Comment by throwanem
13 hours ago
> Have you played before?
> No.
> I assume that means yes.
Yeah, that's that half-century-old state of the art in natural language processing working...
13 hours ago
> Have you played before?
> No.
> I assume that means yes.
Yeah, that's that half-century-old state of the art in natural language processing working...
It's not NLP and it never was. The parser accepts a language with a specific syntax that just happens to vaguely look like English.
Some practise is required to become fluent in that language. But it's worth it, because it unlocks many amazing text adventures!
Thank you for explaining the joke.
You're quite abjectly wrong, though. Text adventures were heavily advertised, in their illustrious and very brief moment of sunshine, as 'accepting English input' (cf. Maher, The Digital Antiquarian), which by definition constitutes NLP. They were just extremely bad at it, hence their accompaniment by a constant stream of excuses like the one you just made. (You must have had to dust it off first! That one is older than me.)
Our understanding of what makes for a fun game has evolved significantly since the 1980s. Designers of text adventures today generally agree that structured, non-natural input is a good thing and reduces frustration in the end. I can't think of any prominent text adventure designer who still pretends the parser understands English. There are also no widely used text adventure development systems that even strive to understand English in their parsers.[1]
I would understand your joke if it was made in the 1980s, but today it only shows a very old misunderstanding of the genre. (One might say you must have had to dust that misunderstanding off first!)
[1]: The systems that do strive to understand English – usually through LLMs – generally do not result in very satisfying games. They are primarily made by AI enthusiasts rather than text adventure designers.
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