What Is an Ideal Adventure? Part III
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, 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 considered the properties of an adventure: story, gameplay, challenge, linearity, relevancy, and constraint. In the final part of this three-part special feature, we shall discuss what makes the ideal adventure game.

THE IDEAL ADVENTURE GAME

The Game World

The ideal adventure starts with a well defined world. It should be a place with history and personality, not just a coffee table to lay the puzzles onto. It should be populated with characters that live there, that clearly have a reason to be there other than to help or hinder the protagonist. The history of this world should not stop with the commencement of play: there should be a strong plot to propel the player through the game. The player should help paint the picture, not just uncover it.

Linearity

Many people talk of linearity as though it is an inherently bad thing in an adventure. This view is too simplistic. Linearity gives the author more control over the plot, usually allowing for a stronger one. It has the danger of giving the player the feeling of being dragged through the game, a passenger rather than a driver. In contrast, non-linearity gives the player the feeling of being in control of the plot, and a greater sense of immersion in the game. However, it can also leave the player lost, not knowing what to do. The linearity of an adventure is thus a tradeoff, and good adventures can be made anywhere along the linearity spectrum. A game that combines both aspects is probably the best approach: a series of chapters, each of which is fairly nonlinear. Some chapters can be placed in parallel with others--branches, playable in whichever order the player likes.

Relevancy

The individual challenges should be relevant. They should be natural parts of the game world and natural parts of the story--no door locks by Rubik or power systems by Escher. If we're to have puzzles--which can be fun--they should be integrated into the game world by appropriate dressing. For example, Myst, unlike so many of its copycats, does a good job of dressing up puzzles as natural parts in the locale. However, there should be a broader ranges of challenges than just puzzles.

The game world should work consistently according to some physical principles. For example, if you have to cut a string, the knife and scissors should both work, and any other strings that can be cut should also be able to be cut by these objects. This does not mean that the virtual world has to follow our rules: cartoon worlds like Toonstruck and dream worlds like Sanitarium can be bizarre, but they should be understandable by the player.

Reasonable Challenges

The solutions to the various challenges should be reasonable. While it is fine to create a difficult game to stump the player, the player should be at least able to understand the solutions in hindsight. The player should feel that he should have been able to find the solution, that he has had all the necessary information to deduce the correct action or at least to try the correct experiment. For example, if throwing an ice cube at a unicorn turns the animal into a pair of pliers, then there should be some prior indication that throwing cubes at magical creatures turns them into tools. If the game is not reasonable, if it is silly, then it devolves into the logical equivalent of a big maze: the player must exhaustively try every possible action until progress is made. This is trivial, but tedious and boring.

Real-Time Challenges

Challenges can have real-time components, but they should be used only to frame an intellectual problem. They should be a test of the player's wits, not of reflexes. Once the player knows how to overcome the challenge, it should only require a few mouse clicks or keystrokes to effect, and with a wide time window. Stated again, it should be a test of conception, not of execution. Furthermore, failure of a real-time challenge should not require the player to restore and replay an unassociated segment of the game--the broader game state should remain unchanged. If there is any dexterity or perceptivity required, the game should adapt to the player, easing the challenge until it ceases to exist. The player should also be able to set the difficulty level directly.

Death

Death can be an annoying part of an adventure, but its absence can be equally jolting. If I pull the pin on a grenade and sit on it, I expect more than a little constipation! A great adventure can be designed without mortal danger, and in the game the player can be reasonably restricted from death. The point in this state, however, is the suspense of a dangerous situation. Still, death should never catch the player unawares. Any fatal action that the player takes should be reasonably deducible as a fatal action beforehand, giving the player a chance to save the game. Even better, the game should do this itself, and automatically restore the player to a point just before the fatal action.

