Two-Click Interface - which way round?!

[Radiant]

Perhaps game designers are being too predictable  Why aren't we using the extra verbs as part of the puzzle?  Boxes and doors don't have to be opened. Levers and ropes don't have to be pulled, NPCs don't have to be 'talked' to.

The older games used to take advantage of this.  Not everything would take the most obvious verb; some lateral thinking was involved.

Except they didn't. At least, not very often. For example, looking at LucasArts' fifteen-verb (Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken), twelve-verb (Indy TLC, Monkey Island), and nine-verb interface (Indy FOA, Day of the Tentacle), it is actually very very rare that the non-obvious verb does anything. I can probably count on one hand the amount of times that either a door responds to something other than open/close, or conversely that open/close applies to anything that's not obviously a door, box, or cabinet.

And likewise, in a decade of Sierra games, the amount of in-game objects that have a meaningful reaction both to being touched and being spoken to is pretty much zero; and pretty much all of their text parser games have been rewritten with the look/touch/talk icons without missing anything.

I'm sure there are a few graphic adventure games out there that have done something meaningful with the extra verbs, but most of them really haven't. And that means that unless the game you're writing right now has a few concrete examples of actually using those extra verbs, don't put them in.

Case in point: early drafts of A Tale Of Two Kingdoms had plans for an extra verb button on the GUI, "move" (similar to the push/pull buttons on the LucasArts GUI). However, when the puzzles were being designed, the question was how many of them actually made meaningful use of "moving" objects. The answer was two, and one of them could easily work with the "hand" icon as well. So there is no reason for an extra verb if you're only going to need it twice, so I took it out, and I think that was the right decision.

[Snarky]

It was more: Talk with the guy, he says something that shows he needs to die, say something to get him distracted (or say the same thing again if you missed the window to do it the first time), then when his attention is diverted, push him. So your solution would be "PUSH HIM" as a dialogue option?

Basically, yeah, though you can make it a bit more organic than that. Like he's divulged his evil plot, and says something like "What are YOU going to do about it?" with your response options something like, a: "What? I can't believe it!" (repeat part of conversation), b: "You'll rue this day!" (leave conversation), c: "Throw you down to hell where you belong!" (push him off cliff)

It really depends on the details of the game and of the story, and there are many different ways to do it. I like your idea, but I don't see why you need a separate PUSH verb for it. You have a motive to push him off the ledge, you're in a conversation, you distract him, he turns his back on you and the game gives you control for a couple of seconds... I think just clicking on him to push is quite sufficient in that context.

You might also have the puzzle be to lure him to where there's a loose rock or the railing is broken. Or you could come up with some other way to throw him off the ledge (maybe hide a wire on the ground and yank it to trip him). You could make a minigame out of it: you might have to fight him, or somehow trick him to fall off (I remember in the Greece BJ game you fool a tourist into backing into a restricted area while posing for a photo). More generally, have you enter a different "game context" where clicking means pushing, not talking (maybe if you sneak up on him in some game-defined way, or like your idea with the timed distraction). Maybe you can talk him into suicide. Maybe you toss him some object he craves, and in reaching for it he falls off...

Another possibility that might be an interesting storytelling device is to simply not make it interactive. The villain gives you the motivation to kill him, and your character just does it. We're so used to being in control that this could possibly be a good way to convey blind rage or hatred overruling any reason.

My point is that I do not think that just because there's one or two occasions like this in the game where you might want to offer two different interactions with a character or object, that makes it a good idea to introduce a whole new verb, or complicate the UI paradigm in general. In fact, I think most of the ideas on the list above make for better and more interesting puzzles than simply having the insight "Hey! I should just push him!"

I think Vince's manifesto has a lot of merit, but a game world isn't an operating system - sometimes it makes sense that the same type of object/character/hotspot should be manipulated/interacted with differently, and in a number of ways.

Absolutely, and I think I raised that point with Vince at the time. Different UIs for different purposes. Plus, games are often about mastering skills and overcoming challenges, so you don't necessarily want to make it too easy. (Though adventure games that let you have fun with the UI are relatively rare. Interestingly, I think Vince's games tend to be among them, what with the twin cursors in Linus Bruckman, and the memory interface and all the mini-games in Resonance.)

I have the standard RM/LM for The Ssmaritan Paradox, but there have definitely been moments when I would've prefered a wider assortment of actions - situations I've solved by having an extra GUI pop up (turn the handle clockwise or counterclockwise? things like that).

I think this actually demonstrates that it's better to make a special UI for special cases than to try to fit everything into however many verbs you have.

