Christopher Allan Webber

Lisp game jam updates 2016-05-01

Christopher Allan Webber at

Won't be too many today, because I have a family function.

I did get to the point yesterday where I could connect to the world, find out my location, and... that's it. But that means a lot of machinery is working.

Matt Molyneaux, Jason Self, EricxDu likes this.

Show all 7 replies

There are two approaches to sentence pattern matching in interactive fiction. The first is how lambdamoo does it: simple, prebuilt structures of "verb", "verb direct-object", or "verb direct-object preposition indirect-object". (If there's ambiguity, you can quote it.)

The second option is much, much richer. This is the route that Zork and the Z-Machine / ZIL take: every action is able to provide its own syntax structure. This allows for vastly more rich sentences in English, which I think leads to much better immersion.

I worked out a plan this morning for adding the latter to my MUD, and I was convinced that it was the right thing to do.

Sadly, a conversation with my brother has convinced me that I was wrong. (I'm glad he convinced me though!) Both of these have tradeoffs; a precise and predictable way of handling actions which is uniform across the whole game, vs a more immersive "literary" system which can accept a wide variety of inputs. I was hoping for immersion, but... as Steve pointed out to me, what do you do when one of the potential objects in your room has a "special word" in it?

For example: in a multiplayer game, how do you accurately identify what to do when one of the objects in your room has a preposition, like "goblin with sword"? You could ban "with" in names, but if actions are able to define their own syntax, you have no way to identify ahead of time what words are "special".

The advantage that single-player interactive fiction games have: the authors of the game can control the names and the grammatical structure of all objects in the world. But if objects are able to provide their own names and their own verbs (commands a player can execute on them), then there's just no way to do this safely or reliably, and there's no way of getting around this in a multiplayer game... especially one where players are able to contribute to the world. (I guess this is why the Lambdamoo people did things the way they did...)

So it's too bad. My MUD won't have the rich sentence parsing I'd like, because I have to decide on a different tradeoff.

However, there's an advantage: reliably destructuring simpler sentences into words means that it would be possible to use the same logic system to build, say, a GUI interface. Or even better: build a federated game!

And one of the interests driving me wanting to explore MUDs here is the realization that what we're doing looks an awful lot like a looser version of the Subject Predicate Object structure of ActivityStreams and ActivityPub.

"Worse is better?" Tradeoffs for sure! Sometimes the decision you make isn't the one you wish you would...

Christopher Allan Webber at 2016-05-02T01:57:22Z

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠), der.hans, Jason Self likes this.

in all these years never really tried MUD's properly

I remember looking at a MUD via telnet in the early 90s, but I gave up after half an hour of endless questions about creating a profile and character in the game. I didn't yet know enough about the game to answer most of those questions! ... I gave up after half an hour of those questions so didn't manage find out what its like to play the game.

(I presume its a lot more fun than the frustrating profile questions that went on and on and on... maybe providing some easy preset profiles for newbies to choose might have helped)

don't know where to find those nowdays

Michael at 2016-05-03T07:46:32Z

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠), Christopher Allan Webber likes this.

I was going to say just quickly leaf through http://mud.lysator.liu.se/www/newbie_booklet.html and login according to http://mud.lysator.liu.se/www/enter.html , but it seems the server is currently not responding. :-(


Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2016-05-03T16:53:22Z

Oh. The server is responding, but only if you're in the uni network or something -- I could do it from my local lysator (uni computer club) account. 15-20 years ago you could log in from anywhere in the world, but I suppose things got rougher out there. :-(

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2016-05-03T16:56:39Z