>       Try to think of imaginative ways to write unattractive Ruby.
>       Perhaps there's a language or two out there whose style you
>       could imitate?  Or ways to circumvent object-oriented design?
>       Or... you decide!

I do not plan to enter the contest, but interestingly, I learned that Ruby
is quite suited for non-OO programming in some areas. My point is, that we
should not forget that Rubys power is not necessarily restricted to
OO-design. The above sentence is of course only suggestions, but I think it
would be the wrong message to send, that only OO-design is good Ruby design.

For example to represent the infrastructure of an adventure game, you have
the concept of a location and the concept of possible ways to move between
locations, and items that can be at locations.
Instead of the approach below, I could also have created location objects,
item objects etc. But in this case everything is handled using strings in a
much cleaner way than an OO approach would have given. The approach is also
extensible in that You can easily add new properties to a location or an
item without having to update a number of objects.

Mikkel

class Adventure
def initialize
 @exits = {
  'building' => ['well'],
  'well' => ['building']
 }
 @location = {
  'building' => "A small old brick building.",
  'well' => "Down in a dry well."
  }
 @itemsloc = { 'torch' = 'building', 'notebook' = 'inventory' }

 @playerloc = 'building'
....
 end

def showExits
 writeline "visible exits: " + @exits[@playerloc].join(', ')
end
....
end