Letter to the Editor October 2, 2002 – Welcome to Just Adventure + – Articles

Articles

We receive numerous emails at JA and, unlike the crayoned ‘You Guyz Rule!’ scribblings that the action-laden gaming magazines print, we receive many lengthy and thoughtful letters that showcase the overall intelligence not only of our readers, but of most adventure gamers in general.

The following email was too good to just post in the ‘Letters to the Editor’ section, so I approached the author and asked his permission to post said email as a feature article. Happily, he acquiesced, and after giving much thought to a title, I then decided to post the letter in its entirety. Not one word has been edited or removed and I believe that Mr. Crowley, new as he may be to the genre, is the perfect example of why adventure gamers are the best gamers. Enjoy.

Dear Randy (and all the rest of the JA crew):
I have been checking in at your marvelous site for about a year now (as well as Quandary’s excellent site) and have noted what seems to be an increasingly acrimonious balkanization of opinions regarding “adventure” as opposed to “(pick a category)” type games. Some thoughts (well, perhaps several, or even a fair number) follow.
My wife and I bought our computer in February of 2001. At the time, I had little, really no, interest in gaming, apart from the typical “bouncing ball” games one could download in shareware versions on the net. I happened to stumble upon the 3D revamp of Myst (realMYST) in April of 2001 and decided to try it, just for a lark. I was dimly aware of the buzz that the original Myst had created in the computer world and had a vague understanding that it represented a challenge to the standard shoot-em, kill-em types of games that seemed to dominate the field, but I had no particular opinion about or interest in or experience of such gaming matters; I was simply curious.
To say that a revelation was at hand would almost be fatuous.
realMYST, needless to say, knocked me straight into the world of what is generally called “adventure gaming” (although I had no knowledge of gaming typologies at the time). Completely by accident, I had entered a virtual world that was graphically beautiful, intellectually stimulating and just plain fascinating, all without the benefit of a single gunshot or bloodspray pattern (more about that later). In the ensuing several months, I played through realMYST, Riven and Myst III: Exile in succession, completely immersed in this new and challenging game environment, so immersed that I refused to refer to walkthroughs (which I had discovered by accident) and would sometimes sit for hours, chin in hands, struggling to thrash my seeming dullard’s brain into some sort of state resembling actual human intellectual capacity, rather than admit defeat and get the walkthrough answer (a principle that I have since abandoned – I confess that playing three or four games a month instead of three games over four months has led to a certain impatience to proceed to the next game, and so led to a certain willingness to use walkthroughs as a matter of convenience – anyone who has played Schizm will know whereof I speak). The fact that the cussed process of just sitting and thinking about these three games could be as enjoyable as actually playing through them was one of the things that hooked me; after finishing Myst III, I poked my head up and began to search out other examples of what I gradually learned was an entire subset in the gaming world, that of “adventure” gaming. A new religious convert could not have been more enthusiastic than I.
While I criticized no one for playing more violent, action-oriented games, I wasn’t interested in them and sought out adventure games exclusively: games like Amerzone, The Crystal Key, The Riddle Of The Sphinx, The Longest Journey, the Journeyman trilogy, “edutainment” games such as Paris 1313 and Byzantine: The Betrayal – all more or less fine examples of the adventure genre (we could argue about the excellence of The Crystal Key, I suppose, but I was new to gaming and everything I encountered seemed valuable in some way or another). Most of these games I found by looking at sites like JA and by checking out Dreamcatcher, Cryo, Arxel, and some of the other usual suspects that came within my field of vision as I played more games.
I began to notice a certain high spirited, but all the same, somewhat mournful attitude emanating from the reviews and discussions I read at adventure sites – it was not long before I realized that the multi-million unit sales figures of Myst were the exception, rather than the rule, in the adventure gaming market and that this brutal demographic fact was contributing to what many devoted adventure gamers saw as a gradual strangling of the genre at the hands of the more profitable, more violent, 12 to 21-year- old-male-shoot-em-up section of the field. Along with these observations by adventure gamers came a sort of passionate conviction that adventure gaming was being destroyed, at the corporate development level, by the same sort of MBA suit mentality that has made of Hollywood an empire of junk, aimed at the fabled lowest common denominator of public taste in the name of profit and shareholder satisfaction. What most impressed me about these statements, true as they were (and are) was that I could see no particular reason why computer gaming, a business existing in the greatest of the liberal capitalist states of the West, should escape the pressures, mostly demographic, that drive each and every other business in the U.S.A., especially if the business in question is at all related to entertainment.
