What are these things on the ground?

[ciphergoth]

Well I would never have guessed that last post would be so popular! I have a followup question for you all.

So one of the things our robot can do besides navigate walls is pick up inert things that it finds inside squares, and put them down in other squares. It can carry any number of these things, and it may find any number in a square; they are all the same. There's one near the exit of the maze in the picture in my last post - the "1" with a circle around it. What should these things be called?

In Karel the Robot and all subsequent programs, they're called "beepers", but that's just confusing - that way it sounds like they do something, but they really don't. So what might be a better name? I've considered coins, tokens, chips, stones, pebbles but I'm just not sure, and maybe there's a better name I'm missing. Do you like any of my proposals, or do you have a better one of your own? Thanks!

Comments

[adjectivemarcus.livejournal.com]

Flags?

[cyberinsekt.livejournal.com]

Pebbles is good, but I'm also fond of the offbeat charm of potatoes.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I like potatoes, but I think it might be a little distracting ;-)

[meico.livejournal.com]

Most people in the game community call such things "pickups" (short for "pickup-object")... The name makes it pretty obvious what you can do with them. :)

And the things that are being carried (or worn) are in your "inventory" (which may let you combine them, take them out, put them away, drop them, etc.).

[purplerabbits.livejournal.com]

Pieces? Then you could progress to playing checkers... Do these things do anything else? Why not?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Do these things do anything else? Why not? er, what should they do?

[purplerabbits.livejournal.com]

Well if they were bricks you could make walls with them. I dunno.

[elsmi.livejournal.com]

"Things your aunt gave you which you don't know what they are"?

I like pebbles. It's a concrete word, it means something to people who aren't already indoctrinated in programming foo-fa, and and it doesn't have other meanings to confuse matters.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

It's a Turing Machine!

You could even call the objects turings :-)

[mistdog.livejournal.com]

I seem to remember early 80s computer games often used to appeal to player's sense of avarice by calling things like that coins, or even treasure.

Possibly not something you want anything to do with, although coins are circular so would fit graphically.

[simont]

Widgets, gizmos, doodads, whatsits, oojits, thingys? :-)

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I love those terms, but they make it sound like the doodads actually do something...

[simont]

Hmm. And on the other hand, "coins" and other treasure-related metaphors suggest that the aim of them is to pick them up and never let them go, whereas presumably there are plenty of interesting programming challenges involving picking them up and then putting them down somewhere else (perhaps so as to form a pattern, or some such). So perhaps purplerabbits's suggested metaphor of game pieces is the best direction to head in, suggesting that they're things you can pick up and put down in ways that are significant to you but they don't do anything of their own accord?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I'm increasingly leaning towards "stones", which is nice and monosyllabic, gets across the inertness like pebbles, but also has a game-playing feel from Go.

[simont]

Oh yes, that's nice. And it's less vague than "pieces", and less prone to accidentally imply functionality than the other game-related idea I was going to suggest, "counters".

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Gems was the first thing that sprang to mind for some reason, but I take Simon's point that this could encourage people to hang on to them.

I'd be quite tempted to call them 'things'. :)

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

Tuits?

I'm not actually sure how serious I'm being.