David Mershon

I want to kick off this semester by putting out a couple of questions that I’d like to answer.

Designers frequently try to inject drama into games.  Stern and Mateas’s Facade is an explicit example of this.  Although it was interesting, Facade was ultimately a magnificent failure.  Its opaque nature and curtailing of player agency made it not the kind of game experience that I want to create.  It got me thinking though, if we can try to shoehorn drama into a game, why not try to extract a game from drama, particularly dramatic works that were not previously thought to be great subject material for games?

I was speaking to Mike Sennott about some difficulties I’ve been having with the fiction of Banker’s Dozen (my interstellar trade project), and we were kicking around the idea of a Dangerous Liaisons/Les liaisons dangereuses type of a plot where a bunch of plutocrats dare each other to do despicable things out of sheer boredom.  As we discussed the possibility I realized that the story of Dangerous Liaisons revolves around a game of seduction being played between Merteuil and Valmont.

I would like to pursue the concept of adapting this story this further, it at least has the potential to be the dating sim from hell.  I would also like to dissect some other not obviously game friendly stories that I have enjoyed to probe for potential gameness within.

Adventure games are funny things.  They routinely have the most compelling fictional elements of any games, but their puzzles are so frustrating that aside from the occasional modern descendent(Dreamfall, Heavy Rain), the genre has been relegated to a strictly niche status.  What is it about the kinds of challenges present in adventure games and IF that can make them so unpleasant?

My theory had been that adventure games have challenges of “choice discovery” as opposed to “choice selection”.  What this means is basically that in adventure games, if you know what the rules of a puzzle are then you’ve basically got it beat.  Every obstacle is a one off problem that is solved by reading the mind of the designer.  This is a pretty good story, but the more I think about it, there are plenty of adventure puzzles that this just doesn’t apply to.  The mechanics of insult sword fighting in The Secret of Monkey Island is a prime example of an adventure game puzzle where most of the gameplay happen after the rules have become clear, and I remember this part of the game being more fun than frustrating.  



My question is, what is up with these exceptions?  What really is the difference between an adventure puzzle and the challenges of an action or strategy game?  Are adventure games primed for rehabilitation as a popular genre, provided they adopt these non one-off types of puzzles and challenges?