Writing Times

[revena]

First off, my newest gaming thing at Fantasy is up: "Quest for Adventure Games"

Second, I'm trying to do some fiction writing tonight and am drawing blaaaaanks. Wanna help me warm up? Prompt me, pls!

Comments

[ct]

What would (character) sell his/her soul for?

[tacithydra.livejournal.com]

Rivalry! Werewolf pack hired for a porn flick! A mysterious stranger emerges from the woods and tries to sell someone a bridge! Selkies form a company to compete with tugboats in the San Fransisco bay!

[liraella.livejournal.com]

I was interested to read your piece on adventure games, as I've been an adventure gamer for years, but after reading it I'm puzzled. Unless I've got it wrong, you seem to be saying that there have been no adventure games since the Myst days. Do you mean only on consoles? Because PC adventure games, while a small part of the market compared to first person shooters and the like, have been going strong ever since the Myst and King's Quest days. Although the big gaming houses have tended to drop their adventure games in recent years because of the greater profit to be made elsewhere, the gap has been more than filled by games which have been developed by small houses and independent developers, most often in Europe (most games also have a US release). There are dozens of adventure game releases a year. Some successful games, such as Syberia, have also been ported to consoles. And one of the big adventure gaming sites, justadventure.com, gets more than a million visitors a month.

Unlike other areas of gaming, adventure games attract a wide range of ages and about a 50/50 gender split. There are a lot of strong women heroes in adventure gaming, which may be at least part of the appeal.

As you can probably tell, I can hold forth at length about this, but I'll refrain in case I totally misunderstood you:).

[revena.livejournal.com]

Woops! It's all on me and poor contextualization. When I was referring back to graphical adventure computer games of the eighties and nineties, what I was invoking was the overwhelming popularity of that genre, which was drastically reduced in market share as graphical engines got more sophisticated and first-person shooter games, etc., rose to the fore. Though computer games of the graphical adventure genre are still being produced, as you discuss, the genre hasn't seemed to make the leap onto consoles successfully yet, which I think is a shame. A few really successful graphical adventure games on a console system could raise the profile of that style of game higher again, and encourage renewed proliferation generally, and particularly on systems with new capabilities (the DS's touchscreen, for example, has all kinds of possible applications in an adventure game - which Hotel Dusk does a great job of exploiting). Which I think would be pretty seriously awesome.

[liraella.livejournal.com]

Aha, right, it was about consoles. That makes sense. It brings up a lot of interesting
points (well, interesting to me, anyway, as I'm passionate about adventure gaming:)).

You're right that adventure games haven't been successful on consoles yet. I think there are
good reasons for this. Adventure games are still pretty much point and click - all that's
changed over the last decade or so is that the environments and characters have got prettier. So
there hasn't been a lot of call for the extra stuff that consoles provide - you might as
well just play them on a PC (and thereby pay less for them, too). Of course, that could also be confusing cause with effect - maybe adventure games have become mired in point and click because nobody has taken advantage of the extra things consoles offer. These days, as you so rightly point out, the advantages
consoles bring would add fantastic dimensions to adventure gaming. It didn't strike me till I
read your piece how great it would be to be able to search environments (which you do a ton of
in adventure gaming) the way you do with Eledees on the Wii, for example.

Of course, nobody's going to make the jump to designing games properly for consoles (rather than
just porting PC games) unless they think it will be financially successful, and thus far, the
track record doesn't give them much hope. Some of that's because of the games that have been
released for consoles - most often, action elements have been added to please action gamers, and
the effect has unfortunately been that the action elements annoy adventure fans and the
adventure elements bore action fans. And some of it, I think, is that people who buy consoles
are just more likely to be action- than adventure-friendly. Maybe this will change as people
start buying consoles for other reasons (the Wii Fit is one example) - it will need to have to
for adventure games to succeed on consoles. I'd like to think it will happen, but to be honest
I'm not sure it will.

I suspect that in fact adventure games need to take other directions to prosper. One of these
that's already being tried is the downloadable shorter game that takes a couple of hours to play
- the new Sam & Max games are a successful example of that. Another very successful series of
games has been the CSI series - it's again made up of shorter subgames, brings a ready-made
audience of fans of the TV series and gets around the limitations of point and click by letting
the gamer work with tons of cool forensic tools.

However, where I dream of adventure games going is in the direction you encapsulate in the term
"interactive novel". The great strength of (good) adventure games is story, and done well I
think it can be about the most immersive milieu for story there is. There's something about
interaction that takes you inside a story in a way nothing else can do. IMO the best adventure game ever done is Jane Jensen's Gabriel Knight 3: not only did I dream about the game while I was playing it, but I was actually woken up one night by a realisation about what was happening to one of the characters. That's never happened to me with a novel (and I'm not dissing novels - I'm a writer myself!) I'd love adventure games to become something played not just by people who identify as gamers, but by people who identify as readers. I'd like them to be sold as interactive novels in bookstores. Most of all, I'd like writers, not game developers, to write the stories, because there are far too many cliched and poorly written games at the moment written by people whose first talent isn't writing. I'd love to start a game studio with just this philosophy underpinning it (and I hope one day I will).

Thanks for letting me rant!