Oh, Chris and I have had many conversations about examine and search. 
I was one of the very first users of Adventuron.
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Good post, but I disagree that LOOK IN containers should be separate than EXAMINE. Think about it: if you are examining a container, aren’t you going to look both inside and outside? If you have to be explicit in looking inside containers, then IMO, that’s a whole separate step that I need to worry about.
Coming from PnC crowd (the winder audience referred), I’m used to just click the eye icon and get all the necessary info all at once. That’s convenient. Why should it be different just because it’s in text format? It shouldn’t be.
My opinion is that games are supposed to be fun, and anything that increases friction should be well avoided.
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This mechanic is why I love Ultima VIII: Pagan. You have to drag the items away to look under them and the things you find with thorough searching is so satisfying in that game. Even keeping your backpack organized scratches a very unique itch.
Drag and drop done right.
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I recently played Indiana Jones & the Last Crudade and it has a bunch of pretty bad puzzles:
- In the library in Venice, there are important books you need to pixel hunt for, but you don’t know which ones or when you’re done so players either have to consult a walkthrough or make a guess that they’ve got them all or play really boring and scan every bookcase on every screen of this maze-like space.
- There are difficult to avoid fights which requore beating a timing-based minigame where losing ends the game, and your health carries over from fight to fight, meaning its easy to get yourself in an unwinnable situation
- Fights are mostly avoidable but each Nazi guard has a different solution (conversation options, costumes, inventory items) and no way to know correctly without trying and dying.
These puzzles are bad because of learn-by-dying (with slow reloads) and tedious gameplay— two classic defects modern games mostly try and avoid.
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Oof.
Oof.
This is also a golden interaction when considering game design in general, honestly. Also, what are unspoken rules and expectations that new players might not have learned yet, etc…
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I think this is 99% right, with Zarf’s proviso about breaking the rules to surprise the player tacked on. Sometimes it does make sense to increase friction, but authors should be very clear that that’s what they’re doing, and have thought hard about why doing so has an upside for the player. And then rigorously testing it, because most of the time whatever justification you’ve thought of for why the friction is important in your particular case is wrong and you should take it out 
Oh man, I played the heck out of that game when I was like 11, and yes, all of these critiques are dead on. At least I had time to tediously mouse over every one of those bookcases back then – alas, I did not have money to call the dollar-a-minute hint line so I never got farther than the castle back in the day.
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I was answering to this: “Also, look, examine, and search are different verbs!” which sounded like a bad approach.
I perfectly know that LOOK AT and EXAMINE are the same action.
To add: LOOKing UNDER a bed or table is perfectly logical in my opinion. EXAMINE gives the overall description of an item, while examining obvious hiding spot is quintessential. Otherwise why not avoid examining at all and just list everything on room description?
Now I go read the thousand posts that came through while I was tasting one of the best steaks in my life.
Later,
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Btw. I guess it’s a matter of habit. Games have been the same for like 30 years, with the same approach to actions and design. We boomers know that we have to SEARCH (or LOOK IN, same action) certain containers — or at least we hope something’s gonna come out of them — and LOOK UNDER horizontal barriers, as well as we know that typing SEARCH WINDOW or SEARCH MIRROR won’t give us unexpected details but, respectively, a view into a garden or our reflected vision. So, yes, you will never trick me with a bed hiding something but you will surely have me leave your game unattended if you expect me to look twice at something or (an ancient Sherlock game, iirc) CAREFULLY EXAMINE something to find a clue.
The steak was really great.
Ps: quality of puzzles is rarely found in their intrinsic nature, but in how good the author is in making them fun. Examples in multitudes.
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Really starting to develop steak envy.
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Better than a pizza thread imho.
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This puzzles me. I’ve read Chris’ post. And uhm well. Searching and object should be the same as examining it because of grinding reasons but looking over supporters should not because of what?
In my living experience, when I see a table I see what’s on top of it. While when I see a (example given) a pile of leaves I don’t have the faintest idea on what’s INSIDE it.
Btw, I would never search a pile of leaves. You know, insects.
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Now I know where to hide the steak.
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I was going to say “Wasn’t there a Sierra game that involved scotch-taping cat hair to your face to create a mustache disguise?”
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Games like Ultima (and later Baldur’s Gate) should be remembered as forms of interactive fiction. Ultima IV is the one I remember best, and was my favorite computer game of that era.
For those who don’t know it, Ultima IV had a set of virtue based stats, which were hardly mentioned in the manual, but you learned about them through play, and maxing out in these stats was pivotal to winning
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The Quest for Avatar !!! still the greatest CRPG !!
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Ha! I was a little confused too. I had trouble reading it actually, because of that font choice. I was mostly sharing the link because it was relevant and had some nuggets of wisdom.
I don’t have quite enough experience with parser games to really say what is best or what I even prefer when it comes to the EXAMINE, SEARCH or LOOK… I mean, SCRUTINIZE is even more thorough than SEARCH, if we’re being honest.
It’s really about context and the world and challenge the author is creating. I would hope that putting something behind another thing isn’t a major puzzle to solve, but I could understand wanting the player to be more involved in interacting with the world. If I were to make a game, I think I would give obvious (and not so obvious) clues when you look at something. Like when you look at or inside a barrel, it might say “It’s completely empty. However, you notice a glint off of something just behind it.” Surveying the room wouldn’t reveal this obvious clue, but exploring items in the room would. Anyway, hiding things with no clues isn’t as interesting to me. It would feel like I had blinders on.
However, if the player knew that a room absolutely had something they needed to find, then why not make them work for it a little? Again, context is everything. Why is something behind something else in the first place? Maybe it only made sense that an item was hidden so that other NPCs wouldn’t have seen it and grabbed it before you did. Anyway, it’s interesting to think about.
