The Common Elements of Adventure Games

The Common Elements of Adventure Games

In most adventure games, the player's avatar is presented with an explorable area containing a variety of puzzles or problems to be solved . Solving these problems opens up new areas for exploration or advances the story line in some way, giving the player new information and new problems to solve. Exploring the environment and manipulating items in it is a key element of most adventure games, although this is not an absolute requirement. It's theoretically possible to develop an adventure game that consists entirely of conversations with nonplayer characters (NPCs), but we haven't yet seen one.

Setting

In some kinds of games, such as chess and Quake , the setting is almost irrelevant. Serious players ignore the idea that chess is a medieval war game or that Quake is about space marines on an alien planet. They concentrate on the bare essentials of the gameplay: strategy in the former case and blazing action in the latter. If the setting intrudes, it is only a distraction.

In adventure games, this situation is reversed . The setting in an adventure game contributes more to its entertainment value than in any other genre . Whether it's grim and depressing, fantastic and outlandish, or funny and cheerful, the setting creates the world the player is going to explore and to live in, and it is for many players the reason for playing adventure games in the first place.

Emotional Tone

The majority of computer games have little emotional subtlety. Games of pure strategy have no emotional content at all; action games and war games have little more. Nor do they inspire complex emotions in the player. "Yippee!" and "Damn!" are about the limit of it ”exhilaration and frustration, respectively. Role-playing games (RPGs), with their deeper stories, offer greater opportunities for emotional expression, but even when their designers take advantage of it, the emotion tends to get lost in a morass of bookkeeping. The players spend so much time buying and selling equipment and trying to optimize their combat effectiveness that the emotional content of the story is obscured.

Adventure games do not have intricate strategy, high-speed action, or management details to entertain the player. The games move more slowly, which gives players the chance to create a world with a distinct emotional tone.

Interaction Model

All adventure games are avatar-based because the player is being represented by someone who is inside a story. However, the nature of the avatar in adventure games has changed somewhat over the years . Both Adventure and Myst were careful to avoid ascribing characteristics to the avatar in the game ”sex, age, and so on. The avatar wasn't a character with his or her own personal history; it was the player, but because the game didn't know anything about the player, it couldn't depict her or say much about her. A number of later text adventures asked for the player's name and sex when started up, using that information later in the game. They were trying to create the impression that it really was "you" in the game world, and they didn't want to offend players by assuming that they were the wrong sex. In Myst , the world was shown from a first-person perspective, and there were no mirrors in which the player could catch sight of herself.

Eventually, however, game designers began to find this model too limiting. They wanted to develop games in which the avatar was a character with a personality of his own, someone who belonged in the game world rather than being a visitor there. Two good examples of this approach are Sierra On-Line's Leisure Suit Larry series and LucasArts's Monkey Island series. In these games, the player could see his avatar walking around interacting with the world. Both Larry and Guybrush Threepwood, the hero of the Monkey Island games, are comic figures, and the games are played primarily for laughs.

There was initially some concern that male players would be unwilling to play female characters, but Lara Croft has demonstrated emphatically that this is not a problem. Female players quite justifiably get tired of playing male heroes because there are so many of them. We think the decision about whether to make your game's avatar male or female shouldn't be based on marketing considerations, but upon the needs of the story. In many cases, the avatar's sex really isn't important anyway, although it might influence the way other characters in the game react . Try to design an avatar who is interesting and likeable. Because this is someone the player will be seeing all the time, the avatar must be a person the player can identify with and must possess qualities he is likely to admire: bravery, intelligence, decency, and a sense of humor, for example. Chapter 5, "Character Development," discusses these issues in more detail.

Perspective

The preferred camera perspective of graphic adventure games is changing. The context-sensitive approach is traditional, but third- and first-person games are becoming increasingly common. Here we examine their advantages and disadvantages.

Context Sensitive

In the context-sensitive perspective, the game depicts the avatar over a (mostly) static background. When the avatar walks through a door or off the edge of the screen, the background changes to depict his new location. In the early days of graphic adventure games, the camera angles tended to be quite dull, as in Figure 15.1, from Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards .

