A loving criticism of the AGS community and its output

[uoou]

a

[ThreeOhFour]

I think you're pretty right, but it's gosh darned hard to think of new ways to do it. I've been trying to find out how to make post-adventure games for ages now and I keep coming back to plain old adventure games.

Love

Ben

[Anian]

Be constructive, not DEconstructive...or something.   Suggest, build, examine, if you make a breakthrough in adventure games, I am sure a lot of people will follow.

I'm also not a fan of "too retro" look in games, no matter how good the art actually is, but some of the games are just beautiful and charming and filled with that "it's a whole new world" essence.
On the other hand going too far away from a formula is not always as sweet, I mean 99.99% of games still follow some archtype of plot development or characters. Reason for this is that not only are we acostumed to it, but it's been perfected and all it needs is some tweaks and twists to make it feel new and interesting, but if you'd go and change sometihng very drastically, it'd probably wouldn't be well recieved.

It's hard to come up with something never seen before and new, but not only that, in a few years it'd be seen as something elementary and obvious, so the prize in the end is not always recieved. There's also the fact of the resources you have to put into projects, experience and talent, some people want to do that, but more people are just interested in telling a story they think other people will be fond of.

[uoou]

a

[Snarky]

I don't really understand the criticism (which you're not the first to state) that making a certain kind of game is to "waste" one's talents. For almost every creator here, game making is a hobby that they do for fun, so they should make whatever they enjoy making. And a lot of players enjoy playing them, too, so it's not all for nothing.

Besides, I think you missed one insight in your analysis. Making a retro-adventure (and I insist it's retro, not classicism) game now is not just to mimic the games of the 80s and 90s. Like you said, the world has changed, and that changes the context that helps determine their meaning. This is common post-modern practice. (Don Quixote by Pierre Menard comes to mind...) Furthermore, a closer look at the games themselves will show that they are actually quite different from the classics in most important respects, length being the most obvious one.

Finally, I don't buy your version of artistic history. If you look at the other narrative arts, mainly literature and film, I don't think they've as a whole abandoned linear narrative or many aspects of modernism, and many of the highest-regarded examples (and I'm talking the stuff that wins the Nobel or the Booker) aren't really engaged with pushing the boundaries of the form. We seem to have finally accepted that not everything has to be a deconstruction, that telling a good story with true insight beautifully well is a valid form of high art. (And in the visual arts, while gallery painting may have exploded the classical tradition--thereby alienating everything but a niche audience--representational art is far from dead, dominating all multimedia, commercial and applied forms.)

Oh, one more thing: You believe in games as a serious art form, and want people to tackle that. Fine. But in any medium, the majority of works are entertainments. The artistic genius who transcends the form is, almost by definition, rare. It's healthy, and probably beneficial to the work, for creators to challenge themselves, a little. But I'm convinced if game makers (or film makers, or TV writers...) as a group took your advice, what we'd see would be an increase in pretentiousness, not quality.

As for this whole thing about focusing on the presentation, not the core; well, the presentation does matter. But more importantly, it's something that's easy to present for critique during the early stages. Gameplay and writing don't really lend themselves to forum criticism; you pretty much have to play the finished (or at least prototyped) game to comment on them. And once the game has been released, many posters are more interested in offering congratulations and praise than incisive criticism (though you do see that in some posts in the finished games threads, and in reviews). There are threads about game design, theory, puzzles, mechanics etc. and if you look at e.g. the Hardydev blog, you'll see a number of posts that discuss those things.

You see what you want to see, and you're missing much.

[Calin Leafshade]

I agree with Drew in as much as it should be the goal of game developers to push the boundaries somewhat but I feel he misses the point that people *know* they are remaking stuff.

AGS is, by and large, an exercise in nostalgia and it claims to be nothing else. Alot of AGS's built-in functionality assumes a classical perspective of the adventure game and innovation does not lend itself to ease, otherwise it wouldnt really be innovative.

[Dualnames]

Okay, first I find the first post to be nicely written if anything. I'm usually bored reading long posts in these forums, as my "Hey " and "Okay. " kind-of-posts are considered masterpieces.

