posted 10-28-2000 02:48 AM               

“Adventure game with no puzzles like train with no wheels…very soon get nowhere fast.” –Ancient Chinese Proverb

The “adventure game” has died. Don’t kid yourself into thinking otherwise. Sure LucasArts, the company that owned the genre, can get away with releasing the occasional adventure game, but that’s the exception, not the rule. This fact makes a great many people sad, myself included, because much more than any other genre, the adventure game was about story. The digital, interactive medium offers amazing potential to tell stories in ways never before possible, so when the genre explicitly about storytelling died…authors either mourned the passing or denied it completely.

The message the market is telling us is certainly not that they don’t want story games, it’s just that they don’t want “adventure games” and all the rules that go along with them. So, what is an adventure game? It’s a story through which the player navigates, taking on the role of one character (or occasionally multiple characters). The story is a gated one, and the puzzles are the gates. In order to progress to new sections of the story, the player must complete tasks and solve puzzles. Since solving puzzles (by their very nature) require the player to think and explore possibilities, adventure games also allow (or force?) the player to wander around the world, talking to characters, picking up objects, amusing themselves until the moment of “aha!” that allows them to progress. In the vast majority of these games, time does not actually pass in any meaningful way. That concept is at odds with solving puzzles, unless events repeat or the player is allowed to travel through time. The result is often a rather empty experience. A large percentage of the game is spent wandering around in a static world, often paused in time, while the player figures out what to do. His reward is the advancement of the story.

Now, I used to love this type of game. I love puzzles. To me, the process of solving puzzles was where much of the fun was. But the genre soon became rather puzzle-stale. Ingenious puzzles are difficult to craft, and the concept of walking around, talking to people, collecting inventory, and using items on each other only goes so far. These games were often forced, in search of variety, to present “puzzles” which went way beyond the realm of lateral thinking and into the realm of the arbitrary. In short, the basic construct of this type of game needs to change for puzzle writing’s sake, if nothing else.

That’s not the worst of it, though. Even with well crafted puzzles, adventure games have an awful lot of emptiness to them. Exploring a static world frozen in time is just not up to snuff these days. There are only so many lines of dialogue characters can have. Heck, Myst didn’t have any dialogue or even any characters to entertain the wandering, stuck player That was fun back when 3D rendered images on a CD were innovative. Games like the Curse of Monkey Island try to minimize this emptiness writing damn funny dialogue to entertain you while you’re stuck. But again, that only goes so far. I was willing to put up with the excruciatingly slow pace of adventure games as a kid, when then genre was fresh, but nowadays, it just doesn’t seem like something I should have deal with. After all, stories are not, by nature, always slow paced.

And remember, the story advancement is the reward in the adventure game formula. But if the genre is really about stories, then shouldn’t the story be the meat of the game, not the reward for solving puzzles? Why do we need puzzles at all? The answer is that no one has really been able to figure how to make a game out of a story. (Yes, the role-playing game (RPG) is a different take on this, but it too is trapped in formula. And yes, Metal Gear Solid manages to have a story gated by action rather than actual puzzles…but work with me here, people.)

Let’s look at how long it takes to play an adventure game. Well, it depends greatly on how able you are to succeed at the game elements along the way. It could take only 2 hours if you know exactly how to do everything (meaning you have a detailed walkthru from the net), or it could take 60 hours. In fact, it could take an expert gamer 60 hours, even though the actual length of real story might be as short as an hour or two. Would my mom want to play this type of game? Absolutely not. She might enjoy the story, but she’d never survive the huge time commitment. If it takes me 60 hours, how long would it take her? She also wouldn’t appreciate the duration being directly tied to her skill at the game. She, as a non-gamer, is familiar with the concept of a tv show being a half hour long, a movie being two hours, a book being 300 pages, and so on. It’s easy to understand where these types of entertainment fit in your real life schedule since they have predetermined, relatively short lengths.

What’s the point of all this? The point is to figure out a way to create a story game that is much more about story than we’ve been able to pull of so far. I think the point is to also think a great deal about the mass market. The concept of storytelling is so fundamental to all cultures that it just seems a shame that our most story based genre of games are not accessible to non-gamers.

