| Chapter 8: Change |

| 8.9. Removing things from play

Some things will occasionally be in a limbo state called being "off-stage": like actors or props not needed in Act II, but perhaps to be brought back on-stage later, they wait on the sidelines. Anything created with no apparent location will start the game off-stage, as in the case of the lamp here:

> Aladdin's Cave is a room. The genie's lamp is a container.

(Such things are easy to see in the World index because they are listed after all of the rooms and their contents, not belonging inside any room.)

To move something back on-stage, we simply "move" it back onto the stage set, so to speak: back to a room, or into, onto, or made part of something else which is currently on-stage. To remove something, we use the phrase:

> remove the gold coin from play

(We are not permitted to remove rooms, or doors, or the player, from play.) We can test whether something is on-stage or off-stage with:

> if the gold coin is on-stage, ...
> if the gold coin is off-stage, ...

or could, for instance, write

> say "Ah, so many absent friends. Who now remembers [list of off-stage people]?"

"On-stage" and "off-stage" are adjectives, like "visible" or "touchable", and they apply only to things. Rooms, directions and regions are the stage itself: so it makes no sense to ask the question of whether they are "on-" or "off-". Doors are always on-stage; backdrops are on-stage unless they have been explicitly removed using the "remove... from play" phrase.

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| Example Beverage Service A potion that the player can drink.

Some kinds of game objects -- food, for instance -- can only sensibly be used once, and should then be destroyed. The EAT command already implements this, but suppose we also had a category of drinkable potions: "Beverage Service" A potion is a kind of thing. The sparkly blue potion is a potion carried by the player. Level 3 is a room. Instead of drinking a potion: remove the noun from play; say "You quaff [the noun]. It goes down beautifully." Test me with "drink sparkly / i".

102
| Example Spring Cleaning A character who sulks over objects that the player has broken (and which are now off-stage).

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