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What is an Adventure Game to you? What direction should Adventure Games take?

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Dance Magic Dance - 15 December 2014 01:12 AM

I’ve seen people say that modern takes on the adventure genre, such as TT’s games, or Trine, or the new King’s Quest game, aren’t real adventure games. That altering the formula makes the genre a different one. The question is, then, what would you offer? What defines an adventure game for you, and what are the limits? Where would YOU take the adventure genre in order to keep it relevant and modernize it?

Trine is a side scrolling action platformer with some adventure game elements in it, but it’s not an adventure game, it’s very much an action platformer.

Telltale’s games, the new King’s Quest game (for now - still need to see more of it to be certain) and a lot of the games that spark a debate here that they’re “not real adventure games” (Gone Home, Brothers, Dear Esther, etc.) are very much real adventure games to me, just not “traditional” adventure games.

Altering the formula doesn’t necessarily make the genre a different one, it just expands the borders a little, evolves it. It’s what naturally should happen to a healthy genre, imo.

An adventure game for me is a game that’s first and foremost story-driven and where the gameplay consists of any combination of exploration, dialogue and puzzle-solving that further drives the story. That means little to no combat (or alternatively: skippable combat like in L.A. Noire).

There are no limits. Some games will push the boundaries so far that they’ll completely blur the lines between two (or more) genres. Every adventure gamer can then decide for himself whether or not he considers these “hybrid” games worth his while or not.
That’s the beauty of our genre: it’s so broad that we can all focus on the aspects (or subgenres if you will) that we like, and we can ignore the ones we don’t.

Where would I take the genre in order to keep it relevant and modernize it? Why would I take it anywhere else than where it’s already going? The genre is fine, with more diversity than ever, more modern AGs than ever and still plenty of traditional ones…

Zifnab - 15 December 2014 03:07 AM

adventure games are not a science but an art

I love this quote! Thumbs Up

Sefir - 15 December 2014 03:27 AM
A.A - 15 December 2014 03:23 AM

I just want more of everything.

Thumbs Up Thumbs Up
Seconded!!

Dag - 15 December 2014 11:15 AM

Yay! Gief moar! Smile

Thirded/fourthed! Tongue

Tad - 15 December 2014 05:03 AM

I like the direction it’s going in. We’re seeing a mix of everything being put out there.

Exactly! Cool

thejobloshow - 15 December 2014 06:53 AM

We have had labels over the years that tried to break down titles into equally vague categories - cinematic platformers, visual novels, point-and-click, interactive movies, walking simulators and interactive fiction.

The many subgenres of AG…  Innocent

     

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It is difficult to say what direction should adventure games take. I would say, like someone already said, that we should be able to play all different style od adventure games. From games made by Wadjet Eye, to those made by Telltale.

At the moment I am playing Broken Sword 5 and have just finished the part in Castel de Sants and it reminded me why I love adventure games. This part has some great puzzles involving paintings with hidden messages, old manuscripts and secret doors, and the beautiful 2d graphics are gorgeous. I always loved this in adventure games and I really love that sort of puzzles.

I love all sorts of adventure games from those done in adventure game studio to the Telltale games, but if I could choose I would prefer adventure games done in 2d that have some real puzzles that aren´t too difficult but still make you think, and that don´t have that sort of urgency like the walking dead where you always have to be ready to press some button even when you are in dialog.

     
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I stick by the age old definition - puzzle solving within a narrative framework.

Where should they go? Nowhere - things have never been better. I have lots to play - from remakes of traditional graphic adventures like “The Longest Journey” on the ipad to cutting edge adventure games on the PSVITA like “Murasaki Baby”.

I only hope 2015 is half as good as 2014.


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I enjoy playing adventure games on my Alienware M17 r4 and my Nintendo Switch OLED.

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TimovieMan - 15 December 2014 04:10 PM

There are no limits. Some games will push the boundaries so far that they’ll completely blur the lines between two (or more) genres…That’s the beauty of our genre: it’s so broad that we can all focus on the aspects that we like, and we can ignore the ones we don’t.

Being able to actually define and catalog things in meaningful ways is a key part of being good reviewers and archivists.  Statements like this make me wonder who this website is actually trying to serve.

To be fair though, the specificity of this website’s Search Filters is pretty excellent.  The fact that I can choose explicit gameplay, input, and graphical styles is a nice touch.

     
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Any reviewer who gives anything more than superficial credence to imaginary genre boxes should be fired on the spot. That would be one of the worst forms of bias to bring to a critique.

An archivist would know better than anyone that attempting to turn art into a science is a fool’s errand. It’s not about definition, it’s about application, and it ALWAYS comes down to a subjective matter of degree. Always.

