My very limited experiences with Facade so far have brought to light for me something important about how I want to interact with such a simulation. I find it beyond frustrating (not to mention almost scary) trying to guess what words might trigger an interesting response — or even any sort of response I’ll understand — in the other people.

What I do like, however, is when I can pick up items and move them around, or simply move myself around, and they will respond to that. I think the difference for me is that while they may still misunderstand what I’m trying to say (You picked up a bottle… do you want to have a drink or do you want to smash it over my head?) at least I know (or have a good idea of) what it is they’re responding to.

Maybe it just comes down to how intuitive the interface is… I’m reminded of Katamari Damacy here. The game only has one verb — ROLL. You can go faster or slower and you can turn… but it’s all rolling. Of course, there’s also only one goal — to pick things up, so maybe it’s a bad example.

I haven’t had a chance to look over your thesis project yet beyond the TOC, but I’m noticing some eerie similarity in our interests. Two random points:

1. I’m not sure, but I think what you term “Willing Suspension of Freedom” might be related in some way to what Jane McGonigal calls the “suspension of belief” - which I believe is essentially an RPG-like willingness to separate player from character knowledge while participating in meta-gaming. I’d like to read more about your ideas, as I’m a sucker for quoting a good term that someone lays out clearly.

2. The overloaded verbs approach is interesting - it would be nice to see an in-depth comparison of it vs. verb-adding sometime. One thing that occurs to me off the cuff is that overloading most verbs with multiple meanings would tend to blunt the combinatoric explosion effect that occurs when you just pile on more verbs. In this series, I’ve actually been arguing for neither - instead, I’m talking about focusing on increasing the richness and variety of error-handling. =)

The world just has to know how to use those verbs correctly and robustly. If anything, we need more ‘adverbs’, not ‘verbs’.

So, I’m in complete agreement with you.

Oh, and ‘willing suspension of freedom’ is a great term.