Interview: Jonathan Blow wants to modernize adventure games

[mode7]

Here's an interesting interview with Jonathan Blow (Braid) about his new project The Witness.
http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/02/15/jonathan-blow-interview-social-game-designers-goal-is-to-degrade-the-players-quality-of-life/
Overall I feel he's quite arrogant and I really doubt if the game really will be the holy grail of adventure gaming (especially as he mentions Myst as main inspiration) but he's got a point when he says that adventure games haven't changed much since the nineties. Of course the old prinicple still works pretty well but pretty much every other game genre has evolved. Why not adventure games?
I'm starting this thread because I've been thinking about this alot. I'm planning to do some things very different for Dacey II. Like introducing gameplay elements from other genres - but still making a pure adventure and not some watered down genre mix.

Do you think classic point and click gameplay is outdated? Or are there at least elements in these games that should be modernized?

[Igor Hardy]

The interview wasn't the end of it. The discussion with Blow continued over Emily Short's blog, where he also explained what he meant better:

http://emshort.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/you-can-also-see-some-marketing-here/

Personally, I don't find him particularly arrogant. I just don't agree with what he said about adventure games as a genre.


Oh, and innovation in the genre has been discussed to the death (of discussion) about a week ago in this thread:

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=42862.0

And it turned out exactly how Dualnames predicted after the first posts.

[GarageGothic]

Why does it matter so much what Blow thinks? He's doing his own thing and expressing his own opinions, wait and see how The Witness turns out and then perhaps we can start discussing whether it works or not.

Just the fact that we're discussing genre in terms of "pure adventure or watered down genre mix" shows how immature this medium and it's audience are. Genre isn't a real thing, it's a paradigm, something we've made up as a conceptual and linguistic tool to describe and categorize the hugely diverse range of artworks we can produce within our medium. If we were even remotely artistic in our venture as game developers, genre wouldn't even be part of the equation, that would be something left up to the critics to define, after the fact. Much in the same way that no Hollywood screenwriter or director in the 1940's ever set out to make a "film noir", they made detective movies, thrillers, melodramas, and eventually some French guy decided that these were all the same thing.

Edit: Also, not only wasn't the interview the end of it, as Ascovel says. It wasn't the beginning either. I don't know if this was the exact same talk Blow did at the GameCity event the interview refers to, but many of the questions seem to pick up on the more controversial points from his lecture "Video Games and the Human Condition". So watch that for a fuller context: http://edtech.rice.edu/www/?option=com_iwebcastask=webcast&action=details&event=2349

[Igor Hardy]

If we were even remotely artistic in our venture as game developers, genre wouldn't even be part of the equation, that would be something left up to the critics to define, after the fact. Much in the same way that no Hollywood screenwriter or director in the 1940's ever set out to make a "film noir", they made detective movies, thrillers, melodramas, and eventually some French guy decided that these were all the same thing.

Since when "detective movies, thrillers, melodramas" are not genres? Being an artist or doing any sort of creative work rarely means not relying on the rules of your craft or your experience. Things do not get created in perfect vacuum.

Choosing a genre at the beginning of making a game is basically the same thing as a painter deciding if he'll do a painting with oil paints or watercolors. He can't change his mind half-way through and expect good results. Neither should he assume he'll just invent a new type of paint by messing around with everything that comes into his hands. Dadaism is easy, while creating something both completely unique and authentically worthwhile awfully hard.

[GarageGothic]

Hehe, I had actually written a bit about how any new idea is a synthesis of what came before, but felt it became a bit too academic.

Being an artist or doing any sort of creative work rarely means not relying on the rules of your craft or your experience. Things do not get created in perfect vacuum.

No, but being an artist also means that you don't let those pre-existing frameworks restrict your creativity. My point wasn't that thrillers and melodramas aren't genres, but rather how arbitrary and fluid all these categories are, and how most of our struggle to "think outside the box" springs from the delusion that there ever was a box in the first place. Of course we work within certain traditions, and this can be useful sometimes - not only does it help us communicate our vision to collaborators and to market the end product to our audience, but it can also be a powerful tool to play with and subvert the audience's expectations. So no, I'm not arguing that genre should be banned, I'm just saying that it's a silly restriction to impose on yourself - and even sillier to expect others to do the same.

