“Pause please”

A while ago I played the freeware game “Façade”, it's pretty much about you being the friend of a married couple and invited over but they're having problems in their relationship.

You can either stand back and watch as the situation between them develops but also jack in yourself and actually write things to say.

As far as I have seen the text parser of the game is actually pretty good and can recognize a lot of things you type, though I was kinda limited in my abilities due to, well, making a load of typos all the time :-p.

The basic idea of being able to actually type in what you want to say in real time on the spot and having the game recognize what you mean in context is great.

However from reading over that sentence you might have recognized the problem there. Typing – on the spot – real time, those things don't go together well and that is the “critical flaw” there, you can't pause and type in your sentence.

Now I see where the developers went, you can't pause a situation in reality to think about what to say. However there is a disconnect between reality and gaming, your way of input.

In reality you can instantly say whats going through your head, in game you are at best still limited to a keyboard (unless it has actual speech recognition but this is not present in this example) which is much slower and you have to watch out for typos that could make your sentence unrecognizable.

So a way around this would have been to allow the player to pause the game to input text which, while allowing for some exploiting, would also allow for the game to take a more dynamic flow of the situation as you simply don't need larger stretches between sentences anymore.

However this is not “point out the flaw of one game”, I want to tie this a bit into gaming in general.

You see one of my favorite topics is “realism in gaming” which, sadly, has a VERY bad reputation to it, mainly, in my opinion at least, due to “critical flaws”.

Just a few days ago I was talking to a friend about how inventory management in open world sandbox RPGs could be handled and he mentioned “it should be all in real time”. However, even with generally being more on the realism side, I had to reject that for a few reasons.

Now while it might sound more logical that time passes as you rummage through your backpack it would be rather annoying to do so, so my thought on it was that time is frozen as you rummage but then taking to use an item from the inventory takes time depending on how much stuff you have to dig through (I.e. how full your inventory is). Again the idea is simply the disconnect between real input and game input, if you have to scroll through a long list of items just to find yours it puts you into a disadvantage you wouldn't have in reality so a break from it in game is acceptable.

Personally I see the inventory screen more as your characters “thought process” of what to take rather than him actually digging around in it.

However I do realize there would be other ways to handle this.

For example the way it's done in later ultima games (I didn't play them myself but seen “The Spoony Ones” reviews) where inventory management is done in real time and all inventories have graphical representation of actually being crates and bags you carry with you.

This sure is one way it could be handled but again has limitations such as very small items being hard to click on with even a mouse, let alone a controller and that your inventory essentially turns 2D that way ignoring the hight of a container.

In some instances you might be tempted to do something in real time, but be aware of the disconnect between real world input and gaming input, putting a player by limited dexterity or possibility of in disadvantage may result in your attempt ending negatively.