If The Walking Dead’s garland of Game of the Year awards and $40m of revenue prove anything, it’s that there is an appetite – a massive appetite – for games that tell a good story, ideally one that’s more sophisticated than Big Impressive Men Save World From Interchangeable Threat. This is hardly news. For years games tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to meet this need by trying to reproduce movie storytelling, but many creators have found a way out of the cinematic cul-de-sac and are increasingly finding their own way – by finding new ways to tell a story, by learning from film and TV without aping them, and by drawing on gaming’s own history.
At the heart of this movement is a genre that’s existed for almost as long as video games: the adventure game. Born as text adventures on the earliest home computers, this genre became a showcase for cutting-edge writing, animation and voice performance in the early 90s as it evolved into the point-and-click adventure, before losing traction as consoles rose to prominence and other games – first the platformer, then the first-person shooter – became the mainstream genres of choice.
Consoles’ controllers made them unsuitable for most PC-centric adventure games of the time, and the genre’s absence from the dominant gaming machines of the late 90s and early 00s contributed significantly to its decline. But the genre never died, despite persistent rumblings to the contrary. It evolved.
I think adventure games are something that casual audiences do like, because they’re about characters and about stories, about solving puzzles with your brain.
“People talk about [adventure games] dying, but they never really did,” says Ron Gilbert, a man who has been making them since 1987, and who stands on the brink of the release of his latest, The Cave, in January. “It’s more that all these other games became so much more popular and eclipsed them. But I think what we’re seeing now is that mobile games, Android and iOS, are drawing this vast number of people into gaming that wouldn’t have gamed before, and because of that adventure games are becoming more popular. I think adventure games are something that casual audiences do like, because they’re about characters and about stories, about solving puzzles with your brain; they’re not twitch games, and I think that’s contributing to this renaissance that we’re seeing.”
It’s not just casual audiences who are looking for better from games’ stories, though. It’s us, too. For too long we have put up with extreme cognitive dissonance when it comes to games and narrative – at best game stories sit beside the action, superfluous, and at worst they get in the way of it (or, in the case of the classic Uncharted nice-guy-commits-mass-murder dichotomy, sit in direct opposition to it.) The adventure game, meanwhile, is a genre built entirely around story. Is it the ideal medium for interactive narrative?
“I do think so,” Gilbert says. “Because the way I’ve always thought about adventure games, at least as I’m designing them, is that the story is really the most important thing. The puzzles are there to move the story along… It would be very hard to do one that didn’t have a really strong story, because there’s really nothing left after that except a bunch of arbitrary puzzles. I think adventure games really are in some ways the perfect way to tell an interactive story.”
The Nintendo DS that brought the first indications of the adventure game’s resurgence into the gaming mainstream. The console’s touch-screen made point-and-click viable again, but the DS’ adventure games weren’t rehashes of the genre’s past, but inventive and playful riffs on the genre that took advantage of that odd little dual-screened console like no other games did. Another Code (or Trace Memory) – one of the launch titles – weaved a haunting story around probably the best dual-screen puzzles that the DS ever saw. In Japan the adventure game morphed into the “visual novel”, giving us games like Phoenix Wright, Hotel Dusk, 999 and, eventually, Professor Layton, plus many more that never made it into translation. The vast majority of all PC games released in Japan are visual novels, and they are dominant on portable consoles too.
I think The Walking Dead is a good example. It’s not a classic point and click adventure game, but at its core it has a lot of adventure game elements to it, and it has had mass appeal.
In the West, meanwhile, adventure games made forays into three dimensions. Heavy Rain was an adventure game; Dreamfall, released in 2006, was a 3D sequel to 1999’s excellent point-and-click The Longest Journey. Telltale and Double Fine were both major players in resurrecting and evolving the classic point-and-click on consoles. As Gilbert points out, though, it’s touch-screen gaming that really enabled their return to the mainstream – on tablets and mobile phones you can buy spruced-up re-releases of the classics, like Monkey Island, Broken Sword and the infuriatingly successful Myst, alongside more and more new adventures: the postmodern Sword and Sworcery EP, Hector, Machinarium, Lili. DS triumphs Ghost Trick and Touch Detective have also found new homes on mobile.
The PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade, meanwhile have been adventure games’ main inlet to consoles over the past few years. At the height of the genre’s popularity on PC very few of the best point-and-click games were ever ported, but there has long been evidence that people wanted adventure games on console – Broken Sword on the original PlayStation sold stacks. Today, The Walking Dead’s huge success has surely dispelled any lingering presumption that all console players want is action.
“I think The Walking Dead is a good example,” says Gilbert. “It’s not a classic point and click adventure game, but at its core it has a lot of adventure game elements to it, and it has had mass appeal. Some of that is down to the license, but a lot of it is because it’s story-based, and I think a lot of people like that.”
In the near future, we’re going to see the return of another well-loved adventure series: Charles Cecil successfully Kickstarted a new Broken Sword game, The Serpent’s Curse. Gilbert’s surreal multiplayer adventure The Cave is just around the corner. Already this year, we’ve had the strikingly beautiful first episode of Kentucky Route Zero, and I’d bet you my right arm we’re going to see a second season of The Walking Dead.
Adventure games now are varied, literary, beautiful, inventive and ambitious; they’re reaching out to all corners of the artistic universe for inspiration, and they’re coming back to tell us stories we haven’t heard before. Traditionally, the LucasArts era in the early 90s has been called the golden age of the adventure game. But I think it could be right now.
Source : ign[dot]com
No comments:
Post a Comment