I will admit that when one looks at the sheer disproportion in numbers, a certain lack of optimism for the future of adventure gaming seems inevitable. For every Legend Of The Prophet And The Assassin\Secrets Of The Alamut there are ten or more brainless bloodsoakers that exist merely to satisfy the revenge fantasies of adolescent boys. But when has this inverse ratio of quantity to quality not been so, in any medium that is even remotely connected to art or public entertainment? Humans are creatures of mass consumption in the modern capitalist West, with all the efficiencies of scale and crude leveling of attention to quality that such a massive delivery system entails. What we should remember is that LOPA\SOA and many other similar games, direct challenges to those efficiencies of scale and leveling of quality, do indeed exist, both as fine examples of the higher aspirations of their genre and as rebukes to the lowest common denominator environment of the wider culture.
Many people bemoan the fact that it is, and has been, the Europeans, for the most part, who have made of adventure gaming the wide-ranging genre that it is. Except for the Myst trilogy and games like the Journeyman trilogy and Morpheus, it seems that the United States is not the best place to incubate adventure games of quality (this is of course a generalization; perhaps the American adventure gaming design field is more robust by far than I have observed – if this is so, I will stand corrected). Sad as this fact is, I see no reason to despair as long as the games come from somewhere. Let the rest of the world lead the way in development for now, if necessary. If Americans buy the games (something that Dreamcatcher, for example, despite its occasionally sloppy adaptations, has made much easier in the last year or so), American businesses will notice and those businesses (or their venture-cap friends) will take an interest in fronting development costs that they now might shy away from. It is interesting to note Cryo’s apparent collapse – our European friends are not immune to the perils of the adventure gaming market, but that could simply be bad management. In a discussion with one U.S. game publisher, who has published at least one adventure masterpiece and seems to care about such things, I was informed that several lines have converged to make the fronting of development money for adventure games problematical: the obvious one of small demographic sales sectors, and the newer one of the real time 3D engine – even adventure games are not your grandma’s games anymore, and the very sophisticated movement engines that have made adventure gaming more lifelike (realMYST is the perfect example here, I think) have also made them more expensive in development. A subsidiary problem related to this is that technically sophisticated games demand like PC’s. The decision not to invest Myst III with a full 3D real time movement engine was based on the complaints that Ubisoft received from lower end machine owners after the release of realMYST. A small point, given the beauty of the released game, but a lesson in how demographic pressures can affect even the mightiest of gaming franchises just the same.
My adventures in gaming over the past year and a half have acquainted me with the problems mentioned above, but they have also demonstrated to me a certain rigidity of thinking regarding what may or may not be regarded as an adventure game. One correspondent, in an otherwise collegial and mild letter, lectured me rather severely about the very strict genre definitions that games should be shoehorned into – adventure games should only have puzzles, for example – story, plot development, technical devices, none of these mattered. Any contamination from other gaming genres automatically worked to the detriment of the adventure game. This is an attitude that I have seen more than once or twice – the idea that there was a halcyon age, an age of purity of purpose, undefiled by anything having to do with the more violent world of so-called “hardcore” gaming – and I suppose that this was once true; but I have come to the conclusion that, like species embroiled in the Darwinian selection process, adventure games are involved in a long, painful but ultimately unavoidable evolution that, while understandably difficult for many purists, may eventually benefit the genre, or at least broaden its reach. I submit my own experience as evidence.
Having cut my PC gaming eyeteeth on the Myst trilogy, I was as thorough an advocate for pure adventure gaming as one could hope for and my subsequent gaming experience did nothing to disabuse me of the wisdom of my predilection. I found adventure games, in all their formats (3D real time, point and click, etc.) always engaging in one way or another, whether as intellectual challenges or interesting environments or purely inventive stories. Sometimes, as in the case of Dracula: Resurrection and its companion, The Last Sanctuary, adventure games, while not perhaps quite ascending to the Parnassian heights of genius, were something nearly as good (and nearly as rare): a hell of a lot of fun! I played a great number of these games and would have remained solely an adventure gamer but for another accidental discovery – a very few games that one could classify as “action” or “shooter” types (or as “action-adventure” for that matter) were challenging and interesting and inventive also, as much as any purely adventure game (we now return, as promised earlier, to gunshots and bloodspray patterns).
