Letters

To: ray@justadventure.com; randy@justadventure.com
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2002 1:44 AM
Subject: E3 2002 / E3 2002 - The Adventure Genre's Last Hurrah

Ray: No! Dilution, corruption, &/or blending Adventure games is NOT evolution or improvement. It is devolution.

Randy: Cheer up? If & when Myst-online gets up, we should see a resurgence in the Adventure game market. [IF they do a competent job writing & promoting it, & don't devolve it. DOG THEM CAREFULLY. It could make or break the future.]

Nobody is saying this, & someone must:

The "proper" future for Adventure games is NOT to copy the past with the same old point-click conventions. That is deadly stagnation. It must grow & evolve, and to me that means using the increasing computer power to seriously up the intellectual realism of the story line & its interaction.

We need to get to constructed worlds of vastly improved realism that talk, listen, think, & react. Allowing a far improved story-immersion experience can come from having an intelligent world to roam in, not just a string of
(by now) immensely predictable stagnant puzzles. That does not mean the Sims, nor RPG, nor FPS, nor... It means a "solve this situation in your own time, in your own intelligence, while communicating with another (AI) intelligence(s). AND, do it without guns & twitch." !story world!.

A cross of Infocom (Choose your own genre.) / Starship Titanic / a quality novel / a quality movie / & the AI programs used in psychiatry, etc. Not a stagnation in a once-revolutionary fixed-puzzle outline, nor statistic
management, nor twitch. But, an evolution in intelligent & interactive gaming that GROWS on the likes of the concepts of the once-mindbending Zork.

A creation that provides a generated world of intellectual/emotional involvement is what is required. That is what Zork was to 1980. That is what must be created for today.