Here is an essay I wrote today. I was wondering if anyone here would like to make a comment about it!
mees wrote: At the heart of every adventure game, so far, is the lead designer's desire to tell a story. He could have written a novel, but the allure of the game world was too great for him. For one thing, it is said a picture is worth a thousand words, and the game world itself is made out of thousands of textures: in videogames, the visual ecstasy of fantasy is richly sustained, reaching its highest point of development. The cutscenes and aesthetic flourishes, which convey the story, are thus irresistible to the mind of a child, who values his fantasies above all else, and the experience of playing a game alongside these story sequences is complementary. As the child matures, he is often unable to recall the reason he liked Zelda so much: no longer enamored by the fairy tale, he tries in vain to speak of the elegance of combat, the simplicity and sublime excellence of the dungeon design, and the delightfulness of the puzzles.
All of this to say, the fantasies of modern children seem to find their most natural home in videogame worlds, and adventure games, which begin as fantasy and end as little more, are thus games for children. What is wanted in an adventure game is an interesting story. And then comes the inevitable question: "but what about the game?" The game was always the nuisance, the unwanted, but unshakable intruder into the adventure. What was the correct solution? If one focuses too much on making the player perform the exciting action of the story, why not just make another side-scrolling action game? In order to satisfy the conscience of the player, one would have to at least make it as good as Ninja Gaiden, or Final Fight, or Double Dragon and that would take time, money, energy... and this all lies outside of the interest of the designer anyway. So, of course, the answer is not action but strategy. Strategy in its most contemplative and still form: the puzzle. Puzzles can be quietly interwoven into the story, and, with relatively little programming effort, the game can become as interesting as the story!
Unfortunately, this is not the case. Take Myst, for example. Here the story is anemic, and it is as if the developer actually had a curious fetish for obscure nonsense contraptions and wished very dearly that such things existed in real life. The puzzles take the forefront, and the player looks on with, at first, bemusement, and eventually disgust. While the puzzles are more complex than those found in games like ICO (which is a three-dimensional version of the adventure game), they are actually less satisfying, and the player can barely stand to get through a couple of them before looking at the in-game walkthrough or, better yet, forgetting about the game altogether.
The first reason for this is sterility of the game world. The world of Myst is an afterthought and a nightmare of aesthetic design, and thus there is little incentive to see more of it (since most players choose adventure games for the story, this is a big problem). Furthermore, puzzles are usually solved while staring at a single screen, or a small cluster of screens, containing nothing more than a series of levers, brass tubes, esoteric circuitry, or whatever random doodad the developer dreamed up in an afternoon of obsessive compulsive hysteria. Experienced game players will realize that these dreary challenges can be found in far better form elsewhere. For example, even the most complex Myst puzzle seems simple when considering the difficulty of finding the optimal route through a level in Castle of Shikigami III, where the player's interest in the challenge is constantly sustained by action and the pleasure of exercising one's nerves. Here high-level strategy is complemented by high-level action, which is impossible in the adventure game. The sense of mastery one gets from excelling in a shooter is it's own reward, for this challenge stretches across the action-strategy/unconscious-conscious spectrum to achieve greater depth. When playing Myst, one wonders if their time might be better spent dissecting a lawnmower--at least that challenge might be of some utility. And so, Myst is insufferable both for its boring story and its one-dimensional puzzles, which require sustained abstract dreaming, and often end in a nap.
ICO is a better adventure game than Myst, but it cannot escape the label "for children" any more than Myst can escape the label "for very bored children." In ICO, the setting is sublime, and the story has the mysterious weight of a foreign fable. Essentially, the game has very good graphics, and represents what must be one of the most well-realized efforts of the story-enamored designer. The puzzles are exceedingly simple, in the style of Nintendo, and the game world unravels before the player's eyes at a steady pace. Eager to see what is around the corner, the young player will finish the journey in no time. The more experienced player will undoubtedly find some small measure of satisfaction in experiencing the serene castle, and will finally realize that there is little to say about the game beyond this. In the designer's efforts to make the modest story unfold as naturally as possible, Ico finds himself doing little more than hopping around some vaguely suspicious architecture, and each room presents only a slight puzzle that will take a couple of minutes to solve. Similarly, the story is revealed to be quite thin, and the initial gravity it gains from association with excellent production values soon gives way. ICO's high reputation is a testament to the effort of its developer, as it truly does stand out in the history of adventure games. But what is important is the end result: a simple story with puzzles so thin as to be nearly non-existent, and excellent graphics.
Myst shows us that, as the complexity of the game increases, so must the complexity of the game world, the developer's fantasy. If the game world and story events are underdeveloped, the puzzles will seem ugly and out of place, and their relation to the story will be tenuous. ICO shows us that a technically proficient game world requires an enormous amount of work, and the more complex the story, the greater the breadth of the mechanics implied thereby, and the more sophisticated the supporting machinery must be. After all, ICO stands as one of the most impressive technical achievements on the PlayStation 2, and its story is practically a bedtime tale. And the inverse of this rule leads us to the conclusion: if one wants to make an adventure game with more interesting mechanics, which might actually hold the attention of an experienced player, one must increase the complexity of the game world dramatically! For any labyrinthine Myst-esque logic puzzle of to actually be compelling, it needs to be decompressed and distributed across a large expanse of equally interesting game world--because the sort of strategy that can be found in an adventure game can be found, in more dynamic and interesting form, in many other genres. People play adventure games for the story, to see new and interesting things!
And so, to the developer, all of these complications seem, at one point or another, rather beside the point. After all, the game isn't the point, the story is! He wonders why he can't be rid of the game entirely, why he has to choose between a sickly game and a shackled story. The player could just guide the character around, plodding here and there, enjoying the feel of the analog stick against his thumb, until the cutscene takes over, setting the player on a new tract, wider than film, narrower than game. But this is nonsense, and Zelda's spell looms large, reminding him of the unity of game and story, the mutual greatness! His mind descends into childhood musings.
If we go a little further than that, it is plain to see that stories really have little place in the world of games, that there is always an uncomfortable friction of one against the other as they wrestle, claw, and bite trying to be free, to bound away in opposite directions. In the case of the adventure videogame, the game is subject to the story and thus always comes up weak and malnourished. And besides, what great storyteller would work at a game studio anyway...