An obvious example here is Nocturne, a game the initial premise of which would normally produce waves of derisive laughter from me (Theodore Roosevelt? Monsters? Moloch the demon as one of our best secret agents?) but which turned out to be a focused, sometimes thrilling example of what a shooter game designed with care and intelligence can do. Besides the obvious brilliance of the graphics and the imaginative storylines, Nocturne brought the player as close to a total environment (especially with lights out and headphones on in the middle of the night) as one was likely to get. Partly adventure, partly shooter, partly black-and-white television horror movie remembrance, Nocturne created by turns a creepy, genuinely scary, sometimes humorous look at the sort of nightmare world that most of us see only in the occasional bad dream (remember the monster dream that you just couldn’t stop having when you were, say, 5 years old?) and managed to sustain this atmosphere through four distinct episodes, each with its own peculiar problems and challenges. It is a game that defies strict categorization; it rather transcends any category one might wish to imprison it in.
A more problematical (from the pure adventure gamer’s point of view) example is Max Payne, which no one in his or her right mind would categorize as an adventure game – this is, on its face, a shooter par excellence. I had absolutely no interest in Payne initially, but I kept coming across references to it on the net and decided, like realMYST, to check it out for no other reason than simple curiosity. I was not encouraged by my first perusal of the manual, with its complicated keyboard controls and plainly violent context, but I plunged in and played as if it were one of my normal games – and another revelation was at hand.
What I saw, and experienced, in Max Payne was graphically brilliant (New York City rendered with care and an eye for the small, telling detail – the dark, irregularly round spots of ancient chewing gum on a subway platform, for instance, a sight that generations of New Yorkers, or anyone within shouting distance of an urban train station, carry around in the deepest part of their brainpans), an intensely challenging, emotionally sophisticated noir tale that dropped me as deeply as any adventure game into a completely unfamiliar and stimulating environment, one that presented a world that few of us actually see, where the interests of various corrupt groups – hoods, police, businesspeople – converged underneath the visible city and laid bare some of the actuality underlying the more familiar reality that most of us experience in our daily lives. I found the game to demand (in addition, it must be admitted, to an unbelievable amount of killing of human beings – there was no such thing as “disabling” in this game) a rigorous attention to the details of what might be called resource allocation – I had to become familiar with the qualities of each of the weapons I could choose to use at various points in the game, as well as pay detailed attention to tactical and strategic matters – no wild shoot-em up this, which would only get me killed swiftly and mercilessly. I was required to think and plan constantly, to conserve ammunition and health, to decide when to be aggressive and when to be circumspect. It was clear that an enormous amount of care and thought had gone into the development of this game and the player was therefore required to exercise the same amount of care and thought in order to navigate the game successfully. Compare these attributes to an absolute mess such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Final Cut (from Arxel, shockingly enough), which, in spite of its beautiful graphic environment, is such a poorly motivated, illogical and plain sloppy disaster that one wonders what possessed the developers to foist this debris field masquerading as an adventure game upon the gaming public in the first place.
Two further examples are Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault and Omikron: The Nomad Soul, the latter of which was reviewed in JA and which is a good example of the hybrid action-adventure type of game that some adventure gamers have been decrying recently. Of Omikron I will say that we see a sophisticated story, an enormous, freely explorable environment with beautiful graphics, multiple pathways, combat that is not only challenging but downright thrilling on occasion (and I’m not a particular fan of hand-to-hand) – almost a surfeit of interesting elements. What’s not to like, from an adventure gamer’s point of view? Medal Of Honor, which takes the player from the World War II North African coast in 1942 to the Schmerzen forest of 1945, in the person of an American Ranger on detail to the Office of Strategic Services, is an enormously intelligent shooter that manages to be hair-raising at the same time that it gives the player a real feeling of empathy for any soldier who has put himself in harm’s way for the sake of his country. More effectively than any movie I have ever seen (including Saving Private Ryan), the game for the first time made me aware of why those men slowly fading from our public and private lives, the men of ’42, ’43, ’44 and ’45, are so proud of the medals they earned in service to their homeland. It is the first game I can think of having played that actually informed me in some aspect of the human condition – and while the player must kill the German soldiers to survive, there is a price of sorts to be paid. These enemy do not die easily or quietly and their suffering is evident as the life ebbs out of them. Altogether a mature and thought-provoking game, masquerading as an adolescent shoot-em up.
