Adventure Gamers - Forums

TimovieMan - 09 July 2012 01:53 PM

Anyone who even remotely calls himself a gamer knows what an adventure game is.

I want this to be true. I want it with all my heart. I’d love it if everyone who plays Call of Duty or Battlefield or Skyrim or Heavy Rain now also played Doom or Quake or Monkey Island back then… but it’s not so, sadly. The ‘90s are starting to be twenty years ago, and the ‘80s thirty (thirty!). And the newer generation of gamers will refuse to be schooled.

Unfortunatly, I still think that unless the demand for pure Adventure games rises drastically, we’ll slowly but surely reach a point where an “Adventure Game” will be “A game where the main character goes on an adventure”, and the old definition will be lost.

TimovieMan - 09 July 2012 01:53 PM

Ever had to explain that you’re not a nerd, but a geek, and that there’s a difference?

Countless times! To the point where I’ve stopped correcting people and just started taking “nerd” as a compliment. Proud to be a nerd. 

I wholehearted agree that the genre name was a horrible choice to begin with, since it never jived with the actual meaning of the word.  That was just dumb. 

I also believe people need to stop wanting the definition to be the be-all and end-all.  The genre is simply too diverse.  Even among games we all agree are adventures, they’re vastly different.  If someone tells you a game is an adventure, the reaction shouldn’t be “oh, I now know exactly what to expect”, but rather “what kind of adventure?” 

Finally, since it’s pretty much unanimous that adventures primarily include story, puzzles, and exploration (perhaps not in that order, and never dictating in what proportions), and there’s no such word that adequately encompasses all three, perhaps we should just invent a new word altogether.  New words are created all the time, and old words “officially” discarded by the thousands every year, so there’s lots of precedent.

So how about Stuzzlations?  Expuzzories?

Jackal - 09 July 2012 04:40 PM

So how about Stuzzlations?  Expuzzories?

I rather like “Pericombombulatory Games”.

Matan - 09 July 2012 03:23 PM

“Point and Click” doesn’t really work, because it’s a definition based on the interface. It doesn’t encompass many new adventure games which are gamepad driven, and it doesn’t even include classic adventure games from the text parser era (ike King’s Quest 1-4 or Space Quest 1-3).

While “point and click” might not always work, most non-adventure gamers (that I’ve come across anyway) actually know what that means, even if the controls are done with a gamepad - and isn’t that the solution we’re trying to come across? A broad definition that people instantly understand. When you say something is an adventure most won’t know what you’re talking about, but for some reason point and click rings a bell, so fine, whatever, I use that instead even if it doesn’t encompass everything to do with the genre. Definitions rarely do, that’s why so many games these days are just called “action adventure” which doesn’t actually say anything about the game at all.

Matan - 09 July 2012 04:48 AM

So, I suggest a new name to the genre: “Story-driven games”.

 

so to avoid the slight confusion of action-adventure and adventure, you’d want to be thrown into a world of constant confusion with every rpg ever made? Because people consider them story driven.
Yeah, adventure is broad, but it stuck. And we have lots of sub-genre names for when you want to describe a game more specifically.

diego - 09 July 2012 05:19 PM

...“each story is written from a second-person point of view, with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character’s actions and the plot’s outcome.”

Sounds familiar?

Making choices to determine the main character’s plot’s outcome? Sounds like mass effect or fallout to me

But seriously, is it more common in adventure games than in other genres to have player actions affect the outcome of the story? I know of very few adventure games that do this - Heavy Rain and Walking Dead are two recent ones. There are also some others I can think of where most of the game is identical and only the ending can be changed based on player actions. Most adventure games just have a linear plot for the player to advance through.

zane - 10 July 2012 12:17 AM

[
Yeah, adventure is broad, but it stuck. And we have lots of sub-genre names for when you want to describe a game more specifically.

Well, I think it didn’t stuck enough (as most gamers mean something else when they say “adventure games”) and I am not sure if I know the sub-genre names you refer to (is that first person and third person? )

In the end, I agree with Lucien that the genre of a game doesn’t really matter as long as the game is good. My main objective is to get adventuregamers to review all story-driven games even if they do not fit their genre definition
I am very glad they chose to broaden the genre definition to include games like Portal, Amnesia, Heavy Rain etc. I just feel it’s the website I can trust best to actually know whether the story of a game is good, and whether the other gameplay mechanics do or do not distract from the story. For now, I am glad with the set of games the website chooses to review, I’m just tired of all the arguments every time they review a non-traditional adventure game.

well, i gave it some thought, and i think if i had to rename the genre, i would call them “solving games” or problem solving… because i think the genre pretty universally centers around the logic of solving a problem in a way that distinguishes itself from other games. Not all adventures have real puzzles, but they do all have problems that you work through. And while technically all games involve solving some sort of problem, (just like in every game you play a role, but it isnt roleplaying) the word doesnt have too much association to other genres. Calling it “solving” also associates it to mystery, without requiring it be a mystery game.

But when it comes to genres: “it is what it is until it isnt.” And our genre is adventure.

Matan - 10 July 2012 01:04 AM

I am very glad they chose to broaden the genre definition to include games like Portal, Amnesia, Heavy Rain etc.

Just for the sake of clarity, we didn’t broaden it at all.  We have the exact same definition we always did.  It’s just that more developers have started thinking creatively in recent years, pushing beyond traditional genre formulas while still maintaining the core elements.  So it’s the games that changed, not us. 

I agree that the adventure name is bad, because as you say it implies a lot of things that aren’t always true.

Story driven games is an even worse name, though, because the truth is that most non-arcade games are to some extent story driven, and usually not less so than the average adventure game. We’ve got more character interaction, and our stories tend to be a lot more varied (they involve less killing, for one thing), but “story driven” is a term that describes Spec Ops: The Line and The Witcher just as well as it describes the average adventure game. It fits most action-adventures too, so no less confusion there.

Also, genre labels are flawed in general. BioShock is an FPS, but is it really like Doom? Same with Deus Ex. Is describing Mass Effect 3 as an RPG really that appropriate? What else would it be called? Is GTA IV a racing game, an action adventure, a shooter or what? Recently it’s been called an “open world-game”, but what does that really imply other than the fact that it’s set in an open environment? If the open environment is the deciding factor, does that mean GTA IV and Mount & Blade are both in the same genre because they’ve both got open worlds? That wouldn’t be very helpful, because they’re really very different (as for M&B, I wouldn’t say RPG is a very fitting label either, because the RPG elements does not really define the experience).

So, err, the point is: Caffusing!

Matan - 10 July 2012 12:53 AM

But seriously, is it more common in adventure games than in other genres to have player actions affect the outcome of the story?

Of course! Just think about Space Quest death scenes, different paths to take in Quest for Glory and different ways to solve puzzles in Kyrandia. No game is linear because one player will walk around confused about how to solve a puzzle while another will know how to solve it right away. Even choosing which age to visit in Myst changes the outcome of the story.