With the E3 conference this week, I’ve been reading about all the announcements and game impressions. The upcoming game I find the most interesting is Scribblenauts, and it’s not even close.
The premise is pretty simple: each level gives you an objective, and you can write anything to conjure it to help you through. And when they say anything, they apparently mean it:
This guy goes a little nuts with his description, but still:
I played it briefly on the show floor. It really was pretty amazing. Here’s the sequence of words I typed:
PICKAXE – I picked it up and dug a hole.
DOG – A dog appeared and wandered around outside the hole.
HAM – As soon as it hit the ground the dog ate it.
CAT – The dog chased the cat and killed it.
GIANT – He was angry! He killed the dog and chased me until I deleted him.
I played one level where my goal was to get from one side of an island to another. My way was blocked by a high rock wall. I solved it by typing SCUBA, putting on the scuba gear, and swimming through an underwater tunnel to the other side.
The guy doing the demo said there were tens of thousands of objects in the game’s database.
I don’t get it. Is it a sandbox game or something?
From what I understand, the level structure is similar to Lemmings or something like that. There are hundreds of small, self-contained challenges where you have to figure out how to reach a star, or get past a pool with a shark in it, etc. But yes, it is a sandbox game in the sense that most of the point is coming up with weird combinations of items to accomplish the goal.
Also I believe there are different side challenges as well, like “solve this level with conjuring only 2 items” or “solve this level using fire” etc.
I think what gets me interested is that this seems almost like a Monkey Island puzzle toolkit, or something like that. In all those adventure games, there are these pre-defined sequences like “trade the gold piece for a fishing pole, use the pole to poke a cat out of a tree, so it runs past a lady who’ll drop her keys, so you can get in her house to find a prize”. But here they’re just simulating everything, so you can come up with your own interactions like this.
It’s a puzzle game. I believe the challenge comes in that you’re not allowed to reuse words, so you have to come up with more and more creative ways to solve various situations.
That sounds a lot like the “guess the verb” problems of early adventure games. Only now it’s become “guess the noun”.
I’m gonna go ahead and guess “I-win button” isn’t in the database then?
I heard on a podcast that one clever-dick journalist wrote in “keyboard cat.”
According to him, even keyboard cat is summonable in the game.
So… is that a “win” or “lose” button.
That would be the Win Button to Fun, I believe.
Seriously - this is shaping up to be one of the first games to actually let you stretch your mind and play it without having the normal, assumed limits-for-videogames attached to it. It deserves a little more than sardonic credit.
One way to keep “guess the noun” at bay would be to allow for dictionary updates online. And allow user created objects. Sure, some people would just create some uber-object that can get you through the entire game, but the creation itself would just be the challenge, then.
This game sounds amazing.
I think we could have more fun trying to come up with words that are not likely to be used by the game reference database, or that are in the database but probably not legitimately functional. I’ll start!
Dirigible.
Lawyer.
Clone.
Spork.
How about “Deus ex Machina” (or sonic screwdriver - same thing 
)
unlikely items:
autogyro
orrery
voulge (pole arm)
Brian
I’m actually pretty sure they have “lawyer”.
Concerning unlikely terms: I just read this article (joystiq.com) today. The game knew the following terms:
lutefisk, air, internet, tattoo, molecule, narwhal, stanchion, but failed on plumbob. A developer who was watching the test sent a message and said that plumbob would be in the final product.