Once again I have run into a nasty little problem reconciling the Storytron technology with the Siboot design. This time it arises from the need to replace the simple text displays with images. Let’s look at the display design I described a few days ago. Here’s the critical area:
I would rather it look something like this:
This is, I think, fairly understandable. However, some of the verbs are all but impossible to represent visually. How do you show “You go first” as a response to “Let’s talk about X”? I could of course change the phrasing; perhaps “what do you think?” can be made to work. Or how about “You ask too much” as a verb responding to a deal proposal? Can it be replaced with something like “sweeten the deal” or “I want more”? And what about “That’s my best offer”? How do you show that pictorially? “Blow off threat”? “Ah so”? “Threaten betrayal”? “Promise no attack”?
I could probably cobble together something for each of these, but I fear that I’ll get a mess. For example, the verb above (“relate feelings”) is fairly simple, but it still has to mash three symbols into a single icon.
The proper way to handle this would be to break the verbs down into smaller particles and use combinations of these particles: verbs and adverbs. For example, there are three threats: threaten attack, threaten badmouth, and threaten betrayal. They could be expanded as follows:
“I will attack you tonight if…”
“I will say nasty things about you to other people if…”
“I will tell everybody what I know about your aura counts if…”
The response to these threats is either an acquiescing “What do you want?” or a defiant “blow off threat”. So in practice, each threat is just a simple transitive verb: Subject threat DirObject. But I would need three different verb-icons, each of which communicates the entire notion described above. It would be much cleaner to have a single “threat” verb with one of three attached adverbs. It would be even cleaner if these adverbs were themselves the verbs that would be used in the threatened actions.
All this suggests that I’ll have to redesign my verbs. I find this outcome repugnant; I went to a lot of trouble getting the current verb set worked out. So I’m going to try to make this multi-verb approach work. First, the multi-verb threats:
The first says “Gaustusu threatens Skordokott with a dream-attack.” The second says “Gaustusu threatens Skordokott with badmouthing.” (Note the ‘good’ aura inside the negation black square. That means ‘good negated speech’.) The third means “Gaustusu threatens Skordokott with declare aura-counts in general.”
I know, it’s not very good. But let’s push on. Here are the corresponding promises:
First: Gaustusu promise Skordokott not attack.
Second: Gaustusu promise Skordokott goodmouth.
Third: Gaustusu promise Skordokott not tell auras.
No worse than the threats, I suppose. Now for some other verbs:
Well, so far, so good.