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alt title(s): Guess The Verb; You Cant Get Ye Flask 
And there's no precious graphics to help, either.
An annoying aspect of oldschool Adventure Games, especially Interactive Fiction, was a limited ability to recognize command inputs. Additionally, the error messages would frequently lack clarification as to what you were supposed to do, often making you want to put your fist through the screen.
For example, let's say the command to look at a monster was "look monster". If you typed in "look at monster", the game might say something like "I don't know how to do that" or "I don't see an 'at' here". This got better over time, but never completely disappeared before command-line interfaces went out of style.
The name of this trope is a reference to Homestar Runner. In the Strong Bad E-Mail video games , Strong Bad imagines himself as a character in a text-based adventure game, and imagines the problem above:
Strong Bad: And you'd be all like "get ye flask", and it'd say "You can't get ye flask", and you'd just have to sit there and imagine why on Earth you can't get ye flask! Because the game's certainly not going to tell you.
Interactive Fiction aficionados claim that this problem was rarely all that bad except in the earliest and worst examples of the genre, and they get really cheesed off that it's the one thing about the format that people still remember. Of course, the fact that it is the one thing they remember is telling... but then, the company most widely known for their parser adventure games (Sierra, of Kings Quest and Space Quest fame) is also the one with one of the worst parsers ever, that didn't improve much in the six years they used it before switching to a mouse interface.
The modern Interactive Fiction hobbyist community includes this trope among its list of things to avoid. Called ' Guess The Verb' bugs, such errors are universally accepted as a sign of sloppy programming. It's now accepted as a standard that every object with any kind of use must have at least one 'archaic' or 'unusual' descriptor — 'stopper' in reference to a bathtub plug, for example.
Examples of games with actual good parsers include (and are pretty much limited to) The Hobbit, and anything by Infocom and Legend. Ironically, that includes some of the oldest adventure games; many of the newer ones tried to reinvent the parser wheel. The TADS (Text Adventure Development System) runtime is particularly good at such reinvention — not only can you actually get ye flask, TADS allows to choose between multiple ye flasks, and will ask which one you actually want. Of course, so does the twenty-years-older Infocom parser.
Sometimes called Guess The Verb or Guess The Syntax. Of course, the equivalent frustration in non-parser Point And Click games is the Pixel Hunt. The "ye" comes from Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe.
Examples
- Homestar Runner: In addition to the Trope Namer example, this became a running joke, appearing in the Homestar Runner online game (as the dungeon caves in on you), and appearing as a point-garnering command in Thy Dungeonman 2. In Thy Dungeonman 3, getting ye flask becomes the object of the game. And Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People features the "ye flask" again, and an extended rant about people insensitively leaving "ye flasks" out without letting people get them.
- DOS. We will just leave it at that.
- In the The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy text adventure, you're actually expected to input an incorrect command at one point, which has an effect later in the game.
- If you never input a senseless command, the game will eventually take a certain correct command (I forget what it is, but it's one you need to complete the game) and use that as the deadly insult. You get kudos for timing it right and saying the actual quote ("I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle").
- One PC magazine described this kind of thing as "toying with various ways of saying PUT BABEL FISH UP ZAPHOD'S JACKSIE".
- Sierra, creator of Kings Quest and Space Quest, never got beyond "<verb> <noun>" phrases in almost a decade of parser design. Their most infamous example, however, is the end of Leisure Suit Larry 2, where the player has to make a bomb using an airsick bag as the wick. The problem is that "bag" is not considered a synonym for "airsick bag" - despite there not being a different bag in a five-mile radius. As a result, many walkthroughs in magazines and on the internet falsely claim that the input here has to be a full sentence (including the word "the" several times).
- This one isn't actually Al Lowe's (creator/programmer) fault. There was an unrelated bug that needed fixing, so Lowe, pressed for time, had someone else fix it. He assured him everything was fine, and the code seemed to check out. The only problem? The programmer changed "bag" from a noun to a verb. Lowe never noticed, as the policy for testing was to use the longest sentence possible, which bypassed the error. More info can be found on Lowe's site.
- In Kings Quest, most locked doors can be unlocked by a variety of phrases, such as "open door with key", "put key in key hole", "use key to open door", etc. Except for the magical door in King's Quest 2, which only accepted "unlock door".
- The above error may just be a programming convention — in object-oriented programming, objects of a similar 'class' (type) derive their behavior from a single 'master' object that instructs the runtime how to handle any instance of a given class (ie, the 'open door' command works for all appearances of object type 'door'). Since the 'master' object contains a general visual description of any door the user may encounter (a generic 'this is a door' description), a special handling method must be programmed so that when the user interacts with the 'magical door' (ie, by typing 'look door') it will describe the magical door, rather than displaying the master 'door' object's generic description. 'Unlock door' (as opposed to 'with key') was chosen as a command for the magical door because the object 'magical door' is non-standard (ie, it's not considered part of class 'door') and the normal code won't work for non-standard objects.
- That's a wonderfully detailed explanation, but unfortunately KQ 2 was based on the AGI engine which was written in the early 80s and wasn't object-oriented. I'd have just assumed that it was general incompetence, except that this is Sierra so there's a fair chance it was malicious (no, I'm not bitter...).