Now the post is greatly written, but it is addressed mostly to close-minded individuals, that usually don't even bother to come to a post addressed to them. Therefore, as usually the initial praise, will result on a de-construction of the post and its clarification as utter crap and nonsense.

At that point, there will be two parties fighting for something entirely off-topic as the freedom of speech, and this of course will end up as a clusterf#$^.

Then again I might be wrong.

[uoou]

a

[zabnat]

I'm with Snarky about not really understanding the cristicism. Also I got this strong mental image in my head about a guy who walks in the historical society meeting and tells them to look in the future and think of something new, instead of just looking in the past.

The thing I mostly didn't understand was about the comments in critics lounge. Did you mean that when someone posts a background and asks for input about the art, you should then just post "I can see from this weird looking background that your plot is excellent, so you shouldn't be worried about it looking like crap."? Also in my opinion technical stuff is important. To a certain degree. I don't want to play a game with bad art, I don't want to watch a movie with bad actors, I don't want to listen to music with bad sound quality. When the technical quality exceeds certain level, then it doesn't matter anymore.

I had much more to say, but I don't know how to put it down. My head doesn't work today, maybe I've been choked out couples of times too much.

[uoou]

a

[Snarky]

It's a waste that only the remakes (to inappropriately but conveniently lump it all together) exist. The talent evident here could so easily be doing things which explore from a different angle as well and yet as far as I can see, it's lacking. It's a waste in the same sense as eating only cheeseburgers, despite them being delicious and nutritious, would be a waste of my palate.

But that's not true. Like I said, the games do not just repeat what was done in the classics. They play with tone, with presentation style, with content, with scope, with puzzle structure, and with technical aspects like the UI scheme.

Take a game like Ben There, Dan That or Time Gentlemen, Please! You can say that it's a traditional adventure game in that it uses a familiar control scheme and puzzle structure, but it's clearly not a game that could have been made in the 90s. The art style, the unique comedic voice, the mix of nostalgia, parody and subversion of the genre, and the underground sensibility is unlike anything LucasArts or Sierra would have produced. It has a distinct ambition that isn't the ambition the classic games had. (You seem to half recognize this and see it as a bad thing, that they should "seek what they sought," but it's really an example of how AGSers are making something different, not just imitating.)

Or look at the nominees for the 2010 AGS Awards. It's my impression that all the Best Game nominees (I haven't played all of them yet) renew the adventure game genre in various ways, great or small. That puts them beyond your concept of "remakes."

You misunderstood me, which is my fault for using narrative in two different senses side by side. I was saying that modernism, considered as a narrative, is irrelevant today. I'm saying this in reference to some games I see, with obvious pretensions towards high-concept (or whatever you want to call that), which are not much more than fairly clumsy rehashes of modernist ideas. If computers had existed in Paris in 1910 then we would've seen exactly these games. Knowing that they were made 100 years after that is a bit depressing.

You're going to have to give some examples. Besides, I see this as inconsistent with the rest of what you're arguing. First you bemoan the lack of artistic ambition, and then you pooh-pooh games that try because they don't live up to your standard. You can't ask for more than people's best; if that's the best and most innovative ideas people can come up with, maybe you're wrong that there's such a deep well of untapped potential.

As to linearity, you make an unfair comparison. Film and literature are inherently linear media. Of course nonlinearity can be expressed through allusion in either, but their nature is linear. Games, due to the absoluteness of agency of the viewer, are the opposite - they are inherently nonlinear and linearity has to be imposed.

Of course there's room for linear narrative based games. But they aren't and should not be all there is.

Adventure games are to a large extent about elaborate, detailed, scripted (as opposed to emergent) narratives. Creating non-linear yet satisfying narratives of this kind is possible (take Heavy Rain as an example), but extremely time-consuming and expensive. It is not a reasonable expectation from a freeware game community, and IMO not an avenue that plays to its strengths.

If you would object that you want games that aren't elaborate, scripted (and hence mainly linear) narratives, well, then you're simply in the wrong community. There are plenty of games like that being made, but they're no longer adventure games, and so can be found elsewhere on the internet.

I see you have me pegged as a pomo

Not particularly. I think a postmodernist would be more sensitive to the creative and transformational aspects of using elements from earlier works and styles, not just assume that because it runs in 320x200 it's merely regurgitating things that have all been done before.