And on that note, adventure games should go in every direction they conceivably can. More specifically, they should move in whatever direction inspires the artists creating them. The worst thing that could possibly happen is to force them all into some predetermined formula. Fortunately for us all, plenty of developers seem to know that. Diversity has always been the genre’s greatest strength.

     

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In non-monotonic logic non-typical example of something can somewhat differ from typical example from that class, like ostrich differs from many birds because it can’t fly by itself. But there seems more going on lately, namely people seem to challenge deffinitions of TYPICAL adventure game.

I am not sure that newer Telltale games are renewing adventure games, they just seem to streamline role of inventory puzzles/fetch quests. I am puzzled by fact that challenging of our understanding of adventure games came around that time when Telltale changed their episodic adventure games into poor man’s episodic adventure games.

     
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garbo - 16 December 2014 02:25 AM

I am puzzled by fact that challenging of our understanding of adventure games came around that time when Telltale changed their episodic adventure games into poor man’s episodic adventure games.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apologetics  Wink


In all seriousness though, labels matter.  If someone asks me, “Oh, you work on adventure games?  What are those exactly?” and I point them to two examples from some nebulous “all-inclusive” pool that have completely different gameplay styles, then I’m doing a shitty job of answering their question.  Categories matter.  Create divisions where there logically should be divisions.  If games play differently enough, they shouldn’t be called the same type of game.  The “everything is art” argument doesn’t fly; people have been labeling and categorizing works of art for centuries and continue to do so, because it’s helpful and logical.  Most importantly, that kind of categorizing and labeling of art informs the work of future generations of artists and ultimately pushes art forward as a whole. 

If I went to a library and asked where Moby Dick was located, and the librarian told me it’s in the section with the books, but she can’t be more specific because they don’t like to categorize works of art, I’d repeatedly edit this post to try and come up with an absurd enough response to sarcastically showcase my extreme displeasure.  Wink

     
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Jackal - 16 December 2014 01:07 AM

And on that note, adventure games should go in every direction they conceivably can. More specifically, they should move in whatever direction inspires the artists creating them.

Yes. And that includes “no direction at all”.

     
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garbo - 16 December 2014 02:25 AM

In non-monotonic logic non-typical example of something can somewhat differ from typical example from that class, like ostrich differs from many birds because it can’t fly by itself. But there seems more going on lately, namely people seem to challenge deffinitions of TYPICAL adventure game.

I am not sure that newer Telltale games are renewing adventure games, they just seem to streamline role of inventory puzzles/fetch quests. I am puzzled by fact that challenging of our understanding of adventure games came around that time when Telltale changed their episodic adventure games into poor man’s episodic adventure games.

The thing is, adventure games aren’t strictly about puzzles - they never have been. The very genre is heavily tied with tv shows and films in that, it’s about you (viewer/player) being taking on an adventure. It could be an emotional one or an action one etc…

If anything, I’d say the games on this site primarily fit into two genre’s. The first being adventure, the second being puzzles. Telltale have simple moved away from the second category.

     

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garbo - 16 December 2014 02:25 AM

I am puzzled by fact that challenging of our understanding of adventure games came around that time when Telltale changed their episodic adventure games into poor man’s episodic adventure games.

Oh, hell no. People have been whinging about the same thing forever. The “Myst isn’t an adventure” contingent was relentless.

Lambonius, your simplistic arguments are those of someone who stands on the sidelines and doesn’t have to actually do the work.

Obviously labels serve a very rudimentary purpose of utility—on a site called Adventure Gamers, that goes without saying. But they are not a panacea for matters of classification no matter how much people like you want them to be.

You know full well we’re not talking about “completely different gameplay styles” but rather games with very similar play styles but different execution, different weightings of individual elements, etc. Again, a point that should be staggeringly clear to a person who worked on an adventure-RPG hybrid.

The “everything as art” argument as you’re trying to frame it is pure strawman. Clearly I’m not suggesting nothing should be labeled, merely that art, of all things, does not lend itself to tidy, lazy classification.

As I said, it’s all a matter of degree. Anyone (rational) would agree that an adventure is largely leisurely and focuses primarily on the three pillars of story, puzzles, and exploration. Word it however you want, but that’s the gist. That’s definition. Easy.

Application is: What constitutes a “story” and how much story does there need to be? (This was a favourite of the Myst crowd.) How many puzzles? What degree of difficulty? How few is too few and how many is too many? Do they need to be fully integrated? (Cue Layton crowd.) What constitutes “action” and how much action can there be? What is the frequency limit or dexterity threshold? How many “other genre” elements should be permitted (Quest for Infamy, step right up)? Etc., etc. And perhaps most importantly: does an adventure need all three key elements to still be an adventure?

The litmus test is Insecticide. Exactly half platformer, exactly half traditional adventure. So which is it? Goodbye, utopian label worship, hello real world.

