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Did Graphics Kill the Adventure Genre?

Last week’s State
of Adventure Gaming created a lot of controversy, discussion and dozens of email responses.
It has already been read by over 100,000 visitors and has taken on
a life of its own.

Two of our readers – Howard Sherman, CEO of Malinche
Entertainment and Scorpia known for her adventure game reviews in Computer Gaming World – felt
strongly enough to express their own opinions on Tim Schafer’s
comment that graphics killed the adventure genre.

Howard Sherman and his company Malinche Entertainment publishes
brand new text adventure games and has this to say about Tim Schafer’s
recent comments:

After reading the latest
Just Adventure State of Adventure Gaming, I was more than a little
surprised by Computer Games Magazine’s recent
interview with Tim Schafer and some of his comments. In this piece
I will set the record straight on adventure games altogether with
an understandable emphasis on text adventure
games. Sorry, Tim.

The question Computer
Games Magazine asked “What do you think
killed adventure games?” My question is — Where did they get
the idea adventure games were dead? We have to assume they are journalists
so why did they even ask such an inaccurate, unqualified question?
Is there some sort of hidden agenda here?

I could question them further — Why did I start a text adventure
game company back in 2002 if adventure games are dead? How is it
that my company is thriving in 2005 with three released titles, a
fourth in production and two more scheduled for release later this
year and early next year? Why is it that Malinche is shipping new
text adventure games to customers all over the world today?

Moving on to the more
interesting answer to CGM’s question, Tim said. ” Well, really,
I would say graphics killed adventure games. The second we switched
from text to graphic adventures, their
days were numbered. When you’re playing a text adventure game, the
most amazing worlds and actions are possible, because the budget
is always the same. Doesn’t matter what the words are.”

Simply stated, Tim is wrong. Very wrong. Graphics did not kill text
adventure games — poor business decisions did. And the words of
a text adventure game are the most important elements. They very
much matter!

First, the legendary Infocom may still have been around today delivering
compelling text adventure games if only they didn’t develop a single
product that ended up sinking the company. That fateful product was
named Cornerstone. For the young ones out there, Cornerstone was
a database product that Infocom poured all of its resources into.
Infocom went from ever-climbing sales and being very cash rich to
losing money and being in debt because of the poor business decision
to depart from their core competency; text adventure games. Activision
took over the weakened company and the rest is history.

Adventure International went bankrupt in 1985. Graphical games can’t
be the culprit because the original Atari 520ST and Amiga 1000, the
first generation of ‘super’ home computers with decent graphics were
released halfway into 1985 themselves. At the time of their release,
there was a tiny library of available titles making graphical games
the improbable culprit behind the demise of Adventure International.
Ken Williams feels Adventure International couldn’t compete against
Infocom (who at the time held 8 of a total of 10 slots for bestselling
software) but I seem to remember it being a little more complex than
that. In any event, Adventure International wasn’t driven out of
business by graphical games. It went out of business due to, unfortunately,
poor business acumen.

Let’s pause for a second and reconsider one of the facts I just
mentioned. Infocom titles occupied eight of ten slots for best-selling
game software. We can only hope graphical games occupied the two
remaining slots.

Moving further long in
Mr. Schafer’s words, let’s talk about the budget of words he mentioned.
It is apparent to me that Mr. Schafer
is no writer. Writers will employ an “economy of words” to
tell their stories but such an economy has nothing to do with money;
it’s all about style. Graphical games always required money, seemingly
more money today than ever. The quality of a graphical game is dictated
as much as by the money behind it as the designers who develop it.
The quality of a text adventure game isn’t indicative of its budget
but of its designer. The one point I agree with Mr. Schafer is part
of the above quote: “If you’re playing a text adventure game,
the most amazing worlds and actions are possible…” Yes, that’s
true. As a professional author of text adventure games, I’ll vouch
for the fact that what I can imagine and place into the games I create
far surpasses anything that is possible today in the graphical game
market.

