I’ve seen some games where the INVENTORY command is not usable when it is completely dark. While there is some logic to this, I think most games assume you can distinguish each item by touch, and hence allow it.
Is this something which is universally hated by players? Something to avoid in new games?
It feels weird to have the inventory command usable in the dark, yet when you try to interact with said objects, it says you can’t see them. I prefer it unusable, or even better, that is is usable but all commmands interacting with objects do so in a proper way.
I think Infocom got it right.
>n
The Troll Room
This is a small room with passages to the east and south and a forbidding hole
leading west. Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the
walls.
A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all passages out of the
room.
Your sword has begun to glow very brightly.
>turn off lamp
The brass lantern is now off.
It is now pitch black.
The troll's swing almost knocks you over as you barely parry in time.
>attack troll with sword
It's too dark to see!
>i
You are carrying:
A brass lantern
A sword
The troll's axe stroke cleaves you from the nave to the chops.
It appears that that last blow was too much for you. I'm afraid you are dead.
**** You have died ****
Now, let's take a look here... Well, you probably deserve another chance. I
can't quite fix you up completely, but you can't have everything.
Forest
This is a forest, with trees in all directions. To the east, there appears to
be sunlight.
>I’d probably find it quite annoying because presumably I need to use my inventory to make the dark area un-dark - unless there’s an important puzzle-based reason to obfuscate the inventory, it just feels like it’s making the player’s life harder to no positive end.
Crossing threads a bit, I’d say that the 1980s conception of darkness was always a bad fit for the medium-sized-dry-goods adventure game. Preventing you from interacting with your goods is a bad mechanic! It blocks you from doing what the game is about! And not in a particularly realistic or understandable way.
It would be better to put you in very dim light. You can orient yourself and interact, but specific actions are blocked (can’t read a book) and certain objects are out of scope (a key in the corner is not mentioned or takeable until you light a lamp). Maybe you can only use the exit that you came in through.
Of course Crowther wasn’t thinking in terms of dim light, because caves really are pitch-dark. But it would have fit the game better.
Zarf said it all pretty well. I think the question I would ask is this: in what way would it add to the experience of playing your game to prevent the player from viewing their inventory while in the dark?
Right, I think a lot comes down to what the dark is for. Dark is a real thing in a cave, yes, but mechanically it is a constraint that prevents movement. It was also, in those days, a way to limit the turn count of a game. Limiting turns was generally understood to be a positive quality in a design. The lamp burns down. Enchanter, which had no light-based timer, relied upon food instead. Planetfall had darkness, and food on top of that.
Darkness also prevented brute-force mapping. Anyone who’s played old wireframe dungeon RPGs from the 80s has done a bit of this.
It would have been poor form to prevent turning on a lamp in the dark, I think, when the dark was so deadly. Realistic or otherwise.
That’s a limited, binary model of dark that persists. That is the tradition. I don’t think there was an effort in simulating darkness in those days, even though that would have been more credible. Why? Marc Blank seemed to genuinely enjoy simulation, but he never went further with darkness. Resource limitations are a likely explanation, but darkness was a very video games thing–clearly established–an occasion for constraints and problem solving. That isn’t to say darkness adds nothing in those old games. Caves are dark, so darkness will be expected. Zork went further and made the darkness a malevolent presence, which was interesting. The grue has endured as an interesting feature of darkness. Where civilization and technology end, there be grues.
Realistically, the light in an adjacent room should be visible from a dark room in most cases (barring automated transit through a twisting passage or doors that close behind protagonists). This is the dim light idea, which makes a lot of sense to me.
But if the author isn’t up to that, I think there’s a convention that probably should be held to so that players don’t get confused or annoyed. I think the real issue with darkness is that making it interesting might require a special effort. That comes back to simulation, I think: coming up with new and exciting ways to engage with what feels familiar.
So far as personal preference goes: I’d rather keep the Infocom model unless something novel is being done. Though I guess there will be silly edge cases. If I have a sack of thirty identical red gumballs and one blue gumball, I should probably work that out. Or would that count as a puzzle? I’d rather not anyway.
Speaking as someone who went blind in his mid-20s and spent a lot of time in the dark or with only a screen for illumination, both inventory being completely unusable in the dark and inventory being fully usable in the dark make no sense to me outside of technical limitations, deliberate breaks from reality, and not being up to the task of programming proper darkness/inventory interactions.
Sure, not being able to tell a red scarf from a blue scarf in the dark makes total sense, but you should still be able to tell you have two scarves in your bag of holding and be able to manipulate them in a way where color doesn’t matter. And maybe you can’t tell the billiard ball from the glass orb because they are too similar in size, weight, and texture, but telling the glass orb from the Metal cube should be easy.