On the other hand, there's a huge and very profitable market for so-called "genre fiction" - formulaic romance novels, fantasy, techno thrillers, horror etc. - loved by their readers, derided by the critics. This, to me, is a very good analog for the current state of commercial video games. Because the point isn't that these airport novels are "bad" in any objective way, I'm sure overall they're entertaining, some of them competently written, and in the end the customer was happy enough with his purchase to go buy the next one the author puts out. And he should be, because it was written for him, to fulfill a pre-existing demand.
I'm not making a value statement here, entertainment is an important part of our culture and probably offers a good deal more economic stability for the creator, but as Blow says - quoting Alan Moore - the role of the artist isn't to give the audience what they want but what they need. This may sound lofty and arrogant, but it's also very true.

Note also that the above-mentioned genres aren't in any way "lesser" or aren't viable playing fields for artistic expression - Moorcock, Le Guin, Philip K. Dick etc. offer plenty of evidence to the contrary. But there's a huge, huge difference between picking a genre and then trying to come up with a story that fits within its rules and conventions, instead of starting off with that one idea - a theme, an image, a character, a scene - that you for some reason just need to express and from which everything else just evolves organically if you let it. Unless genre is somehow essential to whatever idea that's possessed you (if it is, that's totally cool of course), then locking yourself to a certain form or even a specific medium seems counterproductive. But probably that's just a matter of temperament

It'll probably be a good while before commercial games stop defining themselves primarily by genre, but it's a nice sign that the GTA games muddled the concept to such a degree that we didn't try to define it as a third-person-shooter-beat-em-up-driving-game-arcade-adventure but instead invented the term "sandbox game". Now of course, just a few years later, we have people complaining that Mafia II doesn't deliver on what they expect such a game to be. Some people will never be satisfied.

[mode7]

Of course I get you point about not thinking inside of genre borders, on the other hand it's not that easy to abandon the genre completely for video games cause they have to have a interface in some way. GTA 3 was very new and unique you say - I say it's just an action game. Braid? A platformer. Heavy Rain? Adventure. It's very rare for games to completely fall out of genres.
For me an adventure is definied as a game where you have to solve puzzles to progress. This is what I meant when I said a "pure" adventure. Every other element is up for discussion.

[GarageGothic]

Again, it's very easy to label and categorize something that already exists. But declaring "I want to make an adventure game" does not naturally lead to you producing Heavy Rain - if on the other hand you said "let's try to reinvent the adventure genre and forget about its conventions", then Heavy Rain could be the end result. Rules are there to be broken, not followed, so to speak.

I never said we should stop making point-n-click adventures, just that perhaps we shouldn't be so concerned about what's expected from the genre or even think that it's homogeneous enough to be worth keeping "pure". I think it's cool that you're trying out new things, just make the kind of game you would like to play whatever that entails. Looking forward to see what comes out of it

[CaptainD]

"Do you think classic point and click gameplay is outdated? "

The answer to that can only EVER be no! 

Though "point and click" has been interpreted in various ways by different developers, of course.  For instance Curse of Monkey Island had a completely different control interface to the first two MI games, but it was still point and click.

[Anian]

I guess a genere can be stale or oversaturated, but how can it be outdated? Are watercolors outdated because you can paint on your computer? Are books outdated cause you can watch a movie? Are freakin' card games or tetris outdated? ...you can say a lot of different things, including saying that you want to "try something new", but saying a game genere is outdated just makes you look like an arse. I think he's trying to get some publicity.
Yes, there was a disscusion on some new ideas to be brought to adventure games and I agree new ideas and elements should at least be considered if not implemented.

