What Is an Ideal Adventure? Part I
A guide to create the ideal adventure game
By David Adrien Tanguay
This article was originally published on 9 July 1999
on the Adventure Collective site and
is reprinted with permission.
What is an ideal adventure game? The answer to this question has eluded
many adventure game designers, developers, and players. Gone are the past
glory days of Infocom and Legend, who gave us such classic adventure series
like Zork and Spellcasting. Replacing their places, instead,
are a multitude of mixed genre titles such as Tomb Raider, System Shock,
and many others–all of which have blurred the line that, in the past,
so clearly defined the adventure games of yesteryear from the other genres.
Recently, I have taken an interest in this issue, mostly to see if it
is possible to reestablish this missing line. The end results are my thoughts
included in this essay. The goal of this article is to outline the elements
that I think are required to create the ideal adventure game. Although
this topic is obviously very subjective, I hope to share with you something
that I think you can at least accept as good guidelines for adventure
game design.
In this three-part special feature, I will try to 1) propose a working
definition of an adventure, 2) consider the properties of an adventure,
and finally 3) discuss what makes the ideal adventure game.
Defining “Adventure” in “Adventure Game”
Before we can consider what makes an ideal adventure, we must first lay
down some ground rules as to just constitutes an adventure.
There seem to be fewer adventure games being produced lately, even from
the traditional adventure producing companies such as LucasArts and Sierra
On-Line. Furthermore, many of the games being called adventure today are
very different from the games which the term has traditionally been applied
to. While we can accept a boarder definition of adventure, such generalization
simply makes the term useless for future discussion. A useful definition
must establish relatively sharp boundaries. Otherwise, the scope of gameplay
will become too large to even consider talking about what an ideal adventure
game should be.
Any definition of the term “adventure” should be based on the
games that originally defined the medium. These include titles such as
Adventure, Zork and other Infocom games, as well as King’s Quest
and other early 1980s Sierra On-Line adventures. The definition should
also be exclusive, in order to distinguish adventures from other currently
accepted genres like First Person Shooters (FPS), Role-Playing Games (RPG),
puzzles, and Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games. We shouldn’t fear a definition
that excludes games such as Quest for Glory, Alone in the Dark, and
System Shock. Whether or not we decide that they qualify as adventure,
they still remain great games!
Story
Story is an important aspect of an adventure. This prerequisite allows
us to exclude purely puzzle based games, such as Sokoban, Sherlock,
or the daily crossword. However, story must not be the sole defining
characteristic. Books and movies are not adventure games, since they have
no game aspect and no problem solving. Neither is any game that includes
only primitive story elements–Wolfenstein, X-COM, and Alpha
Centauri all have some elements of story, but they are clearly not
adventure games.
Problem Solving
Maybe an adventure is simply problem solving in the context of a story.
This is a good first approximation, but we can quickly see boundary problems.
FPS require problem solving, although the problems there are often solved
by blowing someone to smithereens! Similarly, there are many run and dodge
games where the problems are solved by nimble jumping or ducking at the
right time and place. These types of games can also include varying amount
of story. Clearly, a meaningful definition of adventure must exclude Doom
and Mario. We must therefore restrict our problem solving to
the intellectual realm. The solutions to problems in an adventure game
should be difficult to conceive but not difficult to execute. This gives
us a reasonably narrow border between adventure and the various action
genres.
Deterministic Versus Stochastic
This still leaves us needing a line between adventure and role-playing.
Games in these two genres share many characteristics, although they usually
lean in different directions on the emphasis thereof. Adventures usually
stress on story and puzzle content. In contrast, RPGs emphasize interaction
with a larger and more randomly behaving virtual world. These differences
in emphasis are not definitional, however, since a game clearly in either
genre can be designed with either or both of these elements.
Character development is a tempting characteristic to use to divide these
two genres. Unfortunately, it falls a bit short. It is not unreasonable
for an adventure protagonist to acquire new abilities, such as lock picking
or increased dexterity, during the quest. The difference is not in whether
character development is used, but in the reasons behind using it. In
an adventure, the development is needed to solve a particular problem.
In RPG, the development is needed to improve the character’s chances to
solve nonspecific problems that may arise randomly from the virtual world.
In essence, the fundamental distinction between RPG and adventure games
is the stochastic nature of RPG as opposed to the deterministic nature
of adventures. It is the random presentation of obstacles that makes RPG
character statistics so important. An adventure game seldom plays with
a significant rolling of the die–the game plays out the same every time
you run through it if you take the same actions. An RPG game relies heavily
on rolling the die for determining combat and other event outcomes, whereby
the player must court Lady Luck and develop stronger character statistics
to improve the odds of survival.
Definition
With the above insights, we now have a workable definition of an adventure:
an adventure is the “deterministic, intellectual problem solving
in the context of a story.”
In Part II, we shall consider in detail the properties of an adventure.
