The Death and Re-birth of Genre
By Steve
Today, let’s consider the adventure game. Dead as a doornail. Sure, there’s a thriving community of people admiring games like The Longest Journey. But if you’re thinking this is a vibrant category, you’re in denial.
So, what happened? At one point, adventure games were the biggest, most important PC genre. They had the best technology, they got the most press, and they were becoming the most “cinematic.” (And some, like Day of the Tentacle, should be on any reputable “top games evar!!!1!” lists.)
But as soon as DOOM dropped, it was over. In a couple of years, every other genre surpassed the adventure in technology, most games adopted some form of rudimentary storytelling, and almost all genres started to introduce more and more puzzle-like elements. In other words, all of your adventure itches could be scratched elsewhere.
In response, adventure games went more hardcore. Their puzzles got more and more annoying as designers felt a compulsion to extend play time by making the narrative more elaborate and in-your-face, and/or the fans were demanding that puzzles became harder and harder. When a vocal minority starts to design your games, you’re on the slow road to oblivion. (See: Flight sims, wargames.)
There was always a bigger, more fundamental problem with adventure games: Their puzzles are a series of brick walls. If you can’t figure something out, you can’t advance in the game. If you hit a similar barrier in most action or strategy games—a boss you can’t defeat, some seemingly insurmountable wave of soldiers, a level that defeats all your normal tactics, etc.—you at least feel like you can keep playing, get better, and move forward. Not so in an adventure, at least in the pre-GameFaqs days.
So, with the gameplay stagnating, the technology falling behind, and the audience moving on to other genres, adventure games died. But they’re coming back thanks to casual games.
There’s this incredibly weird category of casual games that are literally pixel hunts. Dubbed “Seek and Find,” or “Search and Find,” or “Hidden Object” games, you’re supposed to find objects on a static screen. They all have some elaborate setting and storyline filled with text and characters that you can easily avoid (or choose to get immersed in). They’re barely games—there are typically time limits, and most don’t let you just randomly click all over the screen without some penalty—but they’re oddly compelling.
But a casual game like Azada takes that basic “Seek and Find” formula, adds in some additional bridging puzzles, and you end up with a game with a series of static screens filled with items to discover. You put these items in your inventory and combine them in order to open up additional areas. And some areas require that you solve puzzles to advance. And it’s all wrapped up in a storyline, further driving your desire to “finish” the game.
In other words, it’s an old-school adventure game.
So, while it’s true that genres get killed off, they can also return again as other, newer genres evolve from the wreckage. And in a weird sort of irony, they often end up back where they started.
(And to tie this into the previous post, the core mechanic of adventures—finding and using to stuff to solve things to progress through a story—is retained.)
August 16th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
Another factor in the decline of adventure games is that they started to suck. Big time. The shoddy Myst clones did as much damage as DOOM, if not more. By the time late period LucasArts classics like The Curse of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango, no one but the devotees cared any more. The adventure genre wasn’t killed off; it committed suicide.
August 16th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
And what the hell is Azada? Go go Google-fu!
August 16th, 2007 at 11:21 pm
I added a link to Azada, though it might help to try some of the other hide-and-seek games to see how it’s an improvement/evolution. As a pure adventure game, it’s still pretty lacking.
August 18th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
Sure, but still pretty diverting. At least enough for me to lay down $20 American. Azada reminds me of the themed puzzle collection from the late-90s, Pandora’s Box. Only the variety and execution of the puzzles make it much more interesting. And it is so odd to see pixel hunts, the bane of the genre, transformed into entertaining gameplay.
Thanks for the tip!
August 20th, 2007 at 6:06 am
My only problem with adventure games is they aren’t about adventure. They’re about scavenger hunting, clicking all over the screen, and solving problems in one way and one way only. They’re more like guess-what-the -programmer-wants-you-to-do-next games.
August 20th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
[…] Good timing, I just found via gamesetwatch a post on the return of the adventure genre. I still don’t think the new casual versions have the heart the oldskool Sierra and LucasArts […]
August 21st, 2007 at 12:07 am
I am so SICK of people talking about the adventure game genre being dead. Hello? Take a LOOK at how many commercial releases of adventure games there’ve been this year not counting the portal games.
Are they the top genre? No. Are they dead as a doornail? Hell no.
August 21st, 2007 at 1:50 am
There are a lot of releases, but the adventure game loyalists aren’t the most discriminating bunch.
Anyway, they’re only dead relative to their peak. But ultimately the article was about how they’ve come back, in a slightly modified form. And the shelves of Target is full of them: Mystery Case Files, etc.
August 21st, 2007 at 9:55 am
Pc games are deader than dead, if games like the Sims sell millions of copies of it’s “furniture expansion pack”
August 21st, 2007 at 10:19 am
Good article. Reminds me of the article bakc in 2000 on OldManMurray (now defunct, I think) where he walked through a particularly idiotic puzzle in Gabriel Knight 3 and concluded adventure gaming commited suicide.
