Comments on: You Little Bobby Dazzler

By: J Thomas

J Thomas — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 18:41:09 +0000

Rich, think about this. Why would anybody subject themselves to a humanities graduate degree and a life of poverty? Hmmm?

Astrophysics students have a reason to avoid drama. Too much of that stuff and you won’t graduate. This doesn’t apply nearly as much to humanities grad students. And if they don’t graduate, is that so terrible?

By: Rich Puchalsky

Rich Puchalsky — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 14:18:16 +0000

I was an astrophysics grad student. Clearly the humanities must be very different.

By: andthenyoufall

andthenyoufall — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:56:10 +0000

Obviously someone has never been a grad student. If even half of graduate students could limit themselves to one hot girlfriend and one psychotic ex, we would have a new Renaissance on our hands.

By: belle waring

belle waring — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:56:01 +0000

I don’t know, Rich; sounds pretty grad studenty to me.

By: Rich Puchalsky

Rich Puchalsky — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 02:47:08 +0000

All right, now I’ve played the game. Violet is too cute to be that manipulative. Also, who knows why this feckless grad student has one hot girlfriend hovering over him/her and an ex just across the hall throwing herself at him/her. It’s all too dramatic to be grad-student-y.

By: Jon H

Jon H — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:18:08 +0000

SEK could do a good one about getting your money back from the library so you can register.

By: Rich Puchalsky

Rich Puchalsky — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:06:46 +0000

Yeah, I’ve been waiting for a post from SEK on this one. The game might as well have been called “SEK, this was your life!” Except that his partner, from her comments, doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would blackmail him.

By: Jon H

Jon H — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:44:31 +0000

Actually, it appears that Jeremy used Inform 7 for Violet.

By: Jon H

Jon H — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:35:32 +0000

Oops, I messed up the tags.

In the above, everything from the first code-formatted “Vouray” to “The Vouvray cask and the Muscadet cask are casks in the Wine Emporium.” is source code. The latter sentence creates two casks, names them, and puts them in the room that was created.

Everything between my “you’re standing in The Wine Emporium, and there are two casks:” and my “You can download it” is the output of running the source code in the IDE.

By: Jon H

Jon H — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:29:20 +0000

Obviously, the next game should involve students having sex in your office.

Given how many Infocom spoof posts SEK does, I’m almost surprised he didn’t write this game.

Lemuel: There’s a new thing called Inform 7, which lets you create these in a slick book-metaphor IDE, using a rule-oriented language that approximates English.

Here’s a brief example demonstrating the creation of synonyms, from the documentation:

"Vouvray" The Wine Emporium is a room. "Set aside, you rather suspect, for tourists: this chamber is barrel-vaulted stone, lined on each side with casks of aging wine. Discarded brochures here and there advertise Wine Tours of the Loire Valley in three different languages, none of them French."

A cask is a kind of thing. A cask is always fixed in place. Understand "cask" or "barrel" as a cask.

Understand "casks" or "barrels" as the plural of cask.

The Vouvray cask and the Muscadet cask are casks in the Wine Emporium.

You can put this text in the source code view of the IDE, click “Go”, and you get a running game where you’re standing in The Wine Emporium, and there are two casks:

Vouvray

An Interactive Fiction

Release 1 / Serial number 081120 / Inform 7 build 5U92 (I6/v6.31 lib 6/12N) SD

Wine Emporium

Set aside, you rather suspect, for tourists: this chamber is barrel-vaulted stone, lined on each side with casks of aging wine. Discarded brochures here and there advertise Wine Tours of the Loire Valley in three different languages, none of them French.

You can see a Vouvray cask and a Muscadet cask here.

>examine cask
Which do you mean, the Vouvray cask or the Muscadet cask?
>

You can download it, free, for Windows, Mac, or Gnome, at http://www.inform-fiction.org

By: Zarquon

Zarquon — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:59:19 +0000

That’s just wrong. Now woman from Australia is called “Violet”.

By: lemuel pitkin

lemuel pitkin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:35:32 +0000

Awesomeness. So there’s a package that lets you create these things?

By: Lex

Lex — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:27:19 +0000

“the crisis of a senior faculty member whose long history of abusive pseudonymous commenting is suddenly and inadvertently exposed.”

Steal my life and I shall sue!

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:03:11 +0000

I didn’t even realize it was the same guy until now. I think all of the Crooked Timberites should enter next year’s competition. The latest version of Inform allows you to create games in something resembling natural language, so it’s not as difficult as you might imagine. (I think that either Belle or Montagu Norman would place highest.)