I’ve been making experimental, graphic novel style IF for some time now. They are closer to a graphic novel than a VN although the presentation is very similar. I often tell people they are VNs because they look like it at first glance. And people know what that is already.
The kind of thing I’m doing could also be called a graphic adventure or graphical IF, but it consists predominantly of character dialogue displayed by character sprites overlaying backgrounds rather like a VN. But there is also long-form non-dialogue text which is rarer in pure VNs.
Other differences from VNs is that; it has a world model, a geography you can navigate, objects and also an optional parser.
Mostly the presentation is choice-based, but increasingly I’m making the parser take a back seat because i found that people when presented with choice stop using the parser. The flip-side of this is that i increasingly do not implement parser only actions since they are unlikely ever to be discovered. Sadly.
There are a few exceptions where i found keyboard input helps the game mechanic and this is to help against choice lawn-mowering. For example, sometimes the keyboard input will pop-up requesting a word, phrase or number which the player has to know. Maybe it’s a phone number, a secret password or a magic spell. People seem fine with this minimal typing even on mobile.
I barely made it out of the house! But isn’t that a different type of repetition than “kill the same goblin 70 times in the same way”?
Fallen London is a good example of repetition, although I wouldn’t have called it an adventure. Insult swordfighting is another good example of a repetitive activity in an adventure game. And Quest for Glory had a whole RPG thing going on. But this type of thing is the exception in a text or point and click adventure. Both in terms of the time you’ll spend in a given game, and in the genre as a whole.
Yeah, I think Fallen London is a good point in favour of your (@paul-donnelly’s) metric that adventure games lack repetition. FL plays more like an RPG which happens to have a lot of text and a central mechanic which is less inextricably linked to combat than most.
The repetition metric says that Disco Elysium is an adventure game rather than an RPG, right?
Disco Elysium uses a system of skill checks to navigate many different types of challenges. It is both repetitive (in that your e.g. Interfacing skill will repeatedly be passively checked or actively selected, at which time it is evaluated to determine whether you succeed or fail at a particular reflection or action) and un-repetitive (because each situation in which you rely on Interfacing is unique and contains only superficial similarities to other such situations). Since almost every interaction affects and is affected by the system of skill checks (which are in turn influenced by equipped clothing and tools and temporary modifiers), the repetitive RPG-ness feels more fundamental to me. Playing Disco Elysium feels much more like playing a tabletop RPG than it feels like playing an adventure game. It certainly has a foot in each camp, though.
Disco Elysium has a lot in common with QBN. In my brain an RPG usually has a set number of statistics which can be directly influenced by the player and that’s much of the meta-game - gaining XP allows them to select which stat to raise. If you want to move a heavy boulder, you exchange XP to increase strength.
In a QBN stats/qualities change via interaction that isn’t always clear. A player might have an opportunity to “grind” a stat (sort of like in Bethesda RPGs where you increase your “climb” stat by repeatedly trying and failing to climb a wall but each attempt gains points toward climbing) but there are many hidden and mysterious stats, which makes character creation and role-play more organic since twiddling with the character sheet won’t always reveal the exact stat or method to accomplish a goal. Qualities themselves are “experience currency” and it may not be clear to get along with the Gravedigger, you must discuss death in conversations with other people which increases a hidden “Morbid” quality that gives you a conversational in with other such people.
