Adventure Games - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 551

setting creates the world the player explores and lives in. For many players, the set-
ting is the reason for playing adventure games in the first place.

The majority of computer games offer little emotional subtlety. Games of pure strat-
egy have no emotional content at all; action games and war games have little more.
Nor do most single-player games inspire complex emotions in the player. “Yippee!”
and “Damn!” are about the limit of it—exhilaration and frustration, respectively.
Role-playing games (RPGs), with their deeper stories, offer greater opportunities for
emotional expression, but even when their designers take advantage of this depth,
the emotion tends to get lost in a morass of bookkeeping. Multiplayer games are an
exception; their social context allows for richer interactions because they take place
among real people.

Adventure games are always single-player games, so they can't rely on social inter-
actions to create richness. They don't have intricate strategy, high-speed action, or
management details to occupy the player's attention. The games move more slowly,
which gives designers the chance to create a world with a distinct emotional tone.
Good examples from the past and present are Phantasmagoria , one of the first
graphical horror games; the Myst series, with its surreal buildings and empty
spaces; and Shadow of the Colossus 's vast and beautiful landscapes, which make it
distinctly more than an ordinary action-adventure.

Interaction Model
Adventure games always use an avatar-based interaction model because the
designer wants to put the player inside a story. However, the nature of the avatar in
adventure games has changed over the years. The early games Adventure and Myst
used nonspecific avatars, an idea discussed in Chapter 6, “Character Development.”
In effect, the games pretended that the player was the avatar.

Eventually, however, game designers abandoned this model so that they could develop
games in which the avatar possessed a personality of his own, someone who belonged
in the game world rather than being a visitor there. Sierra On-Line's Leisure Suit Larry
series and Revolution Software's Broken Sword games are good examples. In these
games, the player can see his avatar walking around, interacting with the world.

NOTE The oldest
graphical adventure
games used static
painted backdrops,
not a freely-moving
camera in a 3D space,
to display each scene.
Many still do. The
painted backdrop
still qualifies as a
context-sensitive cam-
era model, however,
because the camera
angle changes as the
avatar moves from
scene to scene.

Camera Model
The preferred camera model of graphical adventure games is changing. The con-
text-sensitive approach is traditional, but third- and first-person games are
becoming increasingly common. This section discusses the advantages and disad-
vantages of these approaches.

CONTEXT-SENSITIVE MODEL
Using a context-sensitive model, the game depicts the avatar from whatever camera
angle is most appropriate for her current location in the game world. If the avatar