The "Look at" paradox.

[Secret Fawful]

I don't like one click interaction with games. Too linear. Eventually you can just click on everything until every puzzle is solved without having to really think about the progression, your options, and what you can and can't do. Some games managed to still get away with difficult puzzles with it, but most of the time I don't like it. That said, I'm open to new methods of playing adventure games. I'm a huge fan of parsers, especially difficult ones in text adventures where you have to be more specific. I like huge difficulty. I like getting stuck. I like trial and error. I like the long list of verbs in early Lucasarts games. I really don't share vincetwelve and theo's opinions at all. I get the immersion thing, but I never had a problem with that in adventure games. I want to play a damn game, not a damn movie. Telltale lost me after they started simplifying things too much. Now you can't even explore outside boundaries in their damn game. I mean, boundaries are good, but not when they confine you to the space of a puzzle or item giving you no choice but getting every puzzle right immediately. No, the Sierra method of game design which requires trial and error and has dead ends and deaths and ways to get stuck, and the same with text adventures, are the kinds of adventures I like the most.

Not every puzzle has to be difficult though. Sometimes memorability is better than difficulty, and that's what makes Lucasarts' and Revolution games and games like the Journey Down or Legend of Kyrandia great. They're not blister your brain difficult, with the exception of Maniac Mansion and The Dig, but they're lovely and memorable. Actually, I think The Dig was a one click interface, but I can't remember. If it was, it's a rare instance for me where it was hard as nails, and incredible in its design, and really underrated, but still used a really simple interface.

[Anian]

No, the Sierra method of game design which requires trial and error and has dead ends and deaths and ways to get stuck, and the same with text adventures, are the kinds of adventures I like the most.

But that's a ctually almost as limiting - you have to be at the right location atthe right time, you have to try different ways because you die...all the time you have to repeat your actions or save often, but even if you save your not exempt from a dead end, nor are you ever aware that you actually are at a dead end. Instead of not being able to do much, you are able to do lots of things but are not really allowed if you want to finish the game and see what happens and see new puzzles...as I write this, I think it's actually worse than "limiting" gameplay.  :

The other thing where you have like 9 verbs/commands to choose is tempting at first because it's kind of "realistic", but in reality you have to do 2 clicks for EVERY action you want to do, even worse if you want to try more than one inventory item, exponencially growing if you want to try multiple verbs with multiple objects.

I still stand with a combo like right click for descritpion, left click for use/push/talk (depending on object), or similar. And when you hover above an item (and in this case there should be some items you won't ever use, they just have a short description or "nothing important" message) that shows a name of the object. The end, streamlined and simple yet emersive enough and leaving room for artistic choices.
Or maybe a version of GrimFandango keyboard use, but put like Q, W, E for talk, examine, use etc. and arrows for movement, also that option that character has a sort of autolock on interactable items.

[Secret Fawful]

But that's actually almost as limiting - you have to be at the right location at the right time, you have to try different ways because you die...all the time you have to repeat your actions or save often, but even if you save you're not exempt from a dead end, nor are you ever aware that you actually are at a dead end. Instead of not being able to do much, you are able to do lots of things but are not really allowed if you want to finish the game and see what happens and see new puzzles...as I write this, I think it's actually worse than "limiting" gameplay.  

The other thing where you have like 9 verbs/commands to choose is tempting at first because it's kind of "realistic", but in reality you have to do 2 clicks for EVERY action you want to do, even worse if you want to try more than one inventory item, exponentially growing if you want to try multiple verbs with multiple objects.

Any experienced adventure gamer should be looking for dead ends or possible ways to lose in an unfamiliar game. Mazes have dead ends, and solving them requires finding the route that goes from one end to the other. So I compare adventure games to mazes with obstacles in the right path. A maze without dead ends would be a straight line. One click, okay two click games are really, to me, like a maze with less or no dead ends and only obstacles, making it incredibly linear and easy. I also consider dying a dead end, btw. There's no such thing as a non-limiting adventure game, because even mazes are limiting no matter how difficult they are. There are just easy adventure games, and hard adventure games, and no matter what the open-endedness comes to a halt at a point, and most adventure games have an end. And I prefer hard adventure games, hell, even mindnumbing tear-your-hair out ones. It's possible to make an open-ended adventure game I guess, but by the time you solved all the puzzles, you'd just be wandering around doing basic stuff like looking at that guy again or talking to that dragon and re-reading the dialog options you already exhausted. Well, I guess there could be more to exploring it all after the main story, but adventure games are more fun to me when they have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and a more open, but not open-ended, approach to getting through it.