Now here’s the part of
that sentence I don’t agree with – “the
budget is always the same.” Not so, Mr. Schafer. If I budget
my time to predict all of the different possible actions a player
may take on a puzzle or object of some kind, I can see to it that
there is a very high probability of success in my games responding
to an action by a player with a satisfying response. Predictably,
I also disagree with his assertion “Doesn’t matter what the
words are.” I doubt that the author of your choice would agree
that words in a story don’t matter. The words make the story. Period.
Words in a text adventure game are all we have to work with and I
can tell you that I make sure the very best words I can possibly
use are introduced into my titles, nothing less. I’ve been known
to agonize over the right word with a thesaurus and a dictionary
for the better part of five minutes. That’s right. Five minutes on
just one word.

If words didn’t matter I could release six or seven titles a year
instead of my pace of one or two per year.

Going further long in Tim Schafer’s response below, I’ve got some
issues to raise:

“I can remember the moment I heard about adventure games. Someone
told me that there was this type of game that was all text, and you
could type in anything you wanted, and do anything you wanted and
the game would respond. I thought that was the coolest idea ever,
so I got all the Scott Adams game and played them all. Even though
you couldn’t do anything, you could actually type in a lot
of crazy stuff.”

Mr. Schafer starts out
on the right track — text adventure games offer the magic of possibility
that make anything worth a try and
then kills the statement with the myth “you couldn’t do anything.” What
a fallacy!

The puzzles in Malinche’s text adventure games demand the player
do quite a lot, actually. This is the case with Infocom’s titles
and Scott Adams’ as well, naturally. Many puzzles require clever,
insightful solutions requiring quite a bit of player interaction.

Mr. Schafer’s comments continue on:

“But then when graphics got involved – oh, here I go
again – you suddenly couldn’t do anything, you could
only do a few things. And so adventures started to get more and more
beautiful, but more and more limiting. The interesting thing to me
is, even in Grand Theft Auto III, you can really only do a handful
of things, what is it people say they love about those games? The
freedom! “You can do anything!” they say.”

The next question asked by Computer Game World was fair enough.
Tim Schafer’s reply, though, was unreal.

CGM – They’re recaptured
the magic of text adventures?

Tim’s response: “Yes. I mean, it was a lie with text
adventures, too. You couldn’t do anything. It was an illusion.”

I am almost speechless.
Graphical games “recaptured the magic
of text adventure games?” The two genres of adventure games
are incapable of being compared to one another. I would have thought
that someone with Tim Schafer’s accomplishments would be aware of
such a distinction. It’s true to say that graphical games are limited
(OK, VERY LIMITED) in the range of action the player can take. But
in text adventure games, the range of action is very broad. And that
is no lie and nor is that an illusion.

In my work Pentari: First Light, some puzzles have as many as five
different solutions any of which will score the player points and
solve the problem in front of them. What’s limited about that? Justadventure.Com
rated First Light with a solid A because there is actually quite
a lot the player can do.

In Malinche’s murder mystery Greystone, some objects can be treated
as red herrings or, if employed in creative ways, bring the game
to a very surprising end where the player wins in a way they never
would have expected. With a total of four crimes in Greystone (small
spoiler there) the detective skills of the player are put to the
test in several different ways. The thirty different possible endings
to Greystone demonstrate that there is a lot the player has to do
to deliver justice.

Going further, with Endgame the player has a range of choices that
can be made throughout the title that can get his ship sank on the
open sea, blasted out of the water thanks to an all-out assault by
North Korea or trigger a border war between the two Koreas that result
in reunification. And that’s only a partial list of the exhaustive
list of permutations offered by the game. Decisions and actions are
integral to Interactive Fiction.

Any objective reader can pull out dozens of their own examples from
the text adventure games that have been released over the years.

Text adventure games, and adventure games in the larger sense, are
alive and well. They will never die. And thanks to modern computing
power, are larger, more interesting and more challenging than ever
before.

Howard Sherman
Implementor
Malinche Entertainment
– The Art of Interactive Fiction
Why not get inside a good story
today?
http://www.malinche.net