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Has the fun gone out of Adventure Games? Perhaps I'd better rephrase that. Has the sense of fun, the sense of playfulness, left the genre?

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Tons of articles

Too many to list....have at it.

Adventure Game Interfaces

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0. Introduction
1. The genre of Adventure Gaming
1.1. Adventure Gaming explained
1.2. Adventure Gaming constructs
1.2.1 Adventure Gaming constructs-Actions
1.2.2 Adventure Gaming constructs-Events
1.2.3 Adventure Gaming constructs-Information as an Item
1.2.4 Adventure Gaming constructs-Conversation Trees
1.2.5 Adventure Gaming constructs-Further Abstractions
1.3. Adventure Game Interfaces
1.4. Analysis of Interfaces
1.5. General rules for Adventure Game Interfaces
1.6. Conclusion

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Now I know there’s such thing as free money. And it’s called: Text Link Ads.

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Fire your lawyer.

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Good luck guys!

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http://www.gameproducer.net/

Bookmark it...use it. Good stuff.

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Suddenly and without warning, the seed of a new idea sprung to life in a simple post.








"We should make our own sequel."

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It isn't a long stretch to think that the Wii can have the same magical effect on adventure games. Sure, if you were paying attention to the Duck Hunt example, it's obvious the Wii controller works great as a point-and-click device. Just point the controller where you want to click. For the first time ever, adventure games can be played on a console without the D-pad or analog stick controls disliked by so many adventure gamers. But that is just scratching the surface of what the Wii could do for adventure games.

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I've also been told by one developer, a guy who worked at Valve, that storyboarding simply isn't valid in their process of testing and testing over and over until the interactive direction works. I personally see this as arrogance - even in a 3D space, you're still working with a 2D screen. Someone who knows how to use compositional space to their advantage surely has more directorial nous and thus is capable of solving more visual narrative issues straight out when presented with such problems than a games tester. How much time did the testing process waste when someone could've been brought in with prior knowledge? Then again, competitor id Software actually went so far as to storyboard their Doom 3 opus from beginning to end as a movie. Whether they're more successful or not is up to you and largely down to the basis of each individual game's components.





But where does this arrogance stem from?

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If games are to truly compete with movies, the strange attitude to direction which seems to curse many productions needs to cease. Lately I found out that a major, major games company has assigned their sound designer for cutscene direction. As someone who works within direction... it makes you do a double take. The sound designer? If anything it sounds like cutting economic corners... professionally... but when you take into account that this is a AAA title that outright RELIES on cinematic direction and has a big grounding in storytelling, it does make you wonder what's going on.








Unfortunately companies see narrative as something to tack on. It's only very rarely that it's applied as part of the design document, but if you're creating a game with a narrative then automatically that becomes the backbone which drives the player through. If the narrative doesn't fit the picture, why bother? It will do your product a disservice.

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Moving to a broadcast TV style business model, based largely on episodic game releases, will benefit not only games developers, but publishers, retailers, middleware and content providers.

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...a trend toward fewer cinematics, and more scripted events. Nolent says Ubisoft is trying to get rid of cinematics entirely, but they do sometimes sneak back in when a map has to be scrapped or there's some other unexpected problem. Nolent expects to see more "playable cut scenes" or scripted events where the story moves ahead, but players still have opportunities for interaction.

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Introversion is an experiment: can three guys set up a successful game development and publishing company with nothing more than £200 and an awful lot of time and energy? Every analyst in the business would tell you it's not possible - but here were are, five years old, stronger than ever.

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I realize I’m preaching to the choir when I complain about the pc gaming magazines almost totally ignoring the adventure genre. Of course, said employees at the magazines like to write me and inform me as to what a silly fool I am (although ‘fool’ is not the word they usually use).








What has happened all too often in the past, is that my complaint about a review that, rather than evaluating the game instead proceeds to bash the entire genre, elicits a response that, “Well, if you’re defending (insert name of game here), then no wonder the genre is in trouble.” What they didn’t, no what they refused to understand, is that it is not any specific game I am defending, but the genre as a whole. So imagine my surprise, nay my unbridled glee, to discover that PC Gamer seems to have undergone an adventure game epiphany.








The past few months have featured articles on independent developers such as The Silver Lining team, the Sam n Max resurrection and numerous reviews of adventure games that actually review the game and not the entire genre. New adventure game reviewer Logan Decker – along with Chuck Osborn - seem to actually appreciate the genre and their recent adventure game reviews, both positive and negative, are as fair and balanced as any that have ever ever appeared in PC Gamer.









The credit for this startling change can surely be attributed to new Editor-in-Chief Greg Vederman - aka The Vede - whom I initially incorrectly pegged as just another in a long line of action-loving, adventure-hating editors. Thanks Vede, for proving me wrong.

