Zarf Updates

(My first title for this post was "The Mystery of the Missing Adverbs". That was just too trite. Instead I spun the ol' Stratemeyer Syndicate title wheel and picked different words. Now it's trite and clunky; sorry.)

Adverbs are one of the great Bad Ideas of interactive fiction. Imagine this sort of interaction:

We can parse verbs, adjectives, and nouns, so why not adverbs? They provide an additional axis of choice for the player's command. They can be situationally appropriate. (Note how I'm cueing the player to consider alternatives: "At a glance", "at your touch".) Is this a good idea?

Well, no. It's bad. The standard reply is that this is too much choice. It can't be connected to meaningful game responses. That is: 98% of the time, EXAMINE CAREFULLY is going to do exactly the same thing as EXAMINE, so the player will rapidly learn to not bother.

Also, players are used to searching a two-axis space. "Try every verb on every noun" is boring; you don't want the player to go there; but sometimes they get stuck and it happens. Trying every verb/noun/adverb combination isn't practical at all.

(I once tried to equate the two-axis noun-verb searchable space of text IF with the two-dimensional searchable screen space of Myst. I was certainly overstating that connection -- this was before RealMyst -- but it's fun to try.)

This argument is not new in IF circles. In fact it's so well-known that I can't remember the last time someone seriously proposed adding adverbs. They're only hauled out as an example of a Bad Idea!

Except... occasionally, in one of those discussions, someone remembers that Deadline does use adverbs. And they kind of work, right? I mean, the game was playable. We used the right word at the right time and solved the mystery. And yet the idea was never followed up -- outside of Infocom's later mystery games.

What's going on here?

(SPOILER WARNING: Spoilers for the mysteries of Deadline! Some of them, at least.)

First, we note that the manual doesn't clue you in about adverbs at all. Neither the folio-edition instructions nor the grey-box manual (they're slightly different). The sample game in the grey-box manual doesn't use any adverbs either. That's not great! It seems like the game wants you to try a command that you have no way of knowing about.

UPDATE (Apr 3): Aaron Reed points out in comments that the folio manual does mention CAREFULLY. It's buried in the "Time Element" section:

Some actions, such as examinations done CAREFULLY, may take a bit longer [than one minute].

Obviously easy to miss, because I missed it! (So did my PDF search function, because the word CAREFULLY is hyphenated in that sentence, sigh.) And they dropped that line when they wrote the grey-box manual.

But that's just ("just") the manual. Let's look at the parser code that handles adverbs. Here's the entire bit:

 (<OR <EQUAL? .WORD ,W?CAREFULLY ,W?QUIETLY>
  <EQUAL? .WORD ,W?SLOWLY ,W?QUICKLY
            ,W?BRIEFLY>>
  <SETG P-ADVERB .WORD>)

(Side note: Due to the way Infocom pasted parser code from one project to the next, these lines occur in almost every following game. However, they're usually commented out. Only Deadline, Witness, Seastalker, and Moonmist run this code. A few other games detect adverbs and say "Adverbs aren't needed in this game.")

What does these lines do? They simply check for one of the five listed words (CAREFULLY, QUIETLY, SLOWLY, QUICKLY, BRIEFLY), store it in the P-ADVERB global variable, and move on with the parsing. Unlike the verb-noun structure, which is rigid, an adverb can occur anywhere in any command.

However, very few commands care about the P-ADVERB variable. Like I said earlier: almost every action runs the same whether you do it QUICKLY or SLOWLY. Here is everything you can accomplish with an adverb in Deadline:

• If you CLIMB STAIRS QUIETLY or SLOWLY, you learn that they creak no matter what.
• You can EXAMINE/READ NEWSPAPER CAREFULLY/SLOWLY to find the business-section article about the Omnidyne merger.
• You can EXAMINE/READ NOTEPAD CAREFULLY to discover the imprints left from the previous page.
• You can EXAMINE/SEARCH BOOKSHELF CAREFULLY to notice the books that George moved when he... well, I won't spoil that.

What, Master O'Lochlainn, do we observe here? First, it's a pretty haphazard list. (Why not accept CLIMB STAIRS CAREFULLY too?)

More important: all of these commands are optional.

• The game tells you that the stairs are creaky; so do the casefile interviews. Knowing that they're inescapably creaky is just a confirmation.
• READ NEWSPAPER mentions that there are two sections and you've only glanced at one. You can then READ SECOND SECTION.
• The imprints on the notepad are a detective-story cliche; you might go straight for the pencil. FEEL NOTEPAD gives you a blatant hint too.
• If you saw George move the books, the adverb is not necessary. A regular EXAMINE will direct your attention to the books you noticed earlier. EXAMINE BOOKSHELF CAREFULLY is an alternate solution if you missed George sneaking around.

Is this on purpose? That is, did the designer deliberately avoid putting any adverbs on the critical path? I don't know for sure, but I suspect the answer is yes.

One pointer is that there is an unusual command form which is critical to finishing the game: SEARCH NEAR/AROUND HOLES. And this one is explicitly called out in the manual.

(I feel like they should have accepted SEARCH HOLES CAREFULLY as an alternate solution... but they don't. Oh well.)

But there's one more game effect that I didn't mention, and I think it's the key:

• Any EXAMINE or READ command takes 3-6 minutes longer if done CAREFULLY.

This isn't just a matter of bumping the clock. All of Deadline's NPCs move around the house on a schedule, which means they can surprise you in the middle of an action:

If you want to stop Mrs. Robner, or answer the phone yourself, you have to interrupt your EXAMINE. It's a trade-off! And trade-offs are the root of all game agency.

Even if no characters happen by, you're aware of the clock ticking. You're on a schedule too. (The first thing you learn in the game is that the will-reading is at noon.) (For that matter, the game's tagline is "Twelve hours to solve the murder.") Spending several minutes on each EXAMINE is genuinely too much time to waste. You have to pick and choose.

Yes, yes, the game allows arbitrary save and restore. You could search-scum your way around the mansion. But, like the "try every verb on every noun" strategy, it's clearly a tedious last resort.

By placing EXAMINE CAREFULLY into an "economy" of game resources, Deadline breaks the (not-yet-invented) Curse of the Adverb. EXAMINE CAREFULLY is never the same as EXAMINE; it's always a little worse, and sometimes (rarely) a lot better.

Other adverbs don't fit this pattern. But then, none of them do anything interesting, with the very minor exception of CLIMB STAIRS QUIETLY. Anyhow, you're a detective. EXAMINE and SEARCH are really the core actions of the game. Giving them extra flexibility suits the genre.

See also EXAMINE ROOM, the other command which takes several minutes. The game explicitly warns you that it "wouldn't reveal much" -- and indeed it never does. You're supposed to EXAMINE specific objects! But you can see why the game allows EXAMINE ROOM; it's clearly part of both the mystery genre and the time-economy of Deadline.

So perhaps adverbs could be extended to other IF after all. It would require (1) a genre in which some actions require more variety than a raw verb; and (2) a meaningful resource cost for the player to balance. Want to give it a go?

(It would make sense for WALK NORTH SLOWLY/QUIETLY to take extra time as well. Or FOLLOW GEORGE QUIETLY? But NPCs move at a steady one room per turn, for simplicity's sake. Slowing down the player would break the FOLLOW entirely -- not what you want. Maybe some other trade-off...)