18. Adventure Game with Structural Pattern Matching

By Bernd Klein. Last modified: 10 Nov 2023.

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Introduction

Adventure Game image

In this section of our Python tutorial, we introduce structural pattern matching through an intriguing scenario—a hypothetical text-based adventure game.

Text adventure games, often referred to as interactive fiction, are a type of computer game that relies primarily on text-based descriptions and typed language commands for user input, rather than graphics and sound. Typical user input for most of these games look like:

'help'
'show inventory'
'go north'
'go south'
'drop shield'
'drop all weapons'

A notable example of such a game is "Hack," a text-based role-playing game developed in the 1980s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and more commonly recognized as "NetHack."

We will showcase Python code snippets that simulate scenarios within a text adventure game, while also elucidating significant aspects and features of structural pattern matching.

command = input("What are you doing next? ")
action, object = command.split()
print(f"{action=}, {object=}")

OUTPUT:

action='take', object='sword'

What if the user types less or more than 2 words?

command = input("What are you doing next? ")
words = command.split()
no_of_words = len(words)
if no_of_words == 1:
    print(f"action without object: {action=}")
elif no_of_words == 2