- In the first Space Quest game you have to INSERT the keycard. No synonymous or rephrasing of that unusual and unnecessarily technical term will be accepted.
- This (along with other early Adventure Game tropes, especially their tendency to be Nintendo Hard) is played with in Dinosaur Comics. One strip sees T-Rex wondering what life would be like as a text-based adventure; Utahraptor points out that no one would ever be able to get out of bed until they found the right command:
get up
I don't see "up" here
- There is a part in Kingdom Of Loathing known as the Leaflet Quest that is a Shout Out to the Zork games. Since it's not too large, a lot of detail was put into putting smart-aleck responses to random commands not facilitated by the usual Infocom queue. For example:
- An incorrect "throw" command yields: "Your request to throw something, presumably at something else, made no sense to me. Perhaps you're trying to throw an item you don't have, or throw an item at a target that doesn't exist, or perhaps those objects simply aren't intended to interact in that way. For more information on the proper throwing of objects, send your name and address to "Throwing: A Guide For Beginners", Pueblo, Colorado, 80019."
- Trying to go up when you can't yields: "Up? Isn't this maze annoying enough for you with just the four directions? I suppose next you'll want to go north-by-north-east."
- In one storyline mission in Forum Warz you have to complete a text adventure game and tell the character who gave you the mission how you did it. In the mission ending conversation, you tell him you have to enter the command "push button", not "press button"... but while playing the text adventure itself, you can complete that section with the command "use button".
- Scott Adams' 1978 Adventureland required the player to enter the unintuitive UNLIGHT LAMP in order to prevent a lamp from using up its fuel, and would not recognise the verb EXTINGUISH (and certainly not the phrases PUT OUT or TURN OFF).
- There's a slight variation for anybody programming in Inform 7. Much of the syntax is intuitive, but one can't intuit what won't be intuitive. The result is less Guess The Verb and more "Guess the punctuation and sentence structure. Exactly."
- Well, making creating adventure games more like playing adventure games was one of the stated goals...though on the upside, it still arguably has a shallower learning curve than TADS.
- This is alleviated by the fact that, unlike games, Inform 7 is a programming language and most programming languages expect programmers to get syntax exactly right. Inform 7 also comes with documentation, and in spite of being complicated it can do fairly amazing things with its natural language commands.
- Personally, This Troper found everything made sense except for the "if", "otherwise", or "or" loops, which must have the exact sentence structure they want, follow none of the laws of English Grammar, and won't except increasingly or equally in place of [decreasingly]. Bonus points that those are the exception though.
- LifeLine on the PS 2 plays similarly to a text adventure, albeit one controlled by the player's voice than with a keyboard. Aside from the joys of iffy voice recognition causing much frustration and the genre standard Guess the Noun portions, there are several instances in which very specific phrases must be used to get the proper effect. This troper remembers one particularly difficult chip to acquire, merely for the fact that said chip was located behind a bag of some sort, and telling Rio to "check behind bag" didn't work for some reason.
- This troper's favorite moment was "look under sink" "Ew, no, you pervert". I'm, uh, still not sure what she thought I meant.
- Bureaucracy actually uses this as a game mechanic: you actually get penalized for inputting an incorrect command, by an increase in "blood pressure". If blood pressure becomes dangerously high, your character dies.
- At one point the cast of the webcomic Okashina Okashi gets trapped in an alternate dimension based on these games. It was a dark void where the girls had to shout out commands based on the old text adventure games. Bad parsing jokes abounded, shouting "WHY can't I get ye flask!" and crying.
- Peasant's Quest has many funny responses to incorrect (as well as correct) commands.
- This troper never got far in the game Sherwood Forest, for two reasons: a) She never had the manual, so she played the first level umpteen gazillion times trying to figure out how to do something without dying and eventually just stopped playing out of frustration, and b) just about inexplicably, she found that the commands "Northies" and "Southies" were legitimate, unlike "Easties" and "Westies". That little bizarrity fascinated her for hours on end, but did nothing to advance the game.
- Presumably, the game had a filter of only five characters.
- The Angry Video Game Nerd provides the following example of a flawed parser interface in his attempt to play The Count on the Vic-20:
"Okay, so I went north? What'd that do?"
>go east
OK. What shall I do now?
>go east again
Use 1 or 2 words only!
"Oh, okay, I'll give you two words!"
>fuck you
Don't know how to "FUCK" something.
- The game Asylum knew those words... use them once and you get a warning, use them again and it boots you from the game!
- To this day, LPMUD still can't parse look <object> without admonishing the player to "Look AT or IN something."
- Apparently even some Diku MUDS still hold to this convention. Even though examine <object> can be abbreviated to x <object>, look won't be accepted without a preposition.
- These are taken from Infocom and Legend games, that likewise do not accept "look <object>" or "use <object>" on grounds that they aren't meaningful sentences. Nitpicky, nitpicky.
