lmxplx

but why is Grand Theft Auto considered to be an adventure game but Morrowind does not seem to be. To me Morrowind has more in common with Advent (the original Crowther and Woods game) than GTA does.

mag

GTA is only considered an adventure by people who (A) don't know what they're talking about or (B) are really trying to stretch the definition of "adventure." Morrowind isn't really an adventure either, BTW. I recommend reading Adventure Gamers' article about the definition of adventure games. It's pretty good, and it should give you more of an idea of what people around here mean by "adventure," rather than people on those pop sites like GameSpot who classify stuff like Zelda and GTA as adventures.

mag

Glenn Epic

Well I like the way that the inventory classifies adventure games.

There are 4 catagories, A) Pure adventure games, with no action, B) Adventure games with action elements thrown in, C) Action games with some adventure aspects, and D) Pure action games.

I would consider Category A and B to be adventure games. Though some sites eg. gamespot like to classify section C as adventure games also.

__________________
Happenstance

Jake

The answer is, in the console world, which grew up until very recently in a very separate place from the PC world, GTA3 is an adventure game. There's just sort of different nomenclature. Its really annoying. GTA on the PC for instance wasn't considered an adventure game. Of course, GTA 1 and 2 on the PC were a lot more action heavy and a lot less story heavy, but no PC magazine would even consider writing "Adventure" in the little info sidebar. Unless I'm mistaken, the first Zelda for NES was classified as "Adventure" on the box and thats sort of set the trend since. If it wasnt Zelda, it was another game of that type. (okay it wasn't zelda, but thats close kinda).

(following Trep's lead, I will now be adding a big old belated IMHO )

__________________
When on the Internet, visit Idle Thumbs | Mixnmojo | Sam & Max.net | Telltale Games

"I was one of the original lovers." - Evan Dickens

lmxplx

Says herearticle about the definition of adventure games: "Adventure games are about stories, exploring worlds and solving puzzles." Now, that is what I thought. But, with that definition, GTA and Morrowind are adventure games and so are most all RPGs and "action games." An "Adventure" game is wandering around and discovering without having to wade through piles of bodies. Not that Wandering around is without danger e.g.

>kill Dragon
What, with your bare hands?
>y
okay, you killed the dragon with your bare hands
>_

Or maybe being eaten by a Gru.

Discovery is the key word for "Adventure" games not mayhem.

Intrepid Homoludens

Interactive action and violence is not typically a primary aspect of an adventure game. But then my definition is a bit more flexible than most others here. I don't at all consider GTA3 or Vice City to be categorically an adventure game, although I do feel that ICO is. This is because action and violence are among the main features of GTA3, superceding any adventure elements like story, puzzles, or character development. There's proportionately waaaay too much of them, compared to, say, Gabriel Knight 3. Conversely, ICO very much leans on the unfolding story, the exploration, the puzzlework, and character interrelationships, supplanting the combat scenes and platforming. Whereas you remember almost nothing but your interactive violence and body count from GTA3, from ICO you most remember your discoveries of the various halls and rooms of the castle, solving the environmental puzzles while keeping an eye on Yorda, and the growing emotional ties between the two children.

And I sign this,

IMHO

__________________
platform: laptop, iPhone 3Gs | gaming: x360, PS3, psp, iPhone, wii | blog: a space alien | book: the moral landscape: how science can determine human values by sam harris | games: l.a.noire, portal 2, brink, dragon age 2, heavy rain | sites: NPR, skeptoid, gaygamer | music: ray lamontagne, adele, washed out, james blake | twitter: a_space_alien

jjacob

Ha! GTA doesn't even carry adventure elements! Yeah sure it has a story binding all the objectives together but come on! I'm assuming that judgement was passed by some ignorant FOOL at gamespy or something.

I DO feel however, that Deus Ex 1&2, despite its action elements can be called an action/adventure, with heavy adventure elements. There is just so much dialogue and story (even if you'd want to guns blazin you'd die, you need to talk to people and gather information). You also need various items to get through the missions, like lockpicks, multitools (for disabling cameras, turrets, etc), cash, various weapon upgrades, bio upgrades etc. I'm not saying it's pure adventure but the story (or should I say stories?) was very intense (that goes for both DE1&2) and they did go a long way with adventure/puzzle elements.

mag

The main reason I object to the latter definitions is because they were tacked on later after "adventure" already had a definition just for the sake of companies marketing their games as "adventures." Now people think that any game with an adventurous theme is an adventure game, not realizing that it is an actual technical term. It would be like if I decided I don't like the definition of real time strategy and started calling Return to Castle Wolfenstein an RTS. After all, it's in real time. And it does require a certain amount of strategy. I must be an RTS.


