Adventure game developers have tried a bunch of ways of making it easy to control characters in 3d environments.  Myst stuck with the basic point and click.  Grim Fandango used the numpad on the keyboard.  Gabriel Knight 3 used both the mouse and keyboard:  the mouse moved the player, and the keyboard controlled the camera.

With all of these…it’s always felt a little bit…restrictive.

A few weeks ago, Ben Croshaw reviewed the new Monkey Island game.  Here’s the review.  Pay particular attention to 1:50 when he talks about the mouse controlling a character in a 3d environment.

NSFW (language):

That’s exactly right.  He’s hit the nail on the head.  It’s like trying to teach your dog something through a glass window.

The 2D interface of a mouse or keyboard makes actions in a 3d world awkward.

Multi-touch improves on 2d interfaces by giving us more bandwidth (multiple fingers = multiple cursors).  If this is the next step in desktop computing:

What does that mean for 3d adventure games?  How can 3d adventure games leverage multi-touch?

For that matter, how can 2d adventure games leverage multi-touch?  Think of all of the puzzles…