I liked the article “Guybrush’s heirs”. It goes into detail of both parser and choice games.
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I wonder, has anyone made a game about the evolution of computer adventure games? Like, how Evoland covered the console RPG genre.
(Note: Evoland claims to chronicle adventure games, but it’s more about RPGs and Action-RPGs.)
I just think it would be so cool to start with a green monochrome monitor and a parser input blinking at you waiting for keyboard commands… and as the game progresses, introduce graphics, then sound, animation, character keyboard movement, then the mouse interactions, verb buttons, icons, and end with a version that feels like today’s games. It would be kind of neat if parts of the game were able to be revisited with the more modern interface and see how the same areas are re-imagined… and of course, all held together with a gripping story!
I wonder if such a thing could be done for modern IF? I suppose it would start with monochrome and just get higher resolution monochrome with anti-aliasing thrown in somewhere in the middle? 
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Thanks for the kind words!
Yeah, those are really good examples to raise (very fun games too!) The piece already wound up being quite long, so the story it sketches out of adventure-game history being a linear progression to fewer and fewer verbs is definitely oversimplified. I’ve enjoyed Jimmy Maher’s focus on Legend even as his blog has gotten into the late 90s, since I think there’s a lot that’s still fresh and interesting about the way they balanced their Infocom-derived DNA with attempting to make marketable graphic adventures.
You know, I did consider titling it “Threepwood’s Heirs” to make the Wodehovian linkage clearer, but thought that might be an in-joke too far…
Definitely agreed – I actually replayed Fate of Atlantis as I was finalizing the piece, and one thing that struck me is that there are only like one or two puzzles in the game that require more than a single generic “use” verb. Sure, sometimes it’s “push” for a lever or “talk to” for a person or “pick up” for a movable object, but from a design perspective, the assortment-of-hammers-for-a-variety of nails gameplay that I think characterizes the IF subgenres doesn’t actually come much into play here.
I kind of gesture at this in the death of the adventure game section, but my personal sense is that the slippery-slope to one-button interfaces was probably inevitable but also led to a dead end for the point-and-clicker – the options at that point are 1) retain the puzzles and make the stuff you click on really complicated; or 2) dial down the puzzles and focus on choice-based dialogue. And in fact each of those paths wound up being commercially viable to this day, though of course a Monkey Island fan won’t get their itch scratched in the same way by a Room or a late-period Telltale game.
(There’s also option 3: minigames, but I at least haven’t been able to construct a consistent lineage or analytic framework based on that approach).
Thanks Peter!
I’m not aware of anything that does this in Evoland’s style, but there are various remakes that are interesting from this point of view – Sierra redid a bunch of their early games with their VGA-era point-and-click engine, so you can compare Hero’s Quest with Quest for Glory I; similarly, there’s the recent VR-compatible Adventure remake, and I think Myst has been fully remade at least twice now?
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Excellent article! Parser and Choice were always on a continuous spectrum. point-and-click is there too. And visual novels.
these two subgenres of IF are trending towards something resembling classic point-and-click graphic adventures
They certainly are!
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Now that we’ve got a couple articles out in the world and folks can see what kind of stuff we’re putting out, this might be an opportune moment to repeat that this isn’t just meant to be a walled garden for the editors – we’re very much open to submissions from anyone who’d like to write one!
There’s a little more info on what we’re looking for on the site, including links to forms where you can submit a complete article or even just a pitch to test whether something might be a good fit. But if that’s too formal, I’m sure any of us would be excited to kick ideas around too.
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@DeusIrae I enjoyed the article. I think that some modern adventure games almost allow for the variety of actions that an unrestricted verb input offers, even if they don’t use text.
eg. In Frictional Games’ in-house engine (whatever they use for Amnesia, Soma, etc.), “turn the doorknob” is done with an actual circular mouse gesture. Some actions are not so obvious, so this can be used to create real puzzles beyond just “use the thing.” Sometimes this involves ‘real’ machines like a pulley system or abandoned tank.
Apart from that… I think that some text-based engines probably encourage a focus on either verb use or object use. I expect that Inform 7 encourages verb-focused games, while Adventuron encourages object-focused games due to the partial graphics focus (even if it is a true parser engine).
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We have another article to share! This one’s by Ian Greener, and looks at the UK IF scene of the 80s, with a particular dive into the social-climbing satire Hampstead:
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Maybe we should make a discussion topic for each article? Would that be okay, moderators? I don’t think the number of articles we do is overwhelming.
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I accidentally discovered the rosebush two days ago I think, it looks really great and I look forward to reading (well, listening to via TTS) the articles you publish! When I recover enough for long form writing to be a regular habit for me again, I’ll definitely submit an article or two (I have ideas).
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