[threerings]

Originally Posted by Kurufinwe

Another part of the fun, which you've also seen, is that those games are duels – battles of wits between the designer and the player.

YES! I've never heard it put better. What Kurufinwe said.

I started playing Sierra games when I was 10. There's a certain type of logic that classic adventure games require and I excel at it. I love twisting my brain around to the developer's thought process.

It's one of the reasons I love the Runaway games. I thought Runaway was super easy and natural, for someone who knows classic adventure game logic. I had almost NO problem with any of the puzzles. I've never understood people's complaints about the puzzles.

Similarly, I had never played the Monkey Island games until recently (being a Sierra girl) and I've found the puzzles natural as well. I think there really is a gap between people who start playing adventures with recent games and those who started with classic games in the way we approach some of these puzzles.

That being said, I don't have a problem with stories light on puzzles. I am a huge story person as well, and if it doesn't have a story, I have no interest.

What I hate are games where there's story, and then it has some ridiculous Myst-type puzzle, then more story, then safecracking, then story, then tile puzzle, etc. The puzzles should be HOW you tell the story, not just added for difficulty's sake.

[Kazmajik]

Originally Posted by threerings

What I hate are games where there's story, and then it has some ridiculous Myst-type puzzle, then more story, then safecracking, then story, then tile puzzle, etc. The puzzles should be HOW you tell the story, not just added for difficulty's sake.

That describes Culpa Innata perfectly.

[Boriskali]

Originally Posted by orient

Interactive storytelling isn’t a new game genre that developers have failed to successfully create. It’s simply a bi-product of games trying to tell worthy stories. A perfect example is Bioshock; a game that has it all: great gameplay, convincing world and atmosphere, intriguing characters and story. Obviously adventure games are completely different to action games so developers have to approach storytelling in alternative ways, but the principles are the same. You don’t need flashy graphics in a game to tell a good story, but you do need interactivity or you might as well make a film.

The reason games are exciting as a medium for storytelling is because they’re interactive. Simply walking from one conversation and/or cut-scene to the next is a poor excuse for a game and will never be very successful.

I created a new thread for an off-topic response here.

[threerings]

Originally Posted by Kazmajik

That describes Culpa Innata perfectly.

Right. Remind me not to play that one.

[Jatsie]

Originally Posted by tastebud

If I want a sense of achievement, the last place I would go is in front of a computer game. I like my games fun and laid back. Kind of like what Blizzard did to MMOs.

What you refer to as "fun and laid back" i.e. Blizzard MMOs, I find mind rotting and tedious.

I like to be challenged, and when that challenge comes with the reward of deeper progress into an interesting story, it's even more compelling.

The appeal of games for me is that they're interactive, they require significant input. If I wanted to relax and have passive entertainment there's always the television, but with a game I want to exercise my wits.

[Squinky]

Originally Posted by Lee in Limbo

By 'puzzles', I mean that I could do without what I refer to as 'arbitrary problem abstractions', where the designers decide that the logical solution to an immediate problem is too mundane to feel like an accomplishment in the virtual world.

...

Personally, I think the reason Adventure Games are still in a sort of cultural ghetto is because the developers don't trust interactive storytelling. It's understandable that interactive storytelling has such a bad rap, because a lot of games in the last twenty or thirty years were written by programmers, and thus lacked finesse and narrative shape.

Yeah! Those damn programmers, always ruining our stories! Why don't they just write databases instead?

Seriously, though, I've actually noticed that the problem of arbitrary-seeming adventure game puzzle designs (as opposed to puzzles that feel like natural solutions to problems) may in fact stem from a lack of a programming background rather than from its presence. Programmers, after all, are trained to think logically, and it might just be personal preference talking here, but my favourite interactive stories haven't been written by writers proper, but by people with a background in both writing and programming. (Examples of note range from the ye olde Gilbert/Grossman/Schafer team from LucasArts to solo interactive fiction writers such as Emily Short and Adam Cadre. Contrasting this with, say, Ragnar Tornquist, who has a background in cinema, I tend to find that while his stories are compelling, the gameplay often hinders rather than adds to it.)

Originally Posted by Jat316sob

I like to be challenged, and when that challenge comes with the reward of deeper progress into an interesting story, it's even more compelling.

The appeal of games for me is that they're interactive, they require significant input. If I wanted to relax and have passive entertainment there's always the television, but with a game I want to exercise my wits.

I generally like to be challenged as well, but I like part of that challenge to come from the story in and of itself, rather than having the story merely be the reward for successfully completing more arbitrary challenges. While I wouldn't deny that the latter is enjoyable (in fact, it works very well for detective stories, which I actually believe work better as games than as passive media) I think there's a lot of potential in having gameplay challenge our very thoughts and beliefs about the world, as many good stories do. Show rather than tell, so to speak. Such gameplay doesn't necessarily need to be puzzle or action-based.