Metagaming in adventure games - good or bad?

[Charity]

Dying from anything, walking-dead, maze and timed puzzles are also realistic, but there's a reason why they're not in modern adventure games anymore.

Walking deads are not realistic.  They stem from the entirely unrealistic (but necessary) dynamic of only having a limited number of predefined ways of solving a problem.  True, in real life it is possible to sabotage yourself or fail to the extent that a given goal that was once conceivably within your reach no longer is, but when this happens, your life does not just stop.  It doesn't get stuck--at least, not in the way it would in an adventure game.  And generally this doesn't happen because you forgot to pick something up or for some other trivial nonsense.  (Okay maybe in bureaucracy, but that's different)

Death from everything isn't that realistic either.  True, there are a lot of things out there that can hurt or kill you, but games tend to unrealistically exaggerate the fragility of human life and/or the prevalence of lethal entities--and then, not even consistently.  True, people can die from most of the things that kill you in an adventure game, but it isn't a given that you will die every time you fall in the river, every time you get shocked, every time you get hit by a car.  The other problem with this is that game characters are unrealistically clumsy--or rather, the way we control them is.  No matter how intuitive your control system is, it will never approach the complexity with which real humans can interact with their environment.  The subtleties of footing and finger movement and the senses--things that allow us, for instance, to drive safely.  In real life we surround ourselves with potentially lethal entities all the time, but we are rarely at any significant risk from any of them.  Most people will even have a number of "close ones" before they finally die.  Serious injuries they recover from, or near misses, such as when you nearly avoid being run over.  If the game worlds and the way we perceived and interacted with them were truly realistic, death would be quite rare in them.

Part of the problem with realism in games will always be with the player.  One of the problems is that as a player I will never see the consequences in the game world as real enough.  Whether I know that I won't die, or that I can reload, or that I can restart, I will always engage in much riskier behavior than I would in real life.  When the game world makes it clear that there will be real consequences, in game, however, I may react oppositely and become paralyzed.  Unlike the real world, I will never be able to anticipate the risks I am taking with a high enough degree of accuracy to accept that I in fact have a reasonable life expectancy of 70 years, or even 7 days, for that matter.

These concerns relate to timing puzzles in games just as easily as they relate to death in games.  In real life we have a heightened awareness of time, we have more time, and we have a much larger arsenal of ways to compensate when we, for instance, realize we are going to miss an appointment or deadline.  So to say it is realistic to have timing puzzles in a game is only an approximate truth.

It should also be pointed out that the closer we get to solving these issues and making our games "real," the more they will become sandbox games, and not story driven adventure games.

So I guess I agree that not every step we take toward realism is a step toward a more immersive game, especially if that game is an adventure game, even if I do think that on the whole, a game that behaves like reality, is perceived like reality, and is interacted with like reality, would theoretically be about the most immersive gaming experience possible.

That said, I think careful, if heavily stylized, attention to reality is an excellent strategy for creating a more believable and immersive world.  Just remember that as in books and film, the trick is to capture the essence of reality in a way that does not frustrate your audience or compromise your artistic intent.  When you write dialogue, you want the flow of the conversation to be "real," you want people to say things that they would actually say, but at the same time, you don't actually want to write word for word what people DO say in the real world.  You'd be bogged down in "uh"s and "errr"s and awkward pauses, people repeating themselves, cliches, mumbling, unintentional rhyming and alliteration, and not only will this be annoying to your readers, but they will likely get lost in all the excess crap and actually lose track of the layers of meaning that the same exchange would effectively convey in real life.  So instead you try to capture the essence of what people say, the essence of how they say it, and this is a flexible and somewhat subjective thing, but it will still only benefit from careful attention to reality.

Likewise, when we talk about things like motive and carrying capacity for game characters, getting too bogged down in a perfect duplication of reality will be counter intuitive and ultimately impossible, but that isn't a blanket excuse to simply ignore reality in favor of an unrealistic status quo that everyone accepts.  Not saying there should never be games where you get to put tires and mini-refrigerators in your pants, or pick up hairballs and gum wrappers and press strange buttons "just 'cause."  But if you do this, do it on purpose, and when your world is not meant to be humorously or surreally counterfactual (and even when it is, really), pay attention to what reality is actually like, and try to capture some essence of it in the way your world behaves and in the way people interact with it (even if you do achieve this by showcasing reality's absence), because this is a big part of what will draw people in.

