I think I'd rather let my teeth get dirty than use a toothbrush I found
laying around somewhere.
A game I'm beta testing, _Avarice_, promises eventually to have several
thousand objects. You see, it's set in a mansion. Sure, you _could_ pick
up the porcelain poodle and the astrolabe from the bric-a-brac shelf--as
you could in real life--but why _should_ you?
A game should not require that every object have a use in the game. I'm
all for hideously detailed games that have a great many objects that have
no relevance to the game. Don't let the player get away with "I can pick
it up--it must be useful".
This, oddly, is something that works better in a graphical game like
_Avarice_ than in a text adventure, where the necessity to enumerate each
object would lead to absolutely unwieldy screens of text.
Adam
-- adam@io.com | adam@phoenix.princeton.edu | Viva HEGGA! | Save the choad! "Double integral is also the shape of lovers curled asleep" : Pynchon 64,928 | TEAM OS/2 | "Ich habe einen Bierbauch!" | Linux | Fnord You can have my PGP passphrase when you pry it from my cold, dead brain.