Adventure game
Adventure games are a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story, driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, such as literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of genres. Most adventure games are designed for a single player, since the emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult. Colossal Cave Adventure is identified by Rick Adams as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include Zork, King's Quest, Monkey Island, Syberia, and Myst.
Adventure games were initially developed in the 1970s and early 1980s as text-based interactive stories, using text parsers to translate the player's commands into actions. As personal computers became more powerful with better graphics, the graphic adventure-game format became popular, initially by augmenting player's text commands with graphics, but soon moving towards point-and-click interfaces. Further computer advances led to adventure games with more immersive graphics using real-time or pre-rendered three-dimensional scenes or full-motion video taken from the first- or third-person perspective. Currently, a large number of adventure games are available as a combination of different genres with adventure elements.
For markets in the Western hemisphere, the genre's popularity peaked during the late 1980s to mid-1990s when many considered it to be among the most technically advanced genres, but it had become a niche genre in the early 2000s due to the popularity of first-person shooters, and it became difficult for developers to find publishers to support adventure-game ventures. Since then, a resurgence in the genre has occurred, spurred on by the success of independent video-game development, particularly from crowdfunding efforts, from the wide availability of digital distribution enabling episodic approaches, and from the proliferation of new gaming platforms, including portable consoles and mobile devices.
Within Asian markets, adventure games continue to be popular in the form of visual novels, which make up nearly 70% of PC games released in Japan. Asian countries have also found markets for adventure games for portable and mobile gaming devices. Japanese adventure-games tend to be distinct, having a slower pace and revolving more around dialogue, whereas Western adventure-games typically emphasize more interactive worlds and complex puzzle solving, owing to them each having unique development histories.
Definition
The term "adventure game" originated from the 1970s text computer game Colossal Cave Adventure, often referred to simply as Adventure. It pioneered a style of gameplay that many developers imitated, and it became a genre in its own right. The video game genre is therefore defined by its gameplay, unlike the literary genre, which is defined by the subject it addresses: the activity of adventure.Essential elements of the genre include storytelling, exploration, and puzzle-solving. Marek Bronstring, former head of content at Sega, has characterised adventure games as puzzles embedded in a narrative framework; such games may involve narrative content that a player unlocks piece by piece over time. While the puzzles that players encounter through the story can be arbitrary, those that do not pull the player out of the narrative are considered examples of good design.
Relationship to other genres
Combat and action challenges are limited or absent in adventure games; this distinguishes them from action games. In the book Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design, the authors state that: "this doesn't mean that there is no conflict in adventure games... only that combat is not the primary activity." Some adventure games will include a minigame from another video game genre, which adventure game purists do not always appreciate. Hybrid action-adventure games blend the action and adventure genres throughout the game experience, incorporating more physical challenges than pure adventure games and having a faster pace. This definition is hard to apply, however, with some debate among designers about which games classify as action games and which involve enough non-physical challenges to be considered action-adventures.Adventure games are also distinct from role-playing video games that involve action, team-building, and points management. Adventure games lack the numeric rules or relationships seen in role-playing games, and seldom have an internal economy. These games lack any skill-system, combat, or "an opponent to be defeated through strategy and tactics". However, some hybrid games do exist and are referred to as either Adventure games or Role-playing games by the respective communities. Finally, adventure games are classified separately from puzzle video games. While puzzle video games revolve entirely around solving puzzles, adventure games revolve more around exploration and story, with puzzles typically scattered throughout the game.
Game design
Puzzle-solving
Adventure games contain a variety of puzzles, including decoding messages, finding and using items, opening locked doors, or finding and exploring new locations. Solving a puzzle will unlock access to new areas in the game world, and reveal more of the game story. Conceptual Reasoning and Lateral Thinking Puzzles form the majority of the gameplay, where extrinsic knowledge gained in real life is expected to be known and used by the player to overcome the challenges. This sets the puzzles apart from Logic puzzles where all the information needed to solve said problem is presented within the context of the situation, such as combination locks or other machinery that the player must learn to manipulate, though lateral thinking and conceptual reasoning puzzles may include the use of logical thinking.Some puzzles are criticized for the obscurity of their solutions, for example, the combination of a clothes line, clamp, and deflated rubber duck used to gather a key stuck between the subway tracks in The Longest Journey, which exists outside of the game's narrative and serves only as an obstacle to the player. Others have been criticized for requiring players to blindly guess, either by clicking on the right pixel, or by guessing the right verb in games that use a text interface. Games that require players to navigate mazes have also become less popular, although the earliest text-adventure games usually required players to draw a map if they wanted to navigate the abstract space.
Gathering and using items
Many adventure games make use of an inventory management screen as a distinct gameplay mode. Players are only able to pick up some objects in the game, so the player usually knows that only objects that can be picked up are important. Because it can be difficult for a player to know if they missed an important item, they will often scour every scene for items. For games that utilize a point and click interface, players will sometimes engage in a systematic search known as a "pixel hunt", trying to locate the small area on the graphic representation of the location on screen that the developers defined, which may not be obvious or only consist of a few on-screen pixels. A notable example comes from the original Full Throttle by LucasArts, where one puzzle requires instructing the character to kick a wall at a small spot, which Tim Schafer, the game's lead designer, had admitted years later was a brute force measure; in the remastering of the game, Schafer and his team at Double Fine made this puzzle's solution more obvious. More recent adventure games try to avoid pixel hunts by highlighting the item, or by snapping the player's cursor to the item.Many puzzles in these games involve gathering and using items from their inventory. Players must apply lateral thinking techniques where they apply real-world extrinsic knowledge about objects in unexpected ways. For example, by putting a deflated inner tube on a cactus to create a slingshot, which requires a player to realize that an inner tube is stretchy. They may need to carry items in their inventory for a long duration before they prove useful, and thus it is normal for adventure games to test a player's memory where a challenge can only be overcome by recalling a piece of information from earlier in the game. There is seldom any time pressure for these puzzles, focusing more on the player's ability to reason than on quick-thinking.
Story, setting, and themes
Adventure games are single-player experiences that are largely story-driven. More than any other genre, adventure games depend upon their story and setting to create a compelling single-player experience. They are typically set in an immersive environment, often a fantasy world, and try to vary the setting from chapter to chapter to add novelty and interest to the experience. Comedy is a common theme, and games often script comedic responses when players attempt actions or combinations that are "ridiculous or impossible".Since adventure games are driven by storytelling, character development usually follows literary conventions of personal and emotional growth, rather than new powers or abilities that affect gameplay. The player often embarks upon a quest, or is required to unravel a mystery or situation about which little is known. These types of mysterious stories allow designers to get around what Ernest W. Adams calls the "Problem of Amnesia", where the player controls the protagonist but must start the game without their knowledge and experience. Story-events typically unfold as the player completes new challenges or puzzles, but in order to make such storytelling less mechanical, new elements in the story may also be triggered by player movement.