“Who Killed Adventure Gaming”
http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html
I miss OldManMurray.
August 22nd, 2007 at 4:56 am
Four years ago, I felt the casual game space was a great target for adventure games. Having experienced the history of computer games, I bet it would be repeated, but on a mainstream scale. First there were simple puzzle and action games. As those failed to evolve creatively, interactive fiction took the lead. Casual gamers are tiring of match-3 and ’service’ games. I-spy games are the rage, and developers are able to integrate richer stories alongside them. The casual gamer has started to become a little more sophisticated.
My early bet was a game called ‘The Witch’s Yarn’. It had a cleverly simple control mechanism, but it failed to win the casual gamers. Two mistakes: First, there was too much text. Casual gamers don’t come to games for a reading experience. Two, although the puzzles were designed to be much simpler than traditional adventure games, most were still to difficult for casual gamers, who might have swapped a few gems on the screen, to wrap their heads around the narrative tasks involved. Otherwise, the game had decent graphics and terrific music. It still sells, but not enough to call it a success.
In a second attempt to woo the casual gamer to richer narrative games, I’m taking the classic RPG formula with its traditional combat systems (weapons, spells, roguery) and replaced them with casual games that also represent resolving conflict. However, the fantasy world is small town USA in the 1920s. Your band of adventurers are high school girls. Their weapons of battle are: taunting, fibbing, exposing secrets, flirting, etc. Each is a fun, quick, little game that keeps the story moving from encounter to encounter, and you can explore the town and choose your encounters.
Clearly, that may be more than new casual gamers might want to tackle, but I’m targeting experienced casual gamers and regular gamers who are looking for something that isn’t more orcs and elves, or anime. Maybe something outrageous, like the fantasy lives of Mae West and Marlena Dietrich, when they were young and dangerous.
August 22nd, 2007 at 2:46 pm
I’d just like to point out that “Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble!” is one of the greatest game names ever. I want to try it for that reason alone.
It’ll be interesting to see if casual gamers do become more sophisticated. Right now, they seem to lap up the most derivative games imaginable—oh no, another match 3! another plate spinner!—though I’m not sure if those games are selling or just garnering a lot of downloads on portal sites.
I’m also curious if there’s a market for more “hardcore” casual games, i.e. ones that get the typical PC gamer—or ex-PC gamer—to pony up $20 for a nicely produced, old-school genre game. (As in, let’s say I made a little tactical combat game that mimicked X-COM.) I’d like to think that would work, but the challenge is getting those people to discover your game. Casual gamers know where to find games; the standard portals get ridiculous traffic.
But a place where Diner Dash is the #1 download isn’t likely to be one where you’d get much of a conversion rate for my X-COM example.
August 22nd, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Thank you, Steve.
Match-3 and plate spinners are selling very well, indeed! (grimace) But they are in decline compared to the rising star of i-spy games. See Game-Sales-Charts:
http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/
Million dollar companies are surviving on single hit titles. (I know, where’s our share???)
For a little casual combat, try Oasis, or Tower Defense.
August 27th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
*GameFAQs, not GameFaqs
Sure, there’s a thriving community of people admiring games like The Longest Journey. But if you’re thinking this is a vibrant category, you’re in denial.
I thank you for the recognition, but if you think the Adventure isn’t a thriving genre, then I’m curious which genre you were reviewing in CGM’s final years. Did you miss Fahrenheit, Dreamfall, Phoenix Wright 1 & 2, Sam & Max episodes, and Hotel Dusk?
In 2006, the Adventure genre alone outshined most of the major mainstream genres, and with help from simulators of various sorts, turn based strategy games & some space games, the niches completely dominated the entire year. In fact, one of the best First Person Shooters of 2006 was itself just a niche simulator: Red Orchestra.
My only problem with adventure games is they aren’t about adventure. They’re about scavenger hunting, clicking all over the screen, and solving problems in one way and one way only. They’re more like guess-what-the -programmer-wants-you-to-do-next games.
Only the bad ones, or occasionally the bad aspects of the good (but not great) ones. Adventure is really only supposed to be about one thing: Adventure. That’s what makes games like The Longest Journey and The Secret of Monkey Island so magical. It has almost nothing to do with the puzzles, the interface, or even the comedy scattered throughout. (part of the reason I think Dreamfall Chapters should have even less “gameplay” than Dreamfall did) They were about having an adventure. Monkey Island was even about an adventure that carried you out on the high seas! =O
In fact, I consider some of the more story based Action Adventures to be true Adventure games too. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is the kind of game Dreamfall was probably trying to be (though the primary fanbase of Funcom would never have completed the battles towards the end of that game) that gives you a taste of adventure in a completely different interface from the old 2D Point & Click style.
There are a lot of releases, but the adventure game loyalists aren’t the most discriminating bunch.
