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Jake:
And you call me an idiot. Let's travel back in time to the year 1988. You are an eight-year-old boy, happily playing adventure games with your friends. Most of your friends are playing adventure games too. I am 27 years old. I have spent the last three years managing a retail store that sells books, tobacco, gifts and computer games. This has put me in contact with game publishers on a weekly basis. I have been in active communication with other AG players for nearly a decade through clubs and message boards. I have direct customer contact with the people purchasing adventure games. And yet, you want to call me the one with the skewed perspective! You, at eight years of age, had a better overall view of the industry and its sales trends than I did at this point? That hardly seems likely. And calling me an "idiot" because I say things that you don't want to hear, despite the fact that my own experience of the time in question far outweighs yours, seems... well... less than bright. Finally, your insistence on personally insulting me every time I say something you don't want to hear does not exactly lend you a tone of maturity. Just the opposite. |
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(And if you must insist on talking about 1988, maybe you can explain how you know that parents weren't buying games for their kids or letting them use the computer, when everyone here who was a kid then did that??) Thanks Rio/Joe. Glad I more or less got what you were saying--and I agree. |
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Anyway, as it was said before, although your experience means something, the combined experience of all the younger people in this forum who played these games means something too. Why don't you try to aknowledge it? (well, I know the anti-BJ feeling in this thread doesn't help at all) My point is simple. Many children loved adventure games in those days. So many children could love them now. It's "just" a matter of doing the right games (light hearted, adventurous, forgiving, basically games aimed at teenagers, the way I'd say the old Lucas games were), and marketing them the right way. |
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I helped people choose games. I discussed games they liked and didn't like with them. I was their direct personal point-of-sale contact. And while you're correct that it would be more apporpriate for me to take issue with Jake for his personal insults privately, if he is going to insist on publicly insulting me whenever I post, then I'm going to (at least occasionally) publicly respond. Quote:
Those LucasArts games were not aimed at children (with the possible exception of Indiana Jones). They were aimed at adults... but could also be enjoyed by children. If you were eight or ten years old when you first played Secret of Monkey Island, then a full third of the jokes went right over your head and never even made it onto your radar. My favorite example is the scene near the end when Guybrush shows up to stop LeChuck from marrying Elaine. The framing of the scene and even the dialogue choices are a deliberate parody of a scene in the movie The Graduate, a 1967 movie which not one in a hundred thousand eight-year-olds had seen in 1990. Ditto DOTT. Ditto S&M. The fact that these games could be enjoyed by both adults and kids is wonderful. But it is unlikely to be repeated. LucasArts had, at the time, a team of AG writers who had a combined talent unlikely to be equalled in the industry again. It is easy to say "we need more entertaining games that kids like where they don't feel they are being talked down to." But actually accomplishing this is incredibly hard. Roald Dahls and J.K. Rowlings don't grow on trees... and neither do Ron Gilberts. And given that pre-teens were never the primary intended audience for adventure games, the established paradigm makes it all the more difficult to create the games you are clamoring for. In this respect, maybe the "collapse" of the big-studio AG system and the fact that it now rests largely in the hands of independent developers is a Godsend. Since they are free to buck the trends and paradigms of the last 25 years (and especially those of the first 15), they can (if they are so inclined) create kid's adventure games that aren't edutainment, but are simply good AG's. But don't look for it to happen too often. Writing good material is hard. Writing good material for kids is even harder. |
:frusty: :frusty: :frusty:
The thread was not about whether kids played games in the 80s. It was about whether AGs are being made for today's 8-13 year old boys, which just happens to be the age when a lot of us started playing AGs, which suggests that 8-13 year old boys today would enjoy them too if only the right games were being made. :shifty: Quote:
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And they are one of the few exceptions I originally pointed out in the post that led to my being called an idiot and a troll.
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:frusty: :frusty: :frusty: It's also NOT about making games specifically TARGETED at 8-13 year olds or making kids' games. Absolutely no one here is "clamoring" for that. :rolleyes: Quote:
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hey man, I'm just glad adventure games are still being made at all. I'm not one to complain. :rolleyes:
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I read elsewhere (sorry I don't recall where) that Her Interactive had just bought the rights for the Hardy Boys series and were beginning to work on a complementary series like the Nancy Drew ones. This was to be aimed for the 8-13 year old boys. I'm kinda surprised she didn't mention it in the interview.
I personally don't like the ND series, and find it very contrived and formulaic, however, there's no denying their success in the marketplace. The ND series seems to be aimed at a broader age range that the Hardy Boys will be - I wonder how successful it will be. FGM |
I'm not sure how a Hardy Boys game would do. I inherited a set of the originals from my father and enjoyed them but they have tried to modernize the series and only succeeded in alienating kids who liked the originals. As Jake said, BK Kids.
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I wonder if some boys would like a Sherlock-Holmes type of adventure? I haven't played any of them, but that seems like up a certain kind of boyish alley (???). One of the things to remember of course about the Nancy Drew series is that they have two difficulty levels, which makes the games more accessible to the, uh, under 8 crowd. ;) (See Jake's thread.) (As do, of course, other games, and I think this can be a good idea.) The other good point in the developer's thread on this issue was Martin's, which was that if you're trying to get hold of the intellectual property rights to existing characters, it's going to blow the budget for most AGs out of the water. It's probably smarter for them to generate in-house stories if they can with crossover appeal. And I don't buy the idea that it's harder to create something that appeals to under-20s than it is to create something that appeals to over-20s. What you'd need to do though is find somebody who has some [I]experience[I] with it (and there are many of these people), rather than just hoping any given Benoit Sokal-type is going to take a stab at a game pitched at a younger audience and succeed. That's when I think you get the most condescension--when someone who is used to writing for adults and doesn't know what the heck he or she is doing tries to do the same thing for kids. (Did anyone see the reviews of Jay Leno's children's book? Ohmigosh, it sounded hilariously bad. Not that I actually find him funny as a grownup, but that's beside the point.) |
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Saying DOTT was targeted at adults strikes me as odd, since it's clearly very cartoony, and more likely to appeal to teenagers than adults. The same goes for Sam and Max or Monkey Island. |
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