Communicating

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What's wrong with this picture? If you're one of the many adults who has tried interactive fiction and hated it, you may think you know. Actually, IF aversion is easily understandable, in that many of us get the worst possible advice as we get started with the genre. "Look at this great program!" an enthusiastic student tells us, knowing that we like literature. "All you have to do is type in what you want to do. It's just like reading a novel!" And twenty cryptic error messages later, we've had enough of interactive fiction, because, in truth, even the most sophisticated IF program can deal with only a tiny portion of the kinds of English sentences that any speaker of the language uses. However, there's an easy way around this problem. All we need to do is read the clear and witty documentation that comes with each of the programs recommended here, and we will find communicating with the program quite easy.

For those who are working with shareware or freeware works of IF, however, a few suggestions on the kinds of sentences the programs recognize may prove helpful. All works of interactive fiction, even the very earliest ones, can recognize sentences of the verb-object form, such as "take coin," which the story will normally interpret to mean, "I want to take the coin." The IF stories recommended here can recognize many more kinds of sentences, though experienced readers often keep the two-word pattern in mind as the basic sort of sentence on which others are built. For example, contemporary IF stories can recognize "Take the gold coin," "Take the gold coin from the fountain," or "Take the gold coin and give it to the librarian."

In addition, most works of IF can recognize at least some simple questions that begin with "who," what," or "where"; and a variety of useful abbreviations, including "g" for "again," "z" for "wait," "i" for "inventory of what I'm carrying," "l" for "look," "n" for "go north," "s" for "go south," and "u" for "go up."

Conversing with other characters can be one of the most enjoyable and important kinds of interaction in interactive fiction, but it can be frustrating, too, unless the reader keeps in mind several linguistic patterns that most of the stories can understand. Directly addressing a character with a command will often work; for example, "Miss Voss, tell me about the magic stone." Similarly, a reader can often make progress by asking or telling a character about something, as in "Ask the bartender about the vampire." Frequently, a story will interpret a single word to mean that the character says the word. In other words, "hello" will often mean the same as "say 'hello,'" though it is necessary to type out
Say "Hello"
in other stories.

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