I mean, I guess, in some aspects stuff like graphics can be outdated, but I'd consider it only as an argument if the graphics were intended to be the best available and that was what was available, but as soon as graphics were made the way they are because of a design, style or similar choice decision (or some choices are made considering the budget), then it's hard or even impossible to state such a claim and proclaim them outdated.
Not to mention that if you look at games as art, would a game where you can only play by listening to the sounds and the screen was just black...would it be outdated cause there are games like Crysis or Killzone which have very detailed graphics?

When the time comes where you have a holodeck or something similar, then such games could probably be considered outdated, untill then he's an arse for saying it.

[GarageGothic]

Blow is quite clear on what his issues are with adventure games:

Adventure games are still what they used to be. And what the core gameplay actually is, is very different from what the designer intends. The designer wants it to be, “It’s going to be cool puzzle solving. There’s going to be a story and stuff.” But really what’s actually going through the players head in adventure games is, “I don’t know if I should be clicking on this thing” or “I don’t know if this is a puzzle” or “I don’t know if I need an item to solve this that I don’t have yet, or if I’m just not thinking.”

Can't say that I disagree, having played a lot of recent point-n-clickers like The Whispered World, Still Life 2, and even Gray Matter (which was a good game, but still had a lot of design issues getting in the way). There *are* well-designed adventure games that do have a sense of flow and good hinting - the Blackwell trilogy being a very good example - but on the whole the genre still offers plenty of situations where you find yourself walking around for half an hour clicking everything without a clue of what you're even supposed to accomplish before you can proceed. That, to me, spells broken.

[Snarky]

No doubt Blow can be a bit of a Blow-hard (wordplay!), but he made a really great game pretty much all by himself, so at least he has an excuse for being full of himself. I look forward to his take on the adventure genre.

I'm not 100% convinced of his assessment of the genre, but I'll admit this much: there are some perennial issues with adventure game puzzles that probably limit their appeal. No game so far - no matter how good - has found a general solution to those problems, and the only more-or-less effective approach designers are taking to address them is to make the puzzles easier and easier.

I think the problem may be inherent to the essential characteristics of the genre (which I consider to be a story told through puzzles). This definition implies that advancing the story is tied to solving the puzzles, and since a puzzle is a challenge where you have to work out a specific, pre-defined solution, it follows that if you can't find that solution, the story won't progress.

Maybe there are ways to see past the genre preconceptions and avoid this problem entirely, but I don't think the results will be adventure games any longer.

The best way I can think of to solve the issue in an adventure game structure is to put in a very elaborate integrated hint system, with many levels of subtle guidance. And putting in some hybrid gameplay mechanics to keep players interested while they are stuck can probably also mitigate the problem.

[Monsieur OUXX]

I really doubt the game will be the holy grail of adventure gaming (especially as he mentions Myst as main inspiration)

!

[Igor Hardy]

There *are* well-designed adventure games that do have a sense of flow and good hinting - the Blackwell trilogy being a very good example - but on the whole the genre still offers plenty of situations where you find yourself walking around for half an hour clicking everything without a clue of what you're even supposed to accomplish before you can proceed. That, to me, spells broken.

Figuring out what to do is what you're supposed to be doing in an adventure game. Getting stuck on a particular problem is not any more broken that not being able to get past an action-arcade challenge.

[mode7]

There *are* well-designed adventure games that do have a sense of flow and good hinting - the Blackwell trilogy being a very good example - but on the whole the genre still offers plenty of situations where you find yourself walking around for half an hour clicking everything without a clue of what you're even supposed to accomplish before you can proceed. That, to me, spells broken.

Figuring out what to do is what you're supposed to be doing in an adventure game. Getting stuck on a particular problem is not any more broken that not being able to get past an action-arcade challenge.

Exactly! And like in an arcarde games there are unfair challenges which makes you think "Why should I play this? This is just unfair" and challenges where you'll say it's my own fault ("Why didnt I think of this solution" / "Why weren't my reflexes faster")

This little distinction makes all the difference between great games and shitty games.

