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Video: Whatever happened to the Point and Click Adventure Game?

Unkillable Cat

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This is probably one of the most retarded and damaging articles in the history of the Gaming industry.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...dventure-games-die.104725/page-2#post-4250952

Oh shut up, he's right on the money.

Yes, I know what you want to do with me. I read your "rant". Your rant is missing perspective because you're missing an important piece of the picture: Adventure games were purposefully designed to be obtuse, to have convoluted and illogical solutions to their puzzles. It's in their roots. (Note that it's only once adventure games start moving away from that fact, that they really start to become popular. More on that later.)

Why is that? Because they weren't originally designed by committee to appeal to the lowest common denominator, they were designed by the handful of people that actually had the talent to code and write above fan-fiction level, for an 'audience' that maybe numbered a couple thousand people back then. But none of the people involved there were game designers... mainly because it would take another 15 years before someone could stake a legitimate claim to that title!

The first of these obtuse, illogical puzzles is found in the granddaddy of all Adventure games... Colossal Cave Adventure. Solve this puzzle without looking it up online (an aspect of adventure gaming I'll get to later):

You are in a secret canyon which exits to the north and east.
A huge fierce green dragon bars the way!
The dragon is sprawled out on a persian rug!

The goal of Colossal Cave Adventure is to get as much treasure as possible. That persian rug is treasure, but you can't get it while there's a living green dragon about. So the dragon has to go. IIRC every puzzle solution in Colossal Cave Adventure is straightforward, sensible and realistic: To traverse darkness you need light, otherwise you'll trip and kill yourself. The light runs on batteries that need replacing if they run out, so you need to find a vendor that has batteries, etc. So following the established logic of the game (and to play on fantasy tropes) an obvious suggestion is to type >kill dragon ... if only to see what happens.

The game responds:

With what? Your bare hands?

That's the game's first attempt at humor, and it suggests that you need an item to slay the dragon with. Or do you?!?

The solution to this puzzle makes sense when you think about it, but it doesn't make sense within the confines of the game because it goes against the established logic: Straightforward, sensible and realistic.

Want more examples? King's Quest 1. There's a gnome there that wants you to guess his name, which is a direct reference to Rumplestiltskin. (Then again so is every relevant thing in the game, as the entire game is based on well-known fairy tales.) So obviously someone is gonna put two and two together and guess Rumplestiltskin. Except that's not the right answer, and the only further clue you're given is that this guess is close. An in-game note found in a gingerbread house (more fairy tales) says that "it may be wise to think backwards", though it never refers to any specific puzzle or course of action for that wisdom. So of course someone will eventually try to guess his name backwards. Except that's also wrong.

What else is needed? You also have to reverse the entire alphabet, then type out the name.

While that second step of the puzzle follows the clues given, it's also a step too far as it's completely unnecessary.

Unless...

Unless you're Roberta Williams and you're just making it all up, based on fairy tales you were taught as a kid. And having the puzzles directly based on those fairy tales is too easy, and will thin out your game. So you take it a step further, for no other reason than to give players something to do and pad out your game.

This is how games were made in the 1980s. And strangely enough, the gamers of the 1980s liked it that way. For two reasons: It's all that they knew, and they were a small, niche group of people that were actually smart enough to be able to use computers back then. They wanted games that challenged their intellect.

So adventure game developers saw reason to put obtuse, illogical puzzles in their game, because that's what sold back then.

Then some greedy fucker thought that there's money to be made in there somewhere, and that's where clue books and later the hint lines, enter the picture. Having trouble with an adventure game puzzle? Just plonk down $20 for a pamphlet that has all the answers! That too much for you? Then dial a 1-800-number and you get all the answers you need... at a price that may actually surpass that $20. As the devs/publishers wanted people to buy those clue books and call those hint lines, they purposefully made the puzzles in their games even more obtuse and illogical. And that piece of 'game design', to purposefully make your game hard while selling the solution for a price on the side, became the main driving point for Adventure Games from then onwards.