You could also have an adventure game like a maze that has obstacles in the right path and obstacles in the wrong path as well, but THAT I would consider bullshit design because the game had you to do a bunch of work in a puzzle designed to send you to a dead end, and that would piss anyone off. It's like a puzzle where you do something difficult only for the outcome to be to lose all of your inventory for good.

EDIT: Well, okay, you can have dead ends in two click games, and the amount of verbs or a parser only affects the difficulty and amount of things you can choose, not so much dead ends, but my comparison on mazes and adventure games still stands.

EDIT EDIT: I think any dead ends should be intentional though, and unintentional ones are also bullshit. Keeping gameplay balanced is also important.

[Eggie]

Let's not turn this into another debate about walking deads (even if your maze metaphor is pretty crap because you can work your way back from a dead end in a maze butyouknowyeah).

[Secret Fawful]

Let's not turn this into another debate about walking deads (even if your maze metaphor is pretty crap because you can work your way back from a dead end in a maze butyouknowyeah).

Yeah, that's called restoring a save game.   You'll not put egg on my face, Eggie!

Seriously though, working your way back from a dead end in a maze is cheating unless you start over from the beginning in my opinion. In an adventure game, the only way to work your way back from a dead end should be restoring a save game or restarting.

[Babar]

I like the Trapezoid method (also, hello Trapezoid! ). One of the things I love about adventure games is the exploration, and the LOOK interaction really helps with that. Instead of just describing the item to the player, you could perhaps use the player character's response to give an understanding of the character.

Since the conversation has moved on a bit from the original problem with "Look at", I'd like to mention that for me the idea that "Oh, this object only has 1 possible interaction that is relevant?" isn't necessarily followed by "then I should simplify my interface to only have 1 action!"

I don't quite see how that follows. It doesn't break immersion for me to have a choice between "Push Desk" and "Open Desk". It breaks immersion when I start thinking of the game mechanics with having only "Use" and wondering what will happen if I "Use Desk".

It's like those "interactiveness games" I played on the computer as a kid, where you could click random objects on the screen, and each different object would have a different result: a sound effect, an animation, some colourful graphics, etc. Half the fun was clicking on things to see what would happen (the other half was clicking repeatedly on one particular thing and laughing at the repeated sound or animation). Those were fun, but I didn't really consider them adventure games, and I'm not really sure people would want that to be the motivation in an adventure game.

It's like someone at some point looked at games with their plethora of stock responses and said "Why do we have 9 verbs here, when more than half of them half the time give a stock response and have no result?" and figured the answer was "Simplify and reduce the interface" rather than "Be creative and inventive, and think of situations where you'd need to both push the desk as well as open it".

Now sorry to digress even further, but recently for a game I was working on (which uses the 2 button look/walk & interact interface) I came across a situation where I'd want to be able to USE a character (or more specifically something on him) as well as talk to him. And I couldn't think of an all-inclusive, easy to use interface that would allow that! Verb-coins block the screen, require delay (of either extra clicks or waiting time) and thus really annoy me, having a verb-list for 3 verbs seemed a bit silly, and having to swap between different verbs constantly by right-clicking Sierra style also seemed distasteful to me. So then it came down to some technical method....

I was first thinking of utilising the middle-mouse button somehow, but those irritating laptoppers stopped me. Then I thought of combining it with the keyboard, but that seemed like it could be a bit unintuitive. Finally (with some agreeing voices), I decided on a double-click==talk, single-click==use thing.

So...if you figured you HAD to have at least 3 verbs (excluding inventory and walking, of course), how would you handle it?

[Tabata]

I am only a player, but I think that you can't throw the „look at“ away for every game, it depends on the game itself.

I love to explore the gamesworld and the option to „look at“ gives much more possibilities, like a "zoom in" to explore more details by the player or something funny as response, when the char is telling, what he's thinking about the item/area or simply a hint how to go on.

If this verb isn't needed for the atmosphere or the gameplay/puzzles I don't mind, if the option is missing. It is possible to be done without any of the options of a GUI and an inventory (like they did in Samorost), but it needs an other kind of puzzles to work propper.

So if the verbs are useless for a game â€" I prefer them to be omitted, instead of reading/hearing the same (sometimes dumb) response over and over again. 


@Babar:  I didn't realise, that I am irritating  Using the middle-button works very well and I never had probs with it on my laptop (neither while using the touch-pad, nor when using my beloved mouse).

