Guess-the-verb

"Guess-the-verb" is the name of a particular fault in game design where although the player has correctly guessed what he is meant to do, the game's parser does not understand unless he uses a particular and possibly non-obvious way to phrase the command. For example, if there is a crate to be opened with a crowbar and the only way to open it is to "pry crate with crowbar", other actions like "open crate with crowbar" give a misleading response.

Leonard Richardson entered a humorous game into the 2000 IF Competition titled "Guess the Verb!", in which the phrase is used as the instruction in a surreal carnival game.