You Can't Get Ye Flask

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"And there's no precious graphics to help, either."

"Dammit! So let's recap: there are four directions that I can move in and none of them work. What the fuck am I supposed to do?" —SydLexia, reviewing Mystery House

An annoying aspect of oldschool Text Parser-based Adventure Games, especially Interactive Fiction, was a limited ability to recognize command inputs. Additionally, the error messages would frequently lack clarification as to what you were supposed to do, often making you want to put your fist through the screen.

For example, let's say the command to look at a monster was "look monster". If you typed in "look at monster", the game might say something like "I don't know how to do that" or "I don't see an 'at' here". This got better over time, but never completely disappeared before command-line interfaces went out of style. Still, the text parser remained a staff favorite, as it allowed them to anticipate what the player might type in a given situation. Should the player's input be totally off-the-wall (such as 'pick nose'), they would create a suitably off-the-wall response.

The name of this trope is a reference to Homestar Runner. In the Strong Bad E-Mail video games, Strong Bad imagines himself as a character in a text-based adventure game, and imagines the problem above:

Strong Bad: And you'd be all like "get ye flask", and it'd say "You can't get ye flask", and you'd just have to sit there and imagine why on Earth you can't get ye flask! Because the game's certainly not going to tell you.

Interactive Fiction aficionados claim that this problem was rarely all that bad except in the earliest and worst examples of the genre, and they get really cheesed off that it's the one thing about the format that people still remember. Of course, the fact that it is the one thing they remember is telling... but then, the company most widely known for their Text Parser adventure games (Sierra, of King's Quest and Space Quest fame) is also the one with one of the worst parsers ever, that didn't improve much in the six years they used it before switching to a Point And Click mouse interface.

The modern Interactive Fiction hobbyist community includes this trope among its list of things to avoid. Called 'Guess the Verb' bugs, such errors are universally accepted as a sign of sloppy programming. It's now accepted as a standard that every object with any kind of use must have at least one 'archaic' or 'unusual' descriptor -- 'stopper' in reference to a bathtub plug, for example.

Another option is to give a list of all the possible words. One small game, used to demonstrate features of the C programming language, listed its 6 verbs and 12 nouns in the help screen. Chris Crawford's Storytron engine has you choose each variable part of the sentence from a drop-down list, and then adds or replaces the next part of the sentence as appropriate.

Examples of games with actual good parsers include The Hobbit, and anything by Infocom and Legend. Ironically, that includes some of the oldest adventure games; many of the newer ones tried to reinvent the parser wheel. The TADS (Text Adventure Development System) runtime is particularly good at such reinvention—not only can you actually get ye flask, TADS allows to choose between multiple ye flasks, and will ask which one thou actually wantest.

Sometimes called "Guess The Verb" or "Guess The Syntax". The "ye" comes from Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe. The equivalent frustration in non-parser Point and Click games is the Pixel Hunt. Contrast The Dev Team Thinks of Everything, if you are working with an exceptionally good text parser.

Examples of You Can't Get Ye Flask include:

Video game examples

Adventure Game

• Deathmaze 5000, for the TRS-80 and Apple II, contained (among other things) a pit in the first level containing an item you needed to complete the game. Once you stepped on it you were stuck in one place, and your only clue was "To everything there is a season." In case you didn't pick up on the clue, it would shout "To everything, TURN TURN TURN" after a few minutes. Typing in "Turn" did nothing. Physically turning by hitting the move keys did nothing. None of the items you got on that level were "turnable". The only way to know what to do was if you bought the Deathmaze 5000 Hint Sheet from the software company in the early 80's (and whoever you are, you don't have it).
  • The item in the pit was a calculator that displayed 317. If you cleaned it, it displayed 317.2. Typing "HELP" at this point gives the cryptic instructions "Invert & telephone." The player had to think of turning an old-fashioned square-digit calculator display of 317.2 upside-down, which would resemble "2LIE", and then look at the buttons or dial on a telephone to turn this into "2543". This leads to the actual solution, shown on the hint sheet: turn right 2 times, then left five times, then right four times, then left three times.
  • At one point in the game, you have to fart. Yeah. You just type "fart." There are no hints that this would do anything useful, naturally. (Although if you'd experimented with typing "fart" earlier, you'd have been rewarded with being propelled down the hallway on a jet of your own exhaust.)
• 8-bit adventure Heroes of Karn required you to extinguish some smouldering ashes with the water you were carrying. None of PUT WATER ON, DROP WATER ON, POUR WATER ON, USE WATER WITH, QUENCH, DOUSE, EXTINGUISH, COOL, DAMPEN, MOISTEN, SOAK, DRENCH, FLOOD, WET or IMMERSE ASHES would work. Figuring out you had to "WATER ASHES" was by far the hardest part of that game.
• Parodied in Hugo's House of Horrors:

->open bolt Please say "undo bolt".