Except three things happened which exposed this little racket: Games became more user-friendly, the computers running them became more accessible, and the gamer demographic shifted dramatically. In other words, LucasArts, Windows and Doom happened. And behind all three of them lies the same underlying force: Money.

Now adventure game players suddenly found that they had a choice: Play an adventure game that punishes them mercilessly for trying to force-solve its obtuse puzzles, or play an adventure game that doesn't. Combined with the shift from a parser-based interface to a point 'n' click one, adventure games suddenly found themselves being played by millions more people than they had previously. This is why Sierra On-Line lost the crown to LucasArts. But these new millions weren't actually as smart as the 1980s gamers - they were just smart enough to use the next generation of computers, the ones where they could use a GUI to get a mouse-operated game up and running. And these not-so-smart gamers aren't really that fond of games that challenge their intellect, and they outnumber the ones that do. Then Doom hits and the corporate suits suddenly realize that there's real money to be made in the computer gaming market (as opposed to the console gaming market) and the quirky little anomaly known as the Adventure Game was doomed.

Adventure Games had to adapt or die. The hint line racket was dying out, and a larger audience meant more obtuse puzzles would be required. At least clue books were still a thing... until something called the Internet came about and someone realized that you can post the contents of a cluebook somewhere online without charging a dime for it. Finding the solution to a puzzle in an Adventure Game became easier than ever.

All of those events happening all at once should have killed the Adventure Game genre stone dead as early as 1995, but what gave Adventure Games a few year's reprieve was the arrival of the CD-ROM, probably the best form of copy protection the PC has ever seen. Just add a little extra charge on top of the game's retail value, and the genre was able to hang on for a few more years against an ever-growing number of gamers whom had an ever-decreasing desire to play intellectual games, as well as the constant demand for better, more realistic 3D graphics. But the final blow, the deathknell of the Adventure Game, was that it refused to change itself to adapt to the times. It was following de facto standards established in the mid-to-late 1970s, 20 years prior, in a market where 3 years marked an entire generation. Oh sure, it changed the graphics, added action sequences and cinematic cut-scenes, but the core aspect of the obtuse and illogical puzzles meant to challenge the intellects, remained. The culmination of that refusal to change is found in Gabriel Knight 3. That is what Old Man Murray is pointing out, the puzzles became too obtuse and too illogical even for the intellectuals.

Face the facts, Adventure Games were the proverbial Dodo-bird in a climate of constant evolution. They were kangz and sheet at one point, but once the predators and the masses showed up, it was only a question of time when they died out... as a mainstream genre. As has been proven several times since, Adventure Games can still find a market today as long as they think small and think clever... but even now the cycle is coming full circle again. In the deluge of shovelware titles we're seeing released today, there's already too many pixelated point 'n' click graphical adventure games rolling about. Adventure Games are about to die out... again.

Dexter's rant of "WE DIDN'T ASK FOR THIS" is the cry of the minority of players that still liked to have their intellects challenged in the late 1990s, against a force that doesn't care one bit about the concerns of any minority. Doom made the gaming market shift its focus to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and the lowest common denominator in gaming is too stupid to even spell those three words right. Tough titties, but there you go. Smash as many bottles in my face as you wish, IT DOES NOT CHANGE THE FACTS.

I can make similar Durandal-esque posts about several other genres: Dungeon crawlers, puzzle games, turn-based games, abstract games, etc. It's a long list, and it always comes down to the same conclusion: When forced to adapt or die, they chose not to adapt.

So they died.

The end.
 

