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Why do we like adventure games?

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Let me be the first to say that I do not like adventure games as a genre. Which melds nicely with a similar conversation on the Casual Games thread. I love individual games, but not the whole. We recently played a CPT of Shivers, which Sierra admitted was a MYST clone. I loved Shivers and I hated MYST and every other Cyan game that came after.

So asking why we like, love adore adventure games doesn’t make sense to me. There are a lot of threads on the first two pages that just bash adventure games that people don’t like.

We like the games we like to play.

     

For whom the games toll,
they toll for thee.

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rtrooney - 13 December 2018 09:44 PM

Let me be the first to say that I do not like adventure games as a genre. Which melds nicely with a similar conversation on the Casual Games thread. I love individual games, but not the whole. We recently played a CPT of Shivers, which Sierra admitted was a MYST clone. I loved Shivers and I hated MYST and every other Cyan game that came after.

So asking why we like, love adore adventure games doesn’t make sense to me. There are a lot of threads on the first two pages that just bash adventure games that people don’t like.

We like the games we like to play.

And yet, you find yourself on a forum titled Adventure Gamers. Coincidence?

I actually have a theory about this.

In eastern religions and scriptures (Buddhism, Hinduism, etc) there is the idea of karma, or action. The actions we perform are caused by subconscious tendencies which give rise to further karmas. Karmas are what cause all births (of bodies, thoughts, emotions etc) and have caused our current birth of our own body which is necessary to transact with the world and allow our tendencies to play out.

Everyone has to play out their karmas through their current physical incarnation to end the cycle of samsara, which is said to be the purpose of life. Yoga is one means of accelerating this playing out of karmas and exhausting them so the liberation from samsara can be achieved, though other means exist. In the west not many of us are familiar with yoga (meaning the true yoga as union with the divine, not the popular form of twisting your body into a pretzel), but we still feel the drive to play out karmas which explains the manic/neurotic nature of western life, obsessed with endless activity.

Swami Krishnananda on karmas:

We cannot cut short the span of life except by exhaustion of karma. It is karma that pushes itself forward as experience. That fact is not known to the mind because it is involved in the force with which the karma acts.
The causes of the effects of karma are not known to the mind. Perhaps no one can know them, because each aspect of that cause is influenced by every other aspect, so we cannot say that any one is the entire cause. The cessation of these factors is the cessation of the vasanas, says the sutra. The perception of an object is one of the causes.

This is where stories and fiction come into it. Stories are another means of playing out karmas in a vicarious manner, in a way that we cannot usually experience in “real life”. Until recently they were slow and passive forms of experience. Radio, television, movies represented an acceleration of experience so that someone born in the 1920s could experience lifetimes more worth of experiences than say, someone born in the 18th century. A movie is a more substantial form of experience than a novel because its sensory content is far greater and more visceral – not to say anything about the content of the story.

Here is a quote from Marshall McLuhan:

“You must remember that the TV child has been relentlessly exposed to all the “adult” news of the modern world—war, racial discrimination, rioting, crime, inflation, sexual revolution. The war in Vietnam has written its bloody message on his skin; he has witnessed the assassinations and funerals of the nation’s leaders; he’s been orbited through the TV screen into the astronaut’s dance in space, been inundated by information transmitted via radio, telephone, films, recordings and other people. His parents plopped him down in front of a TV set at the age of two to tranquilize him, and by the time he enters kindergarten, he’s clocked as much as 4000 hours of television. As an IBM executive told me, “My children had lived several lifetimes compared to their grandparentswhen they began grade one.”

Gaming is the most immersive experience in the electric media yet to be invented – most likely to be overtaken by VR when that medium is fully developed. Its interactivity means that we are not only experiencing a story but participating in it, and so the impact of the story upon us is much greater. The mind that is engaged in making decisions and which bears the consequences of those decisions feels their impact and assimilates them in ways closer to the ways they would be assimilated if they were played out in “real life”, even if it is aware that those decisions and consequences are not real.

Simply put, we crave certain experiences, and in depth experience provided by gaming is increasingly the preferred mode. We may see it as “escapism” but a game world is as much a “world” as any other worlds we are engaged with in everyday life, whether it’s work-world, dream-world, sleep-world, reading-world, family-world, eating breakfast-world. And as a world it serves us in providing a uniquely targeted outlet for our subconscious psychic and social needs. Adventure games are no different from shooters, RPGs or strategy games, they just target different needs.

However, as pointed out above by Krishnanada, playing adventure games or any other game, is ineffective at burning through karmas as the underlying cause which are the tendencies are not exhausted in the process. The player/participant is unaware of this but will still remain unaffected in her subconscious drive to perform those karmas. The eastern traditions posit various methods for exhausting those binding tendencies responsible for karmas and thereby achieving the goal of life, but unfortunately playing adventure games is not one of them.

 

     
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Not going to quote your reply. That would take up far to much bandwidth.

What I will say is that my statement about not loving Adventure Games was mis-interpreted by just about everyone.

I can like, maybe even love, playing specific games. That, in no way means I love the genre.

I can love playing a chess match with a good opponent. But that doesn’t mean I love to play chess. Unless there’s a challenge, I can pretty much take it of leave it. And, most of the time I’ll leave it.

And so it is with Adventures.

As to why I’m here…. I like discussing the Adventures I like with those that like the same thing. I’m also, by default, the spokesperson for Casual Games. This is the only venue that has a dedicated thread for that discussion. So, where else would I be, but here?

