Look! Look! It’s a three headed monkey!

I’m back again! You’re going to have to bear with me as I’m going to be doing my utmost to write every day to get back into the habit.

Preamble done, let’s get on with the main event. I talked yesterday about seeing the world through Alistair’s eyes. At the moment I’ve a strong suspicion he’s convinced that the world is one large point and click adventure. Don’t believe me? Let me go through the evidence.

• He’s constantly looking around, it’s like he’s moving the cursor over everything he sees to assess if it’s clickable or can be picked up
• He’s always crawling at a fast pace from room to room as if he’s missing something elsewhere, or maybe like he misclicked on the location and has to keep returning to where he’s meant to be
• Everything he picks up must be checked if it can either be combined with another object or will interact with it in some way.
  • Notable examples:
    • Putting things inside things in case they interact
    • Pulling things off shelves in the hope it triggers a secret doorway or event
    • In Yo Sushi on Mother’s day, he ran the baby chopsticks (they’re a thing!) over every item he could reach and looked annoyed when they didn’t combine and no events were triggered
    • My teeth. Quite often he’ll grab my teeth in the hope they can be pulled out of my skull and used elsewhere. As much as I keep trying to persuade him that my teeth aren’t the wind up kind, he still wants to pocket them and try to use them later on
    • Trying to take the contents of his toy chest with him. The stacky cups might interact with the cat if he does it in the kitchen

It goes on, I watch with interest as so far only the Fisher Price piggy bank actually yields results and triggers an event. Sometimes I wonder if it’s more like twitch plays pokemon, maybe I should get Bean a foam Helix Fossil and see if he consults it from time to time in cases of extreme doubt and indecision.

All in all the evidence is mounting up that Alistair’s interface to the world consists of a floating cursor, a bunch of verbs at the bottom of the screen and a small inventory window. So far the action words seem to be ‘TAKE’ and ‘USE’ with the occasional qualifier of ‘ON’. Oh, and of course there’s ‘DRIBBLE’. ‘DRIBBLE ON DAD’ seems to be a favourite, closely followed by ‘SHOUT AT/FOR FOOD’. Oh yes, he’s discovered food my be ingested to recover health, though ingesting the food using the current interface is tricky.

I’m not sure what the outcome of the Bean point and click experience is. I wonder if he’s currently still doing the tutorial level. All I know is that he can be kept entertained for a while with a collection of random objects, last night saw him checking if inserting his birthday cards into the grate of the old fire (blocked up, don’t worry) would yield treasure (it didn’t). It did keep Mrs.Crater and I smiling and gave us the rare opportunity to sit at the dining room table and actually have a meal together (the first time in ages!).

All of this said for combining objects, when Leah presented Bean with a freshly made Temple to Cthulhu made out of Lego Quattro, he immediately set about dismantling it into its component pieces. Is he an investigator seeking to destroy Cthulhu and its minions, or is it simply that the Temple to Cthulhu registered as inert on his display and needed to be broken down? I’m never going to know, by the time Bean is talking he’ll have forgotten all of this and moved onto a FPD (first person dribbler) engine.

Whatever the lack of results might do to the rest of us, it doesn’t deter Bean. If anything he seems more motivated to try new things out, and of course if myself or Mrs.Crater say ‘No’ when he goes near something, then that’s *bound* to do something interesting, right?

All I know is that it’s great watching him play, there’s a sense of purpose there and I can see he’s obviously trying things to make sense of the world. All that said, when I find that he’s trying to combine honey, a lump of cat fur, two brooms and one of my long coats into an outfit to get into somewhere interesting, I’ll know that I was right and there’s a method in the madness!

Mirrored from Never a dull moment. Please leave comments there thank you!