7.7. Saying Simple Things

| Chapter 7: Other Characters |

| 7.7. Saying Simple Things

There are times when even the commands ASK and TELL are overkill: sometimes the player doesn't have much information to offer, so TELL is never useful, for instance. If we don't want to make any distinction between modes of conversation, we can conflate the actions so that ASK LUCIUS ABOUT OLLIVANDER, TELL LUCIUS ABOUT OLLIVANDER and LUCIUS, OLLIVANDER all do the same thing: see Sybil 1.

If we are frequently permitting the player to say things like LUCIUS, OLLIVANDER as shorthand for "talk to Lucius about Ollivander", then we may also want to allow LUCIUS, OLLIVANDER? This makes the player character seem a bit slow (or at least Laconic), but it is an effective interface in some cases. The trick is that the question mark at the end of the command may prevent Inform from recognizing the keyword; should that problem arise, we may want to use Punctuation Removal to erase question marks from the player's command before attempting to interpret it.

Along the same lines, there are situations in conversation where similar commands do not correspond to the same actions within Inform; if we're careless about this, we may force the player to guess which vocabulary we want him to use, which is always vexing. Some cases to look out for:

Inform has actions for "saying yes" and "saying no". Sometimes this is useful, but sometimes we want YES and SAY YES TO FRED to do the same thing. Sybil 2 shows how to roll these responses into one; Proposal expands on the idea to show more ways in which a player could reasonably answer a question put by another character.

Again, if we want ASK SYBIL ABOUT CAKE to do the same thing as SHOW CAKE TO SYBIL, we might use the technique in Nameless to make objects into valid topics of conversation, and to make ASK and SHOW behave the same way.

See Remembering, Converting and Combining Actions for ways to redirect one conversation command to another conversation topic

See Varying What Is Read for a way of asking the player trivia questions that he can answer only on the next turn

91
| Example Sybil 1 Direct all ASK, TELL, and ANSWER commands to ASK, and accept multiple words for certain cases. |
WI

93
| Example Sybil 2 Making the character understand YES, SAY YES TO CHARACTER, TELL CHARACTER YES, ANSWER YES, and CHARACTER, YES. |
WI

Inform already understands YES, NO, and SORRY as commands in their own right, which can make things a little sticky when we want a character to ask a question of the player. The most important thing is not to cover some of the possible phrasings while ignoring others. "Replies" The Grove is a room. In the Grove is a woman called the Sybil. Instead of asking the Sybil to try saying no: try saying no. Instead of asking the Sybil to try saying yes: try saying yes. Instead of asking the Sybil to try saying sorry: try saying sorry. Instead of answering the Sybil that "yes", try saying yes. Instead of answering the Sybil that "no", try saying no. Instead of answering the Sybil that "sorry", try saying sorry. Instead of saying yes in the presence of the Sybil: say "She looks interested." Instead of saying no in the presence of the Sybil: say "She looks annoyed." Instead of saying sorry in the presence of the Sybil: say "She looks bored." The complexity arises from the fact that we want to handle both YES and SYBIL, YES. If we only had the latter, 'yes' would be treated as a text given to the Sybil, just as in the commands SAY YES TO SYBIL or ANSWER YES. But because we have defined it as a command (so that the player can use it independently), SYBIL, YES is understood as an order to the Sybil to do the YES action. Fortunately, we can redirect everything, as here, so that the results wind up the same. And if we want yet another variation not covered by the Inform standard: Understand "tell [someone] [text]" as answering it that. Understand "tell [someone] that [text]" as answering it that. But that is a matter for a later chapter. Test me with "yes / sybil, yes / say yes to sybil / answer yes / tell sybil yes / no / sybil, no / say no to sybil / answer no / tell sybil no / sorry / sybil, sorry / say sorry to sybil / answer sorry / tell sybil sorry".

171
| Example Proposal Asking the player a yes/no question which he must answer, and another which he may answer or not as he chooses. |
WI

286
| Example Nameless ASKing someone about an object rather than about a topic. |
WI

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