Moron Lite

Er, okay. You're still being completely arbitrary about this, though. Don't expect to win this battle.

Ninja Dodo

For the love of Tim Schafer! Not again?!

Shall we put this one on the calender with Samarost?

remixor

So where exactly was this definition ACTUALLY defined? Why do you not have a problem with games like Maniac Mansion being called adventures? After all, its story-based graphical point-and-click interface is a HUGE departure (in terms of control, interface, and gameplay) from the exploration-based text parser nature of Adventure.

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Chris "News Editor" Remo

Some sort of Writer or Editor or Something, Idle Thumbs

"Some comparisons are a little less obvious. I always think of Grim Fandango as Casablanca on acid." - Will Wright

mag

Excuse me? You're the one who wants to classify every game that comes out as an adventure game. How exactly am I the one who's being arbitrary?


Being as how you didn't point to one thing I said that was in error, I'd say I already have.


You're right, that's exactly what I'm saying. Every game in every genre needs to have the exact same interface without any deviation. In fact, there hasn't been a pure game since the 1970s.

I never said that all adventure games need to be exactly like Adventure. I said that Adventure started a type of gameplay that became known as the adventure genre. And that is the type of gameplay present in Maniac Mansion, despite the changes in interface.

mag

Moron Lite

What?! When did I ever insinuate this?
Sorry, maybe I should have said 'war'. I've been in too many arguments today, so I don't feel like debating this one any further. I'm just saying that despite your valiant efforts (writing an article and such), the usage of 'adventure' you're so committed against is here to stay. It's not going to go back. I say this completely independently of my thoughts on whether you're wrong or right.

jjacob

I guess in five years from now, we'll need a seperate forum for this discussion.

Tanukitsune

I never meant to say that Atari's "Adventure" WAS an adventure game, I was just trying to prove that genre defintions change with time....

Does anybody remember the Survival Horror discussion? We more or less agreed that it was "related" to the adventure genre, it was just action adventure, but they gave its own genre name.....

Let's face it, getting everybody to agree on genre definition is impossible...
It's like getting everbody to agree on the best pizza, film, etc, etc....

There will always be a game that you think that it is NOT an adventure, but they will advertise it as one...

And sometimes, they even do the opposite, I can't remember which it it was (Nancy Drew?), but it WAS an adventure, yet they called it a ROL PLAYING game, just because you played a rol!

This discussion might never end, and every year they make new "adventures" that make it harder for us to pin down a definite definition of the genre...

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Apparently I have a Devianrt Art account... And people actually like it!

Moron Lite

It's seriously a good idea to adopt a much more liquid attitude towards genre. Once you try to posit necessary and sufficient conditions for genre, you start a long and fruitless journey. Unless, perhaps, those conditions happen to be sufficiently vague....

(For my money, DOOM qualifies as survival horror. But, you know, it's also action, and an FPS.)

DJ Souza

It can be frustrating to call an "adventure" those games that are action oriented. I am thinkink about those people that only like to play traditional adventures games, the slow paced kind.

For people who plays all types of games, the genre definition might not be necessary, I guess, but I think it is important to adopt some sort of definition, not everybody likes to play Zelda style "adventures" (I do, but a lot of people definitely dont like too much action in their adventuring).

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DIEGO J. SOUZA

Moron Lite

Well, rather than claiming the grand title of Adventure with a capital 'A', I think it's better just to realize that we're talking about a strand of adventure, that at one point was the dominant Adventure. Nowadays, we talk about action adventures, adventure RPGs, and so on. Why not just call the adventures we're talking about puzzle adventures or somesuch? I fail to see why the issue should be so threatening to anyone.

mag

Okay. I just misinterpretted your post then. My bad. As for the article, that's more just because this is the kind of crazy stuff I write about.


Which is weird because that's exactly what I said. But even when you look at it in a "liquid" way, or as a continuum as I prefer to think of it, you still have certain games that are definitely well within the definition of what that genre is and some games that are definitely well outside that definition. For instance, in the RTS genre StarCraft is definitely a strategy game. Super Mario Brothers is definitely not a strategy game. If we look at adventure games, something like King's Quest is definitely an adventure game. Something like Metal Gear Solid is definitely not an adventure game.

Games that are closer to the borderline are more difficult to categorize. But that's not a reason to throw away the whole definition.


The only problem with it is that it implies that all these games are in the same genre when clearly they are not. So if you want to call stuff like Zelda and Grand Theft Auto adventure games, that's fine. But you're still going to need some word, even if it isn't "adventure," to describe the type of game that we used to call adventure games.

mag

Bastich

mag (and those who agree with him) are absolutely, 100% correct. Everyone else is wrong.

IMAO.

mag

Thanks, Bastich. Well, I guess that settles that.

mag

Bastich

LMAO!!! Glad I could be of help!

Moron Lite

The concept of adventure simply does not exist on the same plane as strategy, action, platformer, etc. This is like trying to say that some writings are 'comedies', and others are 'narrative'. What you're trying to do amounts to saying "Only these writings are really narratives! Those are comedies! They can't be narratives! Why? Because they're comedies!"

