17.36. Printing the player's obituary

| Chapter 17: Activities |

| 17.36. Printing the player's obituary

1. When it happens. The obituary is the text "*** You have died ***" or similar, usually followed by the final score.

2. The default behaviour. Printing the aforementioned text, then the final score, and reducing the status line to a largely blank state.

3. Examples. (a) For a work with no meaningful score, it would be odd to wind up with a final reckoning of 0, so:

> Procedural rule: ignore the print final score rule.

(b) Or we could add to the verdict:

> After printing the player's obituary: say "And you visited [number of visited rooms] place[s]."

369
| Example Finality Not mentioning UNDO in the final set of options. |
RB

370
| Example Battle of Ridgefield Completely replacing the endgame text and stopping the game without giving the player a chance to restart or restore. |
RB

371
| Example Jamaica 1688 Adding a feature to the final question after victory, so that the player can choose to reveal notes about items in the game. |
RB

> The options offered to the player at the end of the game are listed in the Table of Final Question Options, which means that we can add to them simply by continuing the table; what's more, the table gives us the opportunity to create a "final response rule", a rule that the game should follow in order to parse the player's input at this point. So, for instance, if we wanted the player to be allowed to ask for notes about any of the rooms, characters, or objects in a historical game: "Jamaica 1688" Section 1 - Procedure Table of Final Question Options (continued)
> final question wording | only if victorious | topic | final response rule | final response activity
> "REVEAL the inspiration for something or somewhere" | true | "reveal [any thing]" | investigate something rule | --
> -- | true | "reveal [any room]" | investigate something rule | --
> This is the investigate something rule: repeat through the Table of Footnotey Stuff: if the player's command matches the topic entry: say "[revelation entry][paragraph break]"; rule succeeds; say "I'm afraid I have no revelation to vouchsafe there." Section 2 - Scenario The Upper Deck is a room. Lucius is a man in the Upper Deck. The maximum score is 501. When play begins: now the score is 501; end the story finally. Table of Footnotey Stuff
> topic | revelation
> "reveal [Lucius]" | "Lucius is based on a historical buccaneer who sailed with William Dampier. The original did carry a Greek New Testament, from which he read aloud when the men were stranded in the jungles near Panama."
> "reveal [Upper Deck]" | "The Callisto is a simplified and tidied representation of a pirate sloop ca. 1688."

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