[Stupot]

In a way, the player character is an extension of the player himself.  So if I as a player know something - If I figure out a solution or realise I needed to pick up that coathanger a few screens back - I would assume my character would have made the same observations given that he is IN the very scene that I am looking at.  And I wouldn't mind trekking back a few screens to fetch said coathanger.  But a balance is needed, because you don't want the whole game to consist of trekking back and forth picking up items as an when you realise you need them.

Although you could argue it from a different angle... Having said all that about the protagonist being an extension of the player, Adventure games are not Role-playing games... you could argue that the puzzles are for you (and the character is just a proxy for you to solve them) and that the story is for the character) and you are his means of experiencing it.

I guess theres no right or wrong answer, but it's an interesting discussion.

[Charity]

You could also say that the player is merely a voyeur, like all audiences, and the player character is his/her own entity entirely, except that there is an intersection wherein the part of the mind that solves problems is largely the same for each.  Even their motivations are different, really, because the character has some objective in the interest of which these problems must be solved, but the voyeur just wants to see what happens if the character succeeds, and may or may not have any preference as to what happens in the end.

[Wesray]

Interesting discussion!

Generally I agree with most here that following the typical adventure game conventions is fine in most games. People expect to collect everything they can, and bending realism a bit shouldn't be a problem as long as the game doesn't aim to be uber-serious or realistic. Some backtracking here and there is fine for objects that are too big or dangerous or that the player character really shouldn't expect to be useful until a later point of the game.

In semi-serious games I enjoy it when the often crazy adventure game logics are connected to the PC's character traits. E.g. I loved the confession scene in Ben Jordan 7 where Ben could confess that he was a cleptomanic. In my own game the player character is known for his unconventional ways of problem-solving/thinking and teased by his girlfriend about it.

What about:

Player sees a crowbar > "I don't need a crowbar." > Player later discovers a crate that's nailed shut > Player goes back to crowbar > "Ahh! This should do!"

That was done in Black Mirror, and done well I feel, though not everyone enjoyed it. Of course it helped that you could always count on the needed object being somewhere close by, not at the other end of the game world. On the other hand finding these objects was sometimes a case of needless pixel hunting. But overall the design worked because the game world was very realistic.

In comedic games I have no problems at all with filling the inventory with all kinds of strange or even bulky objects. That's part of the fun. One of the best visual jokes in Simon the Sorcerer was the animation of the PC cramming a 8-foot ladder in his tiny sorcerer's hat. In such games it is also totally fine to find the problem a long way after the solution. I have fond gaming memories of carrying weird (or sometimes seemingly very useful) inventory items through most of the game until I was finally put into a situation where I could use them.

[Stupot]

I've just finished the first draft of a design for a short room escape game that involves the player doing a bit of research on the internet to help him solve some of the puzzles... It's called 'The Cupboard', and the character is (you guessed it) trapped in a cupboard.  There are many puzzles within the cupboard, but some end up rewarding you with URLs which will lead to webpages that will contain information useful for solving the 3 'main' puzzles.

Then I remembered this discussion...  See, It's a first-person game, so essentially you are the one trapped in the cupboard... a cupboard with no computer and no internet access, so making the player use outside knowledge to solve the puzzles would be an example of metagaming.

As a player, would this bother you, or would you happily embrace this aspect of the gameplay?  (personally I'm really pleased with the result and can't wait to implement it into an actual game.)

I could solve the problem by plonking a working, internet-ready laptop in the cupboard and having a message like 'Ooh, that's handy.  I have full internet access' when clicked on, which would give the player license to exit the game window (it will be windowed) and use the real-life internet, as though it were in-game.

[GarageGothic]

Stupot: Perhaps a cell phone with internet access would be more plausible, or a PDA of some kind if you don't want to give explanations for why he can't call 911. This totally makes me wonder how many people have accessed this webpage while actually being stuck in a closet.