• In many adventure games, the player was safe with the generic verb "Use Item" applied to any object or situation. Some games, however, would not make that leap. Especially frustrating when you're given an item and you're not sure what it is and how you're supposed to use it, such as being given a crank in Laura Bow 1 which you're not sure what to do with. "How do you want to use the crank, Laura?" Aaaaarrrrgghhhh!!!
• As pointed out by Syd Lexia, in the very first Sierra game, Mystery House, the game will accept PRESS BUTTON, but not PUSH BUTTON.
• Peasant's Quest has many funny responses to incorrect (as well as correct) commands.
• Pretty much the entire point of Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle is trying different verbs to see what ending you get.
• Sierra, creator of King's Quest and Space Quest, never got beyond "<verb> <noun>" phrases in almost a decade of parser design. Their most infamous example, however, is the end of Leisure Suit Larry 2, where the player has to make a bomb using an airsick bag as the wick. The problem is that "bag" is not considered a synonym for "airsick bag" - despite there not being a different bag in a five-mile radius. As a result, many walkthroughs in magazines and on the internet falsely claim that the input here has to be a full sentence (including the word "the" several times).
  • This one isn't actually Al Lowe's (creator/programmer) fault. There was an unrelated bug that needed fixing, so Lowe, pressed for time, had someone else fix it. He assured him everything was fine, and the code seemed to check out. The only problem? The programmer changed "bag" from a noun to a verb. Lowe never noticed, as the policy for testing was to use the longest sentence possible, which bypassed the error. More info can be found on Lowe's site.
  • In King's Quest, most locked doors can be unlocked by a variety of phrases, such as "open door with key", "put key in key hole", "use key to open door", etc. Except for the magical door in King's Quest II, which only accepted "unlock door".
  • As part of its copy protection, King's Quest III included several spells the player needed to cast. Rather than an easily-copied phrase, each spell consisted of several steps requiring advance preparation. Unfortunately, several of those steps required a specific verb or the entire process would fail.
  • In the first Space Quest game you have to INSERT the keycard. No synonymous or rephrasing of that unusual and unnecessarily technical term will be accepted.
  • Parodied in Quest for Glory 2 with the lamp, where if you type "put down lamp" your character starts insulting the lamp. However, he does still do the same thing he would have done if you'd typed "use lamp".
  • Quest for Glory I allowed one to type "Pick Nose" (mentioned in the description), which would allow a thief to train his lock picking skills (and get a message saying "Success! Your nose is now opened!). Having too low a skill would cause one to jam the lockpick up one's nose into their brain and die. The really funny bit is that later games (and remakes) kept this Easter Egg (sans the dying part) even when the series abandoned the text parser. The game would then play the "door unlocking" sound, and simply display "success", meaning that players who had not played the original and clicked on themselves with the lockpicks by accident were rather confused as to what just happened.
• Among the many frustrating puzzles in Starship Titanic is obtaining one of Titania's (the ship's AI) broken eyes. It's one of four similar-looking globes (the others are lightbulbs). You can't just reach out and grab it, even though you can poke it and the game will tell you what it is. You have to summon the Bellbot, hold your cursor over the correct one and type: "Get the broken eye". "Get the eye", "Hand me the eye", "Give me Titania's eye", or "Give the eye to me" will not work. Worse, "Get the broken bulb" also works.
• On a game based on the Spanish comic books "Zipi y Zape", apparently you had to drop a nail so that your father sits on it and wounds himself with it and drops a patch. The thing is, people tried lots of variations of "drop nail" or "put nail near father" without any progress. It took SEVENTEEN years until someone with programming knowledge hacked the game files and found out that the exact code had to be "throw nail under tree". As if nails had to be thrown, or anything could be put under trees. Let's all play nail throw! You can find the whole thing explained, if you can read Spanish, in here..
• While Onna no Ko to Misshitsu ni Itara ○○shichau Kamoshirenai recognizes a very diverse array of irrelevant words that serve no purpose but to sexually harass the heroines the incorporeal protagonist is helping, all with unique responses per level (sometimes even having different responses within that level) , several progression critical entries are oddly specific. For example to tell the heroine to grab an American Football, one must type ラグビーボール (Rugby Ball), even though no other balls are present in this level, the game recognizes ball on its own in every other level, and the game is fully capable of handling synonyms. Likewise setting a clock to 9 must use "9じ" (9 o clock), even though number only prompts are widely used for number locks.

