Hi pamelamask,
thanks for your response. It's nice to read, someone enjoyed the script.
Your suggestions are interesting. I have to mention one thing before I go into details. At the moment my time for working on the script is very limited. So I guess none of them will be implemented soon.
Reading the rights has a certain appeal. Yet this is more a thing of an (involuntary) arrest and less connected to the scenario of courtroom. In this script the defendant reports to court on his or her own devices in the hope of making a deal. So he will have to disclose everything anyway.
Personally I'm not very fond of the idea of having the defendant waiting cuffed. This is for several reasons.
In my opinion this would take the focus of the script away from the sentence towards the waiting period. So the actual court-part would stand back for a lengthy arrest-part.
It would also cause an additional delay as the members of the jury would have to judge on the defendants behaviour during detention. In order to influence the punishment this would have to be done in an additional "jury-session" before the defendant is sentenced. Giving every member time to vote it would require a 24 hour period. Not everyone lives in the same timezone and I guess most don't keep the courtroom-script open 24/7.
The last thing I'm kind of uncomfortable with is the idea of handcuffing. This will bring in a toy-requirement in order to be able to use courtroom. At the moment there is no such requirement. The list of possible punishments and in correspondance available crimes will change with your toy-list in sexscripts and with your taboos. Yet there's no toy that will block the script if it's not available. Although I have quite an assortment of toys, including all kinds of cuffs and shackles, I do not own a single pair of police-type handcuffs. So I would be out.
For these reasons I'd suggest to unbundle the arrest into a different script. You could create one with a name like 'police arrest' where the user will be cuffed. After a waiting period, the script could programmatically call courtroom to handle the punishment.
Having the user interrogated to get him accused is something ptdw an I already discussed. The idea was to create a connector between the
interrogation-script and courtroom, the user could activate. We discussed two ideas.
One is to add some truths to interrogation which correspond to crimes in courtroom. If the user confesses one of these, the courtroom-script could be started after interrogation.
The other idea is to add a 'no confession' option in courtroom. If the user selects it the interrogation-script would be started in order to "convince" the user to admit his wrongdoing. If he did, he would be handed back to court.
Due to the limited time of both of us we posponed implementing to a later point.
Ptdw and I discussed already discussed an option very much like your idea with tumblr. If the user activated it and would be found guilty, then the case-details (collateral & evidence) would be passed to nationwide press, i.E. published on temporarily exposed. At the point we discussed it, ptdw had just started to make tests with the temporaily-exposed api. He has a working implementation of this in 'strip or die' so I guess it could be included in courtroom as well.
Yet as above the problem is time or rather the lack of it.
Regards
cgut2001