Adventure games have enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. Online Flash portals have given the genre a new lease on life. Adventures like The Great Living Room Escape and The Scene of the Crime top the charts of web game sites like ArmorGames.com. What once looked like a dead genre is beginning to attract new players.
A friend sent me a link to Machinarium the other day, a winsome little adventure that won the Excellence in Visual Art award at the 2009 Independent Games Festival. I enjoyed it. I even thought about buying the full version. But playing the demo reminded me of why the adventure genre died in the first place, way back in the late 1990s.
The Decline and Fall of the Adventure
First let’s be clear about what an adventure game is. An adventure is all about story. The player is thrust into a dramatic situation full of mysteries, puzzles, and clues. You don’t do a lot of fighting in adventure games. The gameplay is centered on moving through the environment, solving puzzles, and occasionally talking to in-game characters.
In a search-and-click adventure like the classics Monkey Island and Myst or the upstart Machinarium, the player navigates the world by clicking on the screen. A lush image fills the view but only certain hotspots hold the clues. The player’s job is to find the important details, click things, drag things, and use things together to piece together a solution that allows the story to proceed.
Text adventures—also known as interactive fiction (IF)—are another variant of the genre. First made successful by the legendary Infocom Corp., text adventures flourished throughout the 80s but plummeted in popularity with the rise of high-quality graphics. In IF the world is unveiled to the player through pure, simple language. There are no graphics at all. The player controls the game by typing commands into a prompt—phrases like, “Go west,” “Pick up the sword,” and “Ask Jeeves about the bloodstain.”
The power of mere words over the human imagination is part of what makes IF an intriguing and enduring form. Today it has a small but intensely devoted following, with thousands of players, new adventures arriving daily, and even its own Oscar-style award system.
Players are drawn to both graphical and text adventures because of their rich plots, memorable characters, and strong puzzle elements. If a first person shooter is like an action movie, an adventure is like a mystery novel. It offers an engrossing world, an intriguing situation as vibrant and compelling as anything in gaming. But adventures tend to sacrifice interactivity and dynamism when compared with other gaming genres.
Adventures tend to showcase the talents of the artists and writers who make them. This, too, is an appealing feature when those talents are as thrilling as those of Tim Schaffer or Jeremy Freese. But the brilliance of game designers can eclipse that of the player. One of the complaints most frequently heard when a player gives up on an adventures is, “I guess I’m just not clever enough to guess what the designer was thinking.”
I’ve loved both graphical and text adventures since the early 80s. Some of my all-time favorite games—Full Throttle, Enchanter, Grim Fandango—are adventures. But I wasn’t surprised when adventures declined in the 80s and 90s. I’m not surprised they’re enjoying only modest success now. But I believe they can rise to become an important, mainstream genre again. The solution is in the interface.
A Genre of Rejection
The problem with adventure games is that they offer too many ways to fail.
In a game like Machinarium I am offered a beautiful, detailed scene full of millions of pixels. I can move the mouse cursor freely and select any part of the scene. But only certain details, only certain pixels hold the key to progressing through the story. That means that most of the scene, while lovely to look at, is a continent of failure in the eyes of the player.
It’s difficult to see why this is a problem unless you consider how games of other genres work. In a first person shooter, every movement of the mouse is significant. I give the game a stream of input, it gives me back a wealth of lush, fully interactive sights and sounds. Wherever I fire my weapon I receive a response—at very least some sparks and a loud “ping!”, perhaps a box knocked over, glass shattered, barrels exploding. So although there is a “successful” way to play an FPS—aim at “bad guy” pixels and shoot there—even the “failure pixels” are responsive and interesting.
Or consider a top-down role playing game like Diablo or Torchlight. Here again every pixel is significant. Click on a monster to attack. Click on a treasure to nab it. Click on the ground—the most boring bit—and your character moves to that location. Everything you click is valid. Everything either takes you closer to victory or gets you in deeper trouble. Pure interactivity.
