Adventure Games

There were plenty of early, blundering attempts in the general direction of storytelling. The adventure games of the early 1980s made an attempt in this direction. Although they were really just extended groups of random puzzles, they were often organized along the lines of a story. InfoCom pushed things forward in the mid-80s with a series of artistically impressive adventure games. Trinity, A Mind Forever Voyaging, and a well-done adaptation of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy all showed how much could be accomplished within the limited confines of the text adventure genre. However, text adventures were overtaken by graphic adventures, which tended to be weaker on story, and the promising initial effort led nowhere. (The LucasArts graphics adventures provide an important exception; they pushed the story aspect harder than most graphic adventures. Sadly, despite their great commercial success, they failed to inspire the industry to follow their lead.) Nowadays, text adventure aficionados prefer the cognomen "interactive fiction," but in fact, the genre remains nothing more than a series of obscure puzzles stitched together under a single storyline. The most successful of these to date is the Myst series of graphic adventures. They boast glorious graphics, a well-done storyline, and a better-than-average set of obscure puzzles.

Some enthusiasts claim that adventure games like Myst and its sequels constitute genuine interactive storytelling. To say this with a straight face requires a considerably expanded definition of interactive storytelling. The story in an adventure game is fixed and complete; there is nothing for the player to do other than to experience the story. Myst worked well because the story was presented in a fragmented form that required the player to piece it together to understand it. But there was no interaction whatsoever between the player and the story. No matter what the player did, it was always exactly the same story. The most interactivity he could hope for was to experience different fragments of the entire story in which case, the experience was unsatisfying because the story never came to a conclusion.

NOTE

As a historical side note, I should point out that the idea of presenting a fragmented story for the player to piece together was not original to Myst; I believe that Rob Swigart created the first such adventure game sometime around 1988.

Sadly, despite many years of dedicated work by a cadre of devoted followers, adventure games have failed to deliver anything more (in the way of storytelling) than the early InfoCom games. The genre has its appeals, but storytelling is not one of them.