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Viewing post in Will there be any disqualifications?
Thanks for sharing this Dorian.
I have to confess that most of this is far over my head, as I'm not remotely a software engineer or anything of the sort. What I do pick up is that this is doing some clever linguistic processing stuff under the hood, but the implementation of it in your game looks, on the face of it, not anything like everyman's idea of a parser game. It seems to us (organisers) that your game falls outside the boundaries of what we'd accept in this necessarily restrictive competition (for a particular type of text game) but would definitely fly in another text game competition with more inclusive criteria (the upcoming IF Comp would be an obvious place to put a game like this). So we hope to see more of your work - and, hopefully, all of this discussion will have made people sufficiently curious to go and have a look at Cost of Living!
I played the game and I definitelly recognized ELIZA's influence. In some responses more than in others, but it's there.
There is an interesting discussion about differences and similarities between parser IF and chatbots in Jeremy Douglass' disertation "Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media". It's from 2007. Interestingly, Jeremy also proposed a term 'command line literature' that might include parser IF, MUDs, chatbots and 'other command line textual systems'.
There is a misunderstanding about Robin Johnson's entry in ParserComp 2021. He entered the game "Gruesome" (probably made with GrueScript?). However, in that game the parser was not disabled. I would say it was a traditional parser game with a twist (the twist was about dark/light locations). You can play the game to see that the game is a parser game though you first have to push the start-button.
You can see all 2021 entries here: Submissions to ParserComp 2021 - itch.io
No need to be sorry about that. Last year another one organised the competition (partly?) so it may depend on the organiser where he/she draws the line.
We must remember that ParserComp was made to have a more specialised competition than IFComp. If we don't do something to control this, the ParserComp ends up being just another general IF competition. And IFComp and Spring Thing would gladly have accepted your game - it is clearly IF but (as I understand) not parser-IF though I haven't played your game yet so I wouldn't know.