[Anian]

Double click doesn't sound that bad, although it might be better to use it for a function that's not used all the time - like when you click on a character you talk, but if you double click you "look at" it - and not the other way around, because throughout the game you're more likely to look at a chracter once but talk to it multiple times.
Same could be for an item - like single right click is "open" desk, while double right click is "push" or some other function that actually gets "unlocked" after you look at the desk or know something is behind the desk.
On items one left click could be "It's an old desk", but if you twice left click it's more descriptive "The desk looks very old and dusty, it's covered with documents and there's a set of drawers under it".
A book would be left click "It's a Tolkien Lord of the rings book" doubleleftclick "It's an old copy of LOTR wrapped in black leather covers", 1 right click is reading "I open the book, there's an inscription on the second page "To Madeline forever, Mark"...must have been a gift", double right click is taking the book - or a similar combo.

I don't know about middle mouse button, I don't use it that often (browser page scrolling, PS paning tool, 3dsmax and Sketchup rotate etc) but a lot of people don't even get why it's there. There's this one woman in my 3dsMax class that was all bewildered by me using the middle mouse button to do something (and in 3dsMax it is used for roatating and panning views...so it's like the most used thing in the whole software).

In an adventure game, the only way to work your way back from a dead end should be restoring a save game or restarting.

You have a weird view of having fun there. I personally hate going to a restore point, especially when I don't know what happened and I loathe restarting a game because of a dead end, maybe if there's some auto-save, that might be ok, but otherwise, it's just becomes work and not fun.

[Trapezoid]

It would be good to have a number of verbs which can easily be assigned or reassigned to the left and right mouse buttons. They could be rotated on a GUI or by key commands. This is no different from selecting weapons in a FPS-- people don't seem to have trouble with that.

[Secret Fawful]

You have a weird view of having fun there. I personally hate going to a restore point, especially when I don't know what happened and I loathe restarting a game because of a dead end, maybe if there's some auto-save, that might be ok, but otherwise, it's just becomes work and not fun.

Oh, you'll get no argument from me on the fact that I probably have a strange sense of fun, but I think things like this are often looked at through the eyes of someone who can only remember the frustration and not the reward on solving the correct path. Also, I'm definitely not saying every game has to be this difficult, or that games that aren't are broken and bad. I'm simply saying I prefer them that difficult. As I said before, sometimes memorability is better than difficulty.

[Dualnames]

Amazing topic.                      I'm having two interactions: use and look . I always found that look was useless so right click now it does a ''compromise''. It brings the description of the item in question and the inventory.

[Radiant]

Double click doesn't sound that bad, although it might be better to use it for a function that's not used all the time

Well, you'd have to test this, but I think this makes it too easy to accidentally perform the wrong action (either because the player is confused which is which, or because he double clicks too slowly and it registers as two single clicks).

I'm having two interactions: use and look . I always found that look was useless so right click now it does a ''compromise''. It brings the description of the item in question and the inventory.

Wait, so if you look at something then you subsequently have to close the inventory window? That does not sound very convenient.

[Dualnames]

I'm having two interactions: use and look . I always found that look was useless so right click now it does a ''compromise''. It brings the description of the item in question and the inventory.

Wait, so if you look at something then you subsequently have to close the inventory window? That does not sound very convenient.
[/quote]

That's not how it works, the DESCRIPTION of the item in question (CHARACTER, HOTSPOT, OBJECT) + the inventory, are (in) the same GUI. And you open the GUI by right click. Now whether you'll read the description, use an item, or both it's up to you.

[hedgefield]

I like how they handled it in Alpha Polaris, where the cursor is appended with two symbols when over a hotspot, one for the left button and one for the right. This way you can see beforehand what will happen when you click. Some hotspots only have one, some have both. In AP they only employ USE/TALK and LOOK, but in theory you could contextually map any number of common interactions to the buttons. It's rather elegant.

[theo]

I am only a player, but I think that you can't throw the „look at“ away for every game, it depends on the game itself.

Yup. It really is that easy. In many games, complex interactions are awesome, in many, they suck. It totally depends on the type of puzzle and how the setting and mood is being delivered to the player. All I'm lobbying for is to use multiple interactions with caution and to first ask yourself if you, as the designer, are in fact going to use them. If not, throw 'em out! Obviously it's also a matter of taste. Fortunately we don't all have the same preferences, and as a result all sorts of different kinds of games are developed. 

I've learned my lesson with the latest game (Monte Cristo): it has ONE hero and ONE kind of click. As a result I can spend far more time on the story, and produce a much better game.

Yeah, this too is a BIG DEAL when designing a game. For shorter games, it's not an issue, but when you start piling up on the lines it gets to be one hell of a lot of work. Not only writing all the specific dialog, but scripting it and recording the darn lines becomes a gigantic project. (I'm talking from experience, Bwana has no lookats, but has over 1300 lines) From a broader "what makes a good game" perspective, I suppose this isn't relevant, but for us small-time developers it makes a world of difference.