Quoting from the game jam rules (4th bullet point):
"Locations descriptions and object names should be a maximum of TWO words and displayed without an article ("a", "an", "some")..."
I could have sworn that it once said you could not provide any descriptive text for the room description, only what was in the status bar. So I must have misread it, or the rules changed at some point. I saw the rules very early (before submissions were open) and based my design on that. Imagine my surprise when I wanted to check something a few weeks later and the rules had just about doubled in size. Whoa...