No, I definitely want quality not pretence. I don't really see games as a 'serious art form', I don't know or care what that means. I see them as a mode of human inquiry which has plenty of avenues left to explore.

Having said that, any art should be aware of and engage with its form and each medium must at some point become self-aware in order to develop.

See, those two statements read to me like an utter contradiction.

Yeah of course the majority of most form is the lightweight and the throwaway and all that. But I'd say that that stuff is generally produced in conditions where the medium is secondary to some other concern - money, politics, whatever. I would hope and imagine that the people here love games (whether adventure games specifically or games in general) and making games. Stuff made with love is rarely lightweight and throwaway.

But nor is folk art, whether oral traditions or wood carvings, known for being transgressive or deeply experimental. They generally work within an established, only gradually evolving form, which imposes a certain discipline while being broad enough to allow a wide variety of expression, and considerable artistic originality.

And the two are intrinsicly linked - the formal is often discussed without any question as to function, which is indicative of a problematic disconection between the two.

Depends on how you see it. A lot of the critiques and advice on background art has to do with being aware of how technique affects function. For instance the discussions of composition and how to bring focus to certain elements in the scene, in order to guide a player. Or color theory, or the arguments about good and bad ways to break rules of perspective. If you look at the background blitz voting system and except the "idea" category, two of the categories directly address the use of the image in a game (atmosphere and composition/functionality), while the two others are more about how well done it is as an artwork.

I disagree that the substantive stuff is more difficult to discuss than the superficial stuff. At least not prohibitively so. [...] I read this place often enough and enjoy the threads about visual stuff. I don't see much about the other stuff, as I say. Yeah, you see what you choose to see of what's actually there. I'm not saying there's none, I'm saying it seems a bit overbalanced.

It's easy enough to discuss game design, theory, mechanics and structure in the abstract (and those discussions do take place, I count five threads on the first page of the Adventure-related talk board), but it's almost hopeless to offer specific critique of an idea, because so much depends on the execution. You can critique a background or a sprite because you can see it, you can critique music because you can hear it. You can only critique a game if you can play it. I suppose people could post their scripts for people to read, but honestly, who wants to read through twenty pages of notes for "My First Gaem"?

It would be great if more creators prototyped their games (testing the core gameplay, say) and posted them for critique in the Critics Lounge. The problem is doing it without giving too much of the game away. And by the time they've got it implemented to a playable state, I think most creators feel like they're nearly finished and it's too late to go back and change many of the fundamentals.

[Igor Hardy]

It's inspiring to see a call for greater emphasis on experimentation every once in a while. It's great that you would like to see more innovation, Drew, and many of us would like that too. I definitely try new things in my own games whenever possible.

However, I don't understand your criticism of traditional storytelling and linear gameplay (not to mention every game is linear at its very core). I think you might have an idealized vision of how games (and works of art) are created. Innovations, experiments, as well as non-linearity can not (and should not) happen in a void, for their own sake - innovations and multiple choices get introduced to achieve certain fairly concrete goals. In case of disciplines like fiction, film or adventure games the most general goals are usually to tell a specific story, to express some kind of feeling, or create a convincing illusion. Simple, basic and human goals. Not vague and abstract things like "We need to be modern and artistic!" or "We need to create a game that evokes now!" because at best that leads to creating some dada and "notgames", but usually projects like that never even get off the ground.

[Ilyich]

I have a lot to say on the subject, lots of things to disagree with, quite a few to agree with, too, but it'll be quite hard for me to write that much in English, so I'll just point out some of the things that bothered me in this well thought out, and, in a way - sweet post.

You talk about visuals as a technical part, and about story and ideas therein as "content" that matters. Well, I consider visual art, as well as music, to be more interesting, complex and pure forms of art than literature. They are indispensable for creating a unique, singular experience from a mixed media project, be it a movie, an opera or a game.

Super Mario colour pallette alone, beign instantly recognizable and quite weird, creates a whole new visual space for the player to immerse himself in, and thus evokes many new emotions that are hard-to-impossible to find anywhere else.  Pixel art is a valid and relatively new genre of visual art and should not be taken lightly. I feel that interesting and innovative use of visual design is highly underused and underrated.

