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Adventure games belong
to one of the oldest genres in computer gaming. They have been
around for over 30 years and the first computer game
to sell over a million
copies was Infocom’s interactive text adventure – Zork.

So why is it that, after
so much history and experience, most of the adventure games out
there suck?

There are some obvious
reasons; many games appear rushed as the pressures of budget and
shipping in time for the holiday season exert themselves. These
are easy to spot with puzzles thrown in at random to flesh the
game out and endings which are just a little too contrived or abrupt.
Or maybe the game designer just wasn’t that good. Although this
is harder to spot as most games are now developed by teams and
glaring weaknesses can be covered.

But what about that game
which seemed to have so much promise? It has all the talent working
on it. It has a good budget and a reasonable deadline. Yet it just
seems to fall flat. Just what is it that sets a great adventure
game apart from the crowd? What are the rules of gaming that have
been followed or broken?

I started thinking that
maybe I could come up with a set of rules or Gaming Laws that,
if followed, would result in a superior adventure game. I could
post these rules somewhere on the Internet and reference them each
time I reviewed a game.

I started making notes
on my doodle pad. I had little hope that my list would be taken
seriously by the big gaming houses. But at least readers would
have a better idea of where I was coming from in my reviews. And
maybe, just maybe, an independent developer might notice them and
take them to heart.

Then in August of 2004
Randy Sluganski of JustAdventure.com posted his newest State
of Adventure Gaming article.
In it he linked to the blog of Ron Gilbert and his excellent “Why
Adventure Games Suck” article.
Much of Ron’s ideas overlapped with mine. He clarified several
issues I had not thought much about and I had several additional
points that I thought would be relevant.

So I have taken many of
the concepts from Ron’s article and combined them with my own to
create the following Five Laws of Adventure Gaming.

Law 1: The Story is everything.

Law 2: Playability must
be addictive.

Law 3: Navigation
must be “Intuitive-able”.

Law 4: Puzzles must be
solvable by real people in real life.

Law 5: Window dressing
must enhance, but never dominate.

I don’t claim to be the final authority on adventure gaming. If anyone can
think of additional issues which tend to make or break adventure games,
then please send them to me. If I think they would make a relevant contribution,
then I will add them to this article and give the author credit. (I may
not be the final authority on Gaming, but I am the final authority on this
article 🙂 ).

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