Lessons for the new breed of adventure games

Maybe I’ve been suffering light fatigue of the modern triple-A game market, as is somewhat routine when distant temporal rumbles start to foretell the annual E3 avalanche. Whatever the cause may be, I’ve spent recent weeks curled up in a nest of old games, swaddled in an inexplicable fixation on precisely the era of gaming that put loads of people off the pastime altogether. I mean, of course, the late-stage adventure games – the ones with graphics and stories that get more elaborate as the gameplay becomes more leaden, until you’re wondering why they didn’t just force you to watch the low-budget film they’d envisioned instead of making you pixel hunt for the things to click to advance it. Storytellers felt that with more realism, they could make their games more adult, more respectable, and more immersive. However, the result was that oft-lamented and shortlived ‘live-action’ phase, with C-grade actors standing around like robots awaiting input, and hard drives made to chug through video of someone opening and walking through the door you’d just clicked on. Every time.

Maybe it’s sentimentality, but I can’t call them ‘bad’, not exactly. These games were adolescent, and so was I when I played them; I have a fondness for that most awkward of growing pains. When I was a kid, Sierra’s Phantasmagoria games kept me up at night and so, no matter how silly they look to me now, I can’t help but be just a bit scared of them occasionally. Don’t tell anyone.

Ahem. Anyway, most people who work in games undergo frequent nostalgia trips, and with good reason: it takes an exceptional degree of dedication to the field to endure the long hours, frequent disappointments, the early years of powerlessness and compromise, and all of that stuff it generally costs to write about or develop videogames.

Very few make it through all that without having had a deep love for the medium instilled within them at an early age – nothing less than those pure memories of discovery and joy could sustain us. Often, I think most of us work so hard because we’re trying to love games again the way we did when we were kids.

This time, though, I might chalk my latest nostalgia trip up to a trend I’m seeing in the current business climate: adventure games are coming back, at least after a fashion. A happy combination of new, lite mobile and social platforms and targeted crowdfunding means that traditional adventure game designers have more opportunity than ever to do what they love – addressing all of those fans who’ve wished over the years to see the genre return.

Though the big player in the field is Double Fine’s much-anticipated Kickstarter project, Tim Schafer’s contemporaries, such as Jane Jensen, Al Lowe and Space Quest’s Two Guys From Andromeda, are looking at ways to either revisit old brands or make new entries in today’s favourable climate. I remember trying to play Jordan Mechner’s The Last Express as a kid and failing because my computer wasn’t quite stable enough. Now that game’s about to come out on my iPhone, where I can revisit it with one fingertip. What an age we’re in!

Mechner and I spoke recently following a talk he gave at New York University, and I asked him about this revisiting of old game forms. He told me he finds the idea of evolution in games somewhat misleading, since older forms never actually cease to exist, their breadth just shifts based on the scope of a given era’s platforms or audience. Viewed that way, the adventure genre never really ‘died’ – it’s just been waiting for a new opportunity.

When I last talked to Schafer, he also said the state of adventure gaming was much more complicated than living or dead. On the heels of his recent success, though, he reflected on the importance of taking advantage of modern design innovation, known best practices, and audience preferences. Rather than make a rank and file retro throwback, what would an adventure game rooted in problem-solving, story and humour look like today?

That’s a fresh perspective for an industry obsessed with ‘recapturing’ something we’ve supposedly lost with the march of time. Some of the most popular indie games have a ‘retro’ look, or use older design vocabulary as a point of reference for subversion. That weird live-action phase I’ve been revisiting was mainly a step in the wrong direction for games, which at that time moved forward under the assumption that they had to resemble more familiar media to be viewed seriously. It’s only over the last decade that a sensible idea has become the prevailing wisdom: the most valuable games do things only games can do.

But that’s a natural arc of self-discovery for any medium. Maybe creators had to push in an unnatural direction to learn what about games was innate and what was artificial – like adolescents imitating adults in order to find out who they want to become.

While fans might be hoping for their beloved familiar creators to resurrect their childhood memories, it’s more exciting to me to see what those creators have learned over the years, and how they might use those lessons to present cerebral, charming adventure games in brand new ways.