Now, I've made some gross generalizations here, and know that there are no hard lines between Interactive Story people and Puzzle Gamer people. We all come to Adventure Games for a wide variety of reasons and experiences. When I criticize, I'm really just trying to spell out what I see as an imbalance, based on a time-honoured expediency in these games that has become so ingrained that we rarely challenge it. I know some people really just love their puzzle games.
I also know that some people, who might not think of themselves as Puzzle Gamers, are nevertheless quite happy with the status quo, because they've come to love Adventure Games, puzzles and all, as being a unique and immersive experience, and are loathe to see the status quo questioned or threatened in any way. Incremental innovations are appreciated, but radical new approaches are treated with skepticism and often rejected out of hand if the experience is changed too much.
I play and enjoy these games myself (although I'm still currently suffering from some anxiety issues that are making it difficult for me to complete most Adventure Games, whether I like them or not), and have been known to enjoy puzzles, including some mini-game challenges, if they didn't hold up the proceedings too badly. However, I'm one of these people who gets thoroughly engrossed in the narrative and environmental aspects of these games. I find that too many clever but ill-placed mini-game segments can really spoil the effect for me, just as too much dialogue or too much walking can really ruin the game for more goal-oriented players. I'm not in the majority around here when I say this, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who has ever felt the way I do about these games.
I don't want to entirely eliminate a significant and successful form of gameplay from a medium that has largely come to be defined by this gameplay. I just wish I heard more voices intelligently discussing other alternatives to mini-games in Adventure Games. It's one of the reasons I had been scrambling around looking for another name to use for these things, so we could get away from treating them as mere games, and start diversifying the interactivity some more.
Puzzles have their place, and some stories just couldn't do without them, no matter how contrived they might feel in the context of our mundane existences. People keep secrets. People sometimes go to outlandish lengths to preserve their secrecy. Da Vinci wrote his journals backwards. Criminals have been hiding loot and leaving clues and maps in legend and fiction, if not history, for so long, it might as well be fact. Codices go back centuries. Secret societies have supposedly been with us for millenia. And your significant other might have emails from someone you don't approve of in a folder buried so deep on their hard drive, you'd have to spend all day digging them out, if you can understand what the funny names they use for a filing system mean.
The amount of reasoning needed to circumvent these kinds of obstacles sometimes calls for some serious lateral thinking. But they don't all have to lead to a mini-game. Sometimes, the answer is to use a sword on the knot.
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