     

For whom the games toll,
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I love problem-solving, it’s what drives me.  As for the why - dopamine.  Hope that’s not too brief. Grin

     
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Because they are fun. Love the stories and characters. This forum is amazing, one of the best for any genre.

Heart

     

I enjoy playing adventure games on my Alienware M17 r4 and my Nintendo Switch OLED.

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And because I always wanted to be a pirate Naughty

     

Currently translating Strangeland into Spanish. Wish me luck, or send me money to my Paypal haha

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The adventure games I like to play give me the combined benefits of two of my favourite hobbies - reading books and solving puzzles. Reading books has always been an important pastime of mine, and I read fantasy and SF almost exclusively. It is pure escapism into another world, and adventure games makes those worlds come alive. I become the protagonist, especially in the 1st person puzzlers I like to play. I get to discover the story at my own pace. But I need to problem solve. Not the mundane chores of the day, but working out fantastic machines, exploring and gaining access to spaces. Using clues to work out what I need to know. It is the puzzles that drive me forward into the game.

     
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As a child, point-and-click adventure games were on the forefront of art and technology. Incredible art and sound, fully animated, fully voiced with clever writing and pushing the capabilities of the PC while consoles were still about anthropomorphic mascots with behavioural issues running and jumping from left to right.

Compared to that, adventure games made for an immerse experience where I felt closer than ever to being apart of a cinematic world. The games were never about solving puzzles as much. A lot of these “puzzles” sucked and relied heavy on pixel hunting or triggering a flag by selecting a specific option from a dialogue tree. Instead, the experience was about interacting with everything and everyone around you. Talking to strange characters and watching these environments come alive as objects move about the scene.

As to why I wanted to immerse myself in these worlds - I was always drawing growing up and was a big fan of Looney Tunes and Disney. Being able to explore a cartoon world like DOTT or Sam & Max was fairly attractive as a result and the rich volume of interaction compared to platformers and shooters kept me in those games.


Hmm, this might help to explain why Myst is so terrible to me. It’s so isolated and empty. It’s like looking over the belongings of a recently deceased relative. Give me a good old zany point-and-click.

     
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I think the OP is looking for a more objective answer than most people have given.

Why “we” like something can’t be known subjectively.

My guess (and it’s only a guess) is 3 factors:
1.  Illusion of control. We get to have power we don’t feel we have in real life, power to change things.
2. There’s also the lure of achieving something intellectually. It’s a challenge, but not an entirely meaningless one for us because the story gives us a meaning. Unlike a crossword puzzle or sudoku.
3, Immunity. Maybe we have been wounded in the past by certain experiences and know that adventure games give us a chance go out into a fantasy world where we don’t have to face the concequences.
4. Meaning. Our life doesn’t have it and we know it, maybe only subconsiously. We also see no meaning in the ‘real world’ so advgames give us a bubble of reality where it all seems to mean something.

     

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Donuts McGee - 18 December 2018 04:57 AM

4. Meaning. Our life doesn’t have it and we know it, maybe only subconsiously. We also see no meaning in the ‘real world’ so advgames give us a bubble of reality where it all seems to mean something.

I would like to hear more about this.
In many adventure games the entire effort of doing something ends up being pointless and meaningless. If not straight away, at least in the sequel.

In Space Quest you are a janitor on a spaceship, you end up becoming a hero, and then become a janitor again.
In Leisure Suit Larry you work hard to get a woman, and then you once again don’t have a woman.
In Monkey Island you try to make the undead antagonist a little bit more dead, only to find out that he keeps coming back.

In some games, like Monkey Island 2 and Time, Gentlemen, Please, the ending leaves the player wondering what was the point of the entire adventure.

     
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GateKeeper - 18 December 2018 06:07 AM
Donuts McGee - 18 December 2018 04:57 AM

4. Meaning. Our life doesn’t have it and we know it, maybe only subconsiously. We also see no meaning in the ‘real world’ so advgames give us a bubble of reality where it all seems to mean something.

I would like to hear more about this.
In many adventure games the entire effort of doing something ends up being pointless and meaningless. If not straight away, at least in the sequel.

Yes, very true, but isn’t real life the same? Yet that doesn’t stop the vast majority of us running around on endless quests and errands of our own. Nothing has inherent meaning, we place meaning where we think it is.

So we probably need to add a 5th factor. The advantage of the adventure game’s meaninglessness over life is that it is only limited by your imagination.

     

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I like adventure games because they’re basically the only genre in gaming where story dictates gameplay and not the other way around. The plot to every shooter will need to somehow justify gunning down hundreds of enemies. In every platformer you need a reason for the character to maneuver across hundreds of obstacles. It basically limits—with a few rare exceptions—the tales you can tell to different flavors of flashy action stories.

In an adventure game the gameplay can be whatever the story calls for. From surveying an ancient dig-site in Fate Of Atlantis to dumping a can of paint on Victoria Chase’s in Life Is Strange. All an adventure game needs is a narrative and one or more of the following: exploration, character interaction, problem solving. It’s a much more liberating formula and allows for a lot of unique experiences you typically don’t get from other genre’s of gaming.

 

     
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To all that had been said i would add the pacing. You can play at your own pace, with a cup of tea at your side and just take your time. But it doesn’t mean that it’s light or casual, because at the same time its complex and full of content.
This balance between something challenging presented in a slow paced exploratory mechanic, is what i like.
And the way the game is always changing, always developing new situations, you are not just grinding one mechanic over and over again.

     

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