And yeah, any decent light source should be lightable in the dark… and it’s weird that a glowing sword doesn’t provide at least dim light.
Ideally, if I were making a game, I’d want something like
Well lit room:
You are carrying
a red scarf
a blue scarf
a cue ball
a Shiny metal Cube
A black Metal Cube
a frosted glass orb
A Tome of Fire
A Tome of Ice
A Tome of Lightning
A poor lit room
You are carrying
A red scarf
a blue scarf
two small, smooth, heavy spheres
a shiny metal cube
a dark metal cube
a red book
a blue book
a yellow book.
A dark room
You are carrying
2 scarves
two small, smooth, heavy spheres.
two metal cubes
3 books.
E.g. in dim light, the frosted glass and white of the cue ball are too similar to tell apart and the book titles are too blurry to read, but there’s still enough contrast to tell shiny from dark, but in complete darkness, you struggle to identify anything beyond the type of item or its general shape.
Granted, touch is probably my dominant sense and I’m convinced most sighted people have an under developed appreciation for how objects feel when touched or held.
I think limiting inventory and its manipulation in the darkness by default was likely a general concession for simplicity and to prevent making the system too detailed in a way that an author might not specifically want if they wanted to create object-manipulation in darkness scenarios.
I understand in real life in a dark room you’d have general knowledge of your inventory and the shapes of things so you realistically you could probably discern your Aunt Nellie’s lost antique teacup in your bag, but you probably don’t want to try replacing it in the dark with all the other fragile things by waving it around in the dark and hoping to land it in it’s special empty spot.
I checked, and this is the way it works. You can list inventory in the dark, you just can’t do anything with it. The author has to specify if the player can potentially drop stuff (and lose it in the dark.)
Laboratory
The Photo Lab is north.
>i
You are carrying:
Aunt Nellie's lost teacup
a hammer
>n
Darkness
It is pitch dark, and you can't see a thing.
>i
You are carrying:
Aunt Nellie's lost teacup
a hammer
>x cup
You can't see any such thing.
>drop cup
You can't see any such thing.
>i
You are carrying:
Aunt Nellie's lost teacup
a hammer
The other thing that works naturally (unless the author changes it) is the room description isn’t available, so the player must go by remembered directions, or choose directions randomly, possibly to their peril.
Inform kind of goes by “cave rules” even though realistically a single dark room inside a building that is otherwise illuminated probably would never be so dark you couldn’t see a bit - unless the door is closed and there are no windows.
TL;DR: half light or “insufficient light” is a game specific implementation and Inform’s conventions generally try to simplify so an author can specify as they need without undoing too many default specifics.
You can’t perform actions requiring “visible” things in darkness by default (Inform 7). Examining specifies both visibility and light (I’ve thought of them as the same but maybe I was wrong) in the Standard Rules. Switching on and a bunch of other actions (like tasting) just need things–visibility doesn’t come up. So there is a little flexibility there with some actions.
But yeah, I agree, a lot comes down to convention. A question is “If I do something unconventional, what will it buy me?” I think “dim light” could offer a lot, but preventing people from checking inventory probably wouldn’t. But this is a lot like the compass direction question, there’s what’s expected and what might or might not be interesting about a swerve.
This seemingly innocent question raises a fascinating issue (and the responses here prove it). Light is a physical element in its own right within the imaginary world in which the story takes place, and personally, I spent several weeks adjusting its management because it touches on many related topics (and because I’m a total newbie). Questions I asked myself (some of which have been clearly addressed, others not so much): Are there intermediate states between light and dark? Are all natural and artificial light sources equal? Are there creatures with night vision; does their ability work even in total darkness? What is the importance and availability of other senses within the world model? How does light propagate between rooms, depending on their configuration? What is the scope—how are adjacent rooms perceived in terms of lighting and obstacles?
In other words: if my character is in a dark room with a window facing a faint moon, the answer to the question posed is different from if they were locked in a chest and smuggled aboard a merchant ship, or if they wandered a few meters away from their campfire in a dense forest. For the sake of narrative coherence, it’s worth having some visibility rules well tested and tested again 
Unless you want to make your gane purposefully abrasive (i.e. Ferret,) it’s good form to, whichever solution you choose, to always allow the player to back out of the dark area, assess their inventory, and then go back in. Certainly not anything like falling into a dark room via a pit, or the door locking behind you, or whatnot.
just gonna comment that TADS 3 adv3 has extremely granular darkness abilities, including (iirc) dim light and seeing ambient light from other rooms. I haven’t messed with the features myself so I’m not sure how that interacts with the stuff @Mewtamer is describing re: different object properties, but I don’t think it’d be impossible to add a property like isRound to balls or isCube to cubes, isShiny or isFabric etc and do conditional logic on what you can discern in the dim/dark that way. maybe it already does something like that!
