Recently Emily Short [twice], David Cornelson, Nick Montfort, and others have written about the command line/parser in traditional IF, and whether we can improve or eliminate it. Understandably, when ……

Mostly I wanted to point out that I rather liked this phrase:

“a reasonably negotiated subset of a natural language”

It makes me think both of poetry and of second-language learning. If learning how to play traditional IF is like learning a second language, do I feel much sympathy for those who aren’t willing to investigate the half-hour or so of frustration that it takes to learn the basic outlines of the grammar so that they can participate in the conversation? Especially those who haven’t bothered to read the (one- or two-page) grammars beforehand? Well, no, not really, but I’m also not terribly bothered if they decide not to experience IF either.

True. On the other hand, most interfaces are full of little hinty reminders about how to control them: buttons, drop-down menus, toolbars, radial menus, whatnot. IF offers the opportunity to review what nouns are available (sort of, if you accept that you’re not going to get a complete list and that there may be some unimplemented nouns in descriptions). There’s no guarantee of a refresher on verbs.

The only part of my desktop that behaves like IF in its opacity is the Terminal window.

It makes sense for a programmer to be able to determine an object’s methods, but the experience of IF for me is not mainly about programming; instead, it’s about directing a character through a world, often one that is strange. Using langauge, and specifically, a reasonably negotiated subset of a natural language like English, seems suitable for this.

What I suggest would still allow for the typing of standard commands; it would still continue the paradigm of commanding a character. It would just offer a bit more clarity about what that subset of natural language is — as though you were being allowed to say, hey, character, remind me what you know how to do with a door? Ah, right. LISTEN AT IT.

(This said: Ad Verbum is one of the few IF games I can think of that absolutely positively could not work at all, not even for some of the content, in the system I’m describing.)

I have to note in closing something that I find a bit amusing: As Inform 7 is taking a programming language for interactive fiction in a radically more natural-language direction, Short is arguing for an IF interface that is less like natural language.

Less ironic if you consider that the natural-language aspect of Inform 7 wasn’t my idea. I like it — as an expert user, I don’t struggle too much with the syntax, and I find some advantages in it — but I also acknowledge that it is unsuitable for many authors. If I7 were the only kind of language available to write IF in, I would also think we needed an alternative in that arena. Fortunately we’ve already got several.