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They Also Voted Sam n Max as the Best Sports Game









Adventure gamers are eagerly awaiting Just Cause from Eidos. With over 250,000 acres to explore, 303 missions to accomplish, 89 vehicles to command and 32 stunts to master to ignite a revolution, this is one game that is a must have in the adventure community. What? You didn’t hear? As Eidos is proudly proclaiming in its marketing campaign, Team Xbox.com named Just Cause as the ‘Best Adventure of E3 2006’.

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When you write dialogue, or story materials for a game, you make an effort to write content that's entertaining and well-written. The last thing you want to do is bore your audience by listing facts in a clumsy exposition sequence.









However, when documenting the story content for your game, the reverse is often true. Of course, you still don't want to bore your audience (your fellow game developers). However, the best way to keep your writing from becoming tedious is to stifle your creative urges, and instead approach story documentation as a form of technical writing.

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Like comic books, games have no élite form or widely-venerated body of work yet. We produce light popular entertainment, and light popular entertainment is trivial, disposable, and therefore culturally insignificant, at least so far as podunk city councilors and ill-advised state legislators are concerned. They feel no reason not to censor games, because games have no constituency that matters and no history as important forms of expression.








Now I know from long experience that a certain percentage of you are making derisive snorts of contempt because you personally care nothing for high culture and see no reason why anyone else would either. But even if you don’t like it, you still need it. And before yet another idiot pipes up with Standard Asinine Comment #1 (“but FUN is the only thing that matters!”), let me just say: No, it's not. Shut up and grow up. Our overemphasis on fun—kiddie-style, wheeee-type fun—is part of the reason we’re in this mess in the first place. To merely be fun is to be unimportant, irrelevant, and therefore vulnerable.








The serious games movement will help a little with this problem because serious games aren’t just for fun, but by itself that’s not enough. People write comic books to help teach kids about fire prevention and healthcare, but that doesn’t change the perception that comics are for kids. Serious games that seem unrelated to games for entertainment won’t do much for entertainment itself.








Elite forms of a medium help to legitimize that medium. They provide status symbols that people who want to be thought of as important and respectable can support. That’s why big corporations and wealthy families give money to ballet companies and symphony orchestras: Publicly sponsoring the elite forms of these arts reflects well on the givers. The élite forms also create shelter in which the less “worthy” forms of the medium can operate more safely. Once an élite form of video games exists, nobody can ever again say, “video games are just a silly waste of time.” Nobody would dream of saying that about music, even if they thought it was true of bubble-gum pop.

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We can dismiss the more stupid responses pretty quickly. As I predicted, there was a fair bit of reverse snobbery (“I’m proud that I don’t like literature or classical music, and video games should never be for anybody but people like me”) as well as some regular snobbery (“Merchant Ivory films are powdered-wig costume dramas for middle-class faux intellectuals”). Actually, most Merchant Ivory films are about post-colonial India, not noted for its powdered wigs. Both attitudes are ignorant and tiresome.

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Despite all of the graphical advances, increasingly life-like CG in games has also brought with it some surprising realizations.









The most troubling of these is 'The Uncanny Valley', or the sharp drop in emotional response from an audience as character subtleties and likenesses improve. As is the case with characters in many current Xbox 360 games, our attraction has turned to revulsion. We get creeped out. Is this the result of all our time, money, and hard work? All the per-pixel lighting, dynamic shadows, normal maps, and motion capture of Madden '07 has actually degraded the emotional connection players had with previous versions of the game -- 1 step forward, 2 steps back.






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In the quest for this immersive photo-real environment, creativity has died on the operating table. Given all these fantastic tools, the best we can do is attempt to duplicate our own environment on the same regurgitated topics and themes. In an interview with Tomek Bagiñski on his recent CG film 'Fallen Art,' Tomek states that he doesn't see any reason to do photo-real 3d graphics unless you are working for the SFX film industry. His reasoning is that stylized art is far more interesting to look at than just another attempt at reality. The photo-real painting movement ended after a brief period in the late 1960's for exactly the same reason - it was boring to look at. Guess what? So are the majority of today's video games.

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In the quest for this immersive photo-real environment, creativity has died on the operating table. Given all these fantastic tools, the best we can do is attempt to duplicate our own environment on the same regurgitated topics and themes. In an interview with Tomek Bagiñski on his recent CG film 'Fallen Art,' Tomek states that he doesn't see any reason to do photo-real 3d graphics unless you are working for the SFX film industry. His reasoning is that stylized art is far more interesting to look at than just another attempt at reality. The photo-real painting movement ended after a brief period in the late 1960's for exactly the same reason - it was boring to look at. Guess what? So are the majority of today's video games.

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Everyone should check out his Fallen Art movie by the way, it's totally awesome!

As for the topic, I don't think we've reached the realism limit just yet, however I do think non 100% realistic art looks way more interesting, so yes they probably have a point hehehehe.

Cheers

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The most troubling of these is 'The Uncanny Valley', or the sharp drop in emotional response from an audience as character subtleties and likenesses improve.

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