- Command-line operating systems can be just as frustrating, especially to noobs, as parodied in Dave Barry in Cyberspace:
A:> HELLO BAD COMMAND OR FILENAME A:> HELP BAD COMMAND OR FILENAME A:> DO SOMETHING! BAD COMMAND OR FILENAME A:> RUN A PROGRAM, DAMMIT! BAD COMMAND OR FILENAME A:> F**K YOU BAD COMMAND OR FILENAME, A**HOLE
- Parodied in the screenshots of this City Of Heroes (April Fools Day) announcement.
- Satirized in Guess the Verb, an IF game containing several scenarios, each revolving around an uncommon verb.
- The Spellcasting 101 series was both an example of and aversion of this trope. On the one hand, you had to use specific verbs for many situations , but all of the verbs in the game (as well as your entire inventory) is displayed in a menu on the left side of the screen, allowing the entire game to be played with the mouse. (Picking up items required clicking on a picture field.)
- As pointed out by Syd Lexia, in the very first Sierra game, Mystery House, the game will accept PRESS BUTTON, but not PUSH BUTTON.
- Not a game, but the GDB debugger is commandline-based, and trying to remember a specific command can degenerate into this. Is it "show breakpoints"? "List breakpoints"? "View breakpoints"? (hint: it's "info breakpoints")
- Another non-game example: where do you find the preferences dialog in a given Windows application? File? Edit? View? Tools? Also, what is it called? Preferences? Options? Properties?
- Spoofed in Hugo's House Of Horrors, whose interface was similar to the early Kings Quest games. When attempting to open the bolt on a trapdoor, if you typed "open bolt" it would respond Please say "undo bolt".
- In many adventure games, the player was safe with the generic verb "use" applied to any object or situation. Some games, however, would not make that leap. Especially frustrating when you're given an item and you're not sure what it is and how you're supposed to use it, such as being given a crank in Laura Bow 1 which you're not sure what to do with. "How do you want to use the crank, Laura?" Aaaaarrrrgghhhh!!!
- Pretty much the entire point of Pick Up The Phone Booth And Aisle is trying different verbs to see what ending you get.
- Everquest tends to suffer from this trope. When talking to NP Cs you will find [certain words] in brackets, indicating they have more to say on the subject; you need to type those words into the chat log in order to continue down that line of conversation. [However, there is a catch]" "What, however there is a catch?" "Sometimes it's not quite as simple as just typing the words again, and you need to put it in the form of a question; most commonly by adding what to the words in brackets with blatant disregard for syntax."
- Actually, "what about the catch?" usually worked too, and was more syntactically correct most of the time. And usually something that actually did make sense was accepted, if you guessed the right version of it. [Sometimes, there was another catch.] In this variation of the catch, only the syntactically correct response worked (in this case, "What was the other catch?"). The game was annoyingly inconsistent.
- And sometimes, the developers made it obvious they were just being mean. For example trying to ask Bootstrutter about "jboots" earns a response something like "What nonsense is this about jboots? Speak to me of Journeyman's Boots!"
- Zork games suffered from this to some extent, but they did also have some rather amusing responses to bizarre lines the player typed:
It is dark in here. You may be eaten by a grue.
"Hello, grue."
It is a known fact that only schizophrenics talk to grues.
"Eat self"
Autocannibalism is not the answer.
"Jump"
Whee. Now you can go to the third grade!
- All things considered, the Zork parser is pretty forgiving. It allowed for articles and for multipart commands ("pick up the box and put it on the table") and had a pretty big vocabulary.
- SHRDLU was made to avert this trope. It probably helps that it only involves moving blocks around, rather than being an adventure game.
- Deathmaze 5000, for the TRS-80 and Apple II, contained (among other things) a pit in the first level containing an item you needed to complete the game. Once you stepped on it you were stuck in one place, and your only clue was "To everything there is a season." In case you didn't pick up on the clue, it would shout "To everything, TURN TURN TURN" after a few minutes. Typing in "Turn" did nothing. Physically turning by hitting the move keys did nothing. None of the items you got on that level were "turnable". The only way to know what to do was if you bought the Deathmaze 5000 Hint Sheet from the software company in the early 80's (and whoever you are, you don't have it).
- This troper had no choice but to use a cheat sheet, for one only ONE answer is acceptable for every 'picture' in the 'one-dimensional puzzle game' Z-rox and for another, some of the 'pictures' are completely unintuitive and don't come out right even when drawn. The 'man' and 'woman' pictures resulted in throwing in the towel and heading for a walkthrough site, as they were the bathroom symbols, which would imply either plural or 'male and female.' There is no way to tell that it only wanted the singular form. See also: The shapes, especially the square. Also, house, not home, not building, and worse yet does not look like ANY house in this troper's native country at ALL, ever built.
- On a related note not about a text based adventure game, one of those unskippable connect the dot things in Brain Age 2 has a caption "Kite". The picture is a person flying a kite shaped like a pentagon with an A-shaped array of strings. Not a very typical shape for a kite, now is it?
- A few other puzzle games on the website suffer from the bizarre physics version of this trope, as its easier and faster to abuse clipping errors than legitimately complete some of them, and in fact damn near impossible to receive highest honors the legit way. A handful of puzzle games and tower defenses suffer from this trope greatly in their own unique ways, no matter the genre or content.
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