If you pop up a little close-up of the handle and ask players to manipulate it directly, to actually turn it, that's much more natural, and much more satisfying, than just clicking on push/pull verbs (which are always hard to interpret when it comes to turning handles, anyway); again, it's the whole idea of actually making the UI fun, if only in a small way. And you don't need to clutter the overall UI with these one-time options.

But I don't like the verb coin, even with dynamic verbs, as a general UI paradigm. It feels extremely intrusive to me, always popping up and covering the thing I want to interact with just as I'm trying to interact with it. I don't like it ergonomically, with all those movements back and forth (especially in the versions where you have to hold down a button to keep it up on screen) and the risk that if you overshoot it's going to go away and you'll have to start over. With dynamic verbs it's hard to do keyboard shortcuts, and I think by always having you think about the available options, it actually makes the limitations on what you can do feel more restrictive.

But I wouldn't say "all adventure games should be two-click" or even single-click. Variety is good, as long as it's thought through and motivated by the game. For example, in Trilby's Notes, the parser interface ties in with the framing of the story, where it's told through Trilby's journals. That sort of thing is neat.

[Radiant]

Another way of looking at it is that there's interfaces that are superfluous and interfaces that are intrusive, and whereas the former is acceptable, the latter will likely cost you players. For instance, if you're going to have a LucasArts interface with verbs at the bottom of your screen, then adding an extra verb doesn't really hurt; it is superfluous and you might not use it much, but it doesn't bother anyone. On the other hand, interfaces that get in the way of the user or the experience of the story are a bad thing, and here I'm primarily thinking of verb coins. Verb coins are clumsy (in that they require extra motion of click-move-click or click-hold-drag-release), they get in the way (in that they suddenly overlap the part of the screen you're trying to interact with) and they're unintuitive.

I agree with Snarky that different games/stories require different tools/interfaces, but after reading a few of these threads do yourself a favor and avoid verb coins.

[Vince Twelve]

Again, I find myself in complete agreement with Radiant.  We should be besties.  Wanna come over for hot chocolate and girl-talk?

I think Vince's manifesto has a lot of merit, but a game world isn't an operating system - sometimes it makes sense that the same type of object/character/hotspot should be manipulated/interacted with differently, and in a number of ways.

Absolutely, and I think I raised that point with Vince at the time. Different UIs for different purposes. Plus, games are often about mastering skills and overcoming challenges, so you don't necessarily want to make it too easy. (Though adventure games that let you have fun with the UI are relatively rare. Interestingly, I think Vince's games tend to be among them, what with the twin cursors in Linus Bruckman, and the memory interface and all the mini-games in Resonance.)

The comparison was a poor one.  I was young and naive. Plus, things get much more complicated when you actually sit down and hammer the game out, as we all eventually figure out!  But the main point stands: If you're going to have a multi-verb interface, you must justify it.  And by that I mean having several (don't know how to quantify that) instances where you get unique and meaningful responses from using two different verbs on a single subject.  Talking to a person vs pushing them down a hill is a good example of this.

Can we not call it a manifesto?

[Ali]

I quite liked the way The Walking Dead would give you a textual description of the action you're about to take, or the options you have to choose from (even though it offered the player very limited control in places).

One of the frustrating things about 1 or 2 click interfaces is when the character interacts with something in an unexpected way. Then it feels like the game is solving the problem. Somehow, being presented with the option beforehand gives a greater sense of decision-making.

Can we not call it a manifesto?

Manifesto! Manifesto! Manifesto!

[Babar]

You know, talking about getting rid of extraneous verbs, despite what StillInThe90s said, when was the last time walking was part of a puzzle in the game?
/says Babar, jokingly, slowly realising with horror that it could actually be an argument to remove walking


So a most appropriate interface, allowing for single-click to do all, could be hovering the mouse over any interactable would bring up all the actions you can perform on that thing around it (making sure not to block the view of anything), at which point you can click any of them!

...of course, then we have the touchscreen users complaining about hovering....

[Andail]

Good point, Babar, walking is absolutely redundant, but still most of our games have a little character walking around (except those that feature a 1st person perspective) so minimalism hasn't completely taken over the genre.

[Snarky]

But most 3rd-person games that aren't still using the Sierra or LucasArts interfaces have eliminated "walk" as a separate command.

[Trapezoid]

There's a reason open world games are popular. Players enjoy having a high degree of interactivity with the setting. They enjoy manually moving the player. They enjoy having a selection of weapons, the choice of talking to or attacking NPCs, the ability to knock over barrels and smash windows.
Even the Sims uses a two-click context menu, and nobody has trouble with that.

