§5.6. Viewpoint
Inform automatically creates a character for the player - a bland, personality-free entity at the outset, as we've seen. But there is no reason why the player need stick to this same identity throughout the game. Conventional fiction often jumps from one viewpoint character to another, and so can IF.
To do this at the most elementary level, we simply at some point
now the player is Janine;
where Janine is a person we've already defined in the code. Now the player is in whatever location Janine inhabits, carries whatever Janine carries, and wears whatever Janine is wearing. Terror of the Sierra Madre shows off this effect, and also demonstrates how to make the command prompt remind the player which character he currently controls. Some games instead give this information in the status line or after the name of the location when looking, producing output like
The Bottomless Acherousia (as Charon)
We could do the same by adding a line such as
After printing the name of a room while constructing the status line or looking:
say "[roman type] (as [the player])"
Of course, we'll need a good deal of other work to make Janine a distinct person from whichever character the player was before. The distinction may come from changed capabilities of the new character, which we can express through new rules about actions; e.g.,
Instead of listening when the player is Janine:
say "Your childhood accident left you unable to hear any but the loudest noises. Currently there is only silence."
Janine may also have new, different perspective on her surroundings, expressed through the descriptions of the things she looks at; Uncommon Ground makes a "by viewpoint" token for text alternatives, allowing us to tag our descriptions to indicate which variations should be shown to which viewpoint characters. The Crane's Leg 1 and 2 offer more elaborate and specialized ways of customizing the player character's observations to depend on how he relates (physically and in attitude) to the things around him.
If we want to change the tense and person of narration from the conventional present second person, we may do this as well:
When play begins:
now the story viewpoint is first person plural;
now the story tense is past tense.
Though this only changes the form of the text produced automatically by Inform (responses such as "you can't go that way" might become, say, "I couldn't go that way"), and all author-written text in the story must be written in the tense and person intended.
![]() | Start of Chapter 5: The Viewpoint Character |
![]() | Back to §5.5. Memory and Knowledge |
![]() | Onward to Chapter 6: Commands: §6.1. Designing New Commands |
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Suppose we have a game where we want the player to control two different characters, swapping bodies from one turn to the next. First, the setting, and the two people who will alternately play:
If we tried the text above in Inform, we would find ourselves in the Hay-Strewn Corridor and confronted by both Teresa and Maleska. If "player" is not set to any named person, Inform creates a bland person called "yourself" to represent the player. To avoid this, we set "player" to the person we want to begin as. The player character is normally privately-named, so we'll need to make sure "Maleska" still means what it should.
Now the Corridor contains just two people, and we arrive on the scene as Maleska, with only Teresa facing us. At the end of every turn we will use the 'now the player is...' phrase. (This looks as if it simply changes the value of "player": which it does, but it also carries out a complicated operation behind the scenes to effect the switch.)
Our two characters already see the Corridor differently, but let's differentiate them further:
In this small example, strength is not used for anything, except that we will display it on the status line:
That last rule doesn't quite do what we might have expected. When we print "[player]", we find that Inform usually prints "yourself". This is because Inform says "you" to mean Teresa when talking to the player-being-Teresa, and likewise for Maleska. We want to override that in this particular story, because the rapid switches of personality are otherwise hard to follow. So:
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Suppose we have a game where we want the player to control two different characters, swapping bodies from one turn to the next. First, the setting, and the two people who will alternately play:
If we tried the text above in Inform, we would find ourselves in the Hay-Strewn Corridor and confronted by both Teresa and Maleska. If "player" is not set to any named person, Inform creates a bland person called "yourself" to represent the player. To avoid this, we set "player" to the person we want to begin as. The player character is normally privately-named, so we'll need to make sure "Maleska" still means what it should.
Now the Corridor contains just two people, and we arrive on the scene as Maleska, with only Teresa facing us. At the end of every turn we will use the 'now the player is...' phrase. (This looks as if it simply changes the value of "player": which it does, but it also carries out a complicated operation behind the scenes to effect the switch.)
Our two characters already see the Corridor differently, but let's differentiate them further:
In this small example, strength is not used for anything, except that we will display it on the status line:
That last rule doesn't quite do what we might have expected. When we print "[player]", we find that Inform usually prints "yourself". This is because Inform says "you" to mean Teresa when talking to the player-being-Teresa, and likewise for Maleska. We want to override that in this particular story, because the rapid switches of personality are otherwise hard to follow. So:
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