A "Forced Advance" Game

Here’s my idea: the game plays itself. If the player does nothing—touches no game controls—then the characters will go about their business, time will progress, and a predefined story with a beginning, middle, and end will be told. This will take some predictable amount of time. (Perhaps 10 minutes, or 30, or 2 hours, or whatever the designer chooses.) Sounds like a movie, doesn’t it? Well, the player doesn’t have to sit and watch. He can intervene at any time and change the course of events. I certainly don’t mean there’s x minutes of full motion video, then a canned decision point, then more fmv. I’m talking about something much more fluid. More of a simulation.

While the player will see a story without intervening, he won’t necessarily see the most interesting one. If the player’s character had stuck around and talked to crazy Aunt Hilda a little longer, he might have realized why she had that magical locket in her attic that her daughter stumbled across. That Hilda actually put the locket there on purpose. That Hilda isn’t that crazy after all. Puts a new light on the story, doesn’t it? So one facet of this type of game is being able to explore different threads of the story as you desire.

There’s also the concept of changing the course of the story. I can imagine one type of “game” in which the player is completely unable to change the storyline. The “game” is the (disembodied?) navigation through the physical game world, through time, and through the entangled web of the plot. Every object and character in every scene might have it’s own story to explore, all related, all hyperlinked together in a sense. This is, I believe, what “interactive fiction” in games would be like. There really is no game element, but interaction with the story is so extreme that it at least has something in common with games.

Another route is to allow the player to affect the course of events, or at least to try. This might mean trying to convince characters to behave in a certain way through conversation. It might mean taking specific action in the world to try to change things, such as firing a weapon or moving objects around. Perhaps it’s even possible to create traps (Spy vs. Spy comes to mind). The player might be in a position of power (police chief, ship captain, etc.) and easily influence events. Such a game world would probably have to be very resistant to change, though. It’s probably not technically feasible to allow different outcomes to branch into a huge tree of totally different stories, nor is it even desirable. The opponents of interactive fiction state that any story is really 1,000 possible stories where the author intelligently chose the one, single best story to tell. It would still be possible, though, to create a game world whose major story arc was resistant to change, while allowing change on the smaller scale. It might even be fun.

Let’s look at two specific types of stories that work well with this concept: the mystery story and the horror story.

The great thing about a mystery is that it’s kind of like a game to begin with. It’s a story that’s one big puzzle. It’s also not a zero-sum game. It’s not author vs. reader. The author wants the reader to “win” in the end by figuring out the puzzle just before the answer is revealed. He does this by hiding clues through out the story, which is the other great feature of a mystery. Trying to find the clues in a mystery is a game-like activity, and a rather forgiving one. The reader doesn’t have to find all the clues. He’s able to progress through the story and follow it at every step whether he finds every clue, or no clues at all.

A mystery is really two stories in one. One is the story right in the forefront. The story we travel through as we would any other. But characters of this story are trying to uncover the second story—the secret story—of what actually happened. Who was the real killer? How was the diamond stolen? In the timeline, this second story usually finishes before the first story begins. The key feature here, though, is that progressing through the first story is not dependant on uncovering the clues which clarify the secret story. The secret story will be explained in the end, and hopefully the reader can look back and see where the clues were at that time.

So back to our game. The game plays itself and the events of the mystery (the investigation) unfold. Witnesses are questioned, the main character’s safety is threatened, the zany next door neighbor is exposed to be an adulterer, but not a murder, and so on and so on. It’s a story. Through the story are hidden clues, cleverly hidden off the beaten path. Maybe the player should talk to the pharmacist a little bit longer before giving up so easily. Maybe he should make young Miss Weatherby stay the night at the police station rather than risk her being kidnapped. Maybe allowing the main character’s default action of going to investigate the crime scene isn’t the best thing to do. If he chases after that suspicious character on the street he might end up learning something.