Dexter

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Bro, that shit is an entirely stupid "joke" article and testifies no deeper knowledge of the genre or why it became unpopular. One of the main reasons is indeed that other game types got a lot more popular and made lots of money as I've pointed out in the other thread (although this isn't the argument made in said article), but that wouldn't preclude Adventure games still being popular in their own right. After all not every genre exactly manages to sell 85 million copies like GTA even today. The other main reason is that they turned to 3D and tried turning them into "Action Adventure" games, losing the old audience while the supposed new one they were aiming for never showed up. The old one didn't want that shit, they wanted beautifully drawn 2D games with cool puzzles and funny/engaging characters and story, and aside from very few examples most people actually liked solving the tough puzzles and saw it as large part of the game. The new audience were all "what is this boring nerd shit, I want muh DOOM and QUAKE and Counter Strike" and couldn't give any less of a shit about 3D Adventure games.

I haven't really mentioned Text Adventure games in said argument, since as you've rightfully pointed out most of those games were mostly played by a few thousand people at most in the decades before, at that point I wouldn't exactly call it a "genre", but more of a Hobbyist curiosity. Neither the video, the dumb article, nor the original argument was about Text Parsers and they play absolutely no part in why the Adventure game genre got more unpopular in the late 90s. As someone whose favorite genre was "Adventure games" in the 90s and played them a lot and knew people that played them I can tell you that none of them would have mentioned a "refusal to change" or "obtuse and illogical puzzles" as the reason why they stopped playing them. They were just simply underserved, while the "new" players they were trying to reach through changing up the games couldn't give less of a shit about faggy "Adventure games", even if they added some action and made it all 3D, you weren't Shooting and Hacking shit to death after all.

It's the equivalent of MOBA and Battle Royale games getting insanely popular and starting to make lots more money by selling 10x what current AAA games do, and big publishers suddenly stopping to make large SinglePlayer Sandbox games or trying to Shoehorn elements from them into the SP Sandbox games (losing both the audience that likes the new games and the old one that liked them just fine in the process), and for some fucking reason everyone that thought they were a Smartass suddenly started linking to this RPS article that says Assassin's Creed needed a Tourist Mode in 20-30 years time as some explanation of what happened and everyone taking it seriously that this was the reason why and acting like the writer is making some deep philosophical point:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/game-with-no-challenge-removes-challenges.118554/

As you've rightfully pointed out even today Adventure games aren't exactly dead: http://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Point & Click/#p=0&tab=TopSellers and when publishers and developers combine a great art style, with classic puzzles and an interesting or funny story something like the Deponia series or the Wadjet Eye games can occur, and some of the Re-releases of the classics prove that even those can still be successful. Basically what most of them were like in the late 90s before they went through your "refusal to change" by "adapting" and making them 3D and killing off various much-beloved long-running series in the process - for instance I still remember how AdventureSoft was banking on zeh Germans buying their Simon 3D in interviews previous to release, but noone sane who loved the first two could have given less of a shit about playing this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4NR_wVSHx4jzJ37m6VPv_8OJUPsh6dbD

Although today it's more of a problem that the entire PC gaming market is inundated with releases of questionable quality that don't get enough exposure and that's an entirely different discussion that doesn't affect solely Adventure games: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...e-game-renaissance.115818/page-2#post-5305411 and quite different from just a few years ago when even big Adventure game publishers had to beg Valve to be let onto the Storefront because they didn't really see any inherent value in the genre: http://archive.is/0zGRX
 
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Alex

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(...snip)
I can make similar Durandal-esque posts about several other genres: Dungeon crawlers, puzzle games, turn-based games, abstract games, etc. It's a long list, and it always comes down to the same conclusion: When forced to adapt or die, they chose not to adapt.

So they died.

The end.

It seems kinda pointless to point out that the Tyrannosaur Rex died because it refused to turn into a chicken. Either way you would have no Tyrannosaur today.
 

Infinitron

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Statement #1, uncontroversial: "Adventure games died because not enough people wanted to play story-driven games about progressing through fixed narratives through solving puzzles"

Statement #2, controversial: "Adventure games died because they were all badly designed and actually you should feel bad for having ever liked them"

It's the conflation of those two things that gets to adventure game fans. It's mean-spirited, like adding insult to injury. It (probably unconsciously) reflects this hypercapitalist mentality where if something fails commercially it can't just be because there wasn't a market, but the designers had to have been bad, incompetent people. Though to be fair, that attitude is hardly uncommon on the Codex.

