my point, which is that it *is* a problem. A pretty
>small problem, yes. I can memorize new syntaxes for standard commands. (I
>use the word "new" deliberately.)

For "new" read "old", that sort of thing? I expect the same "problem"
presents itself playing Scott Adams etc. stuff.

>But it's getting in the way of me playing.

Well, I'm sorry.

>But you're
>asserting that it's a non-issue because no complex commands are needed to
>solve the game; and as a UI designer I must point out that it *doesn't
>work that way.*

I'd have thought it's no worse than the way some games want you to say
"turtle, invade poland" and others want you to say something like:

talk to turtle
(what do you want to say to the turtle?) invade poland

I remember having had this "problem" some time in the last few weeks
and having found it, briefly, no more than mildly irritating.

>>>Nonetheless, I'm not tremendously motivated to get into
>>>these games.
>> 
>> One issue-ette is that permission was conditional on making only
>> unavoidable changes.

>Yes, that's another reason the problem exists.

In any event, there are likely to be _many_ other reasons why these
games offend modern sensibilities. Instadeaths, discovering you should
have done something ages ago which means you have to start from
scratch, arbitrary puzzles, whatever. Actually, Crobe and Sangraal are
probably not too "offensive" from this point of view, but Fyleet
really opened my eyes even 15 years ago: there are some puzzles in
Fyleet I only got by running out of other things to do, until the only
possible way to solve them was to use some combination of the few
remaining magic words, objects and locations that I hadn't understood
the purpose of yet. I can't see this going down well today, though
I think having _one_ such puzzle in a game might not be too bad,
especially if you can do it pretty near the end of the game: y