There's always been a solution to the problem of getting stuck. It's non-linearity. Think of monkey island for example. Can't beat the swordmaster? Try to find the treasure first first.
Most adventures are best when you have a set of objectives which you can solve independently. You can really get into the flow this way. RPGs like Oblivion extend this idea with their quests. You can really have 20 or more quests simultaneously (The quests themselves are an insult to your brain of course - this is where adventures are much more sophisticated and interesting). I'm going to try such an approach with Dacey II though I'm not sure on the design of the "quests" yet.

[Snarky]

The difference is that an action challenge is solved by performing well, while a puzzle is solved by realizing what the solution is.

The former can be achieved by continuing to play the game. The latter, in general, cannot.

To put it another way, if you play an action game and you keep dying, you're still playing, it can still be fun, and most of the time you can expect to improve with practice, so that you'll eventually be able to defeat it. If you play an adventure game and you're stuck, you're not really playing it anymore. The game has for all intents and purposes stopped until you trip the trigger that will cause new things to happen. The only way to keep meaningfully interacting with the game is to try to brute-force it: exhaustively searching every screen for hotspots or exits you missed, every conversation for dialog topics you haven't covered, and combining every possible inventory item and hotspot in a trial-and-error fashion.

You could counter that you should keep "playing the game" in your head by turning over the problem in your mind until you work it out. Perhaps that would be reasonable (though still, hardly ideal for a computer game) if people could always, in principle, solve any adventure game puzzle they were stuck on by reflection. However, unlike riddles and brain teasers where you know you have all the information to solve the puzzle, in adventure games the thing blocking you is often that you have not found some crucial piece of information, with which the puzzle would be trivial. And even if you do have all the pieces available, there's no guarantee that the puzzle makes sense so that you or any other reasonable person could actually figure it out. Or perhaps it is solvable, but not by you, in which case no amount of thinking will ever get you any further.

The upshot of this is that when you're stuck, there's a good chance that it's pointless to try to solve the problem by mentally "playing" the game in its intended fashion. Click-everywhere-with-everything or a walkthrough may be better choices.

You can't practice solving a puzzle. Either you know the answer or you don't. (Though solving similar puzzles can give you practice that will make it easier to solve this; I fail to see how you could apply that to adventure games, however. Providing players with an analogous puzzle would usually give away the solution immediately.)

[Igor Hardy]

You're right, but being forced to guess without certainty of success is the price of getting the feeling you have some amount of agency in the game's story. If the process of guessing a solution (and so being in "complete dark" for a while) wasn't important, you could have the same amount of fun and immersion by just reading what you need to do from a walkthrough.

I don't fully agree about action games (and other genres) being easier on the player. I recently gave up in frustration on the last boss level in Super Meat Boy - a game lauded for being difficult, but not punishing - and I don't think I'll want to return to it any time soon. And I did give up on quite a few games of other genres in the past too - definitely moreso than on adventure games. Even if they seemed potentially beatable, the amount of time investment needed was putting me off.

General statistics show the majority of gamers don't finish titles they started and I bet what stops them eventually is not just late levels boredom, but also frustration.

[Snarky]

You're right, but being forced to guess without certainty of success is the price of getting the feeling you have some amount of agency in the game's story. If the process of guessing a solution (and so being in "complete dark" for a while) wasn't important, you could have the same amount of fun and immersion by just reading what you need to do from a walkthrough.

I'm not sure what you mean by "guessing". Are you talking about randomly trying anything that seems like it might possibly produce any kind of reaction?

I definitely agree that finally working out the solution to a puzzle after having been stuck on it for a while can be rewarding, but I think that after the first few minutes, while you're ransacking your brain for possible avenues of progress, the period of being stuck is effectively a time when the game is broken. Non-linearity can help with that, since it gives you a chance to keep playing, keep interacting meaningfully with the game world, until maybe something clicks or you randomly activate whatever you had missed. But there's always going to be a point where players find themselves stuck in all the separate puzzles, which can make it even more frustrating because there's no way to tell which thing to focus on (as lack of progress in one part could possibly block other parts, if the puzzles are at all interlocking, which they often are, and since players who are stuck usually won't be able to discern the puzzle structure anyway).