Huh? I feel like you completely missed my point. I already suggested 'puzzle adventure'. How does this imply that "all these games are in the same genre when clearly they are not"? What about terms like 'text adventure', 'graphic adventure', and 'point-and-click adventure'? I mentioned action adventures and adventure RPGs, which GTA and Zelda could fit into respectively. I don't understand why you constantly want to reduce everything to plain-old 'adventure'. You're just trying to strongarm the terms of debate back to your imposed definition of adventure (what is your definition anyway?). That gets us nowhere.

And again, I COMPLETELY fail to see why this is so important an issue. Any consumer who's seriously looking for something like Monkey Island or Broken Sword 3 is going to be able to tell that GTA simply isn't what he's looking for.

mag

Not at all. "Comedy" and "narrative" are too different measures. Because they are independent of each other, whether something is a comedy has no bearing on whether it is a narrative. But how comedic a writing is does determine whether or not it is a "comedy."

In the same way an action game can have some measure "adventure-ism," for lack of a better word. That measure has no bearing on how much action is in the game. It is considered an action game because it is high on action and low on adventure (and strategy, and everything else). As a result, it falls very firmly within the action genre. If it were higher on elements associated with other genres, it would be more of a hybrid game and thus more difficult to classify.

So to go back to your analogy, a story can be high on both comedy and narrative, but it can't simultaneously be both high and low on comedy. And that's what determines whether or not it is a comedy. Not whether it also happens to be a narrative.


I'm actually not. I understand that subgenres exist. And that's what you're talking about, by the way. Note that "puzzle adventure" has the same root as "action adventure" and "adventure RPG." By saying that these games all belong to the same genre, just a different subgenre, you're grouping a lot of games into a category where they don't belong. There is a fundamental difference in the style of gameplay between King's Quest and Legend of Zelda. Notice that text adventures and point-and-click adventures have that same fundamental style of gameplay. The difference is simply one of interface.


Definitions are tricky. I could give you a quick one that would apply to most adventure games, but as we've already seen it would be imperfect. To come up with a definition I'd really be satisfied with I'd have to put a lot more thought into it than I'm willing to for a forum post. But I will say that elements important to an adventure game include a proper blend of exploration, puzzles, and story. That's about all I can say on that at this point.


I know that. But to somebody who's never seen an adventure game before, which many gamers today haven't, how are they supposed to know what to ask for if the term for a game like Monkey Island doesn't exist? How we define games effects how we think about them. If there's no difference in how we think about Monkey Island compared to how we think about Grand Theft Auto, what incentive is there to favor one style of gameplay over the other? And if there is no preference, what incentive is there for publishers and developers to provide more games like Monkey Island? They're all adventures, so they're all the same.

It's absolutely ridiculous that the style of gameplay used in sports games, shooters, strategy games, puzzle games, and every other genre has its own category, but the style used by adventure games is now forced to share some wastebasket category with any game that publishing companies and gaming magazines don't feel like categorizing properly.

mag

Moron Lite

Dude, 'adventure' is not THE uber-genre that 'action adventure', 'adventure RPG', and 'puzzle adventure' are all sub-genres of. They're intersections of different axes of genre. Action + adventure. Adventure + RPG. Puzzle + adventure.

Re: your definition, tentatively, I'd go with exploration and story. Those are fairly conducive to concept of adventure. Puzzles, on the other hand, are not. Keep in mind that I'm just talking about the general idea of adventure, not the game genre idea you have in mind. Hence, puzzle adventure. The kind of games we generally talk about are intersections of puzzle and adventure. GTA has exploration and story, but no puzzles and a lot of action: so, action adventure. Is this really so hard to accept?

"I know that. But to somebody who's never seen an adventure game before, which many gamers today haven't, how are they supposed to know what to ask for if the term for a game like Monkey Island doesn't exist?"

?? If they've never seen an 'adventure game' before, how can they even ask for it in the first place?

scabb

I like the term "graphic adventure" to describe games like Broken Sword, Monkey Island and Myst. The majority of people seem to think that games such as Prince of Persia are "adventure" games, and they're not necessarily wrong - but most of these people wouldn't consider PoP to be a "graphic adventure".

In the UK, we don't consider what the Americans call "Football" to actually be football, as we have our own football, the original football. So we call your football "American Football", and you call our football "Soccer". Slightly confusing? I suppose. Huge Problem? Not really. Bad Analogy? Yes!

mag

Well, if that's the definition of "adventure" you're talking about, I can only ask--why are you talking about it? That's not the "adventure" we're dealing with. That "adventure" is completely irrelevant to video games. If that's what you're talking about then you can cross off exploration and story too. It's just something exciting. We're dealing with a different definition of "adventure." In this sense "adventure" isn't used in the traditional sense of doing something exciting and dangerous. It's just a word that describes a style of gameplay. I seriously don't understand why it's so difficult for you to grasp the concept that this word has multiple definitions.

Puzzles are important because they make up such a huge part of the gameplay in adventure games. That's what sets adventure games apart from other genres. There are other games that also have exploration and story that are certainly not adventure games. Ratchet & Clank has both--is that a platform adventure? Final Fantasy X has both. Should we start calling that an RPG adventure, even though it's a traditional RPG in every sense of the word?


I see that term used a lot, but frankly I never really understood how it differentiates something like Monkey Island from something like Prince of Persia. Isn't any adventure game, except for maybe text adventures, a "graphic" adventure? How is Prince of Persia less "graphic" than Monkey Island?

mag

peb