In an adventure, death is not the only way to die. The player may reach a state where it is impossible to win the game, yet still be alive: a dead-end. The function of death and auto-recovery is to avoid requiring that the player to replay large segments of the game; in the death case, this means not having to replay from the most recent of the player's saved games. For similar reasons, the game should not allow the player to unwittingly remain in a dead-end for a long time. The action (or lack of action) that leads to a dead-end should be treated as if an action leading to death: it should be reasonably expected to be a questionable act, so the player knows to save in advance, and it is even better if there is auto-recovery. Once a player does wander into a dead-end, the game should soon make it clear that the player has done so.

Difficulty

There is no ideal difficulty level for an adventure. Some games should be geared towards novices, and some towards grizzled spelunkers. Within a game, however, the challenges should get more difficult the farther into the game you get. A hard challenge at the beginning can cause a player to just give up. By the end of the game, the player has enough interest in the story and enough investment of time into the game to try a little harder rather than give up in frustration. Even if the player does get completely stumped, at least a larger portion of the game has been enjoyed.

The User Interface

So far I have only discussed the semantics of game design, but an ideal adventure should also have a good user interface. You might think of high resolution graphics, directional sound, 3D (which acquires a new definition every few years), and so on, but those are just means to an end, and any specifications would soon become obsolete. The goal is to present the world clearly to the player, to establish the atmosphere, and to make it easy for the player to play the game. The artists and designers must work within the technology of the day to achieve this; if they are successful, the level of that technology is irrelevant.

The graphic and sound design should clearly indicate what's important to the player. The player should never wonder what those three smudgy pixels are supposed to be, nor wonder what that character mumbled (subtitling should always be an option). Any object that the player needs should be clearly presented and not be a needle lost in a haystack of other objects. That is not to say that there should be no red herrings, only that they should not drown out the necessary objects. Similarly, an important character should not be a face lost in a crowd.

The game should have a good save facility. Players should be able to save where they want to save, not only where the game's programmers would like them to save. It should also save the game as played--some games have been known to make assumptions, which turn out to be false if the player does things different from the designer's intent. There should be no fixed limit on the number of saved games, either; leave that to the player's file system.

The interface should be easy to use, intuitive, and economical of input. Common actions should require a minimum of clicks or keystrokes.

One problem with many recent games is that the interface has gotten so economical that the player no longer has to think of the solution, it just happens. The problem is that designers have streamlined the mouse interface so that the player has no choice as to how to interact with objects and characters. Some games, such as Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, have tried to get around this by offering a large menu of actions for every interaction, contextual with the objects and characters involved. This works well by expanding the search space beyond what is feasible by exhaustive search, but still has the problem that the player is frequently presented with the solution, rather than having to construct it. Other games, such as Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail!, get around this by allowing the player to specify the interaction by typing in a word, in addition to a menu of obvious interactions such as topics for dialogues. This approach maintains much of the flexibility of design of the old text parser, yet also retains the ease of use of the mouse interface.

Final Thoughts

Obviously, there is more to an ideal game than the above. For starters, there should be no bugs. The challenges should be clever: you should be proud to have solved them, or you should want to kick yourself for having had such a hard time, once you have seen the solution. The story should be interesting and engrossing; humorous games should be funny, horror games should be scary. Unfortunately and fortunately, there are no guidelines for creativity.

P. Jong: Although the technology of adventure game design is always in flux, the constituents of what makes an ideal adventure have remained the same. It is vital for game developers to avoid letting the technology to run over the story and gameplay. A great game can be entirely text based or implemented with the latest graphical interface. The essence of adventure gaming is its gameplay. It is the ability to dynamically interact in a meaningful and immersing way with the game world that differentiates itself from the passive experience of reading a book or watching a movie.

Recently, many publishers have marketed titles as action/adventure, RPG/adventure, and so on. While this re-labeling may obviously be a marketing ploy, the existence of mixed genre titles should not, and must not, force us to redefine of what an adventure is. It is hope that this article has outlined the elements that are required to create the ideal adventure and provides both game developers and players a set of good guidelines for adventure game design.