Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 2.13
Too many verbs makes for a lot of guesswork.
The appeal of this system is its potential for invention. In
Zork
, a 1980 text adventure, for
example, there's a room that's described as being “very noisy,” which contains a platinum bar.
If the player attempts to take the platinum bar like she would any other valuable object in the
game—by typing “GET BAR,” maybe—the game just repeats her command: “GET BAR.” Any-
thing the player types is echoed by the acoustics of the room. The solution is to type “ECHO.”
That will break the spell, allowing the player to collect the bar.
In a graphical adventure game, some near-useless item the player collects early in the game
and allows to pass from her consciousness can have an important role at a critical moment late
in the game—a kind of Chekhov's gun. These moments provide a kind of narrative closure and
feel clever—when the player gets the joke.
The problem in these cases is that when the player
doesn't
immediately get the joke, the game
breaks down, because experimentation is slow. How does the player gain information about
the rules of any game? She uses her verbs. In a game that gives the player a hundred verbs,
experimentation is a slow and tedious process. The player spends an hour trying each of her
verbs on every object in her reach, learning nothing until she finds the correct combination.
Are moments of invention possible in games with a concise vocabulary of verbs? Consider
Portal
(2007) to be in this same tradition: puzzle-solving games with overt, expository story-
telling. The game establishes a concise set of verbs very early—the player can join any two
points in space by placing a blue portal and an orange portal. These doorways are considered
connected no matter where there are. There's also a pretty concise cast of objects: walls that
accept portals, walls (a darker color) that don't accept portals, blocks that can travel through
portals like the protagonist, switches that are opened by the weight
of a player or block, gun
turrets that fire at the protagonist when they see her but have the same properties as a block.
Realizing one can position a portal under a turret to remove it from a problematic spot is a
moment of inventiveness. So is realizing one can make a portal above a turret—it's on a piece
of dark, portal-resistant floor in this example—through which to drop a block onto it and knock
it over. In this case, the player is inventing from her existing knowledge of her verbs and the