In adventure games, maybe the problem isn't having too many verbs, but the fact that most verbs are useless for most hotspots. The game world is not as interactive as the interface implies.
If the player wants to push a Coke machine, why not have a generic shoving animation, even if it doesn't accomplish anything?
Too often adventure games limit the player's control. At best, the protagonist constantly has to cosign on everything before doing it. At worst, there's not even dialogue saying "I don't want to do that."

I'm not saying you need to program an animation for every possible action, but the game needs to reward actions whether or not they're part of the solution, at least sometimes. The advantage of having multiple-verb interface is that it makes the player think about different ways to interact with the environment, but only if that thinking bears fruit with regularity. Otherwise, the player will give up on thinking that way.


In short: Any player's thought process can match the complexity of the interface, but ONLY if the gameplay itself does as well.

[qptain Nemo]

I agree with everything Trapezoid has said in this thread so far. (Which I find myself doing quite often lately. I daresay it's very nice to meet somebody who in many ways feels similarly about game design. )

Extra actions aren't just obstacles in the way of the mythical perfectly slick design where the player's breath makes the game play out and solve the puzzles automatically. They are flesh and blood when it comes to immersion and freedom, and those are tremendously important to some of us.

And yes, having extra actions presents certain challenges. But that brings us to that the arguments about how it inconveniences the player to click on extra appearing menus and verb coins are kinda hilariously ironic in the context of a genre that is about solving obstacles and inconveniences, no? I wouldn't be particularly relieved to learn that most adventure game designers are going to adopt a nice 2 or 1 click control scheme just to then go back to the good old "ok, so let's totally ruin the pacing of our story, and the entire potential of the concept, the world and the cast of characters with this sequence of pointless meaningless puzzles about mundane problem solving for the sake of mundane problem solving, ditch all non-vital interactivity and choices, reject mechanical depth along with narrative depth, and end it with a proper "boss battle" crescendo where only the most exhausting obnoxious solutions would apply" school of design. But hey, I only had to use two buttons to survive through all this! Hooray! No, I'm sorry, I'm more concerned about how the game plays, not how many buttons I have to press. I'd press all the buttons in the world for a great game.

And you don't really have to put the player through anything especially horrible.  For instance, employing the keyboard solves a lot of the problems. WASD + mouse kind of setup allows you more than enough buttons to comfortably do pretty much anything without having to press more than two buttons at a time or move the mouse a lot.

Yes, two click control is awesome. I had no problem with it in Beneath a Steel Sky, or Broken Sword, or Deponia, or Memoria. But it's not awesome to the point where it needs to become a law or the only acceptable solution.

[Thaumaturge]

I don't think that I agree that a verb coin necessarily obscures a significant portion of the object being interacted with, since I think that the backing "coin" can be left out -- and that doing so may actually improve the interface. Something like this:

1: A cursor icon shows              2: The player clicks, and          3: The player selects an
    that more than one                     icons animate out from           icon and clicks on it.
    action is available                        the object's position

(Indeed, in retrospect perhaps I should have used the term "radial menu" rather than "verb coin" in my previous post. ^^; )

A radial menu does seem to me to have the weakness that a large number of icons would likely be come cluttered, and tiered menus could be unintuitive to navigate; that said, I suspect that if that many buttons are called for it may be a good idea to look at reducing the number of verbs for the object in question.

As to missing the buttons, or having the menu close accidentally, one needn't make the menu disappear on release; for adventure games, perhaps it might be better to have a single-click open the menu (perhaps with the icons animating out from the position of the object, to strengthen the connection between the icons and object), and have that stay open until the player closes the menu by clicking a button, closes the menu by right-clicking, or selects an option.

In all fairness, the version that I put together was intended for use with a first-person view (a-la the Frogwares Sherlock Holmes games), in which a given object might take up a rather larger portion of the player's view when close enough for interaction than is the case in third-person games.

With dynamic verbs it's hard to do keyboard shortcuts, and I think by always having you think about the available options, it actually makes the limitations on what you can do feel more restrictive.

Do you mean that they restrict the creativity of the designer, or make the restrictions of the game more apparent to the player?

If the former, perhaps -- I can see that one could inadvertently fall into a rut of using the paradigm where another UI might be better. That said, I'm hesitant to throw out a potentially useful UI for fear of that happening.

If the latter then, for myself, at least, I think that it's at the least better than a set list of verbs (as in the 9-verb interface) or the "left-click to interact" interface. A set list of verbs, I think, tends to expose the limits of the game by virtue of finding that many of the actions to have little effect on many hot-spots, even when they might be expected to have some effect. "Left-click to interact", on the other hand, leaves one with only a single action and thus less room to explore available actions.

