[MUD-Dev] Text Parsing

[Chris Gray]

[Ben Greear:]

[My second follow-up to this message, after another few hours of thought.]

> For instance, which of these would you chose to type:
> get the sword from the second bag
> get sword 2.bag
> ge sw 2.bag

I don't think I really like the second form, since it does't allow me to
type the "from". It would probably be fine if it just skipped it,
as long as it doesn't get upset if I put it in. The reason I want to be
able to put it in is that I am used to using it in natural speech. In fact,
if I say to someone "get the sword", and they don't know what sword I'm
talking about, I'll likely say "get the sword *from the bag*", stressing
the "from the bag". Not being able to do that in the game would be
an annoyance.

The use of the object indices here is another issue. Having them available
for disambiguation is good, but I much prefer adjectives. Again, in real
life, if I had a pair of swords in a bag, and told someone
"get the second sword from the bag", they wouldn't know which one I meant,
since the positions are not clear. Instead, I would describe the sword
using adjectives (e.g. the rusty one). Not being able to do that in the
game would also be annoying, simply because it is the natural thing an
English speaker would do.


I've thought a bit more about the earlier example, as well. That was the
one where the system was choosing a focus of attention based on commands,
and then using that focus to interpret incomplete or ambiguous commands.
I've decided I wouldn't like that. My reasons are similar. I want the
world I'm interacting with to be rich and interesting, but I want my
tools of interaction to be clear and completely predictable. Having the
system interpret my input differently, depending on its internal (and
possibly poorly understood by me the user) rules of what it thinks I'm
interested in, would be a bad user interface, in my opinion. I want the
unpredictability to be in the world, not in the way I interact with it.
If I was aware that I was using such a system, I would always be afraid of
it making my character do something I had not intended. I would always
be worried about entering completely correct and unambiguous commands,
so that it couldn't mess with them. The first time it did something
significant (or too many insignificant ones) that I didn't want, I would
likely give up in disgust.

--
Don't design inefficiency in - it'll happen in the implementation.

Chris Gray     cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA
               http://www.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA/cg/


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