I have some small experience with such books. However, it should be clear that what you're doing there is reading a story, not writing a story. If you make it to the good ending and want to brag about it, you'd be telling people that you successfully made it through the book, not that you successfully crafted a good story (if you took all pages you encountered and put them in the right order, I doubt the result would have a great literary merit; and to the extent that it does, you don't deserve any credit for it).Tawmis wrote:See, to me, it does. Have you ever read any Choose Your Own Adventure or Endless Quest books? In these books, you control the character in the story - and take action. For example, you might read one called "A King's Quest" in which the character, Graham, is going on a quest. You get to a part where it says, "If you want to cross the bridge, turn to page 80. If you want to turn back around, go to page 60."adeyke wrote:That's an interesting perspective, viewing the playing of an adventure game as the process of writing a story.Tawmis wrote: See - I think this is where I see a difference in our views. Hear me out here!
So, while I love adventure games for the stories they provide - granted, older games had a thin veil of story, there was at least some semblance of a story there! Now, for me, when I played - as I said, I enjoyed the stories - but I played it as a game - so I expected challenges (and potential death) - because games simply had that! You could almost think of these games, if you want to make them into a story or movie - as first drafts - the writer will put their characters through something, and decide to change in a rewrite - effectively doing a "Restore" from a previous "Save"
I don't think it really fits, though.
You decide to try and cross the bridge, and turn to page 80, and read how a troll leaps over the bridge and devours you! Your quest is over! (Granted a lot of people book mark the page before - so that they can go back and make the other, more healthy choice!) It's just like Save/Restore.
And graphical adventure games are different from those books. With the book, your only methods of interacting are turning a page and reading. So turning back to the page you were on previously isn't a fundamentally different type of interaction.
With adventure games, on the other hand, most of your interactions are those that happen within the game: as the character, you talk to someone, pick something up, open a door, walk somewhere, etc. So the ability to then instead control the whole world by rewinding time to a previously saved point is very different. If that were changed to also be diegetic and actually integrated into the plot and puzzles (i.e. give the character the in-universe ability to reverse time, and make a game where that makes sense), I'd be much more accepting of it. (I'm aware that something of this sort is the case in the game Life is Strange, but I haven't played that.)
That seems a very broad definition of "adventure", then. If an adventure can just be traveling somewhere new, then danger really isn't a necessary component to an adventure. Walking in the park could also be an adventure if you've never been to that park before.See, I guess this is where we don't see eye to eye! I would say every time Sonny Bonds gets in the car, he's going on an adventure - because there's going to be trouble at every corner, as an officer of the law. And for Larry, he's traveling in a new he's not familiar with - that's pretty much an adventure.adeyke wrote: Actually defining what an adventure game is is difficult, but the basic idea is about how the player interacts with the world. And within that genre, there are any number of stories that can be told. Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry, for example, often aren't about going on any sort of adventure, but they're still adventure games.
But even if those are games really are considered to portray actual adventures, that's still not a necessary part of the genre. An adventure game could just be about a day at the office or some other everyday experience.
i think we're just repeating ourselves on this topic. I'll just say that I acknowledge your position but disagree with it and have given my reasons why.See, most deaths to me - are logical (as far as adventure games go). Not all of them, of course. There are some related to "arcade sequence" (not surprising, as arcade games and arcade halls were big in the 80's that these games like Space Quest would inject arcade sequences). There's a few unsuspecting deaths (like the one I keep saying, the metal thing in Space Quest 3), but over all - the death portions are not that surprising when they come. Space Quest when that tasmanian devil thing comes through the wall - if you walk up to it without throwing the rubic's cube, you die. As you should, as that's a part of the puzzle of passing it, and thus, not too far out there to think they'd put a death sequence there if you don't do the right thing.adeyke wrote: But even if we restrict our view to "adventure games about adventures", there are still many ways they can work. A game can be epic, challenging, and full of exploration without any danger. And it can seem dangerous without the actual possibility of death. But suppose you decide that the game should have the actual possibility of death and that "ability to escape actually deadly situation" is one of the things you want to test the player on. Even in that case, you should still be careful that you aren't instead testing them on their frequency of pressing F5. It's not enough to just have a vision of how the game will be played and what it'll be about; you have to consider (and test) how it'll actually be played.
