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IMO that's mostly historical due to the input devices available. Terminal games were played with a keyboard, so feature creep resulted in every damn key on key
by bhaak 7y ago
IMO that's mostly historical due to the input devices available.
Terminal games were played with a keyboard, so feature creep resulted in every damn key on keyboard being used.
Most games slowly evolved away from that when joysticks and mouses became the dominant input devices (although I remember flight simulators still using most of the keyboard) but there were lots of games were people were still using the keyboard because it was faster (like FPS games).
Nowadays, with touch screens, using a keyboard is no sensible option and you naturally land a "first select the object then what you want to do with it".
But with roguelikes, you still often have a Verb-Object interface with keyboard shortcuts unless you play roguelikes that were designed from the start with a mobile interface in mind.
- shadowgovt 7y agoIIRC, this was one of the breakthroughs of the XEROX PARC virtual desktop research: the realization of how universal the pattern "select context, then use menus or keyboard accelerators to select verbs applicable to that context" could be.
- maire 7y agoSurprisingly the Xerox Star GUI was verb-noun and the Apple Mac of the same era was noun-verb. There were (of course) exceptions. I started with verb-noun on the Star then migrated over to the noun-verb on the mac. Noun-verb seemed immediately better. I wonder if XEROX PARC virtual desktop research came before or after the Star?
- tatersolid 7y ago> the Apple Mac of the same era was noun-verb As I recall the standard top-level menus were “File, Edit, Options, Help”