I don't fully agree about action games (and other genres) being easier on the player. I recently gave up in frustration on the last boss level in Super Meat Boy - a game lauded for being difficult, but not punishing - and I don't think I'll want to return to it any time soon. And I did give up on quite a few games of other genres in the past too - definitely moreso than on adventure games. Even if they seemed potentially beatable, the amount of time investment needed was putting me off.

General statistics show the majority of gamers don't finish titles they started and I bet it's not just late levels boredom, but also frustration that eventually stops them.

You're right, and I don't mean to say that action games are never frustrating to the point of despair, or are always guaranteed to be fun even when you're losing. It's more this phenomenon of the game world "freezing up" when you're stuck on an adventure game puzzle, and that the game seems to say "go away, and come back when you know the answer" that I think poses a unique challenge for adventure games.

Like others have said, it takes you out of the game, and it's no wonder people run to walkthroughs. (I would have said that the easy access to walkthroughs, and the fact that they make the game trivial, is another problem adventure games have, but having faced the frustration of playing games for which no walkthroughs are available, I don't think that would really make matters any better.)

If there were something keeping you engaged with the game world, something keeping you exploring and revisiting the available places, things and characters, and maybe allowing you to tackle the puzzle from different angles, I don't think the problem would be any more serious than those facing any other game.

Aside from hybridization, it's hard to see how that could be, though.

[Babar]

This strict classification of genres seem a bit strange and exclusive. For example, I disagree with mode7s's definition of adventure. Heck, mode7's definition could apply to all those puzzle games if you played them in "story mode"- you're basically solving puzzles to progress. Except games like peggle and such aren't adventures.

Personally, I consider adventure games to be story-driven games- you have to advance the story by overcoming obstacles. These obstacles can be puzzles, but they can also be action sequences, strategic placement of troops, or a ledge on the other side of a large pit .

Feels a bit funny talking about this since I've never played Braid, have no knowledge of any of Blow's opinions, and hadn't heard any of this before. But reading through his article, I can't help but agree.

When was the last time something "fresh" was inserted in the genre? He mentions Loom, which I absolutely agree (although to be clear, I'm not saying that was the last time, just that he mentions it!), was an awesome and sadly underrated take on adventure games...it certainly didn't have "puzzles" in the traditional sense, and unlike many adventure games of the time (and even now), there really wasn't any way you could get stuck- you were always progressing or exploring, because you totally understood the mechanism of the gameplay (find music, use music on obstacle), and there was no problem of trying to understand what the designer wanted you to do.

A genre can certainly become outdated. Watercolours and books aren't genres of their respective fields. Baroque music, for example is outdated (I know it might be cheating to use a genre or style that is defined by the time it was made, but I'm sure you understand what I mean), but that doesn't mean people don't use it for inspiration to come up with new stuff.

I come off very often against puzzle design here in AGS (and am then usually misunderstood or misinterpreted as wanting some sort of "interactive movie" gameplay), but that is mostly because I personally think it is prohibitively difficult to make good puzzle-based adventure games, and not much in the last decade has shown me otherwise.

I'm not going to make any excuses about something being "art" or "entertainment" or such stuff, but I can conclusively say that there is a certain style of adventure game as made today, that I do not have fun playing, even if I enjoy the story. I can't really convince anyone else to make the sort of games I want to play, although in my mind, my reasoning seems sound, and I sometimes find it odd that other people like the stuff.

I mean, I enjoyed playing Monkey Island immensely. It was new and fresh and interesting when it came out, and had many very interesting uses of puzzles such as Insult swordfighting, and the voodoo recipes. But then when Curse of Monkey Island just copied the idea of Insult swordfighting (with 1 token difference), I groaned. When it was brought again in Escape from Monkey Island (in it's most basic and stupid form), I almost felt like smashing my head on the monitor because of their bland lack of originality.