As for what goes on in the Critics Lounge - well, most of us have some experience in thinking and writing. We are taught those things from an early age and do them on a daily basis, so there's much less need to go through the basics. Not many, however, can draw a table, so that it looks like a table. Rules of linear perspective are still very much alive and kicking if what you want is to create a good visual representation of a real object.

And I think that all this "wallowing in retro spirit" stuff is caused not only by nostalgia, but partly because we, gamers, feel that the whole pixel-art/adventure thing haven't been properly done yet, it didn't reach it's full strength and was abandoned by the industry way to quickly. We feel that there's still much artistic potential in those blocky semi-abstract shapes and in the passive, observational type of gameplay. Or, maybe, that's just me.

Okay, I seem to have started to ramble a bit, and it's way too preachy, so I'll cut the rest of it short:

- Games are mostly entertainment. Entertainment can become art if it's done well enough. (The Simpsons are way more culturally significant than a Ming Vase or a Penderecki symphony)
- Games are hard to make. Especially for one person. Especially complicated, never-done-before kind of games.
- Non-linearity of games seems to create loads of opportunities for new forms of artisticic expression, but so far, not many have been found.
- The overall quantity of games of reasonable quality from this community, although surprisingly great and lovely, is insufficient to make such  broad observations and wish for more.
- How about a more constructive and in-depth thread on actual possibilities and ideas for experimentation within the medium? (not a dare, but a suggestion - let's discuss the subject itself, and not why it's not discussed and implemented in ags-games).

[uoou]

a

[Scavenger]

Allow me to give a counterpoint. I'm an artist, not a writer, and so the art is most important to me.

The second thing is: You're all too concerned with technique. This relates in part to the above - I think it's caused by the above. This need to create meticulous pixel art this-and-that. But it goes further - the number of posts I see where someone says something like "it's nice, but the perspective is wrong" or "it's nice but the proportions are wrong" and "here's a tutorial on how to do it right".

Which is fine if it's balanced by as much concern about the actual game. About the mechanics and logic and reality you are creating. About the nature of games - what they are and what they can be. The stuff which actually makes the game a game rather than a meticulously drawn presentation. But it's not - I see virtually no discussions like this.

There seems to be an absolute adherence to a really quite staid, pedestrian and regressive approach to the formal aspects of artistic practise. Linear perspective was something the visual arts flirted with for 400 years of its 30000 of existence, and then quickly discarded. Proportion is something to play with - to meaningfully exaggerate and distort, not a rulebook. But this is beside the point.

Stop right there! What foolishness is this? The reasons we use the rules of linear perspective, proportion, colour theory, and other "pedestrian techniques" is because we need to master them before we can play with the form.

How can we break the rules if we don't know them? Breaking the rules has to be deliberate. Breaking the rules when you don't know what rules you're breaking.... that's incompetence, not being avant-garde. If it doesn't work, if it looks wrong, then it must be fixed. Then, once you know the groundwork, the foundations, then you can build up. Art is as much of a discipline as writing. You gotta be internally consistent.

Don't you dare pretend that the rules don't matter. Doing that is appealing to mediocrity.

The point is that I'd rather have a literary masterpiece written in dirt on tree bark than, say, a Dan Brown book printed on paper so smooth I want to rub my face in it, in a typeface so exquisite that seeing a single letter causes me to explode in ecstasy and bound in leather made from the skin of cloned velociraptors. It's the goddamn content that matters. It's what's inside. Of course, polish is always nice but that should really come last. It should be the least concern. The primary concern should be making games which make me think in ways I've never thought of before or make me feel things I didn't know I could feel or ... whatever it is you want to do.

Games are little universes. Every game you make is a separate universe with its own rules and logic and reality which you get to shape and dictate. It's a logical space in which you can say anything it is possible to say, you can arrange reality in any way you like. You could be asking questions about the nature of reality or what it means to be human or trying to evoke a feeling so fleeting it doesn't even have a name and instead you're worrying about whether a couple of lines converge in the same place? Really?

