What XYZZY Does

     An article by Eileen Mullen, found on the internet

Experienced IF game players know that successful strategies or
solutions for puzzles in one game are often worth trying again in
other games.  Experienced game developers learn the value of
coding special responses in anticipation of players trying out
these strategies that worked for them before!

My favorite example, obviously, is the magic word XYZZY from the
game Adventure. Even if you don't want the command to work as your
players hope it will in your game, it's much better to code a
special response than have your parser kick in with a default like
"I don't know the word 'xyzzy'."

Below, in alphabetical order, is a round-up of popular text
adventures that do make use of special responses to the command
XYZZY. How many of these have you seen?

game title          What "XYZZY" does
------------------------------------------------------------------
Curses              For a moment you can almost hear a hoarse
                    voice say something to you. But it passes.

Enhanced            Suddenly you find yourself in exactly the same
                    room you were in before! It's magic!

Horror of Rylvania  You speak an ancient word of power. A hollow
                    voice says, "No chance, chucko. This is a
                    serious adventure. Shape up and fly right!"

MacWesleyan         A hollow voice says, "To order XYZZYnews, the
                    interactive fiction newsletter, send e-mail to
                    xyzzynews@aol.com."

Unnkulian
Unventure II        You invoke an ancient word of power.  So
                    ancient, in fact, that it no longer works.
                    Nothing happens.

Waystation          Actually having you magically teleport upon
                    the utterance of that word would violate what
                    little continuity exists in this game. Sorry
                    about that.

This compels you to do more coding, I know, but the payoff is
really high in terms of delighting your players with an inside
reference to other text adventure games. Let's hope we see more of
these in the future! :)









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