Figure 15.1. A scene in the original Leisure Suit Larry .

As display hardware improved, game development began to require more artists and the quality of the artwork improved considerably. The game's art director chose a camera position designed to show off each location to best effect. Compare Figure 15.1 with Figure 15.2 from Grim Fandango .

Figure 15.2. A scene in Grim Fandango . Note the camera position.

A context-sensitive perspective lets the designer (or art director) play cinematographer, using camera angles, composition, and lighting to enhance the story. Use these techniques with discretion, however. A light touch is best. If you watch movies closely, you'll notice that the majority of shots are pretty straightforward. Movie directors don't use unexpected angles just for the fun of it; they do so to make a deliberate point.

First Person

One of the most famous graphic adventure games of all, Myst, used a first-person perspective. The player's avatar was not seen; in fact, like the earliest text adventures, the player didn't really have an avatar in the sense of a character who belonged in the story. Instead, it was the player himself who was in the game world. Unlike first-person shooters, however, Myst did not render a three-dimensional game world in real time. The game world consisted of a large number of prerendered still frames , which it showed one at a time as the player walked around. Being prerendered, these stills were finely detailed and highly atmospheric. On the other hand, they couldn't depict continuously moving objects or changes in the sunlight as time passed, and the player couldn't look at things from any angle. The world was rich but static.

A real-time 3D first-person perspective gives the player the best sense of being in the world himself, but it doesn't let the player see his avatar unless the game has a functioning reflective surface in it. It also tends to encourage a more action-oriented approach to playing the game, running around without paying much attention to the surroundings. Finally, 3D hardware is still not advanced enough to render extremely detailed scenes (a room crammed with hundreds of complex objects, for example) in real time.

Third Person

The third-person perspective keeps the player's avatar constantly in view, as in Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine or in action games such as Mario 64 . This perspective is common for action-adventures in which the player might need to react quickly (see Figure 15.3).

Figure 15.3. Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine . This is the typical action-adventure perspective.

If the third-person perspective always remains behind the avatar's back, however, the view gets rather dull and doesn't let the player really appreciate the environment. And unlike pure action games in which the avatar's actions and motivations are simple, adventure games sometimes need camera perspectives that allow for more subtle situations. In Figure 15.4, from Gabriel Knight 3 , Gabriel is hiding and watching to see when the maid is going to leave the room.

Figure 15.4. Gabriel Knight 3 in a context-sensitive camera angle.

The later Gabriel Knight games also allowed the player to move the camera around somewhat ”as do some of the better action games, such as Spyro the Dragon and Toy Story (see Figure 15.5). This mimics how a real person can turn his head to look in a given direction without moving his whole body.

Figure 15.5. Gabriel Knight as seen from a player-adjusted camera position. The Volkswagen would not be visible if the camera were behind him.

Case Study: The Secret of Monkey Island

The Secret of Monkey Island is more than 10 years old now, but it's worth studying because it spawned a highly successful franchise with three more games to date. Although it was ostensibly set on a Caribbean island in the 1700s and was about a young man who wanted to be a pirate, it was full of anachronistic touches and was played for laughs. In that respect, it seemed a lot like certain Disney animated films ” The Jungle Book , for example ”although slightly edgier.

When Ron Gilbert, the designer of The Secret of Monkey Island , started work on the game, he had already created an adventure game engine called SCUMM. SCUMM stood for Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion (an earlier LucasArts adventure game). SCUMM was an important innovation for graphic adventure games: It put the verbs on the screen so players no longer had to guess what their options were, and it did away with typing. More important for the developers, it enabled them to create new adventure games easily, without programming them from scratch each time. Three of the five Monkey Island games were made with SCUMM, as well as Maniac Mansion itself and several other LucasArts games.

