Did Graphics Kill the Adventure Genre?

Last week’s State of Adventure Gaming created a lot of controversy, discussion and dozens of email responses. It has already been read by over 100,000 visitors and has taken on a life of its own.

After reading the latest Just Adventure State of Adventure Gaming, I was more than a little surprised by Computer Games Magazine's recent interview with Tim Schafer and some of his comments. In this piece I will set the record straight on adventure games altogether with an understandable emphasis on text adventure games. Sorry, Tim.

The question Computer Games Magazine asked "What do you think killed adventure games?" My question is -- Where did they get the idea adventure games were dead? We have to assume they are journalists so why did they even ask such an inaccurate, unqualified question? Is there some sort of hidden agenda here?

I could question them further -- Why did I start a text adventure game company back in 2002 if adventure games are dead? How is it that my company is thriving in 2005 with three released titles, a fourth in production and two more scheduled for release later this year and early next year? Why is it that Malinche is shipping new text adventure games to customers all over the world today?

Moving on to the more interesting answer to CGM's question, Tim said. " Well, really, I would say graphics killed adventure games. The second we switched from text to graphic adventures, their days were numbered. When you're playing a text adventure game, the most amazing worlds and actions are possible, because the budget is always the same. Doesn't matter what the words are."

Simply stated, Tim is wrong. Very wrong. Graphics did not kill text adventure games -- poor business decisions did. And the words of a text adventure game are the most important elements. They very much matter!

First, the legendary Infocom may still have been around today delivering compelling text adventure games if only they didn't develop a single product that ended up sinking the company. That fateful product was named Cornerstone. For the young ones out there, Cornerstone was a database product that Infocom poured all of its resources into. Infocom went from ever-climbing sales and being very cash rich to losing money and being in debt because of the poor business decision to depart from their core competency; text adventure games. Activision took over the weakened company and the rest is history.

Adventure International went bankrupt in 1985. Graphical games can't be the culprit because the original Atari 520ST and Amiga 1000, the first generation of 'super' home computers with decent graphics were released halfway into 1985 themselves. At the time of their release, there was a tiny library of available titles making graphical games the improbable culprit behind the demise of Adventure International. Ken Williams feels Adventure International couldn't compete against Infocom (who at the time held 8 of a total of 10 slots for bestselling software) but I seem to remember it being a little more complex than that. In any event, Adventure International wasn't driven out of business by graphical games. It went out of business due to, unfortunately, poor business acumen.

Let's pause for a second and reconsider one of the facts I just mentioned. Infocom titles occupied eight of ten slots for best-selling game software. We can only hope graphical games occupied the two remaining slots.

Moving further long in Mr. Schafer's words, let's talk about the budget of words he mentioned. It is apparent to me that Mr. Schafer is no writer. Writers will employ an "economy of words" to tell their stories but such an economy has nothing to do with money; it's all about style. Graphical games always required money, seemingly more money today than ever. The quality of a graphical game is dictated as much as by the money behind it as the designers who develop it. The quality of a text adventure game isn't indicative of its budget but of its designer. The one point I agree with Mr. Schafer is part of the above quote: "If you're playing a text adventure game, the most amazing worlds and actions are possible..." Yes, that's true. As a professional author of text adventure games, I'll vouch for the fact that what I can imagine and place into the games I create far surpasses anything that is possible today in the graphical game market.

Now here's the part of that sentence I don't agree with - "the budget is always the same." Not so, Mr. Schafer. If I budget my time to predict all of the different possible actions a player may take on a puzzle or object of some kind, I can see to it that there is a very high probability of success in my games responding to an action by a player with a satisfying response. Predictably, I also disagree with his assertion "Doesn't matter what the words are." I doubt that the author of your choice would agree that words in a story don't matter. The words make the story. Period. Words in a text adventure game are all we have to work with and I can tell you that I make sure the very best words I can possibly use are introduced into my titles, nothing less. I've been known to agonize over the right word with a thesaurus and a dictionary for the better part of five minutes. That's right. Five minutes on just one word.

If words didn't matter I could release six or seven titles a year instead of my pace of one or two per year.

Going further long in Tim Schafer's response below, I've got some issues to raise:

"I can remember the moment I heard about adventure games. Someone told me that there was this type of game that was all text, and you could type in anything you wanted, and do anything you wanted and the game would respond. I thought that was the coolest idea ever, so I got all the Scott Adams game and played them all. Even though you couldn’t do anything, you could actually type in a lot of crazy stuff."

Mr. Schafer starts out on the right track -- text adventure games offer the magic of possibility that make anything worth a try and then kills the statement with the myth "you couldn't do anything." What a fallacy!

The puzzles in Malinche's text adventure games demand the player do quite a lot, actually. This is the case with Infocom's titles and Scott Adams' as well, naturally. Many puzzles require clever, insightful solutions requiring quite a bit of player interaction.

Mr. Schafer's comments continue on:

"But then when graphics got involved – oh, here I go again – you suddenly couldn’t do anything, you could only do a few things. And so adventures started to get more and more beautiful, but more and more limiting. The interesting thing to me is, even in Grand Theft Auto III, you can really only do a handful of things, what is it people say they love about those games? The freedom! “You can do anything!” they say.”

The next question asked by Computer Game World was fair enough. Tim Schafer's reply, though, was unreal.

CGM - They’re recaptured the magic of text adventures?

Tim’s response: “Yes. I mean, it was a lie with text adventures, too. You couldn’t do anything. It was an illusion.”

I am almost speechless. Graphical games "recaptured the magic of text adventure games?" The two genres of adventure games are incapable of being compared to one another. I would have thought that someone with Tim Schafer's accomplishments would be aware of such a distinction. It's true to say that graphical games are limited (OK, VERY LIMITED) in the range of action the player can take. But in text adventure games, the range of action is very broad. And that is no lie and nor is that an illusion.

In my work Pentari: First Light, some puzzles have as many as five different solutions any of which will score the player points and solve the problem in front of them. What's limited about that? Justadventure.Com rated First Light with a solid A because there is actually quite a lot the player can do.

In Malinche's murder mystery Greystone, some objects can be treated as red herrings or, if employed in creative ways, bring the game to a very surprising end where the player wins in a way they never would have expected. With a total of four crimes in Greystone (small spoiler there) the detective skills of the player are put to the test in several different ways. The thirty different possible endings to Greystone demonstrate that there is a lot the player has to do to deliver justice.

Going further, with Endgame the player has a range of choices that can be made throughout the title that can get his ship sank on the open sea, blasted out of the water thanks to an all-out assault by North Korea or trigger a border war between the two Koreas that result in reunification. And that's only a partial list of the exhaustive list of permutations offered by the game. Decisions and actions are integral to Interactive Fiction.

Any objective reader can pull out dozens of their own examples from the text adventure games that have been released over the years.

Text adventure games, and adventure games in the larger sense, are alive and well. They will never die. And thanks to modern computing power, are larger, more interesting and more challenging than ever before.

Howard Sherman
Implementor
Malinche Entertainment - The Art of Interactive Fiction
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