Graphics and the Adventure Game

One of the genres that gets very little attention as a result of the hit-clustering mentality of the gaming industry today is the adventure. The adventure game has a very long pedigree and is closely aligned with an interesting offshoot of literature called interactive fiction. It also has a small group of fans that will buy virtually anything that's published in the field. I know; I'm one of them.

When I got my start in computer gaming, adventures were everywhere. There were text-based paser adventures, such as Zork and King's Quest. There were point-and-click adventures with verb-noun interfaces, such as Maniac Mansion and the Secret of Monkey Island. For a time, adventure games were the bread and butter for big publishers like Sierra and Lucasarts. What happened? Was Infocom eaten by a grue?

No, it was eaten by Activision, which later happened to secure the rights to make a sequel to a hot little property called Wolfenstein 3-D. Maybe you've heard of it.

You see, what happened to the computer game industry was a revolution. The first-person shooter phenomenon shook the industry to its roots. For a long time, playing a game on a computer was a secondary consideration. The primary purpose of a computer was to get work done, strange as that may seem now....

What happened was that first-person shooters were tremendously exciting. They put the player at the middle of the action, which was conducted in real-time. Not the turn-based scenarios of earlier games. It combined the immediacy of the console with the superior graphics of the personal computer.

Adventures suffered from a few drawbacks that made them very, very uncool. From an industry perspective, they were uncool because they didn't push the technology. The primary determinant of the quality of an adventure game was its story, characters, and puzzles. The primary determinant of the FPS was its immediacy and the player's immersion. That meant a whole series of new technologies were needed: graphics accelerator cards, sound cards, monitors, mice, etc. FPS was a killer app for a range of technologies.

FPSs also had an advantage in that for a long time it was easier to make a better game simply by making a better looking or better sounding game. This is quite different from adventures, where to this day, you can stir up trouble in message forums with a "which Monkey Island do you like best?" question. Adventure games rely on their storytelling, which puts a premium on the expensive, difficult to manage creative types. Developing an FPS requires a team of down to earth engineering types to focus on details like getting a virtual wooden crate to appear to fall toward the earth due to gravity.

Most of all, the adventure genre faded because they attempted to play the game on FPS turf. Though Grim Fandango was critically acclaimed, and used 3-D, from a gameplay point of view it was a step backwards. Rather than spending time on the puzzles or dialog, gamers spent most of their time driving their characters around, WASD style -- something that had nothing to do with the point of the game. It led to platform-itis, a dumbing down of the genre to be a mere hunt for collectible items in the game world. And how much fun is that, after the age of ten?

Well, quite a bit, given the success of the MMORPG. But while the experience is fun, it just doesn't have the depth us old-schoolers remember. So sure, I'll finish this post and grind out a few more levels in World of Warcraft, but secretly, I'll wish I could type "open mailbox" again into a stark, black screen.