When Monkey Island did the whole "replace the required ingredient for the voodoo doll with something similar but not the same to get interesting but still valid results", I found it funny and enjoyable. When 5 million games after used the same gimmick, I got tired of it.


Sorry about the puzzle rant. But yeah...innovation is important. It doesn't necessarily have to come from hybridisation, but that is certainly one way.


EDIT: I see I'm not the only one. What's happened to imageshack?! IS THERE NO SAFE CONSTANCE LEFT ON THE INTERNET?!

[Anian]

A genre can certainly become outdated. Watercolours and books aren't genres of their respective fields. Baroque music, for example is outdated (I know it might be cheating to use a genre or style that is defined by the time it was made, but I'm sure you understand what I mean), but that doesn't mean people don't use it for inspiration to come up with new stuff.

If this reffers to my comment, I meant water colors as in now you can do that on the computer basically and books as in now there's other media for storytelling (might've been a wrong example there).
Why would baroque music be outdated and how? It isn't fashionable, not a lot of people listen to it, is it simple to play, did some better baroque music come along? I mean, if anything, music has been simplified and dumbed down in recent years, even compared to 30 years ago.  

And on top of everything, even if something is labeled as "outdated", it doesn't mean people can't enjoy it, and I think that was being implied. I'd still say that it's a stale genre rather than outdated, it stopped evolving and that's the only real problem and I think that's the trouble of lack AAA titles (but now even that doesn't help stuff like FPSs, cause now that there's more money poured in there's less risk taking and so on). Top notch gamemaking has gotten really expensive and with that the distribtuion of capital has also been shrinked to a small selection.

Genres are very bendy in games, I mean FPS is also at it's basic a point and click gameplay, but generes like horror, fantasy horror, scifi, space opera, mystery etc. are more informative and precise and I think it takes both to define a game ie a scifi FPS or horror point and click adventure. How about rts games, are those outdated? What has gameplay significant changed in RTS games recently? Is Starcraft 2 a completly different game from a SC1? And yet people wouldn't consider RTS an outdated genre?  

[Snarky]

As definitions go, I don't think Babar's works, since it ends up classifying pretty much every game as an adventure; or at least those with a story.

I do agree though that some other, non-puzzle, gameplay is probably called for. Personally I see it as a complement, not a replacement for, traditional puzzles. And I think there are gameplay types that don't require action sequences or ledge-jumping, and are probably more compatible with adventure gaming. For instance, I would say that something like a slider "puzzle" really isn't a puzzle at all, but a problem: it's obvious what you have to do and in general terms how to do it (as opposed to a puzzle), you just have to work out a strategy to solve it. And that is something you can keep trying and practicing until you get it. The same with mazes: the goal and steps that need to be taken to get there are known, you just have to work out the map. A task rather than a puzzle, if you will.

I know many people dislike sliders and mazes, and I'm not necessarily arguing for them specifically. But they exemplify an alternative kind of gameplay that doesn't risk leaving players baffled with no idea of what they need to do to continue the game. (Except for Hard Space, with the most incomprehensible slider puzzle ever.) Loom is another good example.

My other pet idea is to take a page from platform adventures and give players an incentive for and something to do while poking around every corner of the "level", by scattering hidden, optional bonuses around. This could take the form of an integrated "hidden object" game, but wouldn't have to. Leisure Suit Larry 7 had the "Where's Dildo?" hidden objects and numerous easter eggs, Beyond Good & Evil integrated a photography mechanic, The Riddle of Master Lu scattered oddities around the game that Ripley could collect for his museum.

[blueskirt]

I don't think he's right but he's not entirely wrong either. Adventures games progressed technically but the core design remained the same since Zork, Myst and Monkey Island, you don't see much procedurally generated murder mystery or multiplayer adventure games or brand new ideas like that, and you don't see much games like Loom or The Last Express, people tend to stick to Zork, Myst, King's Quest or Monkey Island in term of design.

