The Death of Adventure Games
A recent Gamasutra article by Scott Nixon espouses the belief that the Nintendo Wii console has a good chance of resurrecting the dead adventure genre. I have a couple of questions about this premise, the first of which is, “why the Wii?” and the second and more general question, “is the adventure genre dying?”
Why will the Wii resurrect the adventure genre? The argument seems to boil down to the controller, specifically that the Wii’s controller can be used as an on-screen pointer like a mouse. This argument because it makes the assumption that adventure games cannot exist without a pointing device, which (with all due respect) is obviously bunk. The first adventure games (the original King’s Quest, for example) were designed to be played using only a keyboard and that control scheme seemed to work fine for them. (Given, most computers when that game were released didn’t have mouses attached to them, but the debate is whether mouses are required, not whether they are handy to have.) More to the point, however, there are already adventure games on Xbox and they are all quite playable without using the Xbox gamepad.
And of course if you take this premise farther, it makes even less sense. Is Nixon saying that racing games played in an arcade are a different genre from racing games played on your home console because the controls are different? Are first person shooters on consoles a different genre from first person shooters on PC? If so, what about FPS games that are direct ports? Obviously Prey on PC with a mouse/keyboard is in the same genre as Prey on Xbox 360 with a joypad. Dragon’s Lair is in the same genre whether played with an arcade joystick, a keyboard or even with your DVD player remote. Similarly, Doom 3 is the same genre of game whether it’s played with a gamepad or a keyboard/mouse. Why would an adventure game be different?
Nixon seems to be ignoring, or is unaware, that the Xbox already has several adventure games released for it, while the Nintendo Gamecube has none. Syberia II and Dreamfall both have Xbox ports. Syberia II is one of the highest-rated adventure games of the last few years, and Dreamfall is a sequel to one of the highest-rated adventure games ever, yet the writer doesn’t make the argument that Microsoft is going to resurrect the adventure genre. Why?
It’s clear that if any company is supporting adventure games, it’s Microsoft for two simple reasons: 1) The way a game is controlled has nothing to do with its genre, and 2) the Xbox has had the lion’s share of recent adventure games. So why the Wii?
Nixon states, “It is no secret that adventure games need to break into the console market to remain (some would say become) viable.” What, they aren’t there already?
I think what Nixon and other “adventure games are dying” writers are actually looking for isn’t “adventure games” but “adventure games like the ones I remember from when I was a kid.” There’s a difference between the two. The vast majority of Lucas Arts and Sierra adventure games were comedies, but most modern adventures are not. (There are exceptions to every rule, of course, but generally that applies to every adventure made after Myst.) Old adventure games made use of hand-drawn backgrounds and character animations, but most modern adventures use 3D for graphics. Old adventure games were cartoon-like and rarely dealt with more mature content, where modern adventures frequently have more adult-oriented content. Adventure games didn’t disappear, they just changed.
I think what they’re really after is nostalgia. What they want more than adventure games is, “adventure games that make me feel the way I felt in seventh grade when I guided a biker through a minefield using wind-up bunnies.”
Of course, this presumes that adventure games are dying. The adventure genre isn’t dying and I don’t think it’s even particularly unhealthy. (About a dozen adventure games are released every year.) The reason we frequently see articles about the death of the adventure genre is that the gaming press doesn’t write about adventure games. Well, they do write about adventure games, not only to declare them dead every few months. Irony.
The Longest Journey, released in 1999, is perhaps one of the finest adventure games ever made. And yet it’s virtually unknown, even amongst fans of the old Lucas Arts and Sierra adventures. Syberia received very good reviews from many gaming publications, but again, where was the buzz about it? (And what buzz there was came from the Xbox community, not the PC community.)
If the gaming press was really serious about “saving” the adventure genre, here is what they can do to help:
- Cover adventure games when they come out. Not just the obligatory review, but the same kind of coverage new FPS games get: screenshots, teaser movies, interviews with the developers, etc.
- Stop comparing new adventure games with old Lucas Arts games. That is clearly an unfair comparison. Lucas Arts has the advantage of nostalgia, and there’s nothing the new adventure games can do to combat that.
- And, naturally, stop writing articles about the death of the adventure genre! Or at least hold them back until there’s less than a dozen released a year, ok?