Depressingly Common Adventure Game Design Flaws. The remnants of a dying interstellar civilisation, they come to our planet to seed our adventure games with their parasitic young, to burst their way out in a spray of bone and gore. As a seasoned and battle-hardened veteran, they chose me to go in and end the infestation, armed only with a two by four and a mechanical pencil with half an inch of lead left.

This month's Depressingly Common Adventure Game Design Flaw:

USE KEY TO OPEN DOOR

If there's one thing that seems a bit out of place in a lot of games, it's the courier quest. This, of course, applies not only to adventure games but also any games with a degree of adventure element, like RPGs, action/adventures, or pretty much anything with Zelda in the title. Here we have a game where the player is (usually) up against impossible odds, the sole obstacle between the villain and total victory, a beacon of sword-slashing, gun-toting strength to shepherd the world into a new time of peace and understanding. It should really be communicated to most of the NPCs in the game that there are other, less busy people who could pick up their laundry.

Courier quests (or 'fetch quests') are just part of a larger problem, though, which is the problem of Use Key To Open Door. Overuse of puzzles which involve picking up an object in room A and dragging it onto an obstacle in room B in order to provide access to room C. Of course, this pretty much describes a standard adventure game puzzle, but my problem is how little the formula varies. The truly poor games have you collect armfuls of unlabelled keys of varying shape and size in order to open doors, behind which can be found more keys to add to your collection. I'm looking at you, Survival Horror. In general, though, while most games don't go that far, they do something very similar.

When you boil down Use Key To Open Door to the basics — removing an obstacle just by throwing an inventory item at it — then you begin to realise how depressingly common it is. You can replace 'key' with crowbar, wad of money, pickaxe, rope, or bunch of flowers, and substitute 'door' with trapdoor, bouncer, cave-in, cliff, or high-maintenance girlfriend. When you get right down to it, virtually any puzzle could fit into the category, and the puzzles in most adventure games, even commercial ones, can be 60-100% Use Key To Open Door.

Why People Do It

No 1920s moustache-twirling Hollywood villain ever sat down and wrung his hands in glee with the intention of turning adventure games into endless chains of boring courier quests. The glut of Use Key To Open Door came about unconsciously, quite naturally, through the gradual simplification of the adventure game interface.

Think back to the very early days of gaming, and the very first adventure format of all — the text adventure, which assumed a certain amount of literary-mindedness on the part of the player. Rather than expressing one's desire to execute a certain action through symbolic clicks and drags, this desire had to be expressed much more deliberately with written instructions. In well-designed interactive fiction, the text parser is a direct bridge between your mind and your avatar's actions. In poorly-designed IF, it all descends into endless games of 'Guess What Word I'm Thinking Of', but that's not the point.

The real issue is that few IF text parsers let the player get away with a command like 'Use X on Y'. It would require you to be a lot more specific than that, and would frequently say so. It wasn't enough to just say 'use rope on tree', because that could mean anything. Put the rope at the base of the tree, rub the rope against the tree, give the rope to the tree as a peace offering… no, it was 'tie rope to tree' we were looking for. You'd never find yourself trying to use your every inventory item on every hotspot in a text adventure — if the solution wasn't obvious as soon as the objects came to hand, you just weren't smart enough. Bad luck. Game wins.

Technology moved on a wee bit and graphical adventures became the hot topic. Sierra got into the act with their Something Quests. The text parser remained, simplified a touch, but in most cases it still wouldn't let you get away with 'use flask on monster'. And then, of course, came the mouse-driven adventures. Suddenly keyboards were for the old fogeys, and we were surfing a wave of bright new technology. Unfortunately, developers were then handed the problem of translating the concept of the command line into a mouse interface, and the most obvious solution was the verb button system.

At first, to do justice to the wealth of commands available to the IF player, interfaces generally just featured an absolute horde of buttons. I think it was Return to Zork that produced a button for every conceivable use of a particular object. Of course, there had to be restrictions, and the number of possible verbs that could be associated with the inventory were whittled down fast. Maniac Mansion brought the options down to four: 'use', 'unlock', 'fix' and 'give'. By Monkey Island 2, only the 'use' and 'give' inventory commands survived among a total of nine verbs overall. Each generation struck off more and more verbs that were deemed unnecessary, and soon there was no room for more than one inventory command. Finally, games like Beneath A Steel Sky showed us how low we could go — three solitary actions were available. 'Look', generic 'Interact', and generic 'Use Inventory Item'.

And that, of course, became the root of Use Key To Open Door. With only one command for using the inventory, puzzles could be solved by trial and error, and the dreaded 'use everything on everything' syndrome followed. The adventure game just didn't reward logic like it used to — many times I've used an object on a hotspot randomly and been completely surprised by what the player character does with it. That's not the idea. I'm supposed to be coming up with the solution myself, damn it. We might as well just be putting keys in doors for all the thinking we have to do.