Adventure Games

I was talking to Dan about this a couple of weeks ago, and I thought I’d share some thoughts about the genre.

From a pure game design standpoint, Adventure Games are not particularly interesting.  You have a game space, which can be seen as a very rigid tree, or occasionally a graph.  The job of the player is to manually perform a search on this tree until they reach a particular leaf node.

The method of node traversal takes different forms, but usually includes things like finding, combining, and using items, speaking to characters, moving to various rooms, and solving pre-constructed puzzles.  In 2009, there is nothing ludologically complex about this, for the most part it has been done.  We have learned certain lessons about the way in which you should or should not go about constructing your game tree (for example, having extremely deep branches that ultimately are dead-ends are frowned upon, as is progressing down a branch that is otherwise identical to the correct branch, but is missing some key piece, such as picking up an item, that does not become appearant until it is far too late, and the game prevents you from retracing your steps).  But assuming you follow these guidelines, making an adventure game does not involve doing anything revolutionary, from a game design standpoint.

Which isn’t to say they aren’t interesting or that people shouldn’t make them.  From a narrative standpoint, adventure games can be incredibly rich, and there are people (myself included) who greatly enjoy the excerise of traversing the trees you have made for us.  In fact, in the last few years, it is precisely because these games are so well understood and strictly defined that tools like AGS have been made available, providing one of the most direct routes for hobbiest game designers to implement their visions.  I’m a big fan of the idea that if anyone has the ability to write a book (as it stands today), then there will be a large pile of shovelware books, but also an increase in the amount of good material available for me to consume.  I feel the same way about games - although we are not at a point where making games is as straightforward as writing a book - Adventure Games are one of the best places to start finding them.

A final observation.  One of the reasons that the adventure game genre has been so threadbare in the last 10 years is a lack of market for them - they became a niche.  With the ongoing explosion of the market as a whole - especially in the realm of casual games, people who were ‘non-gamers’ 10 years ago and are ‘casual gamers’ now are beginning to discover this niche, to the point where casual portals like Big Fish Games are offering titles such as Syberia 2 - a very hardcore traditional point and click game - to their members.  That says to me that you may see this genre, commercially stagnant, have a revival in the coming years (to a point, you are already seeing this via Telltale Games, et al. on the Wii).

Some interesting recent or upcoming releases in this genre:

• The Chzo Mythos
• A Tale of Two Kingdoms
• AGD Interactive remakes of King’s Quest 1 and Quest for Glory 2
• The Whispered World
• Three Cards to Midnight, from the makers of the Tex Murphy series (Looking at a March 2009 or later release at this point)