![]() ![]() As designers, our job is to keep people in this state for as long as possible. As the story builds, we are pulled into the game and leave the real world behind. The same is true of story games (as well as almost all other kinds of games). ADVENTURE GAMES MOVIEOne way I judge a movie is by the number of times I realized I was in a theater. You soon start looking around the theater, noticing the people in front of you or the green exit sign. When the story starts to drag, or the plots begins to fall apart, the suspension of disbelief is lost. It occurs when you are pulled so completely into the story that you no longer realize you are in a movie theater or sitting at your couch, reading. When you are watching a movie, or reading a good book, your mind falls into this state. There is a state of mind called "suspension of disbelief". This problem calls for a special kind of storytelling, and we have just begun to scratch the surface of this art form. It is hard to create a cohesive plot when you have no idea what part of the story the player will trip over next. But the player doesn't always do what the designer intended, and this causes problems. In a story game, the player is given the freedom to explore the story. You just sit in the theater and watch it. The single biggest difference is interaction. We have to choose what to borrow and what to discover for ourselves. However, it is important to realize that there are many more differences than similarities. We can learn a lot from them about telling stories in a visual medium. It is not fair to completely ignore movies. Story games are not movies, but the two forms do share a great deal. Knock it off! If you really want to make movies, then go to film school and leave the game designing to people who want to make games. The other source for the name Interactive Movie is what I call "Hollywood Envy." A great number of people in this business secretly (and not so secretly) wish they were making movies, not writing video games. These people feel that the closest things to story games are movies. It is the goal of narrow-minded marketing to place everything into a category so it will be recognizable. The desire to call them Interactive Movies comes from a couple of places. ![]() The same thing needs to happen to story games. Movies came from stage plays, but the references are long lost and movies have come into their own. What we need to do is to establish a genre for our works that we can call our own. The fact that people want to call them movies just points out how lost we are. One of my pet peeves is the recent trend to call story games "Interactive Movies." They are interactive, but they are not movies. The key here is "done right", which it seldom is. When done right, it is a form of storytelling that can be engrossing in a way that only interaction can bring. The element that brings adventure games to life for me is the stories around which they are woven. I enjoy games in which the pace is slow and the reward is for thinking and figuring, rather than quick reflexes. It is no surprise that this is also the genre for which I design. Of all the different types of games, the ones I most enjoy playing are adventure/story games. Why Adventure Games Suck And What We Can Do About It I would also like to thank David Fox for passively-aggressively forcing me to post this. ADVENTURE GAMES TVBut in the meantime, there is something interesting on TV right now. At some point in the near future, I will do an annotated version of this article, talking about things that have changed, or were just plains wrong. ADVENTURE GAMES PLUSI learned a lot from Monkey Island 1 and 2, plus countless kids Adventure Games at Humongous Entertainment. I wrote this article to help fellow Adventure Games designers back in 1989, but the RPG, FPS and RTS designers of 2004 could use a little of the self-proclaimed wisdom of the past.Īs I read this some 15 years later, I'm not sure I agree with everything in here anymore. If this is true, they've done a pretty bad job of it. Some people will tell you that Adventure Games aren't really dead, they have just morphed into other forms, or that other genres have absorbed Adventure Games. Make sure you read the whole thing, it starts out slow, but his conclusion could not be more true. I think this article from Old Man Murray (written in 2002) sums it up pretty well. A lot has changed for Adventure Games as well, but unfortunately not in the right direction.Īdventure Games are officially dead. It is now the futuristic year of 2004 and we are all driving around in flying cars and wearing sliver jumps suits. I wrote this back in 1989 while I was designing Monkey Island. ![]()
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