The most ambitious critiques of the adventure game genre are those that attempt to elaborate on Statement #1, by making the claim that gameplay consisting of solving static puzzles, even if those puzzles are good and well-designed, is fundamentally crippled and unsatisfying. But that requires a deeper formal analysis than "lol moon logic puzzles".
 
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Dexter

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:argh: Damn you and your moving around of posts. :argh:

Statement #1, uncontroversial: "Adventure games died because not enough people wanted to play games about progressing through story-driven narratives through solving puzzles"
There's plenty controversial about that statement, starting with "Adventure games died" and going over to "not enough people" without giving a definition of said. Arguably the same amount or even more people "wanted to play" said games as in previous years. The market had just shifted very quickly and half a million players, which would have been considered immense in previous years and turning a profit was suddenly considered not worth the effort/investment and turning enough profit in a world where Tomb Raider could shift 7 million copies. The market was essentially dropped by big players after it refused to grow overnight and their experiment to shift to 3D Action Adventures ultimately failed, even though the potential for moderately good Sales for considerably little effort producing worthwhile classic Adventure games was still there.

Statement #2, controversial: "Adventure games died because they were all badly designed and actually you should feel bad for having ever liked them"
I'd say that's not only controversial, but outright wrong, since many people specifically played and liked them because of said considered "bad design".

The most ambitious critiques of the adventure game genre are those that attempt to elaborate on Statement #1, by making the claim that gameplay consisting of solving static puzzles, even if those puzzles are good and well-designed, is fundamentally crippled and unsatisfying.
How is that "ambitious" instead of presumptive and condescending? How is calling certain design "crippled and unsatisfying" anything else than (your) opinion or any different from for instance saying that Turn-based games are "fundamentally crippled and unsatisfying"?
 
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Infinitron

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How is that "ambitious"

See my edit. It's ambitious because it requires a deep analysis as opposed to pointing out low-hanging fruit surface flaws. The conclusion one might reach after reading a bunch of Old Man Murray-style articles is that if adventure games had managed to rid themselves of all cat mustache puzzles, the genre would still be thriving. Which is almost certainly not the case.
 

Wapcaplet

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I haven't really mentioned Text Adventure games in said argument, since as you've rightfully pointed out most of those games were mostly played by a few thousand people at most in the decades before, at that point I wouldn't exactly call it a "genre", but more of a Hobbyist curiosity.
Having grown up in the Age of the Text Adventure, I hate seeing the sales numbers lowballed and the "genre" belittled. Zork I sold nearly 380,000 copies between 1981 and 1986. Most text-only Infocom games sold at least 50,000 copies over their lifetimes.
 

Sceptic

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IIRC Myst sales weren't half bad even by today's standards, so the market argument doesn't really hold.
Half-bad? It outsold Doom, the game that supposedly killed the genre, and I think that was only on the Mac and not counting the PC sales when the game was ported a year or so later. The sales figures for Zork have already been mentioned, and they trump pretty much everything made in the entire decade following Zork. The entire argument about non-profitability (especially vs less-profitability, which does actually have a point) of adventures is bogus, as I've said in the past as well. None of that really matters though because as Inf pointed out it's a completely unrelated argument to the OMM-style moon logic puzzle argument, which was always made by people who hate adventure games and whose argument only apply to the shitty adventure games that no one ever bought or played in the first place.
 

Taluntain

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The Myst games (which are hardly even adventures) were insanely popular in some markets (i.e. the US), but more or less ignored in others. Like a few other titles (e.g. 7th guest), they were also bundled with various gaming hardware up the wazoo, so that's mostly how they flooded non-US markets. I remember that at the time of release everyone here dismissed Myst as some lame half-assed attempt at a game that only Americans are going crazy over for some unfathomable reason.
 

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