What Is an Adventure Game?

An adventure game isn't a competition or a simulation. An adventure game doesn't offer a process to be managed or an opponent to be defeated through strategy and tactics. Instead, an adventure game is an interactive story about a character who is controlled by the player. Chapter 4, "Storytelling and Narrative," discussed this idea in theoretical terms. The adventure game is the idea's practical application, although the way in which interactivity and narrative are handled varies considerably from game to game.

All adventure games are conceptual descendants of the original Adventure . Although the genre has changed considerably over the years , the games are characterized by certain qualities that they all share: exploration, collection or manipulation of objects, puzzle solving, and a reduced emphasis on combat and action elements. This doesn't mean that there is no conflict in adventure games (although many adventure games have none) ”only that combat is not the primary activity.

The Original Adventure

Adventure was a text-only game. Its gameplay was simple but ”at the time that it was written ”completely novel . The player was an explorer, wandering around in an enormous cave filled with treasures and dangers. A variety of obstacles prevented her from getting into the deeper parts of the cave, but by cleverly using the things that she had found, the player could unlock these areas and continue exploring. The object of the game was to gather all the treasures and bring them out of the cave.

Adventure was the first computer game to give the player a real illusion of freedom, and this remains an important quality of adventure games today. Before Adventure , computer games tended to ask specific questions and expect specific, often numeric answers ("How much money do you want to spend this year?"), or to present players with a fixed list of options and ask them to choose one. The player could type anything she wanted in Adventure , and game would try to respond appropriately. Of course, the game understood only a limited number of words, but because it didn't tell the player what they were, she never knew the full scope of what it would allow her to do.

Adventure also brought personality to computer gaming. Most of the games written at the time spoke to the player in a kind of programmerese. They gave prompts such as "Enter horsepower:" and printed error messages such as "Value too high, re-enter (5-500):". Adventure spoke to players as if it were a person rather than a machine, saying "I don't know how to do that" rather than "Invalid command." It could become sarcastic if the player tried to do something ridiculous or impossible , or even be funny occasionally, another rarity among games of its day. Comedy remains a major element of many adventure games because it discourages the player from taking the game too seriously. Breaches in suspension of disbelief don't bother the player as much in a comic setting as they do in a dramatic one because the player is less immersed in the story in the first place.

The Growth of Adventure Games

Adventure games were highly popular in the early days of personal computers. Because they contained no graphics, they were inexpensive to develop and allowed great scope for both the designer's and the player's imaginations. A group of researchers at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, inspired by the original Adventure , wrote a much larger adventure game named Zork on the mainframe there. Soon afterward, they converted it to run on personal computers and founded a company, Infocom, devoted to developing text adventures . Infocom published games about all kinds of things: fantasy magic, film noir detective stories, exploration of an ancient Egyptian pyramid, and so on.

The original Adventure didn't have any plot; it just offered a space to explore and puzzles to solve. With minor exceptions, its world did not change as time passed. But it wasn't long before games began to explore the notion of "interactive fiction," an ongoing story in which the player was an active participant. Some games were sold along with books that players were supposed to read ahead of time. Of all the branches of computer game design, interactive fiction has been the subject of the most academic research because it challenges traditional conceptions of what narrative is and does.

As soon as personal computers began to get graphics capability (the very earliest were text-only), developers began to add graphics to adventure games and the games really took off. LucasArts and Sierra On-Line dominated the genre, and for a while they produced the best-looking, highest-class games on the market: funny, scary, mysterious , and fascinating. Adventure games provided challenges and explored areas that other genres didn't touch. Myst , a point-and-click graphic adventure, was for many years the best-selling personal computer game of all time. (It has recently been supplanted by The Sims. )

Adventure Games Today

In the past few years, the market for adventure games has grown more slowly than the market for other genres. Adventure games depend less on display technology than fast-paced action games do; as a result, they get less attention from the gaming press, which has led to a misconception that the adventure game genre is "dead." In fact, adventure games are alive and well; they're just less highly publicized than their high- adrenaline cousins.

The invention of 3D hardware accelerators has actually given adventure games a new lease on life. We usually think of dynamic three-dimensional worlds in the contexts in which they first appeared ”vehicle simulations and first-person shooters ”but 3D hardware has a lot to offer adventure games as well. The first graphical adventure games came with gorgeously painted but static backdrops for every scene. Players could see a lot of things but could touch very few of them. But when every object is rendered in three dimensions and it's possible to move freely among them, the world becomes much more immediate and alive.

The static-backdrop adventure game is still very much with us, but nowadays it is likely to use scenes created with 3D rendering software and raytracing rather than pixel painting. Myst was the first commercial game to use 3D rendered backgrounds, which contributed to its success.

Action-Adventures

The arrival of 3D hardware also gave rise to a new sort of game, a combination of action game and adventure game called, unsurprisingly, an action-adventure. The action-adventure is faster paced than a pure adventure game, and it includes physical as well as conceptual challenges. Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine is a good example of the type. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time might be considered another, although, with its levels and bosses, it's closer to being a pure action game. Exactly when a game stops being an adventure game and becomes an action game is a matter of interpretation. By some interpretations, the Tomb Raider games are action-adventures because they do include puzzles, but the puzzles aren't all that clever, and the action is so continuous that we would classify it as an action game.

Adventure game purists don't care for action-adventures; generally , they dislike any sort of physical challenge or time pressure. If you plan to make your game an action-adventure, you should be aware that although your design might appeal to some action gamers who might not otherwise buy your game, you might also discourage some adventure gamers who would.

The Replayability Question

At first glance, it would seem that the greatest disadvantage of adventure games is their lack of replayability. Because most adventure games consist of puzzles with a single solution, when you know the solution, there's not much challenge in playing it again. An adventure game that requires 40 hours to finish the first time might take only 4 the second time.

In practice, however, this turns out not to be much of a problem. Research has shown that a great many players never finish their games at all; even if the game offers 30 or 40 hours of gameplay, many players play for only 15 or 20. This suggests that if they can't replay a 40- hour game for another 40 hours, it's unlikely to bother them. Provided that the game is good value for the money the first time around, it doesn't need to be replayable .