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From: John Colagioia <JColagioia@csi.com>
Organization: No Conspiracy Here...
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Marie-Line Chabanol wrote:
[...]

> |> Moreover the imperative is more natural for some (many?) people. And the feeling is better when the game expects this case too.
>
> Well I am french and I always think my IF instructions (in english) as being
> actions I want to make, that is infinitive verbs. Maybe it is also, as was
> already pointed, because of all the graphical adventure games
> with their infinitive icons.

Well, the majority of documentation for IF games tends to say that each command completes the sentence "I want to..."

I would imagine that the equivalent French (or any other of the hundreds of verb-conjugating languages) documentation would want you
to complete "Je voudrais..." or the equivalent, which would require commands to be the infinitive.

A nifty (although almost totally useless) fringe benefit of infinitive-only usage is that, since the infinitive forms of verbs are far
more regularly structured (-er, -ir, and -re in French), it is easier to distinguish bad verbs from verb-lacking sentences--something
like:

] souvenir la
Je ne sais pas le verbe "souvenir."

] abcdefg la
Le mot "abcdefg" n'est pas un verbe.

....or something like that, anyway.

[...]


