Teacher's notes: We could probably simplify the movement some if we used a tuple, like (-1, 0), instead of "LEFT".

Hmm. Sorry I'm still a bit confused. Move is an input variable that looks for the string 'left', 'right', 'up' or 'down' in a list and acts accordingly. How does this jive with making move a tuple?

This is what the simpler function would look like if the program used "move" as a tuple instead of a string.

It would not be more simple to decode strings and convert to a tuple.

move  = input("> ").upper()


 def move_player(player, move):
    x, y = player

    if move == 'LEFT':
        x -= 1

    if move == 'RIGHT':
        x +=1

    if move == 'UP':
        y -=1

    if move == 'DOWN':
        y+=1

    return x, y

this is what I currently have...

Right, and that makes sense by being more convenient for the user than typing in a pair of offsets to make a tuple. But I believe the comment in the Teacher's Notes was just a "what if" scenario.

oh, ok. I see. Basically we could make that function much shorter but than one would have to input (x, y) every time, rather than simply writing left, right, up, or down. The function would then take the index position of said tuple and merge it with the player's x and y and return this value?

However I suppose though that one would then have to write some code to make sure the player doesn't move more than one cell at a time so at the end of the day it's not really very practical, not to my newbie eyes at least.

Thanks for explaining, Steven

If I'm understanding that comment correctly, then I agree. Perhaps if there's another interpretation I missed someone else will post an answer.

The conversion of user text to tuple could be simplified using a predefined dict:

move_tuple = {
    "LEFT": (-1, 0), 
    "RIGHT": (1, 0),
    "UP": (0, -1),
    "DOWN": (0, 1)}

# Steven's code
def move_player(player, move):
    x, y = player
    return x + move[0], y + move[1]

# get user input
move  = input("> ").upper()

# covert and move
move_player(player, move_tuple[move])

Ahh! Why didn't I think of using a dictionary.. Wonderful, thanks