While an alternative UI or good conversation scripting will indeed likely better a verb-coin in at least some cases, I'm not sure that they're not overkill for others.

For example, if I have a plate of food, I might want to smell it, eat it or pick it up. If these actions are very important, an extra UI might be a good idea, but if they're there to add a little "flavour", so to speak, or intended for bonus points, it might not be worth the time and effort. A conversation, on the other hand, feels a little artificial to me in this situation. An unobtrusive dynamic verb menu seems to me to work better here than either of the other options.

Regarding keyboard shortcuts, I'm not sure that I've ever used them -- what are the standard keyboard shortcuts for some of the common interfaces? (Since tone can be tricky to convey online, let me say that I ask sincerely -- I'm honestly unfamiliar with using keyboard shortcuts for standard adventure game interfaces, that I recall offhand.)

That said, I think that Snarky does have some good ideas; I really do like the conversation laid out for the "push a character" scenario, and agree that for the "turn a wheel clockwise or counter-clockwise" scenario an alternate UI, perhaps showing the wheel in close-up, is likely one of the better choices (and very likely better than a verb coin), in part by likely feeling rather natural.

Finally, I think that I agree with Ali on the point of adding some description to a single-click interface (whether text, cursor-icon or both): doing so should at the least significantly reduce the ambiguity that seems to be one of the weaknesses of the system.

[Snarky]

There's a reason open world games are popular. Players enjoy having a high degree of interactivity with the setting. They enjoy manually moving the player. They enjoy having a selection of weapons, the choice of talking to or attacking NPCs, the ability to knock over barrels and smash windows.

In adventure games, maybe the problem isn't having too many verbs, but the fact that most verbs are useless for most hotspots. The game world is not as interactive as the interface implies.
If the player wants to push a Coke machine, why not have a generic shoving animation, even if it doesn't accomplish anything?
Too often adventure games limit the player's control. At best, the protagonist constantly has to cosign on everything before doing it. At worst, there's not even dialogue saying "I don't want to do that."

I'm not saying you need to program an animation for every possible action, but the game needs to reward actions whether or not they're part of the solution, at least sometimes. The advantage of having multiple-verb interface is that it makes the player think about different ways to interact with the environment, but only if that thinking bears fruit with regularity. Otherwise, the player will give up on thinking that way.

We're moving away from UI design to game design here.

But I would say that on the one hand, I agree that a certain level of interactivity in the game world is important for it to not just seem like a static backdrop for puzzles, and that it's a good thing to have a few fun, non-essential activities (Easter eggs, pointless but fun actions, optional minigames, activities that can be repeated even after they've been completed, other gameplay mechanics, ways to collect extra points or achievements, etc.) around the edges of the game, so to speak. However, I do not believe that going for maximum interactivity by adding lots of possible actions that are unrelated to the puzzles makes for a better adventure game.

That's because not all game genres are the same, and what works in an open-world game doesn't necessarily work in an adventure game. In a game like The Sims, just tooling around in the world and seeing what happens is what the game is about. In a standard adventure game, it's about experiencing a particular story by solving particular puzzles. Cutting away extraneous elements is key to making that work. (I feel like the argument in favor of making adventure games open-world is like saying movies shouldn't be edited together into just the important scenes, but should film absolutely everything happening to the characters 24 hours per day, and allow audiences to decide which parts to watch. Or like saying that because building a rich and detailed world is a plus if you're writing a multi-novel fantasy series, it will also improve any joke you're telling.)

So sure, if you want to add a feature to your game that lets your character choose different hats to wear, then go for it! If you think it would be fun to give players the option to play pranks on various NPCs, sure, why not? If you see some part of a room and think "players are definitely going to want to interact with that thing," add a response or maybe even an interaction for it, even if it's not part of a puzzle. But if you end up spending more time adding pointless interactivity to your world than things that are part of the gameplay, then not only are you not really moving the game development forward, you're quite possibly making the game worse.

[Snarky]

(Breaking this into multiple posts to reply individually)

And yes, having extra actions presents certain challenges. But that brings us to that the arguments about how it inconveniences the player to click on extra appearing menus and verb coins are kinda hilariously ironic in the context of a genre that is about solving obstacles and inconveniences, no?

No. Because we're not talking about meaningful, fun challenges. We're talking about pointless tedium standing in the way of fun.

