Adventure Gamers - Forums

Then again, in shooters every building is labyrinth and player kills more than action film hero. Oh, so believable. Trouble with overcomplicated puzzles isn’t immersion, but fact that adventure games have existed so long that ingenious puzzles tend to be done in past, but designers still have to come up with challenge.

Gonzosports - 25 March 2014 01:06 AM

Ron Gilbert was on the panel and said something that struck me - that he thought that humor was so important in an adventure game because, “what you’re doing in adventure games is often so ridiculous - that it makes more sense when you can poke fun at what you’re doing. In a serious game, doing those same actions can break the suspension of disbelief.”

I’m not fond of this, because it’s a design philosophy that’s been abused in the past (including by Gilbert in MI2). Coming up with contrived, nonsensical (i.e. bad) puzzles and hoping that poking fun at how contrived and nonsensical they are somehow excuses everything is lazy and insulting. If you make an unfair, frustrating puzzle and then laugh about it, you’re not laughing with the player, you’re laughing at the player.

So I’m all for games breaking the fourth wall and poking fun at their own conventions, but that should never be used as an excuse for bad puzzle design.

Serious vs. comical is just a personal preference.  Personally I’ve always preferred serious games.  I also prefer serious television and serious movies to straight comedies.

I typically don’t really have major problems with bad puzzles either, as long as the rest of the game is good enough to overcome it.  I may be irked by some of them, but one stupid puzzle is certainly not going to ruin an otherwise great game for me.  Even with serious games.

I can’t really think of ANY adventure game that has ever played it completely straight and had no humor in it whatsoever.  The Longest Journey, for example, mentioned above, had plenty of humorous moments.  Most of these kinds of games, even the so-called serious ones, are more like Raiders of the Lost Ark—a serious premise, but rife with plenty of comedic moments.  Games don’t have to be outright comedies to have comedic elements.

In terms of puzzle abstraction, I’ve never thought of it as something that works better in comedies vs. non-comedies.  Abstract puzzles are just a staple of adventure games.  Some are great, some aren’t.  I’m not sure the tone of the game’s story has much to do with it.

For my money, Monkey Island 2 doesn’t have a bad puzzle in it.  But that’s another topic. 

Well, it may sound like a bullet-proof idea on paper but I doubt it is as effective as Gilbert implies. This is one of the rules he set out to follow in the design article he wrote in the 80s, which summarized many clever solutions to the nonsensical aspects of adventure game puzzles.

The application of some of these rules however, such as the one we’re discussing here, don’t necessarily work out all the time. For instance, I am not always amused by stupid puzzles in comedy games. So I guess regardless of story type, the design has to be adapted for it.

I’m not so delusional that I ever forget that I’m playing a game. I like serious games, and funny ones. As long as the whole experience is really integrated around a cool style and narrative, any storytelling genre is appropriate.

I actually find funny games more risky generally, because often times they’re just not funny and they try too hard. That really takes away from my enjoyment, I don’t like disliking the characters. That’s why Monkey Island’s brand of humor is great, the characters actually don’t try to tell that many jokes. The game just IS funny, the things you do are funny and don’t need to be spelled out. The dialog is actually very short and concise and obviously not spoken, and the repetition has a funny effect after awhile, it allows you to fill in the blanks to make it funny to you.