These clues are basically just like the DK coins in the action platform game Donkey Kong Country 2 (see my article on that game). They don’t have to be found, but they are there to challenge the player. No matter how good or bad a player you are, you’ll get to the end of the story (in a fairly known amount of time) and the mystery will be solved, though perhaps not by your character. But if you’re able to find enough clues (DK coins), then you have the satisfying ending of solving the mystery yourself. Notice that this is an example of a larger story arc that is unchangeable by the player. No matter what the player does, Jimmy the Locksmith will still be the murderer. Minor events along the way (do you lose the game of 3-card monte to the street thugs?) and the ending (do you unmask the killer or did your sidekick) are flexible.

One problem with this type of game is the pacing. Being forced to advance through the story, never having a break might not be the most fun experience. As I talked about in my article on pacing, having a rising and falling sine wave of action is nice thing. Juxtaposing the highs with the lows give each a little more punch. So what if…parts of a game are in this “forced advance” mode we’ve been talking about, and parts are more like the traditional type of adventure game? The regular parts would have a feeling of safety, really, since the time pressure would be gone, allowing you to explore at your leisure, and perhaps even give you enough time to solve some actual thought puzzles.

And here we have the classic formula for the horror story. Parts of the story (the non-forced advance parts) are safe zones, and slow-paced. Interspersed are the tense parts—the parts where you are forced to act—forced to go forward—forced into the unknown. Furthermore, during these parts, you have a feeling of lack of control, just as you should in horror. If done well, the universe might even seem to be an entity, bending you to its will. In fact, I even created a design for such a game where the villain is a demon who has the power to beckon to the main character, forcing her to act, to progress. She has enough control to choose how she progresses (does she jump or crawl or draw her weapon?) but not enough control to resist. And boy, does that demon show up at inopportune times!

This horror game I’ve described, though based on the same forced-advance mechanic as the mystery game, is really of very different character. In the horror game I worked on, a great deal of the gameplay comes from the action elements caused by the forced advance. The character is forced across dangerous and scary territory. She must jump and shoot and swim and so forth to survive. During the regular parts of the game, she can carefully explore territory or story threads, find secrets at he leisure, stock up on weaponry, etc. These are the calm parts, and the forced-advance sections are the tense parts. Really, it’s more of a “game” in the sense gamers are used to than the mystery I described.

The mystery allowed the player to be swept through a story while simultaneously exploring the story itself, trying to find the hidden parts of it, rather than concentrating at all on jumping or shooting or any other traditional “gamer” activities. The horror game spices up the pacing of more traditional game forms with an interesting mechanic.

Through these examples I hope I have scratched the surface of new ways to tell stories in video games. I truly look forward someday to turning such theory into practice, and to others advancing this still-infant art form.

posted 12-05-2001 06:54 PM               

Try it, it will rekindle your interest in the genre.

posted 12-06-2001 04:50 AM               

The Zelda games were some of the most successful in the franchise, and it would behoove many people to question exactly why. It's not an RPG, it doesn't have vicious shoot-em-up action..no blood...and yet millions of people over the age of 21 ravenously bought this game, played it through, and loved it.
The adventure genre must never die!

posted 12-06-2001 11:09 AM            

On the plus side, cRPGs seem to have made a minor comeback, although the friction between Bioware and Interplay may throw a wrench into the works.

posted 07-30-2002 11:47 AM            

The role of story in games is a hot topic right now. I would argue that it's like any other feature. Either do it well, or leave it out. A bad story will simply detract from an otherwise entertaining experience.

As for puzzles in games, there is the (in)famous Old Man Murray article about the gabriel Knight puzzle and the death of adventure games. Puzzles can be important to an adventure game, but only insofar as they provide the player with a believable solution that fits within the game context. Bad example: The Daedalus Project. Good example: The Longest Journey.

Oh, and I've decided to modify my stance on adventure games being dead. There seems to be renewed interest in old adventure games, which isn't the same as having new adventure games to play. The genre isn't dead, it's just stagnant.

posted 08-16-2002 11:57 AM               

------------------
This world is a net of ideas, and if that net were to ever break, then all that would be left would be the cockroaches.
-me

[This message has been edited by Maximus Asmadi (edited 08-16-2002).]

posted 08-16-2002 12:29 PM            

I haven't played any other RPG's I can stand - most I've played since have just been so crowded with graphics, tedious combat, and filler dialog (nobody ever gets to the friggin' point in japanese games). The only classic adventure game I played and really got into was Sam&Max - and the puzzles were, as mentioned in the article, totally illogical (attach the magnet to jesse james' severed hand, attach that to the ball retriever from the crocodile swamp driving range, then shove the whole affair into the world's largest ball of twine). These days, its games like Zelda & Megaman Legends that have more to offer then tedious action, gratitous or endless pointless dialogue that stay afloat. Soul Reaver is another. Megaman Legends: The Misadventures of Tronne Bonne has the toughest, most mindbending puzzle missions I've ever played - and loved every minute of it.