You can certainly create fun challenges around UI elements. Guitar Hero is basically all about mastering the controller: you know exactly what you want to do, it's just a matter of getting your fingers to do it quickly enough and at the right time. Or something like Labyrinth, where the fact that you have to control the ball by tilting the board provides the challenge. Or fighting games where you're trying to chain the right commands together to unleash combos.

There are a few examples of things like this in adventure games, but they're mostly minigames or one-offs; none of the major UI paradigms (except perhaps for text parsers) really provide much sheer fun just in terms of using the interface. The best you can hope for is usually amusing mouseover descriptions.

And if you can't make it fun, at least make it transparent, nonintrusive, not-a-pain-in-the-ass-to-use.

I wouldn't be particularly relieved to learn that most adventure game designers are going to adopt a nice 2 or 1 click control scheme just to then go back to the good old "ok, so let's totally ruin the pacing of our story, and the entire potential of the concept, the world and the cast of characters with this sequence of pointless meaningless puzzles about mundane problem solving for the sake of mundane problem solving, ditch all non-vital interactivity and choices, reject mechanical depth along with narrative depth, and end it with a proper "boss battle" crescendo where only the most exhausting obnoxious solutions would apply" school of design. But hey, I only had to use two buttons to survive through all this! Hooray! No, I'm sorry, I'm more concerned about how the game plays, not how many buttons I have to press. I'd press all the buttons in the world for a great game.

People should not make boring games with boring puzzles. This is a thread about interface design, though.

Yes, two click control is awesome. I had no problem with it in Beneath a Steel Sky, or Broken Sword, or Deponia, or Memoria. But it's not awesome to the point where it needs to become a law or the only acceptable solution.

No one is saying it should "become a law or the only acceptable solution." We're saying people should think through what they're trying to do with the UI, and whether there's really any good motivation for picking a more complicated, intrusive, or tedious-to-operate UI. If they have a compelling reason, that's great. (Experimentation or just plain variety is a valid, compelling reason.) If not, then the one/two-click design is the most streamlined, transparent and efficient mode of control yet devised for traditional 3rd person, 2D point-and-click adventure games.

And you don't really have to put the player through anything especially horrible.  For instance, employing the keyboard solves a lot of the problems. WASD + mouse kind of setup allows you more than enough buttons to comfortably do pretty much anything without having to press more than two buttons at a time or move the mouse a lot.

To me, this again comes down to a question of what's fun (I think I've talked about this before as the "Fun Principle": games should be fun). If moving around is fun in your game, then having the player move the character around manually (whether WASD or whatever) is probably a good idea. There are many games that build a lot of their fun from the task of moving (let's just take Prince of Persia as an example).  But if moving around is not fun (and I think that applies to games like Grim Fandango and Dreamfall, for example), then requiring the player to manually move the character around is just a tedious chore.

[Snarky]

I don't think that I agree that a verb coin necessarily obscures a significant portion of the object being interacted with, since I think that the backing "coin" can be left out -- and that doing so may actually improve the interface. Something like this:

1: A cursor icon shows              2: The player clicks, and          3: The player selects an
    that more than one                     icons animate out from           icon and clicks on it.
    action is available                        the object's position

(Indeed, in retrospect perhaps I should have used the term "radial menu" rather than "verb coin" in my previous post. ^^; )

I see several problems with this verbcoin version. First, what happens if you click on something closer to the edges of the screen? Seems like the buttons might appear outside the screen so you couldn't click on them. Second, if I understand you correctly, you have to click inside the button in order to activate the action? So that requires a large mouse movement to hit a small target. According to Fitt's Law, this will be a slow action, and it requires both physical effort and concentration. That delay and that effort adds up for every action, and makes the interface tedious to use over time.

If the set of verbs is different for each object, you also have to wait, look all around the screen, and interpret each icon before you can start moving the cursor towards the action you want. If the options are static and always in the same location of the screen or relative to your cursor, on the other hand, you can memorize them and turn the movements into muscle memory, which makes it much faster and requires less attention. (This is a general problem for dynamic menus, and one of the reasons they're unpopular in Windows applications.)

A relatively minor, fixable problem is that there's no indication of what you clicked on (none of the screens show a hotspot name), so you can't be 100% sure that you're acting on what you think. (In the screens, am I clicking on the plate or on the food, for example?)

With dynamic verbs it's hard to do keyboard shortcuts, and I think by always having you think about the available options, it actually makes the limitations on what you can do feel more restrictive.

Do you mean that they restrict the creativity of the designer, or make the restrictions of the game more apparent to the player?

The latter.