Interactive Fiction

• Scott Adams' 1978 Adventureland required the player to enter the unintuitive UNLIGHT LAMP in order to prevent a lamp from using up its fuel, and would not recognise the verb EXTINGUISH (and certainly not the phrases PUT OUT or TURN OFF).
• The Angry Video Game Nerd provides the following example of a flawed parser interface in his attempt to play The Count on the Vic-20:

"Okay, so I went north? What'd that do?" >go east OK. What shall I do now? >go east again Use 1 or 2 words only! "Oh, okay, I'll give you two words!" >fuck you Don't know how to "FUCK" something.

• • The game Asylum knew those words... use them once and you get a warning, use them again and it boots you from the game!
    • And this was after he sooner found a way to eat his pillow than he did find a way out of the room he was in.
• Bureaucracy uses this as a game mechanic: you get penalized for inputting an incorrect command, by an increase in "blood pressure". If blood pressure becomes dangerously high, your character dies.
• The otherwise excellent Curses by Graham Nelson had a section where you had to cram a voice-operated robot mouse into a mouse hole and then give it instructions - only the standard commanding language explained in the instructions ("mouse, go north") didn't work. Trying every verb on every object randomly might bring you to the correct solution: you have to address the hole, not the mouse ("hole, go north"). It also freaked out completely if you just gave it the following simple command:

>dance (with yourself) Yourself does not wish to dance with you.

• The Fahrenheit 451 text adventure was a nasty example. You could be killed for something as simple as crossing the street at the wrong times of day, there were several times you had to fight off a Hound or Fireman...and the result was based on if the computer felt charitable, and you advanced the plot contact members of the Underground using literary quotations as pass-phrases. However, the parser system was pretty craptastic, and if you so much as left out a punctuation mark, then you lost your chance to use the phrase, and had to leave the building and come back to try again. Worse, it had plenty of Guess the Verb moments as "Talk to man" worked sometimes, while others you had to use "Ask Man" with no indication as to what. Top it all off with a Downer Ending with a side order of Fridge Logic if you managed to put up with the game's quirks long enough to reach a conclusion.
• Satirized in Guess the Verb, an IF game containing several scenarios, each revolving around an uncommon verb.
• In the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure, you're actually expected to input an incorrect command at one point, which has an effect later in the game.
  • If you never input a senseless command, the game will eventually take a certain correct command (I forget what it is, but it's one you need to complete the game) and use that as the deadly insult. You get kudos for timing it right and saying the actual quote ("I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle").
  • One PC magazine described this kind of thing as "toying with various ways of saying PUT BABEL FISH UP ZAPHOD'S JACKSIE".
  • Also in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure, there is a cup of "tea". If you type GET TEA you are told that you can't do that. After a tremendous amount of frustration, you'll finally figure out to type GET CUP. That's, of course, because it's not tea. As a running joke in the series, it is "a substance almost, but not quite, totally unlike tea". You also start the game with "no tea" listed in your inventory.
• The Spellcasting 101 series was both an example of and aversion of this trope. On the one hand, you had to use specific verbs for many situations , but all of the verbs in the game (as well as your entire inventory) is displayed in a menu on the left side of the screen, allowing the entire game to be played with the mouse. (Picking up items required clicking on a picture field.)
• Infocom's SHOGUN, based on the novel by James Clavell, involves the protagonist in trying to communicate with the Japanese by searching for a common language. However, one can not actually input lines in any of the foreign languages he knows... and trying to type anything like "Say 'where am I' in Spanish" crashed the parser.
• Zork games suffered from this to some extent, but they did also have some rather amusing responses to bizarre lines the player typed:

It is dark in here. You may be eaten by a grue. "Hello, grue." It is a known fact that only schizophrenics talk to grues.

"Eat self" Autocannibalism is not the answer.

"Eat grue" I doubt the grue lurking in the dark would agree with you.

"Jump" Very good. Now you can go to the second grade.

• • All things considered, the Zork parser is pretty forgiving. It allowed for articles and for multipart commands ("pick up the box and put it on the table") and had a pretty big vocabulary.

