What Is an Ideal Adventure? Part II
A guide to create the ideal adventure game

By David Adrien Tanguay

This article was originally published on the Adventure Collective site and is reprinted with permission.

In Part I of this three-part special feature, we proposed a working definition of an adventure. An adventure is the deterministic, intellectual problem solving in the context of a story. In Part II, we shall consider in detail the properties of an adventure.

PROPERTIES OF AN ADVENTURE

Story

Story is an important part of adventures. There are two aspects of the story: back story and plot. The back story, or background story, is the history of the game world prior to the player gaining control. This includes the history of the player's character, the protagonist. It may be revealed early by accompanying documentation or introductory segments of the game, or it may be fleshed out during the course of play by interacting with non-player characters, reading notes, and so on. In contrast, the second aspect of story is one created by the protagonist during play. This journal of play is referred as the plot.

Gameplay

People often talk of gameplay, but what they mean by it varies. Here it means the semantic actions performed by the protagonist. This is distinct from the syntax used to express those actions. Whether you type "pour pitcher into bowl" or click the pitcher icon on the bowl, the effect is the same. The difference is one of result versus one of method.

Challenge

The player must overcome many obstacles to complete a game. Examples of these obstacles include inventory-based problems, dialogue trees, machine twiddling, sliders, timed sequences, and others. More appropriately, these obstacles should be called challenges, and the collective aggregate of these obstacles is known the challenge. The term puzzles should, instead, be reserved for self-contained obstacles like sliders and Rubik's cubes.

Linearity

People frequently talk about linearity, but confusion exists regarding its definition. In one sense, linearity refers to the geographic path the player takes through the game. In this case, a game is said to be nonlinear if the player is free to roam widely about the game world. This may not be a very interesting quality: exploring might be fun, but wandering back and forth gets old, fast. The other sense of linearity refers to the sequence of gameplay, that is, the order in which the challenges can be solved. If there is only one order in which the challenges can be overcome, then the game is completely linear. If all of the game's challenges can be overcome at any time, then the game is said to be nonlinear.

Linearity is caused by a relationship between challenges. The solution of a challenge typically gives you a reward, such as access to new parts of the game world, objects, abilities, and information. These connections create a gameplay graph where the challenges are the nodes. Technically, in graph theory, this gameplay construct is a directed acyclic graph, and it functions similar to a Petrie network.

Few (if any) games are completely linear or completely nonlinear. Many have a linear introductory series of challenges, and most have a linear finale. In between, there are some common shapes in the constructs. Adventures are frequently split into chapters, each to be completed in a linear sequence. This segmentation gives the author control over the plot, but at the same time allows the player to have nonlinear freedom within each segment. It is also common to see the game split into independent branches, whereby the player can complete the branches in any order. A branch is, in effect, a mini-adventure within the larger one.

Relevancy

Relevancy describes the relationship between the challenges and the game. Specifically, it describes the believability of the challenges as part of the game world and as part of the story. As an example of irrelevance, how many real world doors have you seen that are opened by a slider puzzle? However, relevancy is not always clear cut: very odd things may just make sense when done by Wile E. Coyote!

Constraint

Constraint can either be in time or geography. Many adventures include time constraints in their challenges. These constraints may vary in duration. In the broadest form, the player may have several minutes or hours to complete a set of challenges, such as fiddling about in the laboratory while the mad scientist is off for lunch. In a narrower form, the player may have several seconds or minutes to solve a particular challenge, such as defusing a bomb. With even tighter constraints, a challenge may require some action within a window of only a few seconds, such as throwing a grenade after pulling the pin. At the extreme end of the real-time continuum is the arcade challenge, which is an actual physical challenge to the player.

Geographic constraints are commonly used by the author to impose some linearity in an adventure. Typically, at the beginning of a game, the player has access to only a restricted part of the game world. Completion of challenges during gameplay may then allow the player to access a greater part of the world previously not accessible.

We now have understood the properties of an adventure: story, gameplay, challenge, linearity, relevancy, and constraint. In Part III, we shall finally discuss what makes an ideal adventure game.