In the case of IF, sure you can now type stuff like "Pick up the vase, the keys and look under the desk" but do they react to commands like "How big is the vase? What color is it? What's under the desk? Where am I?" You don't see much articles about design or the actual mechanics of adventure games like Vince Twelve's article on badly designed interfaces and how useless it is to have two different verbs to talk and interact when you never talk with objects or physically interact with NPCs, an article that left a huge impact considering the number of AGS games released in the last years that used only two buttons, one to walk and interact and another to examine.

I also don't think anyone should feel offended or take Blow's remark personally or get the impression they're part of the problem either. There's absolutely nothing wrong with using the same old mechanics or making a game like Monkey Island if that's what you want to make, Abbaye Des Morts was one of the best platformer I played last year and it was a very basic yet fun platformer, same thing with Tiny Barbarian released earlier this year. You don't have to tread new grounds if you don't want to, I forgot who here keep saying this but to quote him or her, make the game you want to make. But I think we should all feel concerned that adventure games design are still stuck in the nineties.

[Igor Hardy]

I definitely agree that finally working out the solution to a puzzle after having been stuck on it for a while can be rewarding, but I think that after the first few minutes, while you're ransacking your brain for possible avenues of progress, the period of being stuck is effectively a time when the game is broken.

I seem to be that odd person who, when stuck, enjoys just walking around adventure game worlds, listening to the background music, trying all the different interactions (that's one of the reasons why I enjoy more complex interfaces) and even repeating certain dialogs with other characters (I hate when the game doesn't allow you to do that). I feel more confined and powerless when I'm stuck in a linear level of an action or strategy or puzzle game.

When was the last time something "fresh" was inserted in the genre?

Like anian, I think you could just as well argue there it's been years since we've seen something "fresh" in other genres. Or I could say that for example Ben's "!" felt really fresh and different to me - I loved having all the locations condensed on one screen. And I was impressed how decision making was handled in Downfall. Gemini Rue's "leg interactions" are something quite interesting too - it's not just Full Throttle like kicking.

"Something fresh" can be pretty much anything, not just Loom's unique interface which was rather tedious to use for me.

[Babar]

But the calling of it as being "outdated" isn't because of improvements in technology (such as your examples using books and paintings). It's because of it being a style or genre that is just...outdated.
I suppose it may just be semantics here, I'd consider "stale" and "outdated" to mean mostly the same thing.

But I'm talking about creation of the thing here, not the actual thing itself. Monkey Island is still a great game (especially if you haven't played the 5 billion derivatives that came after). Much of Bach's music is still awesome. But if someone tried making a game exactly in the style of Monkey Island or making music like Bach, it'd just be weird, and a "good copy" at best, or (more likely) crap at worst.

I can't really answer you about RTSes, as I really don't find them very interesting . I played....Warcraft 1 and 2, and even 3 when it came out, and I believe I probably played one of the Command and Conquers at some point, but they really don't stick in mind other than "1) build up troops and support 2) Attack". My favourite strategy game (for some inexplicable reason) is Colonization (the original one). It's turn-based, though, but that doesn't stop me from coming back to it about every year, and spending a week of almost continuous play beating it.

FPSes were pretty stale genre too, but then (people tell me that) Half-Life changed all of that. Personally, I still find them all very samey, but at least with FPSes I'm able to have some mindless fun whenever I want, so it makes for a good time waster.

As an aside, I'm going through the video GarageGothic linked, and it makes a very interesting definition for "Adventure Games" (as I consider and love them), but without calling them that. One of his suggestions for good game design" is story progression, i.e., not just having an initial condition and requiring the player to "solve" that.

You'd think that an adventure game would automatically have story progression, and it should, but many people don't seem to have that. For example, "I am at an archaelogical dig site, and I must go deeper in" is the initial condition and "I've made it to the deepest inside level of the dig site, some grand mystery has been shown, and I win!" is the end condition of an AGS "adventure game" I recently played. It had no story progression, just a situation that had been lengthened and "interactified" by artificially inserting puzzles into it.

