Is it against the player's expectation to have examine do more senses than just sight?

Question

EXAMINE THING and LOOK AT THING are conventionally the same command, and they conventionally give you the description of the thing.

What I’m wondering is whether descriptions should focus solely on sight, or if descriptions ought to include noises and possibly odor as well (provided it isn’t an odor you would have to sniff up close to observe, perhaps). It feels odd to me to have to use up two turns to X THING and then LISTEN TO THING when if you were really there you’d experience both at once, but at the same time I’m sure some players would find it odd to see non-sight information after examining, and if it is all bundled into one command what is the point of the others?

One of the reasons I’m asking this is because I’m experimenting with alternate primary senses as well. If you were, say, a dog whose primary sense is smell but who still sees, it would seem unusual to have to use up two turns to SMELL THING and then LOOK AT THING to get all the info, even if both are timeless. It feels to me that EXAMINE THING would best fuse both together, but then you have to consider what SMELL THING and LOOK AT THING do.

What do you feel you would want as a player, and why? What would you think naturally and what would you require ABOUT text guidance to understand?

Answer 1

EXAMINE/LOOK AT very often gives you a lot more information than simply what the player character sees. A lot of the time it adds the character's memories: "This is the shirt you wore to Jessica's recital a year ago, to the disastrous Sidewalk Chalk Tournament two years ago, to the department picnic in whichever year it was you went to the department picnic. It's brown." Or, especially when the object of the verb is involved in a puzzle, its "description" includes some guesswork by the player character: "From what you can tell, when the generator was in operation, it supplied power to the nearby alarm system."

People add information from other senses in descriptions all the time, and without causing any consternation—I've yet to hear a player complain about a LOOK AT response that mentioned a smell. On the other hand, if you do mention a smell, chances are good that the player will try to SMELL the object next, and there'll definitely be some consternation if that doesn't get a response.

But if you're writing about a dog (or similarly-blessed being), I think it's a great idea to merge SMELL with EXAMINE. It makes real-life sense: A dog probably smells everything passively all the time, without any more effort than we use when we look at something. And when players notice olfactory sense-data in every EXAMINE response, and they notice that SMELL returns the exact same responses, they'll catch on very quickly that you're saving them the work of typing both commands. Plus it would be immersive!

Answer 2

Well, Ryan's answer said a lot, but I'd add I'd be disappointed if I wrote a good sized game where it didn't. Even "it looks rough" or "you hear a humming as you get close."

 

Smell seems to be the best of these as it can't be purveyed electronically (yet). Neither can taste, but it's a lot tougher to describe and a simple "examine" doesn't translate well to tasting. However, I agree that rerouting smell/hear/feel to examine or vice versa is very effective and helpful to the player.