The Secret of Monkey Island included a number of other innovations as well, most notably an insult-driven sword fight. This was a fight between the avatar, Guybrush Threepwood, and a master swordswoman. Rather than making the fight a physical challenge, which would have required a lot of additional programming and would have turned off some players, Gilbert chose to make use of (and make fun of) the way adversaries always insult one another in old swashbuckling movies. When your adversary insults you, you must choose an appropriate comeback quip. If you do, Guybrush advances in the fight; if you choose the wrong one, he is forced to retreat. If you make enough correct quips in a row, Guybrush wins the fight. The insults themselves contain cues as to which reply is correct, so you don't have to find out by trial and error.

It's this kind of humorous lateral thinking that separates great adventure games from merely good ones. The Monkey Island series belongs among the greats.

Player Roles

In most computer games, the player's role is largely defined by the challenges she will be facing , whether it's as an athlete in a sports game, a pilot in a flight simulator, or a martial arts expert in a fighting game. But adventure games can be filled with all kinds of puzzles and problems that are unrelated to the player's stated role. Indiana Jones is supposedly an archaeologist, but we don't see him digging very much. The role arises not out of the challenges (unless you specifically want it to), but out of the story. In an adventure game, the player could still be a pilot, if that's what the story requires, but it doesn't necessarily guarantee that she'll get to fly a plane. And she might be anything else or nothing in particular ”just an ordinary person living in an extraordinary situation.

A good many adventure games do connect the player's role with the game's activities, however. Players' roles often involve travel or investigation: explorer, detective, hunter, conquistador, and so on. The player can even be some kind of a scientist, if it's a branch of science that involves travel: geologist or zoologist, for example.

Be sure that the challenges are not too disjoint from the role, however, or it could be frustrating for the player. Heart of China , which was otherwise a straightforward adventure game, included a poorly implemented 3D tank simulator at one point. To continue the game, the player had to use the tank simulator successfully. This was a real problem; adventure game enthusiasts seldom play vehicle simulations, and many could not get past that point. It spoiled the game for them.

Structure

Adventure games typically have only one gameplay mode. Unlike sports games, with all of their team-management functions, or war games, with their battle planning, adventure games don't need a lot of specialized screens. Apart from looking at a map or the inventory or examining objects close up, the player always sees and interacts with the world in the same way, and that doesn't change from one end of the game to the other.

What adventure games do have, however, is a story structure: a relationship between different locations in the world and different parts of the story. Over the years, this has evolved. The earliest adventure games, including the original Adventure , mostly emphasized exploration rather than allowing the player to participate in a narrative of some kind. The player perceived little sense of time passing ”that is, of making progress through a story toward an ending. The game simply gave her a large space and told her to wander around in it. Structurally, it looked rather like the drawing in Figure 15.6.

Figure 15.6. The structure of early adventure games. Each circle represents a room. S is the starting room, and E is the end.

As adventure games got larger and began to include a story, designers started to break them up into chapters (see Figure 15.7). The player could wander around all he liked in the area devoted to a given chapter, but when he moved on to the next, the story advanced and there was no way back. If the player needed to take a particular object from one chapter to the next , the story would not let him progress until that object was in his inventory.

Figure 15.7. The structure of story-driven adventure games.

With the arrival of 3D graphics and the action-adventure, the stories began to be even more linear. Areas occasionally had simple side branches but few complex spaces or loops . The space in an action-adventure is structured more like that of an action game or a first-person shooter (see Figure 15.8).

Figure 15.8. The structure of action-adventure games.

Storytelling

This subject is discussed at length in Chapter 4. In this section, we just reiterate a few of the key points and talk about their significance in adventure games. Adventure games rely on storytelling more than any other genre. We can't tell you in this book how to create a good story, but you can learn from innumerable other resources. A great many theories exist, beginning with Aristotle's Poetics and continuing to postmodernist literature. If you're trying to make a game that's fun to play and, better yet, sells well, it's probably best to avoid some of the more outr literary theories and stick to what works for the vast majority of books, movies, and television. On the other hand, if you're trying to expand the boundaries of the interactive medium with a never-before-seen work of art, more power to you.