• The foulest, evilest, most likely-to-drive-the-player-mad game was by far Murder in the Museum found on the Big Blue Disk. It deliberately invoked this trope and required players to guess the NOUNS. What was described as "a leg bone" could only be obtained by typing "Get FEMUR", a "small gun" was "DERRINGER" and on, and on. There were no hints as to what you were actually supposed to call an object to pick it up, The text parser was more pedantic than sierra's, and if you weren't fast with the pencil the game would actually delete the text of the piece of dissolving spy paper from the screen, thereby causing you to lose a critical and random code which would make the game unwinnable. Not that it was possible to figure out what was in the space probe and thereby even progress with the game.
• The original 'ADVENT', also known as Colossal Cave, had something that looked like a snappy comeback, but was actually a question to answer:

> kill dragon What? With your bare hands?

• • To kill the dragon, you actually have to answer that question with "yes".

Congratulations, you have killed the dragon with your bare hands! (Unbelievable, isn't it?)

• The Edutainment Game Voices of Spoon River several times explicitly tells the player to "place" something on something else... but the verb "place" isn't implemented. It's not too hard to figure out that you have to "put" instead, but it's still weird.
• Ad Verbum makes an art of this—for instance, one room is described entirely in words beginning with S, and will only accept commands beginning with S (of note: the only exit is to the north). On the plus side, the parser's willing to accept a large number of words that wouldn't appear in a normal game.
• "The Six Foot Tall Man Eating Chicken" has a pretty big one. There is a cork. There is a bucket with a hole in it. Putting the two together? Plug doesn't work. Use doesn't work... Solution is PUT. Which is never mentioned
• The Very Big Cave Adventure responds to any use of "take" or "put" with "Try 'get' or 'drop'". Which is fine, until you want to stop carrying the bomb...
  • One of its stock responses when it can't parse a command is "Sorry, this thick computer doesn't understand that."

MMORPGs

• Parodied in the screenshots of this City of Heroes (April Fools' Day) announcement.
• EverQuest tends to suffer from this trope. When talking to NPCs you will find [certain words] in brackets, indicating they have more to say on the subject; you need to type those words into the chat log in order to continue down that line of conversation. [However, there is a catch]" "What, however there is a catch?" "Sometimes it's not quite as simple as just typing the words again, and you need to put it in the form of a question; most commonly by adding what to the words in brackets with blatant disregard for syntax." "What about the catch?" usually worked too, and was more syntactically correct most of the time. And usually something that actually did make sense was accepted, if you guessed the right version of it. [Sometimes, there was another catch.] In this variation of the catch, only the syntactically correct response worked (in this case, "What was the other catch?"). The game was annoyingly inconsistent.
  • And sometimes, the developers made it obvious they were just being mean. For example trying to ask Bootstrutter about "jboots" earns a response something like "What nonsense is this about jboots? Speak to me of Journeyman's Boots!"
  • Somewhat related to this trope: you needed to activate the chat text field to talk to NPCs, otherwise, pressing letters on the keyboard would result in activating hotkeys for game commands. Standard fare, sure, but then you take into account that the default key for "Attack" was 'a' and it was possible to attack friendly NPCs. Forgetting to press Enter before typing could be lethal as you'd get three letters into "What" before the NPC flattened you for what seemed like no reason.
• In one storyline mission in Forum Warz you have to complete a text adventure game and tell the character who gave you the mission how you did it. In the mission ending conversation, you tell him you have to enter the command "push button", not "press button"... but while playing the text adventure itself, you can complete that section with the command "use button".
• There is a part in Kingdom of Loathing known as the Leaflet Quest that is a Shout-Out to the Zork games. Since it's not too large, a lot of detail was put into putting smart-aleck responses to random commands not facilitated by the usual Infocom queue. For example:
  • An incorrect "throw" command yields: "Your request to throw something, presumably at something else, made no sense to me. Perhaps you're trying to throw an item you don't have, or throw an item at a target that doesn't exist, or perhaps those objects simply aren't intended to interact in that way. For more information on the proper throwing of objects, send your name and address to "Throwing: A Guide For Beginners", Pueblo, Colorado, 80019."
  • Trying to go up when you can't yields: "Up? Isn't this maze annoying enough for you with just the four directions? I suppose next you'll want to go north-by-north-east."
  • It does have some of its own Ye Flask moments, though. Typing "enter house" makes you go inside the house, but "leave house" or "exit house" doesn't work; you have to "(go) west" to get back outside. This can be especially confusing for text-quest newbies, because the house is right next to the starting point, so they may get stuck inside the house before figuring out that "go [direction]" commands exist.
• To this day, LPMUD still can't parse look <object> without admonishing the player to "Look AT or IN something."
  • Apparently even some Diku MUDS still hold to this convention. Even though examine <object> can be abbreviated to x <object>, look won't be accepted without a preposition.
    • IIRC, the argument to "look" is expected to be a direction in which it is possible to move from the current location ("look n" means "show me the description of the room I'd be in if I were to go north"), while "look at" and "look in" are actually treated as single verbs (and synonyms for "examine") It's a lot more complicated to make a verb sometimes a synonym for another verb and sometimes not a synonym for another verb than a non-programmer might think. It's theoretically possible to fix, but apparently no one with the requisite skill has ever been bothered enough by it to actually do so, probably because fixing a minor parser flaw that's only a problem for n00bs anyway is a lot less "sexy" than adding a flashy new feature.
  • Infocom and Legend games likewise do not accept "look <object>" or "use <object>" on grounds that they aren't meaningful sentences. Nitpicky, nitpicky.
    • Again, probably less a case of technical pedantry and more a case of programming difficulty ("use" could, theoretically, be a synonym for almost every other verb in the game; making it such would mean there's little point in even bothering with verbs at all).

