Adventure Gamers - Forums

shout out to my brother, who took me to a show by Lebbis and Mattijs Verhallen about coincidence, which helped me structure a lot of my thoughts - i’m also going to steal a core part of the motif:

I know some of you will recognize this phenomenon as a starling murmuration. Why is fascinating in its own right, but for the purpose of this thread, the question is how.

Fortunately, this has been researched: it’s based on each bird understanding about four simple rules. Time and location, don’t bump into other birds, if you get too close, reduce your speed (don’t swerve), pay attention to six or seven birds in your direct vicinity. Something like that.

The rules are easy to follow, work in correspondence and produce something that is, at its core, predictable - if you settle in at the right spot, as the sun sets, you have a good chance of witnessing a performance similar to this.

Similar, but never exactly the same. Each murmuration has different patterns and shapes - A grander, more organic version of Conway’s game of life.

Adventure games, traditionally, seem to have a comparably basic, concise set of rules.

1. the creator of this game is your master.
2. you shall figure out exactly what your master wants from you and perform these actions.
3. the master shan’t communicate their wishes directly.
4. you shall persist in trying all actions, reasonable or unreasonable, until you find the one that satisfies your master.

Other video games have made this process more dynamic, not only giving the player more agency, but putting the responsibility on the game design to deal with the player.

Adventure games still seem to “work with” the player based on the earlier mentioned rules. Some developers have tried to work around this rigid structure (Shout out to Kheops Studio), but this results in an incredible amount of extra work for what essentially comes down to alleviation, rather than a structural solution.

Can adventure games break with, or reform, the way they are structured and communicate with the player? Are there good examples of AG games that go beyond being educated guess-a-thons?

Or will the genre just be a niche, for as long as it lasts? Will hybrid-style games do any good? Can the genre try new things, or explore the way it operates and flip it in some interesting ways?

so how about these rules?

Vegetable Party - 12 March 2023 11:07 AM

1. the creator of this game is your master.
2. you shall figure out exactly what your master wants from you and perform these actions.
3. the master shan’t communicate their wishes directly.
4. you shall persist in trying all actions, reasonable or unreasonable, until you find the one that satisfies your master.

 

1. Games give you inconveniences to navigate - and try to make that rewarding. Some games offer desirable effects (bonding, competition, figuring out social dynamics) and development that’s applicable to real life (motor skills/mental faculties, coping skills) and on a more metaphysical level: figuring out yourself, others and how to navigate and engage with the world.

Adventure games really offer very little in this regard. You basically learn to be persistent and using the most blunt way of determining intent outside of yourself.

Some adventure games are fair masters, giving you a choice of difficulty. Others accommodate you by tolerating more than one solution, though many of them can’t help reprimanding you with fewer points, maybe even a worse ending.

In general, though, the genre is not really built for flexibility - players are subjugated to the rule of absolute authorial intent.

Most other genres have taken on the role of a facilitator,  learning from the input in-game and switching up what it offers - like an older, stronger animal play-fighting with a younger sibling, or the band leader of a jazz outfit, rather than the riddles of the unmoved Sphinx we still get from adventure games.

Shout out to Whispers of a Machine for creatively adapting to the player’s style and choices.

2. Games have laws- not just like rules or instructions,  more like thermodynamics: they govern the general direction and possibilities that challenge/facilitate the player. Ideally, this also directs the player towards one outcome over the other without being too literal about it.

This is where adventure games really have a hard time. it’s basically puzzles as gates to other puzzles, or worse - puzzles as arbitrary hurdles. It’s difficult to think of ways to do things differently, within the genre.

Other than arcade-elements or borrowing mechanics from other genres, i’m not sure how adventure games can develop in this regard.

shout out to a game that really tried to break this up: Return to Mysterious Island - multiple ways to solve inventory puzzles that allow for experimentation and (possible) application of some real world knowledge, without relying on some very specific cultural benchmark or reference point.

3. and .4.

These are the easiest to play fast and loose with in order to streamline a game. Rather than making the game a guess-a-thon, a tried and true method of easing the frustration is the hint system.

Good hints are the cornerstone of the genre. Ideally, they are worked into the game itself. If this isn’t enough, a good hint system can go a long way.
Even it’s a soft workaround, it does the job.

Some games used audio-visual clues, which is a bad solution. Not because it can’t be done well (Riven, The Witness), but because it just shifts the senses required to process the games input. It’s a different challenge and it decreases the genre’s accessibility.

Before you think i’m about to go cancel culture on the genre, these types of games are fine, other genres have all sorts of cues as well - nothing’s for everyone. But it falls short as as a solution to what is, i’m sorry to say this, just a recipe for bad game design.

There’s a more obvious workaround - just make the solution less hard to guess. reducing the amount of interactive objects, being more literal with directions.

If the wine’s bitter, you can keep adding water, but it’s just going to end up being a diluted version of the same wine.

Are there adventure games that do manage to implement the 3rd and 4th rule in creative ways?