Wanna bet?

I'm sorry, I don't buy this "adventure means something different in the console world." That is only true because people trying to market those games want people to think of them as adventures regardless of whether they are or not. An adventure is an adventure no matter what system it's on.


I really doubt the phrase "Experience the challenge of endless adventure" was meant to be a description of the genre. It was just a little marketing slogan. Most games can be described that way, even though they're not necessarily adventures.


An adventure game isn't just any game with all puzzles, story, or exploration. Any game can have those. It depends a great deal on the balance. Like Intrepid said, in an adventure game the puzzles make up the primary part of the gameplay. GTA may have a story and exploration, but it is a bit more lacking in the puzzles.

I'll even agree that these genres are not totally distinct from one another, but rather points along a continuum. So certain games do indeed share features of multiple genres. But there are some games that are just obviously not adventure games. Grand Theft Auto is not an adventure game. Metal Gear Solid, as much as I love it, is not an adventure game. Legend of Zelda is not an adventure game.


I'd call it more of an action/RPG, but you're right that it is one of those games that's not clearly in one genre or another. Warren Spector likes doing games like that just to confuse everybody.

mag

Moron Lite

Remember what the word 'adventure' means in the first place. In a lot of ways, the word is more applicable to GTA3 (maybe to 1 and 2) than it is to a lot of so called "adventure games". That's the problem with genre naming in the gaming world: you get people identifying something as belonging to this or that genre based on, say, interface, when the name of the genre is 'action' or 'adventure' (which both point to concepts that really aren't mutually exclusive).

Jake

I said at the end of my post that Zelda wasnt the example I was looking for, but there are lots of early "epic" style 8-bit era console games that were classified as "adventure" by their publishers and by game magazines, which set the trend in the console world.

__________________
When on the Internet, visit Idle Thumbs | Mixnmojo | Sam & Max.net | Telltale Games

"I was one of the original lovers." - Evan Dickens

remixor

One thing I think people should bear in mind is that if our definition of "adventure" was widely accepted, it wouldn't currently be worth even having that term exist. Can you imagine if GameSpot's entire Adventure section only covered the type of games covered on this site? Believe me, they're not going to spend their time covering a million identical TAC games (and practically nothing else) that the same people are going to buy anyway. The definition of "adventure" has simply come to mean a different thing than "graphic adventure", which is really what we mean when we talk about adventures. GTA might be an extreme example, but I do sort of understand the rationale. Like Jake says, the console definition of "adventure" has always been different from the PC definition--I'm sorry, but we really can't claim absolute ownership over the term. People have been describing Zelda games as adventures for a long time now.

__________________
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

guybrush_guy

thats weird, my post got deleated! anyone know why?

mag

When we're talking about video game genres, I think it's perfectly fair to define the genre based on the type of gameplay. "Adventure" as a game genre is not the same as what we mean when we normally use the term "adventure." In the context of gaming, "adventure" means a game with a certain type of gameplay. In the same way, an "action" game isn't any game that has an action-oriented story. If it was, we could call just about any RPG an action game. But it's not referring to the theme or mood of the story. It's referring to the type of gameplay. An action game is a game that has action-oriented gameplay.


A lack of new titles isn't a very good excuse to redefine an entire genre, despite what sites like Just Adventure + may think.


And people have been wrong for a long time now. I'm not claiming ownership of the term. I'm saying the term was already in existence when people started misusing it. Adventure, the original adventure game (created for a console system, BTW) was released in 1980. The first Legend of Zelda title didn't come along until 1987. There already existed a more suitable, more accutate term for the game. But people decided to call it an "adventure" just because it sounded better. I don't want to sound like one of those hardcore adventure fans who won't accept anything as an adventure game unless it falls within a precise, narrowly defined category of what an adventure game should be. But there are certain definitions that should be adhered to. You like Legend of Zelda? Fine. But call it what it is--an action/RPG.

mag

Moron Lite

Yet word usages and meanings change all the time. And I don't see where "in the context of gaming" gets you. Below, you talk about how "the term was already in existence when people started misusing it." Well, wasn't the meaning of 'adventure' before it was applied to games in existence before it got mapped to what you're insisting is THE adventure genre? Doesn't it get misused when it starts being applied to games that simply share similarities of interface, as opposed to *actually* having elements of adventure?