Oh, great. "The writing is so much more important than the art!". Way to make my kind's contribution null and void. Graphical Adventure Games are primarily a visual medium. It isn't IF. Worlds are created through the visual medium just as well as the written one. Without good art, the effect is limited. Again, if we don't know the rules, we can't break them. Saying that the visual elements are pointless, that we could just write up a new universe with crappy MSPaint art and flicky, warpy animation (or none at all) and it would be preferable to a beautiful game is a pretention I cannot stand. You seem to not get the importance of art in games. And writing is just as hard as art.

How can we engage in a dialogue, how can we invent a new universe to blow people's minds if we can't even craft a simple, enjoyable game? This talent doesn't sprout overnight. It has to be built up from the building blocks. We make simple games to practice. Think about it: The average member of the AGS community can't have made more than 1-3 games. We are not master craftsmen, or philosophers. We're amateurs experimenting with something we too are trying to understand. If the games industry has failed to make more than a handful of games that can be considered true art, made by professionals, what chance do we have?

I believe games are THE cultural form of the 21st century. The one that matters. This place has such an amazing concentration of talent and obviously has the will to make games. You have this tool and you have absolute creative freedom - you should be pushing the form forwards. You should be exploring and defining what a game can be, what a virtual world can mean. You should be engaging ina  dialogue which has a meaning and relevence now not wallowing in a discussion from 20+ years ago, vomitting it up and chewing it over again and calling it retro. Retro comments and critiques and reshapes. Remaking this stuff isn't retro, it's classicism and classicism is artistic death. More than that, it's accepting and revelling in being irrelevant.

We do what we find fun. Not what we think should be a new -ism. Philosophical masturbation isn't my bag - Entertainment is. Maybe we like the look and feel of games from that era, and want to experience more? I sure think games moved on technologically before they were ready.

Even the games which get lauded as pushing things forwards tend to be nothing more than, at best, early modernism presented as a linear narrative. A narrative that was discarded by every other medium almost 100 years ago.

Really? Well! I'm sorry for not being so educated as to know exactly what you're going on about there - it just comes across as pretentious and haughty. But I'm pretty sure modernism has never fully left the other mediums.  Being hooked on these wordisms is surely unhealthy. So long as the story comes across, it shouldn't matter what techiques you use to tell the story. Just like art: It needs rules to adhere to, otherwise it's not very good.

I think it's kind of a duty, if you have the talent and the will and the ability and desire, to make something which affects people now you as much as these games obviously did back then. To think about and understand what form that must take today and at least try to make it.

Yeah, I'll try to make an entertaining game. Like the games before entertained me.

I'm a bit offended that it comes across that you want games to be this lofty ideal, and that individuals who aren't english lit. majors should write them. But they should always play with and build on the rules of narrative!

BUT WOE BETIDE if ART gets the same treatment. Can't be allowed to build on previous knowledge there. "Stop being so anal about whether the art looks good. But the storytelling, oh, I'll be so anal about that."

What exactly is it you want? We're trying our best here, and you're dismissing our efforts so offhand. Remakes are good practice to get better at making games (they show you how to make a game - just like artists followed their masters in the old days).

Pixel art is a beautiful medium, and quicker than doing full animation at ridiculous x ludicrous pixels. It's just that much more economical. And we practice things.... to get better. You don't think someone's ultimate ambition is to remake the same game forever?

Let's be realistic here. People make the games they want to play. They want to entertain people. They want to make something beautiful or funny or silly or engaging.

Would you rather play a game based on a silly, fun thing?

Or Tracy Emin's My Bed?

I know what I would want. I must be a philistine.

[Khris]

Wrong forum.

j/k

Let me start by saying I disagree with pretty much everything you said in your initial post.
zabnat and Snarky addressed it well so I'll leave it at that.

The second thing is: You're all too concerned with technique. This relates in part to the above - I think it's caused by the above. This need to create meticulous pixel art this-and-that. But it goes further - the number of posts I see where someone says something like "it's nice, but the perspective is wrong" or "it's nice but the proportions are wrong" and "here's a tutorial on how to do it right".
[...]
The point is that I'd rather have a literary masterpiece written in dirt on tree bark than, say, a Dan Brown book printed on paper so smooth I want to rub my face in it, in a typeface so exquisite that seeing a single letter causes me to explode in ecstasy and bound in leather made from the skin of cloned velociraptors.

