7.6. Reading and talking

| Chapter 7: Basic Actions |

| 7.6. Reading and talking

A few actions apply not to items alone, but also involve what might be called conversation. The first is the one used for looking things up in books (which is conversation of a kind, even if the author is not present): "consulting ... about ...". For example,

> In the Grove is a book of sybilline verses.

> After consulting the book about "grove", say "The Grove is a sacred yadda, yadda. There's a tree, that sort of thing. Wisdom."

> After consulting the book about "future events", say "It's a bit, what's the word? Delphic."

Note that what follows "about" here is a piece of text in double-quotes, and not the name of something. It can be almost any text at all, and in fact we shall later see (in the chapter on "Understanding") that we can match complicated patterns of words, too.

Similar actions are used for conversing with people:

> After asking the Sybil about "verses", say "She blushes."

> After telling the Sybil about "persians", say "She nods gravely."

> After answering the Sybil that "I am mad", say "She sighs."

These would be produced by commands like "ask sybil about verses", "tell sybil about persians" and "answer i am mad". Answering is very seldom used and can be forgotten about, but the distinction between asking and telling is often worth preserving, which is why there are two different actions for these. If you would prefer to make "tell sybil about X" do the same as "ask sybil about X", the following rule would serve:

> Instead of telling the Sybil about something, try asking the Sybil about it.

Games with a lot of conversation often involve great heaps of rules like the ones above, which can be repetitious to type out. We shall also later see (in the chapter on "Tables") that we can tabulate questions and answers in a much more concise way, if we prefer.

See Topic columns for table-based ways to store and retrieve conversation

91
| Example Sybil 1 Direct all ASK, TELL, and ANSWER commands to ASK, and accept multiple words for certain cases. |
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92
| Example Lucy Redirecting a question about one topic to ask about another. |
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Occasionally we will want to replace the player's question topic with another of our own devising. We can do this in the simplest possible case like so: "Lucy" The International Boardgame Championship is a room. Lucy is a woman in the Championship. Instead of asking Lucy about "checkers": try asking Lucy about "games". Instead of asking Lucy about "games", say "'I don't like games,' she sniffs." Test me with "ask lucy about checkers / ask lucy about games". Note that this syntax did not work in older versions of Inform; it is now safe.

93
| Example Sybil 2 Making the character understand YES, SAY YES TO CHARACTER, TELL CHARACTER YES, ANSWER YES, and CHARACTER, YES. |
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94
| Example Costa Rican Ornithology A fully-implemented book, answering questions from a table of data, and responding to failed consultation with a custom message such as "You flip through the Guide to Central American Birds, but find no reference to penguins." |
RB

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