The main focus of an adventure game shouldn't be the puzzles, and when the puzzles basically become the story, it's all lost

I have to rescue the princess - Okay, I've gotten to the castle - Okay! I've gotten past the guard in the castle - Okay, I've gotten/manufactured the key to the dungeon door! - Okay, I've gotten the princess! - Okay, now I've escaped the castle with the princess - Yay! I've won!

Isn't an adventure game in any sense at all to me, and is probably simply total boredom. But by mode7's definition (and I'm not knocking mode7 here, just that he exemplified the general understand of adventure games here), it is an "adventure game".

EDIT: As a response to a point Ascovel brought up that I hadn't responded to, I also enjoy the exploration aspect of many adventure games, and it most certainly can be counted as a form of gameplay for me. And the feeling I get when I find something new in my explorations is almost as rewarding as solving a puzzle to advance the story.

[Absentia]

The main focus of an adventure game shouldn't be the puzzles, and when the puzzles basically become the story, it's all lost

I'm only half in agreement here, but I might just be misunderstanding you. I think in an ideal adventure game, the story would be told through the puzzles, rather than puzzles being obstacles for story progression.  In fact, calling them 'puzzles' makes them feel separate from the rest of the game. It's an awfully difficult thing to design and keep consistent, but ideally puzzles need to be almost as important to the storyline as cutscenes and dialogue. It's my view that for good storytelling in games, the actions of the player (not the player's character) should be what directly relates to the story. That's not to say you don't need cutscenes / 'story progression'  but they should give a clear link between what the player did and what resulted. I'd rather think of story progression as an ongoing thing that's inclusive of puzzles, since theyre pretty much the most 'complex' way that the player can interact.

EDIT: As a response to a point Ascovel brought up that I hadn't responded to, I also enjoy the exploration aspect of many adventure games, and it most certainly can be counted as a form of gameplay for me. And the feeling I get when I find something new in my explorations is almost as rewarding as solving a puzzle to advance the story.

Agreed. I get the feeling that exploration is an overlooked element of adventure games.  Monkey Island has always had explorable islands that are avaliable from the onset of the game, which works great, but I'd love to see that taken a step further and have an even bigger explorable world,  almost like in an RPG.


I think the inherent 'flaw' in adventure games that Blow talks about is actually more of a 'hurdle.' The kinds of actions your player performs in adventure games are so much more detailed than in other genres. Most people know what a gun does, and most shooters will make it clear that there's a button which will fire your gun.  I'm sure a gun could be used for a few other nifty things that don't involve firing it, in the same way that Gordon Freeman's crowbar wasn't built for swinging at headcrabs, but you likely won't come across it over the course of a shooter (barring a QTE.)

Since there are potentially a limitless amount of actions that a character can do in an adventure game, both the functional uses and the unofficial uses of an item are valid. Then it becomes incredibly easy to start to enter the realm of subjection in regards to what the purpose of an item or some element of the world is.  In many adventure games, the lack of detail on objects (not so much on a visual level, but thats certainly a part of it) and the lack of explanation as to what the object might be used for (not just the functional use) leads to players falling back on their own ideas based on things that they know of in real life.  This is bad, because not everyone has the same experiences, knows the same things, and you have to design the game to only work in one way...most of the time.

I think the general problem is that making good adventure game puzzles is actually really freaking hard. You need to strike the balance between giving the player everything he needs to know (apart from logical deductions) but not holding his hand, not letting it become too nonsensical, but then still making it challenging enough that the player feels at least a little bit smart.

Another thing I think isn't done enough with adventure games is non-linearity. I imagine mostly because it'd be *insanely* difficult to do it well.  I would love to see adventure games where the manner in which you solve a puzzle has a consequence on the story, where dialogue isn't just a way to get hints and establish characters, but it can change elements of the story. Or perhaps the order in which you visit locations can impact the story as well.  Too often an adventure game is boiled down to this puzzles + story idea, but if most people identify an adventure game by its control scheme and interface, then it seems to me that there is a lot of unused potential in the genre.