Is there life after death of the adventure game? Rise of the adventure game ethic
First posted on 10 May 2006. Last updated on 30 June 2009.
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| McGinnis is the author of Game Quest. |
About the author
Leopold McGinnis is the author of the underground novel Game Quest (published by Underground Uprising Press), about the hostile takeover of the world’s most famous computer game company and the death of the adventure game. Game Quest is his first novel.
Having once lived in other countries including Philippines and Japan, McGinnis has returned to his roots living now in Canada, where he devotes a lot of his energy to fighting for independent art and spends too much time in front of the computer.
For more information on Game Quest, visit Game Quest by Leopold McGinnis.
For more information on McGinnis, visit Leopold McGinnis dot com.
Is there life after death of the adventure game? I'd have to say that the answer is an emphatic yes. Perhaps a bigger question is why? In the span of a few years, the once towering game genre had fallen from market dominance to near absence on retail shelves. The industry has abandoned it. The pioneers are gone or have stopped producing for the genre. The 3D shooter had riddled it with bullets. Yet, the adventure game has been mistakenly pronounced dead more times than Mark Twain. So why is it still hanging on? There are multiple theories on this, I'm sure, but I'd say that what it really comes down to is a simple ideal—a little something I like to call the adventure game ethic.
The adventure game ethic is a highly infectious meme, a way of thinking that inserts itself into mind of the adventure game player and sticks there, begins to affect the player in the long term far beyond the keyboard and into the real world.
Origins of the ethic
The very first game I ever bought was King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne. I was 10. I got stuck on the very second screen I entered because I couldn't pick up a trident lying on the ground. I didn't explore anything else in the game because I became obsessed with picking it up. Why couldn't I? It was right there!
After an hour or so I decided that the game was stupid and went upstairs to talk to my dad who'd gotten the computer as part of his professorial grant. I asked him what a trident was. Dogged by the image of standing right next to a trident and being unable to pick it up, I returned later that night and suddenly was able to pick up the trident. How, you ask? I spelled it correctly this time!
That day I'd learned some valuable lessons:
1. Don't be afraid to ask for help.2. Learn how to spell, you idiot, especially when the word is written correctly right in front of you, gawd!
3. A trident is a forklike weapon with 3 spikes.
4. If you use your noggin, you can do it!
From that moment on I was hooked. First it was King's Quest, then Space Quest, then Police Quest... It didn't stop. Though I had to use hint books for some of the earlier games, it eventually became a point of real pride that I could beat a game without one, that I could do it myself. I admit to even faking illness on a few occasions to play these games instead of going to school. I scrounged and saved my pathetic 13 year old allowance for weeks to afford the newest games. I was introduced to Leisure Suit Larry by the dad of a friend who'd brought a pirated copy home from work. It was the funniest thing I'd ever seen. This was before the days of ratings systems. Even though I was nervous buying the games, the middle-aged couple who ran the only shop in town where you could buy computer games never blinked an eye at my so-called adult purchases. Frankly, I think they were just glad about the sales. At 14, Leisure Suit Larry 3: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals became my favorite game of all time.
Sadly, the adventure game went belly up. Sometime between when LucasArts entered the market (the only other computer gaming company to "get it right") and the arrival of Doom, the adventure game tanked. The emergence of dedicated sound cards and high resolution graphics did not help the sinking genre. Suddenly it wasn't possible to fit all that cool stuff on the disks and still have the disks fit in the box. Storylines and game length took a hit. Hundreds of other companies, taking the lead from Sierra On-Line, leapt into the market. While the quality of games from Sierra On-Line was eventually hampered by the company's own expansion and changes within the market, the swarm of bad to mediocre knock-offs flooding the stores eroded player confidence.
The shoot-em-up rose in all its glory to fill the gap, like a counter argument to the plotted puzzles and pace of the adventure game. Bolstered by venture capitalists flooding the market with money, the computer gaming market suddenly became a "serious business". Unfortunately, there's not a lot of room for fun in a "serious business" and the new market soon had no room for the adventure game. It's not that adventure games weren't fun. It's not that they weren't good. It's not that they didn't make money. It's just that there were faster and easier ways to make more money. With all the new competition and marketing's tendency to appeal to the basest of human instincts (hunting things or destroying things), there was a race to the bottom.
From this I'd learned several valuable lessons:
1. Money is more important than fun or quality.2. It's cheaper, easier and more lucrative to be unoriginal.
3. Quality, originality, and a fan base have little to do with market representation or sales.
4. The adventure game is dead.
Yet, the irony is that the adventure game didn't die. Corporate officers, now at the reigns of the computer gaming industry, have declared over and over that the adventure game is dead. A week later when someone asks "Is the adventure game dead?", these marketers simply say "The adventure game is dead." The problem with this debate is the narrow arena within which it is discussed. It's all about sales. When industry analysts talk about the adventure game being dead, they mean that the major gaming companies refuse to make adventure games. They mean that adventure games aren't readily available on retail shelves.
