Goodness, I haven’t posted here in two years? I’m just not very good at keeping a blog, am I? I think it’s partly my being busy with other stuff, partly not knowing what to say, and partly never really getting comfortable with blogware. WordPress is always going to be a stranger to me. Sorry about that.
There are other things I want to talk about, but this post is about my Thinger project, which is a spin-off from my Responser project.
As you might know, my Responser project began as just a webpage where I collected responses to the magic word XYZZY in interactive fiction games. Curious readers wanted to see responses to PLUGH and PLOVER as well, so I made those pages too, and then I got curious myself about other commands like SING and PRAY which tend to be used in similar ways.
I’ve also, over the years, attempted to catalog status line styles, classify room names, track which games used which extensions, compare how things are coded differently in various authoring systems, and other esoteric ways of looking at or dissecting IF. So I suppose a project where I collect object descriptions was inevitable.
So, yes, Thinger is about the responses in works of IF where you EXAMINE something. It’s utterly ridiculously time-consuming to find and extract these text segments in the first place, but it also becomes less clear as I get more data on how to organize and present the data. It’s a work-in-progress, y’know?
You can visit http://plover.net/~davidw/things/ at any time to view the current status of the project. There’s quite a few categories of objects to look at now, and I’m always adding both more categories and more examples. I also have a small handful of super-categories for organizing the categories themselves. I recently implemented a way for a category to belong to more than one super-category; for example: pianos are listed under both fixtures and musical instruments.
For the most part, Thinger is heavily biased towards sampling works of IF that I’ve also written walkthroughs for. It’s just a lot simpler for me to work with those works, and believe me, that’s already a large (and growing) corpus to keep me busy.
And what’s the point of the Thinger project? I really don’t know. I find the mix of viewpoints side-by-side fascinating. Like, you look at a ladder. What does the author feel they need to tell you about it? What the ladder’s made of? How long it is? How sturdy or safe it is? Where it leads to? Or is there something else that needs to be said? Or perhaps we don’t care and it’s just a generic ladder. Right now, Thinger is just a curious museum of oddities and mundane-ities.
I think, though, at some point, I will want to start analyzing what sorts of information is conveyed by descriptions, and which sorts of info are associated with specific objects. For example, an author might feel it’s relevant to say who owns a goblet or a bed, but not who owns a boulder. And maybe I’ll try my hand at a description generator tool someday. But when will I have the time to do that? How do I have the time to do any of this?
I’m babbling. Time to stop the post here. Thanks for reading.
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