This game analysis was suggested by TGP reader Liordino. If you have a game you’d like analyzed, submit it along with your name and website (if you have one), and what you think readers could learn from it!
Point and click adventure games are truly games from a different time. Back in the 80′s and early 90′s, now defunct companies like Sierra were kings of the genre. Based around tightly woven stories, humor, dialogue, and characters, the games allowed players to deeply explore a world to their heart’s content.
Today, however, point and click games are relegated to a niche genre. Available mostly on the PC (and a few handheld titles like Phoenix Wright), these games have largely faded away to games of a much faster pace, including action/adventure, RPG, and mini-games.
Forgotten Wisdom
Some may say that the reason these games have faded from their past glory is because of their excessive focus on narrative, part of the Aesthetic Layout of a game. While part of that may be true, there are aspects of adventure games that modern developers can learn from as another color to add to their game design pallet.
Modern game designers often tend to focus a lot on the game’s Base Mechanics. How does it work? What are new ideas in programming terms? How does that square interact with that circle? While the Base Mechanics are certainly a part of the Game Design Canvas, they are not the entire canvas. This is a lesson that can be learned in these anachronistic adventure games — that putting more weight and effort into the Aesthetic Layout, in terms of story and narrative, can indeed give some interesting results.
These results are apparent in a moment near the beginning of the game we’re going to look at to illustrate this: Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars, a 1990′s PC game that was eventually ported to a number of other systems including the Playstation and the Wii. For those who aren’t familiar with the title, we’re just going to run through the very beginning of the game, watchable here.
A Narrative Snack
“I considered climbing on the Lamp Post, but it wasn’t going to shed any light on the affair.”
This is one of the humorous lines that the main character, George Stobbart, says in the first few moments of gameplay. The Base Mechanics in Broken Sword are standard enough for the adventure genre. The player can click on various objects and people in the world to explore and look around. Clicking on certain objects will move the plot and the game forward, while others, like this one, just provide some witty line of narration and nothing more.
But the monologue line above illustrates one great difference between the importance of narrative in adventure games and other genres. Does this little joke add any gameplay? No, not necessarily. The player doesn’t receive any reward, nor has the character done anything to make progress in the game.
For some players, this experience is therefore useless. However, for other players, particularly the ones who would most likely enjoy adventure games, the little monologue is a delight just to listen to. It is unique, it develops the character, and makes the world feel more real. It is a fun snack on the way through the five course meal of the game’s storyline.
For this reason, adventure games take more strongly after novels and literature than any other genre in games. Like a paragraph out of Charles Dickens, Broken Sword allows you to explore the environment in detail, learning about all of delicately placed pieces of scenery while simultaneously exploring the main character’s mind.
Not for Everyone
People are complex creatures, and people are different. Some players will love that a dev team (or indie developer, for many readers on this site) spent time to sprinkle little bits of Aesthetic content throughout their game. For these players, the more the better. But other players will quickly grow bored with it and fly through the content, ignoring it, believing the storytelling aspects to be completely useless. For those players, the more non-mechanical content is created, the more cheated they will feel.
The trick in this case is to decide which player developers are creating for, and then be true to what they are interested in.
Intelligent Developer’s Challenge
For those wishing to stretch their developer muscles, please leave a comment below to engage in the dialog around the following question:
If some system were added to Broken Sword to keep track of how many pieces of narrative content the player had clicked (“You’ve found 18/25 monologues in this area”), how would that change the game?
i’ve always enjoyed adventure games, even as they stopped being popular. they seem to be more character heavy than other games.
if you started keeping track of how many things the player clicked, i feel like it would just become a collection contest. not sure if that’s good or bad.
That’s exactly what enjoy so much about the Sam & Max Adventures. Those little funny comments about the environment makes me first click every object in a room when I enter it, instead of heading right to the next person to talk to.
To answer your question: I think that it would make the game more enjoyable for the mentioned fast-paced gamer type. Because it gives him something to chase after. Even if he won’t be giving close attention to the actual comment :S
For the other player type, it indicates whetever there are more comments to hear or not and therefore shouldnt be disturbing.
@George, yes, adventure games do have space for more text and voice acting, and thus often better fleshed out characters. That is something a lot of players love.
@Phil, great answers. One question that would pose to the designer might then be: is there any joy for the player in knowing that you actually MISSED some of the narration?
Thanks for the comments!
As per the keeping track of finding hidden monologues, I know that I at least, would not be satisfied without finding them all. This would make adventure games even more of a pixel hunt for me, clicking everything to get all the dialogue. I am never satisfied thinking I missed some content.
Hi Brice! Glad you liked my suggestion. :)
I totally agree with you about the humorous lines of the characters on adventures like Broken Sword. It’s funny how something that adds nothing to the gameplay can became so important on a game.
About keeping track of finding hidden monologues, I think that it depends on the player type, like @Phil says. And I think that the “fast-paced” player could be frustrated if he end up on an endless journey after one lasting monologue, like I was when discovered that to get 100% on some Tony Hawk game I had to do a lot of specific tricks on specific locations (wich, by the way, made me don’t care about completing 100% on a game anymore =P). About the other kind of player, I couldn’t agree more with @Phil. But I’m sure of one thing: it would be trophies on PSN and Live for those who find every monologue.
Personally, I don’t like that “trophy hunt” kind of playing, but hey, I’m just one type of player after all, and I think that some people would enjoy it, while some others (like me) really would not care about it.
@Bryce
For the fast gamer type it would help him get the trophies / achievments he wants to achieve. He could see exactly how much he has left to find which i think is a better motivator than if you have no idea how close you are to your goal.
For the other player type it could help him if he likes to really get each and every information out of the game he can get. But it could also disturb him because it could set the player under pressure, which wouldn’t be enjoyable if the player just wants to concentrate on the story and the riddles.
if a system was added to a point adventure game where it tracks the amount of monologue i click, the concept would ruin the game. first of all, narrative is more of an emotional feel, not a programmed reward that prompts as a numerical value. we should go along with the flow while the dialogues, musics, or scripts happen naturally. secondly, design should be unnoticed. the whether players understand or not, they should play the game without noticing why they are hooked on it until the end. not only base mechanics are long term incentive but also narrative, which can keep gamers hooked on until the end without noticing. nonetheless, interesting article. the fact that some players are about keeping track of reward and punishment to the point where they actually take the reward and punishment literally where there has to be a puzzle and spawn point. on the other hand, narrative driven player may think of a punish as a non AI conflict and a reward as an emotional progression.