§6.5. Examining
By default, examining an object shows its description, and - for devices - tells us whether the object is switched on or switched off.
This kind of additional information is not always what we want, so if we have a device whose on/off status we want to conceal, we may write
The examine described devices rule is not listed in any rulebook.
On the other hand, there are times when we may want to add a similar line or two to the descriptions of other kinds of objects. Crusoe allows us to append an "It is charred." sentence to the end of descriptions of things we have burned in the fire. Since it works by introducing a "printing the description" activity, Crusoe is also a good example to start from if we want to introduce more complex, flexible descriptions of items throughout our story.
Odin rewrites the "You see nothing special..." line with other text of our own, for items that otherwise do not have a description.
Finally, we may want to look at multiple things at once. The Left Hand of Autumn demonstrates how we might provide a different response for EXAMINE PAINTINGS than for examining each individually; Beekeeper's Apprentice provides a SEARCH command that will show the descriptions of all the scenery in the current location.
See Actions on Multiple Objects for an alternative EXAMINE ALL command
In recent years there has been a strong trend towards providing unique descriptions for all implemented objects. Often this is a good idea, but there are also contexts in which we may want to discourage the player from looking too closely at some things and concentrate his attention on just a few interesting ones. The trick here is that leaving items completely undescribed leads to rather dull exchanges like this:
...which can leave the player with the impression that the author was simply too lazy to describe everything. So it can be a good idea to replace that default message with a different one more appropriate to the game. For instance:
Because the description is attached to a whole kind ("thing"), it is really a blanket instruction about many objects at once. More specific instructions always override less specific ones, so we can easily make exceptions. For instance, the following will work correctly:
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In recent years there has been a strong trend towards providing unique descriptions for all implemented objects. Often this is a good idea, but there are also contexts in which we may want to discourage the player from looking too closely at some things and concentrate his attention on just a few interesting ones. The trick here is that leaving items completely undescribed leads to rather dull exchanges like this:
...which can leave the player with the impression that the author was simply too lazy to describe everything. So it can be a good idea to replace that default message with a different one more appropriate to the game. For instance:
Because the description is attached to a whole kind ("thing"), it is really a blanket instruction about many objects at once. More specific instructions always override less specific ones, so we can easily make exceptions. For instance, the following will work correctly:
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