Super Metroid had no dialog at all, and was considered the best adventure game for the SNES - because its till had the elements of adventure - one giant persistent world to run around in, and you have to cross back to the same points back and forth getting the parts and equipment and completing the tasks to unlock your way further into the game.

Lets face it - clicking through text boxes is a piss poor medium to tell a story. I gave up on the final fantasy games after crawling my way through the opening drama in FF8. Metroid avoided this by not telling a story. Star Control 2 avoided this by filling half the screen with text and being quick to click through - and packing it with useful info and the occasional knee-slapper (not boring dramatic life-stories).

posted 03-03-2005 02:12 AM            

Currently I made the first steps of hosting a small battle on a web site.
I have run into a problem, a problem many run and ran into.
What is it about?
Well there is this game called CMBO, CMBB and CMAK which allows you to play tactical WW II battles.
It has quite an enthousiastic following.
It has one problem though: tactical battles generally have only relevance in a greater whole.
So while it's nifty you just kicked out your opponent from a village, but what next? And what relevance did it have.
Enter therefore the forum: to put tactical battles in a greater whole and provide players with the opportunity to find adversaries.
What is offered by these sites and fora is an operational or tactical environment for players to make decisions in and when two forces meet a battle is played.
Now the nature of modern warfare is that there isn't one deciding battle (no waterloo therefore) but a host of smaller battles culmulating into one final victory after a long while.
Even specacular victories, like the fall of france or poland took weeks to accomplish and finish and were made up of many smaller battles.
And here is the nature of the problem:
because each battle, however small, can influence another each need to wait upon the other to finish. (if tank a is commited in battle 1, it can't appear in battle 2 etc, and if it's destroyed in 1 it can't appear in any subsequent battle)
Since time is used to order things and time is lineair this dependency is almost unbreakble.
Since most games are played by mail and an average battle exist of 30 turns or 60+ mailings, it is not unusual to take a month before a battle to finish, as even 2 mails per day is beyond most to cope with.
One can see that this takes a very long time and people start to lose interest if they happen not to be involved in a battle.
There is one solution to this problem as offered by OW(onionwars): have a forum with a hardcore of followers and lost's of issues to adress.
I wonder if it is possible to adress this problem in another way?
Hence my posting in this post.
Let's consider a battle to be a story, with a developing story line. wha tis possible?

posted 10-12-2005 11:19 PM               

quote:

---

And remember, the story advancement is the reward in the adventure game formula. But if the genre is really about stories, then shouldn’t the story be the meat of the game, not the reward for solving puzzles? Why do we need puzzles at all? The answer is that no one has really been able to figure how to make a game out of a story.

---

Story is not gameplay, so it really shouldn't be the meat of any game. The puzzles are there because they are, on some level, fun to solve. Games are made to tests the abilities of their players, and are based around a structure of trial and reward. There's nothing to reward here, and thus you have no gameplay, which follows you have no game.

quote:

---

Here’s my idea: the game plays itself. If the player does nothing—touches no game controls—then the characters will go about their business, time will progress, and a predefined story with a beginning, middle, and end will be told. This will take some predictable amount of time. (Perhaps 10 minutes, or 30, or 2 hours, or whatever the designer chooses.) Sounds like a movie, doesn’t it? Well, the player doesn’t have to sit and watch. He can intervene at any time and change the course of events. I certainly don’t mean there’s x minutes of full motion video, then a canned decision point, then more fmv. I’m talking about something much more fluid. More of a simulation.