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This exactly.
In Anchorhead, it’ll warn you that LOOK IN, LOOK UNDER & LOOK BEHIND are all verbs you will need to use. So you know to use them. Plus it’s a generally realistic game in terms of everyday tasks except eating, so it feels right that maybe you wouldn’t think to very thoroughly search every part of an object.
There is, of course, an extent that this can go to (an open container with visible contents can obviously show what’s inside; but maybe a large sack shouldn’t show because even if it’s open, you really need to search to find objects in a sack).
I think that’s really the main point.
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True! I’m actually playing Anchorhead right now as part of my plan to replay all the games with 100+ ratings on IFDB in reverse chronological order. In the new version, I had to LOOK BEHIND something, but I was explicitly told ‘there is something behind _____’. So cluing helps a lot!
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I dislike “brain teaser” type puzzles of the sort found in 1970s truck stops. So doing something like a Towers of Hanoi is bad. I’ve been critical of Spellbreaker’s scale puzzle, but the twist (light or dim unknown) makes it better. I realized during my most recent playthrough that it seemed just interesting enough to pass muster.
I don’t really like making rules about what authors can and can’t do. I’d rather emphasize the importance of doing things well. By making inviolate rules, we can give ourselves a reason to dismiss things without trying them or even without thinking about them. It’s good to formulate principles, but in the end, we must consider specifics. Hence, the scale puzzle is fine, while Zork Zero’s multiple towers of Hanoi is not.
No puzzle that requires an action can be good if there is never a reason for the player to perform the action. That could apply to SEARCH, PUSH, TAKE, TABULATE, or even EQUIVOCATE. We could play whack-a-mole all day with individual verbs, but the problem is almost always that the author did not provide a motive (not even a cleverly disguised one) for doing what was needed.
When I learn the solution to a puzzle that I could not solve, I consider the available information. If there was enough information, or if I disregarded valid hints, I give the author their due. I missed it. However, if there wasn’t enough info, I feel annoyed. It seems cheap. I grow suspicious of the author. What else have they been keeping from me?
I like to separate bad puzzles from noble failures. Sometimes an author is creative; they try something new. There is a desire to move the medium forward. If they fail, it is a noble failure. “Bad” applies to the other failures.
- The Bank of Zork puzzle in mainframe Zork was an attempt to move things forward (noble failure)
- The Bank of Zork puzzle in Zork II was no longer new. Dave Lebling didn’t understand what it was. It seemed that nobody did. And yet, it went in unchanged (bad).
Good puzzles usually involve doing cool things. I put magic in Repeat the Ending because doing magic is fun (even in a less fun story). If I had to divide 782873978923 by 13098709187090897 by hand, that would be difficult, but it would not be fun. It certainly would not feel “cool.” A bad puzzle is work. It’s rote. A good puzzle tries to do something new, it challenges not only its player but its author. If the player doesn’t like it, they are at least compelled by it.
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To me, a good puzzle (i.e. one that players will enjoy) has two components:
- Finding the solution is fun. This usually (though not necessarily) means an “aha!” moment when you figure out what you need to do. If someone tells you the solution, your reaction should (again, usually) be “ah! that makes sense!” (or “clever!” or “I should have thought of that” or…), not “how on earth was I ever supposed to figure that out?!”
- Implementing the solution is fun. Solving the Towers of Hanoi problem has provided many an “aha!” moment to novice computer programmers, so why isn’t it a good puzzle in IF? Because once you’ve figured out the solution, putting it into practice is mind-numbing tedium.
The infamous cat-hair-moustache puzzle mentioned above fails the first of these. The solution might be fun to play out—going around catching cats and such is good classic adventure-game material—but what you need to do makes no sense even when explained.
Separate EXAMINE, SEARCH, and LOOK UNDER verbs fail the second of these, in many cases. Maybe there’s only one object in the whole game you need to LOOK UNDER to find a vital clue—but unless it’s really well-clued, now you’ve taught the player they need to try this verb on literally everything they see. That just adds a lot of pointless busywork to every room.
The unlisted exits puzzle in Jigsaw (where, in the very first room in the game, you have to ignore the exits listed in the room description and go a different direction entirely to find vital equipment) fails on both these accounts, for me. When I found the answer in a walkthrough, my reaction was “…seriously? Southeast? Why?”. And then once I knew the solution, I needed to tediously try every direction from every location in case of further hidden exits, which wasn’t especially fun.
Fixing the first of these is relatively easy. Have people test it and gauge their reactions. Add more clues if you need to, add alternate solutions, and so on. There’s a whole lot that’s been written on this and I like to think I’ve gotten a good amount of practice at it.
Fixing the second of these is a skill I’m still developing. Testers tend to be great at determining if something is frustrating them, but they don’t always know why. Figuring out the why is the author’s job.
For a specific example, some people ran into frustration in Stormrider because they didn’t examine one of the various tools you acquire throughout the game. The easy solution is to just say “well that’s user error”. But this indicates I’ve been implicitly expecting the player to always EXAMINE everything they pick up. Someone suggested in another thread, why don’t I just make it automatic? Every successful TAKE followed by an automatic EXAMINE? Obvious in hindsight, yet not something I’d ever thought of before.
(Of course, if you make too much automatic, then you start losing the “aha!” moments. But I don’t think anyone gets “aha!” moments from realizing they need to examine things when they pick them up.)
So, are there any “just bad” puzzles? I would say yes—puzzles that too egregiously violate one of these guidelines. Breaking the first gets you moon logic puzzles. Breaking the second gets you randomized mazes that need to be solved by brute force. Breaking both of them at once is a recipe for player frustration.
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