If the latter then, for myself, at least, I think that it's at the least better than a set list of verbs (as in the 9-verb interface) or the "left-click to interact" interface. A set list of verbs, I think, tends to expose the limits of the game by virtue of finding that many of the actions to have little effect on many hot-spots, even when they might be expected to have some effect. "Left-click to interact", on the other hand, leaves one with only a single action and thus less room to explore available actions.

What I'm arguing is that the object-verb order of commands in the verbcoin paradigm tends to put more attention on the list of commands that are available, and especially so if the commands are dynamic. In the 9-verb interface, after a while it starts to fade into the background: You know push/pull don't really do anything on most things, so you can pretty much ignore them. And in a two-click UI the limitation is built right into the mechanic of operating the game in such a fundamental way that you don't necessarily even notice it, except when you face some situation where you can't make the game understand what you want to do (which is going to happen in any UI). It's like when you're playing a 2D platformer, you don't really miss the third dimension: the fact that you can only move left and right, up and down is such a basic part of the game that you just accept it and get on with playing.

But if in an adventure game, every time you click on an object you are presented with "this is the explicit list of things you can do with this object" which is different for each thing, that puts it much more front and center, makes the limitations more obvious and more obviously arbitrary. Sure, it has benefits as well (particularly if you are good at coming up with the right mix of specific and general interaction options), but I believe it's wrong to assume that just because you're giving players more interactive options, it's therefore going to seem less limiting.

For example, if I have a plate of food, I might want to smell it, eat it or pick it up. If these actions are very important, an extra UI might be a good idea, but if they're there to add a little "flavour", so to speak, or intended for bonus points, it might not be worth the time and effort. A conversation, on the other hand, feels a little artificial to me in this situation. An unobtrusive dynamic verb menu seems to me to work better here than either of the other options.

You don't need a verb coin for this.

Smell: Look at food (right click)
Eat: Use fork on food
Pick up: Use doggy bag on food

Or alternatively (depending on how the food is going to be used in the game)
Eat: Click on food
Pick up: Click on plate

Regarding keyboard shortcuts, I'm not sure that I've ever used them -- what are the standard keyboard shortcuts for some of the common interfaces? (Since tone can be tricky to convey online, let me say that I ask sincerely -- I'm honestly unfamiliar with using keyboard shortcuts for standard adventure game interfaces, that I recall offhand.)

LucasArts had particular letters for particular verbs. From memory:

W: Walk
L: Look
U: Use
P: Pick up (or possibly T for Take?)
G: Give
S: Push (I think; possibly P)
Y: Pull
O: Open
C: Close

Knowing the keyboard shortcuts made things much quicker and less tedious.

Sierra let you use some combination of Enter, Space and Tab, but they weren't shortcuts as much as alternatives for the mouse buttons, I think. Similarly, A two-click UI hardly needs keyboard shortcuts except perhaps for opening the inventory (I would try Tab), other menus, or picking dialog options (the number keys). I don't think there's any consistency when it comes to verb coins.

[qptain Nemo]

However, I do not believe that going for maximum interactivity by adding lots of possible actions that are unrelated to the puzzles makes for a better adventure game.

That's a very clever misdirection, but the trick is the expression "a better adventure games" is extremely ambiguous. What does that mean? It's clear you sort of imply that a better adventure game is something that sticks to the core of its traditional gameplay as much as possible. However, that is hardly the only possible interpretation. To me a better adventure game is a more interesting, a more limit-defying, a more narratively rich, a more surprising, unusual adventure game. The Vacuum, The Last Express, Blade Runner, Culpa Innata all made moves away from the traditional and are all I'd call "a better adventure game". You appreciate puzzles in adventure games. That's cool. But I always appreciated the quality of narrative and interactivity first and foremost. Adventure games used to have the level of interactivity absolutely unmatched in other genres. That's what important to me a thousand times more than some inventory puzzles that I also happen to like a bit. You're essentially proposing sacrificing my priorities for yours. Which is fine, actually, I don't care much for the claim of the name "adventure games" in particular that you're trying to conquer, but when you start labelling it "a better way to design"...

(I feel like the argument in favor of making adventure games open-world is like saying movies shouldn't be edited together into just the important scenes, but should film absolutely everything happening to the characters 24 hours per day, and allow audiences to decide which parts to watch. Or like saying that because building a rich and detailed world is a plus if you're writing a multi-novel fantasy series, it will also improve any joke you're telling.)