Huh, not sure how much I agree with the definitions thrown around… When I think “Adventure Game” without the text or point-and-click descriptors, my mind jumps to Zelda games that aren’t Zelda II, though you could give those the action descriptor to distinguish them from the text and point-and-click categories… and well, Zelda has repetition in hte form of mainly sword fighting… Though the fuzziness comes up in that while I’d generally consider Zelda an Action Adventure and the Ys games Action RPGs, differing in that Link mostly gets stronger through collecting new equipment and collecting heart containers to increace a very abstract concept of HP, with few games having more than two or three upgrades to Link’s core attack and defense stats while Adol mainly gets stronger through combat experience that leads to leveling up and incremental increases to more finely measured stats, the two actually play very similarly(both franchises even have the oddball that goes sidescroller)… And while I’ve always thought of the Zelda games as adventure games, I’ve found out in recent years that some consider them RPGs…
And on the RPG side of things… most of the RPGs I’ve played don’t let you dump experience into a stat of your choice, and if they let you focus a build on specific stats, its based on mechanics that are hidden from the player… Take the Pokemon games for example, with Individual(IV) and effort(EV) values. Things might have changed in games that came out since I went blind(Pokemon White was the last game I played), but for at least the first 5 Generations, the games gave no indication that every wild encounter was rolling metaphorical dice to determine how good the wild pokemon would be in each stat relative to others of its species or that defeating enemy pokemon in battle not only reward experience points towards leveling up, but points to specific stats depending on the species of the enemy. In the earlier games, vitamins were the only method a player without external knowledge had of affecting a pokemon’s stats explicitly, and even then, the games didn’t advertise that the vitamins maxed out before EVs did, and other wise, it just looked like random stat boosts with every level up, with the earliest games not even showing the stat increases when leveling up.
No idea what a QBM is, though i’m pretty sure I’ve only heard it on this forum and then possibly only in regards to Fallen London, which I’ve never played.
Not saying anyone is necessarily wrong, just that the definitions stated don’t quite fit with the intuitions I’ve developed over the last ~30 years regarding game genres… And of course, all categorizations are artificial and trying to fit oddly shaped pegs into geometrically perfect holes.
QBN is “quality-based narrative”. Qualities being variables. I think of it as “an RPG on steroids” but generally play doesn’t involve direct stat-management like an RPG and there can be hundreds of mysterious or invisible changing qualities about the player - like rules that specify what they can interact with and do any any given time.
Imagine a paper CYOA book with all the story pages bound that you read in linear fashion unless instructed to turn to a specific new page.
Now take all those book pages, tear them out and throw them in the air so they scatter across the room: At first, player qualities only allow you to randomly pick up and read and interact with any pages that aren’t touching each other. After you do that, you gain the odd numbered pages quality, so you can only pick up and interact with pages that landed with an odd page-number face up. Now you have the only first pages of chapters quality, so you can pick up and interact with pages that start a chapter and don’t begin in the middle of a sentence.
That’s a very rough analogy but kind of how it works.
Personally, I was avoiding the term “adventure game”, to limit my scope. I wanted to go a little broader than “text adventure”, since point-and-click adventures and Myst clones are similar to text adventures with respect to repetitive activities. Although @HanonO’s post, which I was initially replying to, is referring to text adventures specifically. I definitely didn’t intent to include the Zelda games in my observation about “adventures”. I would have said “adventure game”, like you did, in that case!
My understanding is that “adventure game” is the broadest category, and not particularly coherent as a genre, including everything from Adventure itself to the Zelda games. In that category you’ve got “action adventure”, which follows wider gaming’s conventions around repetitive activities, and separately you’ve got “adventures”, which can be divided into “text adventure” and “graphical adventure”. It’s just “adventures” that I’ve been trying to describe.
I think this is in line with common usage of these terms. People don’t actually say “adventure” much any more, without qualifying it as a “text adventure” or “graphical adventure”. I like it though.
I’m not sure I understand this at all. As someone who grew up in the UK in the 80s, I think of it like this. First we had “text adventures”, “adventure games” or simply “adventures”; what are now called parser games, or parser IF. The term “interactive fiction” wasn’t commonly used in the UK as the Infocom games were unavailable on the majority of home computers. Text Adventures were characterised by the ability to move freely across a map and solve inventory puzzles.
At the same time we had arcade type games including platformers. The early platform games had progressive levels; when you finished one screen you progressed to the next. At some point in the early-mid eighties, somebody had the bright idea of taking the “travelling around a map” and “inventory puzzle” aspects of text adventures and applying them to platform games, and we got what became known as an “arcade adventure” or “graphical adventure”. These were generally flip-screen games though scrolling ones came later. They required fast reflexes as well as puzzle-solving skills. Arcade adventures also came in top-down and isometric varieties. Examples included Citadel, Spycat and Exile for the BBC Micro and Knight Lore, Pyjamarama and Atic Atac on the ZX Spectrum.