The mere fact that I am writing an article about adventure games on a site devoted to their discussion proves that the adventure game is not dead. The fact that Vivendi Universal was convinced to allow distribution of a fan based sequel to King's Quest proves it. When you take marketing and media coverage out of the equation (which marketers may have you believe is the be all and end all), you have a thriving adventure game market. Something rawer, more real and more personal than any other gaming genre has—a fanatically devoted fan base that cares about the genre beyond just its form as entertainment. In fact, there are so many fan made adventure games out there, of high quality, that it will take an inordinate amount of time to play them all. I'd wager that there are more adventure games released on a daily basis than any other genre. Frankly, the adventure game is kicking serious ass.
Like me refusing to give up on the trident, the adventure gaming community is refusing to give up on this quest. In fact, it's obsessed with it—all because of the adventure game ethic. The death of the adventure game is unacceptable because it represents not just the death of a game, but a way of thinking, of the ethic, which has meaning beyond the screen. Other genres might have built-in ethics, but none are so tenacious as that of the adventure genre.
What is the adventure game ethic?
A lot of it can be attributed to Sierra On-Line. While it didn't technically invent the adventure game, the company formed, innovated and expanded the genre from simple text based, computer generated choose-your-own-adventures into what we see as the adventure game today. Sierra On-Line had an independent, individualist and adventurous outlook. Because of this, a lot of the way it did and saw things, went into the adventure game, influenced the shape it took and, no doubt, re-inspired the company in return.
A gamer only has to learn about Sierra On-Line's early history to understand the parallels between the way Sierra On-Line thought or acted and the way their games were created. The company started out in a garage in the days when gaming was not considered a lucrative or serious business. It did it anyway. There was no groundwork laid for gaming, let alone adventure games. As Ken Williams has once remarked, when they first started Sierra On-Line they didn't think they "had much more strategy than just to have fun". Sierra On-Line also purposefully did not hire staff from other companies, fearing that would affect their innovation. It took risks to focus on creative thinking.
It's not a stretch to see how playing those games imprinted that way of thinking onto the adventure gamer. Much like in a game, you are a lone character on a mission. For whatever reason, only you can do it. Throughout the game you'll meet people who will help you and others who will ridicule or try to stop you. There is no clear path to the finish line, and often you have to go off in tangents to achieve your goals. You have to think creatively. You have to not be afraid of trying different routes. Fun is an important part of it and you can't be afraid of failure. In fact, the horrible death scenes are sometimes the most fun and helpful parts of the game.
That ethic, like a meme, gets into the players' brain. Yet, as a general principle, it has applications far beyond just the game. Adventure game fans cannot help but be instilled with the adventure game ethic. Do it yourself. Don't be afraid to ask for help. Keep trying. Don't be afraid to follow your own path. It's that ethic, I think, more than anything else, that has thrived and kept the adventure game afloat despite near abandonment by the industry. Somewhere, the adventure game took the wrong turn and encountered a horrific death.
So why isn't the adventure game dead yet? It is because the adventure game ethic loves a challenge. No death is a waste in the adventure game since you often learn from it. The genre has merely restored to an earlier point and is trying a different approach. If the industry isn't going to do it, then the gamers themselves are going to find some other way to bring it back. Even if they have to do it themselves or start a mass mailing campaign to revive their favorite games or do it for free at the risk of it being C&Ded at any moment, they'll do it. They'll invite friends to help. Amongst all the genres of games, the adventure genre may be the hardest to kill after all.
So despite the familiar lessons I'd learned from the popular market about the fall of the adventure game:
1. Money is more important than fun or quality.2. It's cheaper, easier and more lucrative to be unoriginal.
3. Quality, originality, and a fan base have little to do with market representation or sales.
4. The adventure game is dead.
I feel what I'd learned from the adventure game are equally important, if not more so:
1. Don't be afraid to ask for help.2. Learn how to spell, you idiot, especially when the word is written correctly right in front of you, gawd!
3. A trident is a forklike weapon with 3 spikes.
4. If you use your noggin, you can do it!
This is the nature of the ethic. This is why the adventure game is far from dead but in fact resurging. The adventure game ethic is infectious. It's a thinking of potential rather than reality. Though we live in a world of status-quo, of less-than-perfect lands where some domains are ruled by self-interested sorcerers, we have a bag full of inventory items to get us through. They can take the adventure game off the shelves, but they can't take away the adventure game ethic. As long as the adventure game ethic survives, the adventure game will live on—online and offline.