Now consider a text adventure. I’m confronted with some text and a prompt. For example:
The Troll Room
This is a small room with passages to the east and south and a forbidding hole leading west. Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the walls.
>|
Okay, your turn. What do you do?
Assuming you’re familiar with text adventures, you know that you can type “east” or “south” or “west” to venture out. You could probably examine the walls or the bloodstains or the deep scratches. Should you examine the floor? The ceiling? Checking your inventory might be smart.
The genius of text adventures—the thing that makes them truly great—is that you can type just about anything at the prompt. You could even get creative: “Smear the blood on my shirt.” The potential for terrific diversity and dynamism of play is unmatched. Text adventures can go anywhere that the shared imaginations of the designer and player can go. When they’re at their best, they make the point-and-click simplicity of first person shooters look infantile.
In practice, however, most text adventures have very narrow expectations for the player’s behavior. There are certain key items and actions that the player must notice, put together, and figure out how to express. The great frustration of text adventures is that you often figure out the right solution long before you figure out how to say it. Or you figure out a perfectly sensible solution that is arbitrarily rejected by a designer who didn’t happen to think of it too. “Light the candle with a coal from the fire,” you say, and the response is, “I don’t know the word ‘coal’,”—yet the adventure just used that very word in the description of the room.
Rejections—where a user interface responds to player input by saying “You can’t do that”—are the worst kinds of computer responses. Both graphic and text adventures are built on rejections. They invite the player to try things, then slap her hand. This has been their downfall.
It need not be so. Adventures of all kinds can still be made a popular and successful genre. But it’s going to take work.
Making Analog out of Digital
The weakness of adventures is their digitalness.
Most modern games are highly analog. Everything is soft, fuzzy: the position of objects, their velocities, their flammability—everything that’s modeled in a modern video game is modeled with floating point numbers. Adventure games, on the other hand, are enumerative. They are branchy. There are n options; there are only those options; there is nothing in between those options. There might be 9 hotspots on the screen that you can click. There might be 15 verbs that the text parser recognizes. But nothing else. No gray areas.
This branchiness spells trouble for the user experience. It puts the player on a rail, a restrictive path that she must tread. The designer made the path and he made it creative, by Jove; the player must conform to the designer’s vision. Certainly there is no room for creativity from the player.
This intense constraint is what must change if adventures are to thrive. Good games star the player, not the designer. The best games cultivate and reward the player’s creativity; the designers’ creativity plays a supporting role.
Imagine, then, an adventure game in which the player had to solve a puzzle—get to the other side of a chasm, for instance. Rather than designing one or two solutions, the designer anticipated dozens of possible approaches and rewarded all of them. To a large extent, the designer built tools and elements—things like batteries, blowtorches, light sensors, and player-layable water pipes—rather than set-piece, one-off devices. These tools and elements are problem-independent. They can be used in various ways and contexts. The player can combine and apply them to a variety of creative solutions.
A game that rewarded player ingenuity in concocting solutions through diverse tools would be a game that made players feel smart and successful. This is the sort of puzzler anyone could love.
But anyone who has tried writing an adventure can imagine how huge such a design would be. Arguably, no individual could build even a single text adventure that aimed for this goal. And a full-length graphical adventure would require a major development team.
Niche is Nice
Before I sign off, I want to offer an antidote to the advice I’ve just given. There’s a good chance everything I’ve just said has completely missed the point. Maybe adventure games should be small-time. Maybe they should serve only a niche market. After all, in how many other genres can a single person build an entire game? There is something beautiful about the small, dedicated following that adventures and text adventures now enjoy.
But even if this market stays small, designers should keep striving to move the player into the center of the game. Creative types always want to revel in their ideas and flaunt their own genius, but games are the worst medium for prima donnas. As I play adventures from the last few years and compare them to those from a decade ago, I see that the genre has developed a little. Not enough. For the art, if not for the market, adventures should continue to expand their ability to delight and support—not thwart—the player.