---

Same problem here. Even though the player can intervene, the only behavior rewarded is the ability to press a button. The player's desire to influence the story is what's behind this button press, to be sure, but all you're doing is rewarding curiosity. This does not a game make.

quote:

---

The “game” is the (disembodied?) navigation through the physical game world, through time, and through the entangled web of the plot. Every object and character in every scene might have it’s own story to explore, all related, all hyperlinked together in a sense. This is, I believe, what “interactive fiction” in games would be like. There really is no game element, but interaction with the story is so extreme that it at least has something in common with games.

---

Here you admit that we're not even talking about a game. Games are structures of rules used for amusement; here, you've got this interactive movie that might as well just be a movie after all. The branches of the story may be interesting, but is it really going to be that much fun to sit back and "choose your own adventure" in this leisurely way?

quote:

---

One problem with this type of game is the pacing. Being forced to advance through the story, never having a break might not be the most fun experience. As I talked about in my article on pacing, having a rising and falling sine wave of action is nice thing. Juxtaposing the highs with the lows give each a little more punch. So what if…parts of a game are in this “forced advance” mode we’ve been talking about, and parts are more like the traditional type of adventure game? The regular parts would have a feeling of safety, really, since the time pressure would be gone, allowing you to explore at your leisure, and perhaps even give you enough time to solve some actual thought puzzles.

---

With a "forced adventure" mode you impart this horrible feeling of a lack of control, and also trigger the complete withdrawl of the player from the immersion of the story. There's not enough meat to this play to be a relevant enough diversion to the story; as opposed to the story in an RPG being subordinate to the adequate gameplay, and serving as occasional reward.

quote:

---

In fact, I even created a design for such a game where the villain is a demon who has the power to beckon to the main character, forcing her to act, to progress. She has enough control to choose how she progresses (does she jump or crawl or draw her weapon?) but not enough control to resist. And boy, does that demon show up at inopportune times!

---

This gameplay device is so transparently contrived that it's even more painful than, say, trying to rationalize the existence of "save points" as an actual part of a game's world. This lack of choice does not in any way make the game more fun or interesting. In fact, it would probably be preferable to just select options from a text menu.

quote:

---

The horror game spices up the pacing of more traditional game forms with an interesting mechanic.

---

No it doesn't. This type of mechanic is trite, and has been discarded in the past in favor of devices that are fun, and, surprise! work as part of a good game. It changes the pacing, yes, but dilutes rather than "spices [it] up".

That said: interactive stories can be fun. However, this mysterious "game about story" is not really going to be adequate as any kind of game, and thus should remove those elements from its proposed structure. People play games to be challenged and rewarded, not to simply enjoy a story and occasionally make a decision or two. Conversely, people watch movies to be sit back and be entertained.

It's also important to note that in an interactive story you're going to lose nuances important to film that allow it to be richly interpreted and approached critically; if someone is "playing" an interactive story, they experience neither the enjoyment of being challenged NOR the amusement of passively viewing, because you've stuck them in this uncomfortable position constantly in between absorbing narrative and gaming (while in a typical modern console game these two activites are clearly and distinctly separated).

I'd like to think that there can be a happy medium, but what you're describing sounds like an inherently weak experience.

posted 02-18-2006 08:55 PM               

Anyway, I thought of a way a forced advance could be brought into a mystery game without it interfering with the player's activities:

You play a private detective. Someone has come to you with a case to solve, but the police are working on it as well. If you miss a clue, the police will find it, and the story will advance. Your objective is to solve the murder before the police. The basic plotline will progress, with certain events being triggered by the uncovering of a certain clue by either yourself or the police.

In a way, you'd be playing against the computer for the chance to advance the plot (although the computer's own advances would be on a set timetable), but cooperative play wouldn't be excluded either - if you found a piece of evidence that you couldn't deduce the relevence of immediately, you could either look for other things to make it clear or take it to the police to see if they can make something of it. If the police have found another crucial piece of evidence that you had not, the plot would advance. The police would get the credit for it, but they would be more willing to share their findings with you in future.

On a separate note, I was surprised that Sirlin didn't mention Murder Mystery Weekends in his article, as those are essentially a live-action version of his proposed mystery game, only in multiplayer.