The mainstream is even less discriminating. Perhaps on different things, but niches focus on more important things that are deeper than how shiny the graphics are and how loud the guns are.
I can certainly agree that the more casual angle of games is bringing another thriving niche market into play though. The Wii is designed to take full advantage of these types of things & the DS is driving just about all the old 2D genres.
Ultimately, the true Adventure genre consists of games that divert focus from all the distractions of relatively game-y conventions (fun as they may be on their own, there’s still something else out there) and deliver you an experience, one not buried in fluff. (yes I’m staring at 70 hours of grinding, and yes, I do hate some puzzles)
August 28th, 2007 at 12:32 am
I’d say Sam & Max is the only one of the bunch that really qualifies. Fahrenheit is more of an action/adventure, for example. And I wasn’t fond of The Longest Journey or its sequel.
(I wasn’t including console games, for the most part, because I was really talking more about how the adventure has been taken apart and reassembled in the PC download casual space.)
Your last statement about “true adventures” reminds me of one of the things that was off-putting about adventure fans; their sense of superiority. (Wargamers and sim guys are like this too.) Why is an adventure game somehow less fluffy than a shooter? Bioshock has a deeper, more detailed, and more serious story than any adventure game I’ve ever played, for example. It just has you shooting things between narrative bits instead of solving (generally) arbitrary object-oriented puzzles.
August 30th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
Well, I won’t try to say I don’t consider myself more well rounded than the average gamer, because I do, but I think it’s important to clarify that I don’t find Adventures to be inherently better than other genres. It’s a bit like comparing action movies to comedies. Actually, in this case I guess you have action comedies as well, so the complete compatibility isn’t helpful if I’m trying to say that it’s a good thing to keep things separate sometimes…
Fahrenheit is more of an action/adventure
Take this for example. Fahrenheit is another example where the action didn’t inhibit the story at all - much less than puzzles to boot. I know I’ve never played Adventure games for the puzzles, even though a few have been funny in their own weird way throughout the history of Adventure gaming.
In fact, the only reason I’ve been sticking around with the Adventure genre (or was ever drawn to it) is because it usually likes to focus on the story. Whether that involves comedy, suspense, mystery, or an epic struggle really doesn’t matter to me. I just enjoy the focus on that. Usually developers who have nothing but puzzles to work with take a lot of time with their stories.
But really, if I’m talking about things like “true adventure”, it’s really more about the core that most of these games are built around. You can build a game around racing, sword fighting, blowing stuff up, sneaking around, sports (or make a sport out of shooting things in CPL), jumping on things without falling down, and of course around a story. The Adventure genre & RPG genre are the two that nearly always focus on the story “core” (forgive my lack of a better term - I’m not very articulate, but I’m working on it) but I find most RPGs get distracted in filler content too frequently for my liking.
I think it’s convenient that the Role Playing Game genre is similarly dependant on stats just as Adventures stereotypically use puzzles. I really don’t care about either of those elements. And really, the idea of playing a role that can expand into a large variety of options is a design mechanic that could easily fit into just about any other genre.
And actually I didn’t plan this ahead, but System Shock 2 - conveniently another Irrational game - seems to fit all three cores here quite well. It had a fair bit of role playing, enough for me to consider it an offbeat RPG. It was obviously a magnificent game based on the First Person Shooter mechanics primarily. And like several of Irrational’s games, it had a great way of telling a story.
If more genres would frequently take the idea of telling a story in a game as a serious mechanic in the overall experience, then you could truly experience an adventure in just about any genre, regardless of the gameplay itself. If it works even for rides in Universal & Disney theme parks (the 3D Spider-Man ride wouldn’t be nearly as cool if it was just a psychadelic 3D light show without the whole story experience to go with all the cool effects - themselves amazing) then it should be good enough for just about anything.
I’m just about ideas of how to say this, so I’ll switch media entirely, and equate The Matrix to a FPS/Adventure hybrid, the nearly brain dead Matrix sequels (though still visually entertaining - well the middle one anyway) to a stereotypical FPS, and Blade Runner to a fairly traditional Point & Click Adventure. The plain shooters are always fun, but we do see them every few months. (yet they’re also more reliable) A film like Blade Runner doesn’t have a whole lot of excitement going on in it (I could yawn through almost every puzzle I’ve ever solved that didn’t have comedic value in itself) but it’s still an amazing experience. And then a film like The Matrix comes along and has a strong focus on both basic cores of the movie going experience, which makes it memorable in both regards. I still consider it a story movie, and it was made better by having the action, and better still by keeping nearly all of that action character driven.
But what do I know? The only games I’ve played in the last month are Tetris & various pinball machines at the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas. (I’m still emulating them on my PC, but it’s not the same) I’ve been focusing almost entirely on the fun part of gaming lately. I’m not spiteful of games without stories, but whenever I’m in the mood for it, I like to turn toward games with strong stories.