One of the curious things about having moved my website to WordPress is that I can now see what people are searching for when they wind up here. I regret to say that many of these searches were in fact futile, but here, perhaps I can answer a few of the questions after all:
- hints emily short city of Secrets.
Nope, sorry, I don’t have any, beyond what’s already in the game. Nor is there a walkthrough anywhere, to the best of my knowledge. Your best bet is to post questions to rec.games.int-fiction. The game is unsupported now, which means that I don’t have time to fix any more bugs and don’t have the intention of creating any more support materials (like hint files, etc.) to go with it.Edited to add: There are now ( July 2008 ) hints by Victor Gijsbers. Thanks to Victor, and enjoy! - “inform 7” how to kill characters. Well, gosh, that’s up to you, isn’t it? “remove Johnny from play” should take a non-player character out of the game, but when it comes to the finer points of motivation and plotting…
- what is second person narration?. Second person is when the subject of a sentence is “you”. You go to the store. You will meet a handsome stranger. (“I will meet a handsome stranger” would be first person, and “He will meet…” would be third person.) So second person narration would be a whole story written that way. It’s not very common in most forms of literature, but interactive fiction relies on it a lot. I hope that helps with your homework.
- simulation Marie-Antoinette. I wish. A simulation Marie Antoinette would be fun. SimTrianon sold separately.
- the feelies, as in a band from New Jersey. Wikipedia is your friend.
- cutting a conversation short. I hear “gotta go, the cat’s on fire” works well.
- explanation of the plot in all roads jon. You got me — I don’t know what happens in “All Roads“, either. I recommend looking at rec.games.int-fiction about the time the comp reviews came out that year: there was plenty of speculation.
- Christopher and Emily Crawford. No, I am not Mrs. Chris Crawford.
- summary of the kissing doorknob story. Whuh?
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
Didn’t David Welbourn write the kissing doorknob story?
Well, Emily, I don’t know what people are exactly searching for in your own site, but i can tell you that ifreviews.org already received more than 50 hits directly from this site! Which I guess is quite good :)
I really enjoy reading your articles about IF since they are very light to read!
Thanks for sharing with us!
Kind regards,
José ‘RootShell’ Borges
I think I may be the one who searched for “how to kill characters”. :) The point was basically that I wanted to turn a person into a thing (“now the gardener is a thing”); but I don’t think that kind of type-switching is allowed by Inform 7.
Victor: Aha! That makes sense. But yeah, you can’t type-switch that way. It is probably possible to make a character inanimate, but this seems like more trouble than just substituting a corpse object for the person when the proper time comes.
Well, I had a class of characters (let’s say: servants) who could be killed (perhaps it had something to do with a magical dagger), and would have to leave a body behind when killed. So what I wanted to do was write a definition of the servant class that made this automatic. Since neither type-changes nor dynamic object creation are allowed, this did pose a bit of a problem.
In the end, I just made the body a part of every servant, and ensures that it would be left behind when the servant was killed. Works fine. :)