Here are a few pointers about storytelling as it applies to adventure games.

Dramatic Tension

The essence of any story, whether it's interactive or a fixed narrative, is dramatic tension: a situation or problem that is unresolved . This is what holds the reader's attention and keeps her around to see how it comes out. To create dramatic tension, you must begin by presenting the problem. In adventure games, this often happens in a cut scene right at the beginning of the game. The meaning of the scene doesn't always have to be clear; mystery and uncertainty are a common element of dramatic tension. For example, in The Longest Journey , we begin by learning that April Ryan, the avatar and heroine of the game, has been having increasingly vivid nightmares whose meaning she does not understand. At the beginning of the game, she has no goal other than to find out why she's having nightmares. Later, more dramatic tension is added as we learn the source of those nightmares and new problems emerge.

The resolution of dramatic tension occurs at a moment usually near the end of the story called the dramatic climax. Short stories frequently have only one source of dramatic tension and one dramatic climax; longer stories can have several in a row, of progressively increasing importance. A really long story can have several major dramatic climaxes at intervals, and what ties them together is a common theme, setting, or characters. Such stories are called epics or cycles . Richard Wagner's cycle of four operas, The Ring of the Nibelungs , is one such. Each opera is a self-contained story with its own dramatic climax, although some characters carry over from one opera to the next, and all of them concern the fate of the same magic ring.

As an adventure game designer, the puzzles create dramatic tension for you. However, they alone are not enough. They are small, individual problems. There must also be a larger problem that is the reason the player is playing the game in the first place.

The Heroic Quest

The majority of adventure games are heroic quests of some kind, a mission by a single individual to accomplish some great (or, in the case of Leisure Suit Larry , not-so-great) feat. Although it's possible to write an adventure game that is a detailed character study, no one has done so as a commercial product, and the emphasis on a single person doesn't lend itself to a sweeping epic with a cast of thousands. It's also possible to create a game about a small group of people, but giving the player a group to manage interferes with her identification with one of them as her avatar. Games about groups are easier managed as RPGs because of the natural "party" structure of the quests. An adventure game is more like a novel written in the first person.

Among the characteristics of the heroic quest is that it is always a movement from the familiar to the unfamiliar and from a time of low danger to a time of great danger. For example, if you have a big dramatic climax, it should be the last really major one in the game because anything that follows it is likely to feel irrelevant. This is why the boss enemies appear at the ends of levels in action games. If you defeat the Lord of Terror, it feels anticlimactic and rather unfair to have to fight his second-in-command afterward.

Occasionally exceptions to this structure arise, such as in stories in which the hero is abducted at the beginning, escapes , and is trying to return to his home. However, in these stories, it doesn't get easier and easier until he just strolls in happily. He often returns home to find that things have changed for the worse and must be corrected, or that he must leave again to hunt down his abductor.

Of course, none of this means that there can't ever be periods of quiet; in fact, there should be. In both of J.R.R. Tolkien's most famous books, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings , periods of great danger are interspersed with periods of safety and rest for the heroes, during which they can regain their strength. A long story that consists of nothing but action will feel unrealistic and silly after a while.

The works of Joseph Campbell and Christopher Vogler discuss the heroic quest at length, and we encourage you to read them for inspiration (see Appendix B, "Bibliography," for details).

The Problem of Death

For many years, game designers have debated the question of whether adventure games should allow the avatar to do something that kills him. Some adventure games have proudly noted on their boxes that you can't ever die; others have warnings in the manual that you might encounter dangerous situations. In some respects, this seems like a strange thing to worry about. After all, avatars routinely die in action games and get shot down in flight simulators, so why shouldn't they be able to die in adventure games?