Like I’ve repeated countless times, here at AG we don’t get to cherry pick. We have to make decisions on many dozens of adventure games year in and year out, often before we have full knowledge of how a game will work. If some people take exception to a few cherry-picked outliers… sorry, I’m not even interested enough to finish that sentence.

Zifnab - 16 December 2014 04:02 AM

Yes. And that includes “no direction at all”.

Of course. If what inspires a developer is to keep moving in a very traditional direction, more power to them. If they’re sacrificing their own vision just to assuage vocal diehards, however, then everyone loses.

 

     
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garbo - 16 December 2014 02:25 AM

I am puzzled by fact that challenging of our understanding of adventure games came around that time when Telltale changed their episodic adventure games into poor man’s episodic adventure games.

Meh, that happens all the time. The same happened when King’s Quest was first released, and again when Myst was released, for instance. Continually challenging one’s understanding of something is not a bad thing, you know. It’s what leads to enlightenment. Stagnation would be worse.

Lambonius - 16 December 2014 03:22 AM

In all seriousness though, labels matter.  If someone asks me, “Oh, you work on adventure games?  What are those exactly?” and I point them to two examples from some nebulous “all-inclusive” pool that have completely different gameplay styles, then I’m doing a shitty job of answering their question.

If both are adventure games, then they’re not going to differ that much in making your point. Especially since you would in such a case pick more traditional games as a reference, not some of the outliers. Or would you take it further and not even mention Myst and Grim Fandango in the same breath just because they play differently?

Categories matter.

But they shouldn’t be all-important. They can’t be. They’re useful tools, but they can’t do everything.

Create divisions where there logically should be divisions.

Sometimes that’s not possible. If I want to divide my DVD collection into genres, then I have absolutely no clue whether Galaxy Quest should go under ‘comedy’ or under ‘sci-fi’ because it’s both. That’s why they get sorted alphabetically. The title is more important than the genre.

The “everything is art” argument doesn’t fly; people have been labeling and categorizing works of art for centuries and continue to do so, because it’s helpful and logical.

And there’s never been much of a consensus about any of it. Wink
That also explains why we can’t come to a consensus of our own genre’s definition. Labels are useful, but only to an extent. And a lot of it is murky and subjective.

Most importantly, that kind of categorizing and labeling of art informs the work of future generations of artists and ultimately pushes art forward as a whole.

The category or the label says absolutely nothing about the quality, and it’s the quality and innovativity of the art itself that pushes art forward, not the label or category. Wink
In fact, it’s precisely the innovativity that makes labeling so difficult… hence this entire discussion… Tongue

If I went to a library and asked where Moby Dick was located, and the librarian told me it’s in the section with the books, but she can’t be more specific because they don’t like to categorize works of art, I’d repeatedly edit this post to try and come up with an absurd enough response to sarcastically showcase my extreme displeasure.  Wink

If I went to a library to look for Moby Dick, I would go to the fiction section, look up the letter M for Melville and see if I can find it alphabetically.
Barring the book being lent out or misplaced, I’m going to find it that way. Without help. IN. ANY. LIBRARY.
See my Galaxy Quest example earlier: the only divisions that should be made are the ones between things that can’t coexist. Fiction and non-fiction are primary examples. And even there, some works will blur the lines.
For movies you could perhaps divide live-action and animation, but where does Pete’s Dragon or Who Framed Roger Rabbit go in that case? English and foreign-language divisions: where to put Inglourious Basterds which is part English, German, French and even Italian?
There are always going to be works that blur the lines. These make labeling and categorizing difficult if not impossible. Should those suddenly be excluded from one category? Why? From which one?
Hence the point that labeling and categorizing are always going to be subjective.


I find it really ironic that you seem to be making a big deal out of this, seeing as you were involved in the development of what can be described as an adventure-RPG hybrid. Would you be offended by references in RPG-centric sites?



Edit: oh, hi Jackal! You beat me by a few minutes. Tongue

     

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I like the way things have been progressing now. There are some great experimental adventures and so many subgenres that it’s hard to keep up, while there are some really excellent old school stuff too. I enjoy all kinds of adventures and prefer it so that people keep making them. Visual novels and interactive movies and puzzlers with stories - I don’t care what it is - as long as I get to experience my story and/or immersive world.

     

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Some very interesting ideas here. Personally I feel one of the weak points of the AG genre is the excessive focus on puzzles. Ken Williams once said something along the lines of : to make a good adventure game, you have to try and make a fantasy game, a comedy game, a mystery game, or a space exploration game or whatever, but NOT a puzzle game. I totally agree with that. To me adventure games are not puzzle games. Puzzle games are a genre in itself, and they can be beautiful and atmospheric and have stories, like Myst, but they are not adventure games. Adventure games are games where the main game mechanic is telling the story. “As detective John searches the crime scene, he finds a cigarette butt in the bushes next to the corpse.” These are the very actions you would undertake in an AG and they tell the story. Solving puzzles do not tell a story. Fighting people doesn’t either. If the story is being told in-between the game mechanics, through cutscenes, dialogues, book pages, recordings or whatever, it’s not an AG in my opinion.