I'm sorry, but this comparison is a trainwreck. First of all, there are plenty of movies that don't leave the impression that were actually composed out of important scenes at all. Secondly, why would an open world be inherently analogous to random viewing of a lot of mundane footage is beyond me. It'd be only mundane and pointless if it's badly designed. The comparison of a novel with a joke doesn't make any more sense, because jokes aren't highly flexible interactive experiences where you can naturally insert open worlds to a huge benefit. How does any of this disprove the simple idea that you could make some very good adventure games with a more open structure than the traditional linear sequence of puzzles with only one solution to each I don't know. To me a more appropriate comparison would be for example a hybrid of Legend of Kyrandia 2 & 3 multi-solution approach to puzzles and Little Big Adventure semi-openness. Not so hard to imagine I'd say.

In a standard adventure game, it's about experiencing a particular story by solving particular puzzles.

Again, this is very elusive ambiguous statement. While, it's quite factually true, what is it you're arguing for specifically? That more freedom&interactivity focused games are inferior design? Or that they need to REALLY distinguish themselves from "adventure games" and never ever again dare call themselves that? Or what? It's not quite clear what fate you're proposing for "non-standard" adventure games.

But if you end up spending more time adding pointless interactivity to your world than things that are part of the gameplay, then not only are you not really moving the game development forward, you're quite possibly making the game worse.

Not only you label it pointless, you then imply it's not gameplay in itself and that it's inferior to it. That's three highly arguable suggestions, and I can tell you right away I disagree with all three.

To me, this again comes down to a question of what's fun (I think I've talked about this before as the "Fun Principle": games should be fun). If moving around is fun in your game, then having the player move the character around manually (whether WASD or whatever) is probably a good idea. There are many games that build a lot of their fun from the task of moving (let's just take Prince of Persia as an example).  But if moving around is not fun (and I think that applies to games like Grim Fandango and Dreamfall, for example), then requiring the player to manually move the character around is just a tedious chore.

Well, you know, exactly. If something in the game is fun, I'd say it's usually worth doing. I don't know why unreasonable lengths of making it easier should be reached. Moving my mouse cursor towards the actions list with occasional extra actions in Death Gate was totally worth it. But I'm all for making things better and easier when it's reasonable. And hey, what do you know, Broken Sword 3 had almost arbitrary sets of up to 4 actions that you could perform absolutely effortlessly without moving any extra muscles anywhere. I thought that was great. But considering ditching extra actions when you actually could make them fun (and only if, I do agree that if you don't need it, then you just don't) because you're scared that selecting something from a menu or pressing an extra button is too much work for the player is doing it backwards in my opinion.

Incidentally, I mostly liked walking around in Dreamfall.

[Radiant]

I don't think that I agree that a verb coin necessarily obscures a significant portion of the object being interacted with, since I think that the backing "coin" can be left out -- and that doing so may actually improve the interface. Something like this:

Technically true, but that doesn't solve the other issues with verb coins, i.e. that extra actions are needed to perform a simple task. The player now has to (1) click, (2) wait for the animation, (3) move the mouse to the right icon, and (4) click again. Frankly, an interface like this would make me quit the game within minutes.

Regarding keyboard shortcuts, I'm not sure that I've ever used them

You should definitely consider them. They only take 10 minutes to implement, and give the player an alternative way to control everything. Some players really appreciate that, and people that don't want keyboard shortcuts will simply ignore them, as they're never intrusive. Frankly any Lucasarts-based GUI becomes much faster in the hands of a non-novice player if it has keyboard shortcuts.

And that's the point of an interface, after all: being fast, convenient, and non-intrusive.

[Crimson Wizard]

Technically true, but that doesn't solve the other issues with verb coins, i.e. that extra actions are needed to perform a simple task. The player now has to (1) click, (2) wait for the animation, (3) move the mouse to the right icon, and (4) click again. Frankly, an interface like this would make me quit the game within minutes.

I think there could be an alternative:
- Short click: default verb (open door, pickup item, look at for RMB);
- Long click: display additional verbs.
If long click is hard to use (to determine a time period needed), it may be "hold and drag to the side" - which opens menu at the place defined by drag direction. Or just double-click.

[Snarky]

However, I do not believe that going for maximum interactivity by adding lots of possible actions that are unrelated to the puzzles makes for a better adventure game.

That's a very clever misdirection, but the trick is the expression "a better adventure games" is extremely ambiguous. What does that mean? It's clear you sort of imply that a better adventure game is something that sticks to the core of its traditional gameplay as much as possible. However, that is hardly the only possible interpretation. To me a better adventure game is a more interesting, a more limit-defying, a more narratively rich, a more surprising, unusual adventure game. The Vacuum, The Last Express, Blade Runner, Culpa Innata all made moves away from the traditional and are all I'd call "a better adventure game". You appreciate puzzles in adventure games. That's cool. But I always appreciated the quality of narrative and interactivity first and foremost. Adventure games used to have the level of interactivity absolutely unmatched in other genres. That's what important to me a thousand times more than some inventory puzzles that I also happen to like a bit. You're essentially proposing sacrificing my priorities for yours. Which is fine, actually, I don't care much for the claim of the name "adventure games" in particular that you're trying to conquer, but when you start labelling it "a better way to design"...