A final game in my rogue’s gallery: American McGee’s Alice. I suppose this is one of the hardest for adventure gamers to swallow – American McGee, for God’s sake, he of the Quake III engine! My curiosity (I knew absolutely nothing about this game when I picked it off a shelf in the local Best Buy store – an excellent source for adventure games, by the way) was again my unwitting compass, as I encountered a game with an interesting and complicated backstory (complete with 19th century insane asylum casebook), a graphic environment that recreated the damaged and oppressed Wonderland of the game in a thoroughly original manner, a reluctant but fearless lead character in Alice (complete with 19th century button-up shoes) whose demure outer mien did nothing to hide her lioness’s heart, a succession of alternately amusing and/or terrifying enemies, a succession of marvelously inventive toy/weapons for Alice to use and music that for once actually thrills the player – all this wrapped up in an adult, deranged, brilliantly awry version of Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece which fully realizes the heart of darkness that has always been hidden, just out of sight, under the “children’s story” which Alice’s tale has usually been tagged as.
So what is my point? I think adventure gamers (and I do, and always will, love straight adventure games – I do not sneer at “point-and-click” and do not demand that a game have the latest in technology) need to broaden, if not their horizons, then perhaps their understanding of how opportunity presents itself in the form of challenges to orthodoxy. I am increasingly coming to judge games not by their categorization, but by what I would call their internal integrity – does the game treat the player as an intelligent, thinking being? Does it possess an internal structure that holds together, as opposed to a slapdash series of effects that stand as adornments, rather than interrelated elements? (Hitchcock is again instructive here: all that wonderful attention to graphic detail, but what we see are essentially adornments overlaying a story in which not one of the characters compels our interest, sympathy or empathy – one of the very few games I have not bothered to finish). Does the music demonstrate some care and attention to what is actually going on in the game, or is it merely an annoyance (to jump back to Hollywood for a moment, compare what John Williams hath wrought in Star Wars, for example, with what Howard Shore has done in Lord Of The Rings – Mr. Williams more often than not intrudes upon the action with his bombast; Mr. Shore integrates his music into the film so that it becomes one with it, a true melodrama in the best sense of that often maligned word). Does the story exhibit some understanding of the human condition, or is it merely a series of setups for the next effect or plot twist. By these standards, I would argue, some so-called shooters are better adventure games than some adventure games! Think of Max Payne’s struggle with his guilt over the deaths of his wife and child, the events that open the game – we are given two episodes during the game in which we can explore Max’s complicated and very painful feelings about his responsibility for the deaths of his family members, feelings which deepen our understanding of his rage against the enemies whom he vies with and that cause him to question his own motives when he reflects on the violence he is perpetrating upon those enemies. Adult (in the true, mature sense) stuff, indeed, rare enough in any medium, but rarer still in the gaming world.
I do not think that anyone with strong opinions on these matters should cease opining about them (what else exists of value on this planet but strong opinions, against and by which we may test our own convictions?) and sites like JA have done a hell of a lot to bring attention to the difficulties that adventure game developers, and players, face in the sort of business environment that tends to stifle innovative development rather than stimulate it. Adventure games, much like the early internet, seem to be a last bastion of sorts, where quality has at least an equal chance in its eternal competition with quantity and where independent actors (Dark Fall, i.e.) can still make a difference. But look around, everyone – there are some very interesting games (that, for lack of a better name, I’ll call crossovers), floating around that just might pique your interest if you’re willing to try something a little different. The details do not fundamentally matter: a complicated keyboard-mouse control regime can be mastered with a little practice here, a rather violent game can be played on the easy level there – but players who segregate themselves from what they have decided they should not experience will never know the challenge of the new, and therefore, the excitement of discovery, even the excitement that comes of testing one’s opinions in open contest – gaming against one’s own gaming instincts, I suppose I would put it. The results can be surprising – they were for me, though I will never abandon my edutainment and pure adventure games. Let’s just say that I am open to being surprised by the evil empire – as rare as that may turn out to be.
Kudos to all you folks at JA, for your illuminating and thoughtful reviews and all your other services. I suspect there are more than a few 45+ types such as myself who value your adult perspectives on what is, after all, properly a child’s pastime. It is perhaps too much to say that gaming keeps us young – nothing can do that – but that it keeps us young in spirit, I doubt not.