Upcoming title Scribblenauts for the Nintendo DS, will be an interesting expereince, that twears and merges different genres and histories into one game. It is a mix of a puzzlegame, an inaginary playfield and thouse holy old text-driven adverntures from the past like Zak McCracken. In an interview at IGN the creative director Jeremiah Slaczka says about Scribblenauts:

So if there’s a Starite in the tree, you could write “ladder” and then a ladder would spawn. Climb up the ladder, and you grab the Starite. There’re more ways of doing it though obviously. You could write “axe”, and then cut the tree down using the object you spawned. You could write “shuriken” and throw that at the Starite in the tree and knock it down. It’s all based on real physics and interaction, so there’s nothing pre-canned.

I do not know any implementation details, therefore I don’t know how the vocabulary / inventory engine really works. Did they really put up hundreds and thousands of words and objects, each with different functionalities, into the DS database, in order to solve the 100 puzzels? An interesting question, especially if you think of re-use the engine, for example of opening it for the crowd to surf on it.