I found myself at odds with your opening line at first since I didn’t see what the problem could be, but after reading Hanon’s example:
I totally get it!
To me this response pattern comes across as somewhat unpolished or lacking in implementation. I think I’m on the same page as you regarding that last point, and my ideal would be an inventory that’s always accessible paired with individual item interactions that are appropriately restricted by darkness (and give custom responses). I really like Jeffery’s idea of obscuring non-touchable differences between items, if and when relevant! Some differences could also be smelled or tasted.
Maybe multiple carried containers can be used to store items, à la Breakfast in the Dolomites with its different pant pockets (though maybe not that extreme), so that in darkness the player can keep track of similar things by putting them in different places. The packet of salt goes on the left, the packet of sugar goes on the right…
I agree with everyone saying it makes sense for the player character to be able to take stock of inventory in the dark — and beyond that, I would generally expect the PC to be able to remember what we’ve picked up. In a majority of games, >INVENTORY is mostly just a convenience command, since it doesn’t provide any information that the player couldn’t get by scrolling up or keeping an external list. Suppressing it carelessly just makes the play experience more tedious.
That being said, blocking off or messing with the inventory can make for some interesting puzzles, if done deliberately and in a way that engages the player! Maybe you wake up from an ambush to find your hands tied, and you’re not sure what exactly your assailants took from your pockets — or maybe the PC has been hoarding items for years and your Bag of Holding is so disorganized that in the dark you can only grasp at items of a target size/shape and make the best of what you find.
I think inventory should work at all times. It is (as pointed out above) a reminder of what the player character is carrying and I consider it a convenience. Beats writing down what the player character is holding anytime IMHO.
I can imagine scenarios where taking inventory would be useful in learning something has changed (when e.g. manipulating held items).
In my WIP I sidestep the darkness challenges (and introduce new ones) by not allowing the player to enter total darkness, and compensate for this by using a light source with limited reach (lights the room it is in, plus some additional rooms in line of sight). It creates some interesting possibilities.
That’s definitely an interesting approach! I was pleasantly surprised to see something similar in Under the Cognomen of Edgar Allan Poe. I was afraid that we’d be forced to walk through darkness and risk running into our double, as that’s the kind of challenge that more old-school games have prepared me for, so being kept away from it instead was a relief.
Seconded, with nuances. The classic model has the advantage of not being in the way of the player for the sake of subversion or annoyance. Tacit rules for the classic model are simple and clear, and behaviour is predictable. Preventing interaction with the player’s inventory has been done many times, with mixed success. It is not good mechanics unless it makes in-game sense from a puzzling standpoint, not just a mimetic one. The interest, as always, is in what edge cases actually bring something worthwhile.
Nowadays that resource constraints are not generally a priority, there is a lot of temptation about subverting well-established tropes, but just doing it as an end is not a good idea. Games are for players to enjoy, not for authors to use as a showcase. Unless you are deliberately submitting a proof of concept, such as The Knapsack Problem (bears mention) then you’d better think about wider integration with the game’s challenge dynamics.
This, of course, complicates things. Immensely. The number of ways it can go wrong is staggering, and balance is often questionable. Some games have explored good ideas around inventories (including lack of it, which is now classic), but most of the successful ones have pared back the inventory constraints, unsurprisingly. So yes, I welcome experimental explorations with inventories as long as they bring something good. Please mind: not new, but good. Originality does not correlate with playability.
[For Inform 7] I wonder if there’s an easy way to go through - there are actions that “requiring light” and wonder if you can unset them somehow…
Smelling the candle does not require light.
I pulled this from an example so it might be possible to completely alter the visibility rule book based on this recipe book example:
Visibility rule:
if examining:
if the detail of the noun is fine and the number of visible lit candles is less than 5, there is insufficient light;
if the detail of the noun is ordinary and the number of visible lit candles is less than 3, there is insufficient light;
there is sufficient light.
So I wonder if you can say
Before examining the statue:
if there is insufficient light:
say “You can’t see clearly, but your fingers trace the contours of the face.” instead.
Before examining the marble bust when in darkness:
say "You can't see clearly in the dark, but your fingers trace the marble contours of her features. Yep, it's your Aunt Nellie." instead.
Laboratory
The Photo Lab is north.
I
You are carrying:
a marble bust
x bust
It’s a smaller-than life-sized marble rendition of your Aunt Nellie’s head and shoulders you can carry around with you.
n
Darkness
It is pitch dark, and you can’t see a thing.
x bust
You can’t see clearly in the dark, but your fingers trace the marble contours of her features. Yep, it’s your Aunt Nellie.
drop bust
Dropped.
take bust
You can’t see any such thing
“dropped” could even be replaced with something referencing losing it to the dark or such.