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Originally Posted by GarageGothic
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Great and funny article
. It also explains a lot, because mother-in-law can also represent other gamers who are not accustomed or acknowledged to adventure games, and can show with what sort of decisions developers and publishers have to deal with if they want their product to find wider audience.
modern "casualization" of video games could be also closely related to things like - growth of internet, along with the rise of use of personal computers in almost every aspect and mass marketing. Changes happen in every genre that are evident to die-hard fans of that genre - Civilization fan who played all games in a series will probably tell you that Civ 5 is a commercially mass-oriented simplified version of previous installments, and long-term RPG fan will tell you that none of new RPG games can compare to the complexity of an older ones. It's not different to adventure games, but it's really interesting to see how things develop because adventure genre is unique in a way that it was the most popular genre, yet with the rise of popularity of action oriented games managed to keep up with it's roots, which is not a "conservative" thing at all because the shiny-new FPS is also based on every basic idea that Wolfenstein or Doom had. Further, it's special in a way that many of modern casual games rely on adventure game elements, like puzzle solving, and even story-telling. Finding a hidden-object is just a simple form of puzzle solving in order to progress.
"Casualization" of adventure games could also mean how graphic surpassed text adventures, or how things evolved regarding the fact that we have an option to show hot-spots that wasn't there before. As for modern "casualization", it's not clear how the traditional adventures will come out of it, but it is already visible how, like every other genre, adventure games are influented, and especially because of the fact that games like hidden object games that are on the rise resemble adventure genre the most, and that the two have a lot in common, or becoming similar. I suggest
this article on thoughts of correlation between them.
Some things are already obvious, like that some traditional adventure companies are "lost" in the trend. City Interactive is no longer doing adventure games, Kheops and AWE Games too. Some are in the middle of it, like Frogwares who made casual game out of Dracula series or AGON producers who announced that there will be two new AGON game versions - casual and "full" one. Or Al Emmo casual game, which as authors said - "was needed in order to raise funds for next full adventure game". The only question in all of this is will those companies that embrace themselves in titles that might bring them more financial success ever revert to the old ways?
But even if they don't, you can't beat interactive story telling. If we are to discuss how adventure games are influented, puzzles is probably the first thing that comes to mind. But when you think of it, puzzles or "interaction" is the only thing which make games what they are.
