Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
the hero of the story. A few adventure games have been made (most recently,
Dreamfall ) in which the player switches from one avatar to another at different
points in the game, but they are not the norm.
ADVENTURE GAME An adventure game is an interactive story about a protagonist
character who is played by the player. Storytelling and exploration are essential
elements of the game. Puzzle solving and conceptual challenges make up the majority
of the gameplay. Combat, economic management, and action challenges are reduced or
nonexistent.
This definition doesn't mean that there is no conflict in adventure games (although
many adventure games have none)—only that combat is not a primary activity.
Adventure games seldom have an internal economy. All the relationships within
the game are symbolic rather than numeric. Manipulating or optimizing an eco-
nomic system forms no part of the adventure game experience; this (among other
things) sets them apart from role-playing games.
The Growth of Adventure Games
Adventure games were highly popular in the early days of personal computers. The
earliest ones were text-only, which made them inexpensive to develop and allowed
great scope for both the designer's and the player's imaginations. A group of stu-
dents at MIT, inspired by the original Adventure , wrote a much larger adventure
game named Zork on the mainframe there. Soon afterward, they converted it to
run on personal computers and founded a company, Infocom, devoted to develop-
ing text adventures. Infocom published games about all kinds of things: fantasy
magic, film noir detective stories, exploration of an ancient Egyptian pyramid, and
so on.
The original Adventure didn't have any plot; it just offered a space to explore and
puzzles to solve. With minor exceptions, its world did not change as time passed.
But it wasn't long before games began to explore the notion of interactive storytelling ,
which Chapter 7, “Storytelling and Narrative,” discusses in detail.
As soon as personal computers began to develop graphics capability (the very earli-
est were text-only), developers started to add graphics to adventure games, and the
games really took off. LucasArts and Sierra On-Line dominated the genre and for a
while produced the best-looking, richest games on the market: funny, scary, myste-
rious, and fascinating. Adventure games provided challenges and explored areas
that other genres didn't touch. Myst , a point-and-click graphic adventure, was for
many years the best-selling personal computer game of all time. (It was later sup-
planted by The Sims .)
Adventure Games Today
In the past few years, the market for adventure games has grown less steadily than
the market for other genres. Adventure games depend less on display technology
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