Later, much later, from my point of view, you got the point-and-click adventure games of Sierra Online et al. When people talk of “adventure games” nowadays they’re usually referring to these, which causes me confusion because for me “adventure game” just meant “text adventure”. I was the wrong age for the point-and-click game, they emerged when I was making my way in the world of work and had no access to a computer, though I did play Discworld and Discworld II later. I have never played Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle.
That more-or-less matches my understanding, except that “action adventure” is probably a more common term than “arcade adventure” these days. Or would you say those aren’t the same thing?
But I would expect “adventure game”, unqualified, to refer to an action game these days (of course, in the early 80s it was just a synonym for “adventure”).
For what its worth, I’ve never heard the term arcade adventure. Granted, I’m American, was born in 1986, and by the time I got my first console for Christmas of 96, Polygons were already starting to take over as the dominant unit of game output… and I understand that back in the 80s and 90s, the North American and European gaming landscapes were completely different.
What it looks like is that the meaning of the term varies both geographically and generationally. “Adventure game” to me means both “text adventure” and “point-and-click adventure”, but it has held the former meaning longer. Thus, the above either/or poll isn’t that helpful.
The phrase may have been popularised in the UK by the children’s TV show. The Adventure Game, which first aired in 1980. It was created by Patrick Dowling, who had played the mainframe Adventure and was a fan of Dungeons & Dragons and the Hitch-Hiker’s radio series. The Adventure Game was a puzzle-solving gameshow with a wacky sci-fi premise reminiscent of Hitch-Hiker’s.
The term “adventure game”, or simply “adventure”, was used by my small group of school friends who enjoyed playing text adventures, and it was used in the magazines we read. CRASH, BBC Micro User and Electron User all had dedicated adventure columns. I suspect that “arcade adventure” was coined by games publishers to denote an arcade-type game with adventure-like elements, and that how the magazines referred to them too. The term '“action adventure” may also have been used but was much less common. “Graphic adventure” was occasionally used by publishers for this type of game, but it could also refer to a text adventure with illustrations, so “arcade adventure” was less ambiguous.
The Wikipedia entry for an “Adventure Game” states “Adventure games are a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story, driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving.” It acknowledges that both text and graphical varieties exist, but doesn’t distinguish between them.
Edit: a quick online search reveals that the term “graphic adventure” is a whole other rabbit hole, and I’m not going down it this morning!
Quite coincidentally, I’ve written a short-ish blog post about this precise question just two weeks ago. Its framing is how the term “Interactive Fiction” has changed over the years, but at its core it is an examination of the different terms that refer to this kind of work and how differently they are used and/or perceived.
Yeah, this is in line with what I’ve seen. I was once bored and looked at what’s considered to be the most popular adventure games on spaces like Reddit. You can usually find LucasArts games, The Last of Us series, Breath of the Wild, Uncharted, Zelda, etc., though the less point-and-clicky of them get the prefix “action”.
I wager that most people who don’t use this site see “adventure games” as a kind of feeling that you’re exploring a larger world than, say, the contained worlds of a typical Metroidvania. So, less a genre and more evoking the feeling of setting out on an adventure.
Many genre definitions are seeing slippages – roguelikes are infamous, but a more recent example would be like bullet hell, once a subgenre of shoot em’ ups, which is now the term for Vampire Survivor-likes – and I think the market decline of point-and-clicks allowed more people to define more freely what they mean by adventure games.
For me, I reserve “adventure games” to describe the lineage of Infocom, Sierra, Scott Adams, CYOA, and the roots of visual novels. But I don’t want to get into internet arguments about someone claiming Mass Effect is an adventure game. There’s better things to do in life like playing adventure games.
Same. I chose “other” because “adventure game” to me means Zork, Kings Quest, Monkey Island - any game where the primary gameplay isn’t action platforming or fighting.