It sounds like you've completely misunderstood what I was saying, as demonstrated by the fact that I value and appreciate all those games you list, and personally really enjoy several of them. (I've praised The Vacuum as one of my favorite AGS games numerous times.)

But Trapezoid wasn't talking about alternative gameplay elements. He was talking of interactivity that doesn't tie in to the gameplay at all, that doesn't accomplish anything:

If the player wants to push a Coke machine, why not have a generic shoving animation, even if it doesn't accomplish anything? [...]
I'm not saying you need to program an animation for every possible action, but the game needs to reward actions whether or not they're part of the solution, at least sometimes.

In a standard adventure game, it's about experiencing a particular story by solving particular puzzles.

Again, this is very elusive ambiguous statement. While, it's quite factually true, what is it you're arguing for specifically? That more freedom&interactivity focused games are inferior design? Or that they need to REALLY distinguish themselves from "adventure games" and never ever again dare call themselves that? Or what? It's not quite clear what fate you're proposing for "non-standard" adventure games.

I'm saying I think the qualities of "open world" games are largely incompatible with the qualities of adventure games, and that you need to strike a (fairly conservative) balance when it comes to "pointless interactivity": while a little bit is great, adding more and more random, non-goal-oriented crap to do in an adventure game pretty quickly just dilutes the actual game, making it worse.

But if you end up spending more time adding pointless interactivity to your world than things that are part of the gameplay, then not only are you not really moving the game development forward, you're quite possibly making the game worse.

Not only you label it pointless, you then imply it's not gameplay in itself and that it's inferior to it. That's three highly arguable suggestions, and I can tell you right away I disagree with all three.

I didn't label it pointless, Trapezoid did, by saying "it accomplishes nothing" and "isn't part of the solution."

Well, you know, exactly. If something in the game is fun, I'd say it's usually worth doing. I don't know why unreasonable lengths of making it easier should be reached. Moving my mouse cursor towards the actions list with occasional extra actions in Death Gate was totally worth it. But I'm all for making things better and easier when it's reasonable. And hey, what do you know, Broken Sword 3 had almost arbitrary sets of up to 4 actions that you could perform absolutely effortlessly without moving any extra muscles anywhere. I thought that was great. But considering ditching extra actions when you actually could make them fun (and only if, I do agree that if you don't need it, then you just don't) because you're scared that selecting something from a menu or pressing an extra button is too much work for the player is doing it backwards in my opinion.

Again, no one is saying that! If you think having certain actions in the game will be fun, by all means put them in! But then think carefully about the most effortless, least intrusive, least complicated and easiest to learn UI you can design to carry out those actions (I include in this concept of UI the possibility of accessing the actions through special inventory items, dialog options, etc.): and the answer will, in my opinion, almost never be a verb coin.

Incidentally, I mostly liked walking around in Dreamfall.

Ummm... why? It's not like there was any gameplay to it: you couldn't jump, you couldn't fall, it wasn't really interactive since you couldn't really do anything; mostly the levels were so linear you were simply walking forward from Point A to Point B (very little exploring), and apart from a couple of extremely poorly implemented chase/stealth sequences, there was no challenge or skill to it. It was only a chore you had to perform in order to play the game.

I remember one level as literally consisting solely of walking up a hill, without any opportunity for interaction.

Again, I'm not saying walking/moving can not be a fun thing, even in an adventure game. That's what Journey was all about, right? But it's something you have to design for. In Dreamfall, it seemed like they'd only thought "Oh, it's 3D so we have to do direct control. Hey, people love Tomb Raider so they'll love this, right?" without given any deeper thought to why moving around is fun in Tomb Raider.

[Monsieur OUXX]

EDIT: removed

[Knox]

In adventure games, maybe the problem isn't having too many verbs, but the fact that most verbs are useless for most hotspots. The game world is not as interactive as the interface implies.
If the player wants to push a Coke machine, why not have a generic shoving animation, even if it doesn't accomplish anything?

If the game designer tries to make various responses/animations to most hotspots for almost every verb, adds hotkeys to each verb (walk, talk, interact, inventory)...then is a Sierra-Style interface "acceptable"?