I don't see how you're not....

I encourage you to check out this article (not written by me): http://www.ludonauts.com/archives/000012.shtml

guybrush_guy

gamespot.com sorts games ware they should'nt be. splinter cell and prince of persia were in there adventure catagory for a few weeks.
when i go to gaming stores, the employer usualy asks what i'm looking for, i say "old adventure games", he usualy walks away and comes back with a crash bandakute game or some other Action game that does'nt involve masive acts of violence. a lot of people think an adventure games are just games that involve no killing\violence

DJ Souza

GTA is a driving sim I tell ya!

__________________
DIEGO J. SOUZA

Tanukitsune

You mean like this "Adventure"?

(Strongbad: GET THAT FREAKING DUCK AWAY FROM ME!)
The main problem is what keep clinging on our own defintion and we forget that there is a non gaming definition of adventure...
If we use the dictionaries definition all games are adventures....

You just have to remind that our definition of adventure is different than the rest of the world... Even for other gamers...

Oh, yeah, and they don't get the 3-headed monkey jokes either...

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

remixor

So...every time a new sort of game comes out, we should take its name and apply that as a strict genre definition to every other game that comes out and is similar? Just because that first game was called "Adventure" doesn't mean its system of gameplay is the gospel for a genre of games that is the adventure genre. That's silly.

__________________
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

Jake

Heh yes. There's no Mario (or I guess it would be "Pitfall") genre, but there are "Mario-style" "Platformers"...

__________________
When on the Internet, visit Idle Thumbs | Mixnmojo | Sam & Max.net | Telltale Games

"I was one of the original lovers." - Evan Dickens

mag

Do you understand that the whole point of a genre is to have a group in which to easily categorize games? Of course not every adventure game has to be exactly like Adventure. Adventure was used because it typifies a style of gameplay that is consistent with that general category of game. It makes things easy when you can look at the gameplay and say, "That's an adventure game." But if we change the definitions of those genres every time it suits our whims there's no point even having them.


No, that's a nonsense analogy. Since we're talking about games, the definition of "adventure" not in reference to gaming has nothing to do with it. They're two separate things. Before people started using "adventure" as a word for a genre of video games, the word had nothing to do with gaming. So it couldn't be misused in that way. Once it became the name of a genre, though, it took on a new definition that was more relevant to gaming.

Most of the time when we need a word for something new, we don't just make up completely new words. We use words we already have. So now adventure has a definition in the context of gaming. Likewise, "mouse" just meant a rodent before computers came along. Now "mouse" is an input device. That was not a misuse of the word "mouse." It was simply adding on another definition. Now if I use the word "mouse" in a similar context but for something different, for instance if I use "mouse" to describe all input devices, that would be a misuse of the word.


Because I didn't come up with this definition. I wasn't even around to care about it when people came up with this definition. I'm saying this is a definition that was already around, and it should be adhered to.


Obviously there are games that are not clearly in one genre or another. I even said as much in one of my previous posts. And it goes back a lot longer than Metroid Prime. One of my favorite games, Quest for Glory, blends adventure and RPG elements. Is it a pure adventure game? No, not really. But neither is it a pure RPG.

So, yes there are some limitations to our definitions of genres. They're not perfect. I don't think they were ever really meant to be. It's just a quick and easy way of categorizing games. But some people go overboard whenever they play a hybrid game and decide we need to get rid of all genres entirely. Just because they're imperfect is no reason to throw them away.

The biggest grudge I have against mainstream gaming's attempt to redefine the adventure genre, though, is that it's really an attempt to muscle real adventure games to the side. You look at GameSpot's list of upcoming adventure games, and you wonder why people talk about the death of the adventure genre. It looks like it's going pretty good. After all, look at all the adventure games coming up. You've got Metal Gear Solid 3, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Silent Hill 4, Resident Evil Outbreak. We don't need any more adventure games.

The thing is, words have power. They effect the way we think. Now we have a generation of gamers being brought up thinking of an adventure game as being any game with an adventurous element to it. Some of them have probably never even seen a real adventure game. So how are they supposed to say they want one if they don't even know what it is? Better yet, how are they supposed to say they want one if the word for it doesn't even exist? After all, an adventure game isn't a game like King's Quest or Monkey Island. It's just a game that's adventurous, like Zelda. And the classic definition of an adventure game just goes away because the new adventure genre is getting along just fine without it.

Hmmm...now that I think about it, this could be a new article for me to write. Thanks, Moron Lite.

mag