Edit: just to clarify about solving puzzles or fighting not telling stories : in a book you wouldn’t read about how the character swings his axe on each hit or what buttons he pushes on a keypad. If your game mechanics are too focused on elements that would not be detailed in a narrative text, I don’t consider them as adventure game mechanics.

     
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For me, this issue isn’t black and white at all and to try and make it so is to over-simplify it.

I think everyone would agree that the definition of Adventure Games is subjective - as is the definition of any genre in any field and I am certainly happy with that. I agree that there cannot be tight boxes for definitions of games and many brilliant games defy description in this way.

I agree with Jackal in that insisting on narrow genre boxes would be a poor basis for critique in itself, but when I read a review I do want an indication of what sort of game I am reading about - ideally by reference to genre. More specifically, some indication of how it might differ from the “genre stereotype” would be massively useful. If a game being reviewed as an adventure game heavily features platforming elements then I want to know about it, and the simplest way is to say that it is different from a “traditional adventure game” (whatever that even is) by including platformer segments. That, in my book, is more than superficial credence, but is also necessary and a good and positive thing. Please don’t fire whoever reviews the new King’s Quest game! Wink

However, I am also with Lamb, at least to the extent of saying that genre definitions are very useful (maybe not absolutely necessary). For instance, If I go to Steam or a “mainstream” gaming site and want to browse adventure games then it is helpful to have “adventure” to click on to sort my results (once I have waded through Assassins Creed & Uncharted etc. Wink ) More importantly, it helps me explain my preferences of games, I can say that I like Adventure Games, Strategy games etc. but not FPS etc. That is a generalisation of course and there are many games that won’t fit into a narrow category box, but that doesn’t matter, people understand what I mean and that is the key. Genre boxes are useful to refer to, even when they are fluid.

I went to AdventureX recently in London on the basis that it concerned adventure games and on the understanding that, in broad terms, the games there would come under the genre definition of “Adventure Games”. That doesn’t mean there was no variety, there was some IF, some traditional AG’s and some not traditional, but the genre box of “Adventure” was still an important thing, even if not all of the games fit perfectly into that box. [/personal opinion]

     

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Intense Degree - 16 December 2014 12:18 PM

I agree with Jackal in that insisting on narrow genre boxes would be a poor basis for critique in itself, but when I read a review I do want an indication of what sort of game I am reading about - ideally by reference to genre. More specifically, some indication of how it might differ from the “genre stereotype” would be massively useful. If a game being reviewed as an adventure game heavily features platforming elements then I want to know about it, and the simplest way is to say that it is different from a “traditional adventure game” (whatever that even is) by including platformer segments. That, in my book, is more than superficial credence, but is also necessary and a good and positive thing. Please don’t fire whoever reviews the new King’s Quest game! Wink

Great post, Sir.

More and more, adventure game reviews (not just on this site, but all over, really) seem to focus on story only, and mention gameplay in passing.  In a two-page review, a page and a half will often be an outline of the story (usually spoiler-free, but not always.)  What in the hell is a detailed plot summary even doing in a game review?  If it’s an adventure game, obviously it’s going to have a well-developed story (if it’s any good, that is,) so all we really need to know is, “Is the story good?  Does it hit the right tone for the subject matter?  Etc.”  We don’t need an outline of specific plot elements. 

The Game of Thrones review here on AG is one I read recently where I found myself shaking my head as to how much of the review was relegated to outlining the specifics of the story.  In that reviewer’s defense though, he did go on to specify things like the lack of any puzzles and meaningful consequences for one’s actions, and I found the fact that he had taken the time to play through it twice choosing opposite responses to be a very helpful thing to do in determining how well this game handles choice/consequence.  So good on him for that. 

At the same time though, I couldn’t help but think that he could have saved himself a page or so of writing if he had just said that it plays like a Telltale game, and most people would know what that meant.  Now obviously, that’s overly simplifying it, but Telltale’s Walking-Dead-Style-Game is a good example of a sub-type of adventure game that is basically a genre unto itself at this point.  If you say “Walking-Dead-Style-Game,” anyone who follows adventure games at all is going to know exactly what that means.  And people who don’t follow adventure games probably aren’t going to be reading reviews on a website called Adventure Gamers.  Wink 

I don’t know.  I would just appreciate a little more categorization sometimes, and I reject the idea that there should be no limits at all.

     

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