The reason has to do with the nature of the gameplay. In a first-person shooter or a military flight simulator, it's obvious that the avatar is in mortal peril all the time. In fact, in most genres of games, it's win or lose, kill or be killed , and the enemies are clearly marked . Adventure games are different because they seldom have an explicitly declared enemy and the player is encouraged to go everywhere and touch everything. If you tell the player to explore the world and then you fill it with deathtraps, he's in for a frustrating time. Nowadays, most adventure games adopt a "fair warning" approach, making it clear when something is dangerous and (usually) offering a way of neutralizing or circumventing the danger. If you put a dragon in a cave, it's a nice touch to litter the entrance with the bones of earlier adventurers. That ought to get the point across.

Most adventure games have a save-game feature, so death isn't necessarily catastrophic; on the other hand, stopping to save the game does tend to hurt suspension of disbelief. Adventure games shouldn't be so dangerous that the player has to save all the time because it ruins the storytelling. If you are going to include death in your game, we encourage you to autosave the game at intervals so that the player can restore it even if he hasn't explicitly saved it. You don't have to let the player know that you're doing it. Again, it helps to preserve the suspension of disbelief if you don't.

Challenges

The majority of challenges in an adventure game are conceptual: puzzles that require lateral thinking to solve. There are many types of puzzles; we list a few here to get you started:

• Finding keys to locked doors. By doors and keys, we mean any obstruction that prevents progress and any object that removes the obstruction. Many adventure game puzzles are of this type. The challenge as a designer is to give players enough variety that they don't all seem the same.

• Figuring out mysterious machines. This is, in effect, a combination lock instead of a lock with a key. The player has to manipulate a variety of knobs to make a variety of indicators show the correct reading. Try to make their presence reasonably plausible ”too many adventure games include mysterious machines that are clearly just a puzzle, not a realistic part of their world.

• Obtaining inaccessible objects. In this kind of puzzle, there's an object ”whether it's a treasure or something needed for some other purpose ”that the player can see but not reach. The solution is often to find a clever way of reaching the object, perhaps by building some device that will give access to it.

• Manipulating people. Sometimes an obstruction is not a physical object, but a person, and the trick is to find out what will make the person go away or let the player pass. If it's a simple question of giving him something he wants, then it's really just a lock-and-key puzzle. A more creative approach is to create a puzzle in which the person must be either defeated or distracted. The player should have to talk to him to learn what his weakness is.

• Navigating mazes. This is an area that's deliberately confusing to move around in so that it's hard to know where you are and to get where you want to go. Use mazes sparingly. They're easy to make badly but difficult to make interesting. A maze should always contain cues that an observant player can notice and use to help her learn her way around.

• Decoding cryptic messages. Many players enjoy decoding messages, as long as there are sufficient clues to help out.

• Solving memorization puzzles. These puzzles require the player to remember where something is ”a variant of concentration. She can usually defeat these by taking notes, but that's reasonable enough; it's how we remember things anyway. The real challenge for you as the designer is to create a realistic reason for the puzzle to be in the game.

• Collecting things. This is really a compound version of other puzzles; the player's job is to find all five of the pieces of the magic whatchamacallit.

• Doing detective work. The basis for lots of police-procedure games, detective work is great fun. Instead of solving a "puzzle" per se, the player has to figure out a sequence of events from clues and interviews with witnesses. It doesn't necessarily have to be a crime; it could be any unknown event.

• Understanding social problems. No, we don't mean inflation or unemployment. The challenges of understanding, and perhaps influencing, the relationships between people is a little-explored aspect of adventure game design. Most of the people in adventure games have very simple, mechanical states of mind. If we devote a little more effort to it, people, rather than objects, could become the primary subject of adventure games, and this would make the games much more interesting.

Only playtesting can tell you whether a puzzle is too hard or too easy, and unlike other genres, you can't adjust an adventure game's difficulty by tweaking some numbers . When designing puzzles, we encourage you to try to allow for lateral thinking of the players. If there's more than one way to solve a puzzle, don't arbitrarily restrict the player to your preferred method. Obviously, you can't build in multiple solutions to every puzzle, but if the player tries something entirely logical and there's no good reason why it doesn't work, she's going to be frustrated.