This I have to address though.
While I agree, I'd rather have a literary masterpiece written with a pen on paper. Teaching people a few basic rules about perspective and proportion is as easy and quickly done as giving the dirt smeared guy holding the bark a stack of paper and a pen.
It will also greatly improve bad art. Bad art & wrong perspective is horrible to look at, bad art with good perspective is still bad art but not that bad.

[uoou]

a

[uoou]

a

[Snarky]

I certainly accept that those games make very minor adjustments to the formula. And that's great, they are a thing. Not at all the thing I'm talking about but certainly a valuable thing.

I'm not talking about formal tweaks. I'm not talking about anything formal, actually. But I'm aslo (to prevent any further 'misunderstanding') not diminishing that as a pursuit. But it's already there, so I have no need to ask for it to happen. Which is why I am not. And am, rather, asking for something else to happen. Which is the thing I am describing. Which is none of those things.

Besides, I see this as inconsistent with the rest of what you're arguing. First you bemoan the lack of artistic ambition, and then you pooh-pooh games that try because they don't live up to your standard

I think you're being a bit disingenuous. Cohesion matters. I could write a novel with a random word generator and call it a subversion of the form, but it would just be a shit novel.

I'm not asking for something randomly different for the sake of being different.

I'm really not anti-'remakes'. I'm just pro other stuff and think there's not enough of it (and believe it would feed on itself and go somewhere interesting). I'm not anti-adventure game though I love it when people make stuff which is not adventure games in AGS. I'm really not anti 320xwhatever.

I'm just particularly interested in stuff which deals with what virtual worlds are/can be and think that can be particularly eloquently explored in a simple/constrained environment (with inhereted expectations and forms - I think they help as something to work both with and against) like AGS. That's what I'm personally interested in, not my view of 'all there should be' or whatever. Maybe, as you say, I'm just in the wrong place. I hope not, I've grown quite attached to some of the people.

Mmmm... I'm a bit disappointed in that response. I thought you believed that AGS games were stuck in recreating 90s adventure games over and over, and any original or creative development would be welcome, but it turns out you're only really interested in one direction of evolution, the one you like.

What you're really asking is for people to make more games that appeal to your tastes, rather than to other people's (say, their own) tastes.

Your reasons against emergence (for example) clash with your exmaples of 'innovation' stated earlier: make them shorter (for example). Or otherwise find a way. Or sit there saying it's impossible if you like. I'd like to talk about it at least though.

A procedurally generated adventure would be interestingly emergent. Quite probably a bad game, though it depends, but certainly an interesting one. I don't really buy the time thing, a procedural, nonlinear, emergent adventure could well take less time to make than a linear one, depending on complexity. And there's collaboration. And I've seen how much time people put into these things anyway.

Wouldn't be playing to the strengths of a classic adventure, for sure. It would have other strengths, it would be something else.

I meant that IMO, this is not a promising avenue of development for adventure games, and not one that plays to the strengths of hobby creators or the AGS community.

Part of why I don't believe in procedurally generated stories is that people have been trying to do them for literally the last thirty or forty years, and efforts to date have been very disappointing. Take Façade, for example. Years of work to create a narrative that goes on for perhaps 15 minutes, and you bump up against the limits and shortcomings almost immediately. In my opinion, that makes the level of immersion far lower than in a well-written scripted, mostly-linear game.

You might also be interested in the games by Deirdra Kiai (Squinky), which push the limits of non-linearity. Personally I think they're far less satisfying as games than they must be as experiments, but they have their fans.

Thanks, hadn't looked there much. That's the sort of thing I'm looking for.

Almost all the discussion about gameplay, ideas etc. go on the Adventure-related Talk board, so if you don't check there you're going to get a very skewed impression of what's debated and not. Again I'd like to mention the Hardydev blog, which posts longer essays about specific aspects of adventure game design. And the discussion brought to mind a list of articles about adventure game puzzle design that I put together a few years ago, which might inspire some ideas about what's possible within the constraints of the genre, or at least give a better idea of what those constraints are.

[Igor Hardy]

Again I'd like to mention the Hardydev blog, which posts longer essays about specific aspects of adventure game design.

Thanks for the HardyDev recommendations. Nice to hear it can come to mind while discussing design.