Survival Horror

• LifeLine on the PlayStation 2 plays similarly to a text adventure, albeit one controlled by the player's voice than with a keyboard. Aside from the joys of iffy voice recognition causing much frustration and the genre standard Guess the Noun portions, there are several instances in which very specific phrases must be used to get the proper effect. One chip is particularly difficult to acquire, merely for the fact that said chip was located behind a bag of some sort, and telling Rio to "check behind bag" didn't work for some reason.

Non-video game examples

Film

• Phelous points out that the website in FeardotCom seems to run on this sort of interface.

Literature

• In the novel God Game by Andrew Greeley, the natural language parser for the game interface that the narrator uses to do anything more than speak directly to the characters in the game is amazingly sophisticated for 1986 -- but is still prone to this trope at the most frustrating moments. (And sometimes it seems to do it just to annoy the narrator.)

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner: In addition to the Trope Namer example, this became a running joke, appearing in the Homestar Runner online game (as the dungeon caves in on you), and appearing as a point-garnering command in Thy Dungeonman 2. In Thy Dungeonman 3, getting ye flask becomes the object of the game. And Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People features the "ye flask" again, and an extended rant about people insensitively leaving "ye flasks" out without letting people get them.

Web Comics

• This (along with other early Adventure Game tropes, especially their tendency to be Nintendo Hard) is played with in Dinosaur Comics. One strip sees T-Rex wondering what life would be like as a text-based adventure; Utahraptor points out that no one would ever be able to get out of bed until they found the right command:

>get up I don't see "up" here

• At one point the cast of the webcomic Okashina Okashi gets trapped in an alternate dimension based on these games. It was a dark void where the girls had to shout out commands based on the old text adventure games. Bad parsing jokes abounded, shouting "WHY can't I get ye flask!" and crying.
• Taken Up to Eleven with Problem Sleuth.
  • What pumpkin?
  • However, you can get ye flask. In a published edition, Word of God says that he didn't know the reference at the time.
• This page of The Noob.

Web Original

• Cracked.com has "Revisiting Old School Text Adventures as a Jaded Modern Gamer." It has the AI reacting with shocked horror to the insane player's sadistic commands, and eventually feeds him to a swarm of Naughty Tentacles monsters out of spite.
• SCP Foundation: SCP-603-44 is an Interactive Fiction game in which almost all commands players have tried to input have resulted in messages saying that there is no such object here or that "you cannot [do X]."

Real Life

• There's a slight variation for anybody programming in Inform 7. Much of the syntax is intuitive, but one can't intuit what won't be intuitive. The result is less Guess the Verb and more "Guess the punctuation and sentence structure. Exactly."
  • Well, making creating adventure games more like playing adventure games was one of the stated goals...though on the upside, it still arguably has a shallower learning curve than TADS.
  • This is alleviated by the fact that, unlike games, Inform 7 is a programming language and most programming languages expect programmers to get syntax exactly right. Inform 7 also comes with documentation, and in spite of being complicated it can do fairly amazing things with its natural language commands.
• SHRDLU was made to avert this trope. It probably helps that it only involves moving blocks around, rather than being an adventure game.