Text adventures (aka interactive fiction) provide for Player input in the form of verb-noun phrases. The earliest text adventures only allowed a single verb followed by a single noun (i.e. ‘open mailbox’). Over time, parsing strategies improved and Player input expanded to include whole paragraphs.

Text adventures were little more than an exercise in guessing an author’s vocabulary and way of thinking. Rather than playing the role of protagonist in the unfolding story, the Player played the protagonist in an entirely different story, namely “figure out what the author intended when she created the adventure.”

I’ve done quite a bit of research into emotions and the primitives that underlie the words we use to describe how we’re feeling. Over at We Feel Fine, it looks as if there is an attempt to classify blog entries depending upon the emotional words each contains.

The issue with such efforts is that the words one uses to describe how one feels necessarily fail to account for the system underlying the semantics. Much like Searle’s Chinese room, here there is a failure to ground the words, to connect them with some underlying experience. It’s in the grounding of the words to experience that one discovers additional meaning.