(That was a joke, in case it’s not obvious.)

Anyway. I’m thinking about the the “I used to like adventure games, but not anymore” thing right now. Almost all analyses seem to start like that, and then almost all of them proceed to talk about all the things they don’t like. One acknowledgement of affinity, followed by lots and lots of hate.

Where’s the love? That’s one thing I enjoy about your ruminations: you’re completely willing to say “here’s the reasons adventure games suck, and here’s a game does all those things but I love it anyway.”

You know, the Aristotle there, he says to himself, why do I like some plays and not others, and what do the really satisfying ones have in common? And then he basically sets down a set of observations from which we get all modern ideas about dramatic structure. So what do we get if we take adventure games, go back to first principles, and get all Aristotle on their ass? I mean, what’s the common ground between Gabriel Knight and Monkey Island?

Let’s talk about what we loved and why we loved it.

I bet you have some ideas…

I thought my comment was pithy and clever but now it seems obvious and gauche. I’ve got commenter’s remorse. I hope I didn’t come off as an ass, and if I did, darn, sorry.

Nice rumination. Your brain chews stuff good.

I had this thought: in an adventure game, the player’s ego is on the table. So it’s maybe not as important to design smart puzzles as it is to design puzzles that make the player feel smart.

I’m playing through Strong Bad episode one on the Wii right now, by the way. The interface rocks!

My favorite line so far is “Rats Like Metal! …apparently…”

And I can’t stop saying “Savé/load” the way SB does on the title screen.

For adventure games to have relevance instead of just being an evolutionary dead end, we need to keep asking the question, “Would this be just as good if we released it as a non-interactive movie?” I think ideally, your game should be broken if you can watch it without the puzzles.

Appreciate the discourse – just found the blog through my StatTracker and I’ve enjoyed the handful of posts I’ve gone through so far, so don’t worry you’re not too rambly.

There’s non-linearity throughout the Sam & Max (and Strong Bad) games, for the reason you mention — you want to make it so that the player always has something to accomplish even if he’s stuck on one particular branch. We originally had a joke in the finale of Season 2 where 333 was the number of the beast, and that’s why there’s always three things you have to do in adventure games: 3 pirate trials in Monkey Island, 3 Soda Poppers to defeat, 3 ways to win the presidential campaign, 3 ways to get Max declared High Priest of the Ocean Chimps. It’s not really X, then Y, then Z, as much as A+B+C, then W+X+Y, then Z.

But — and it sounds like a nitpick, but I don’t think it is — I wouldn’t say that the puzzles are gating mechanisms for the game or the story. If an adventure game is designed well, the puzzles are the story. Ideally, you’re not solving a puzzle to get to the next story moment, but you’re actually completing the next story moment. When you think of it like that, it doesn’t make as much sense to have “best 3 of 5 to progress” type goals, since that leaves you with 2 extraneous story moments. In a Mass Effect-sized game, maybe you can get away with that, but especially in an episodic series, you’d just be wasting development time on something many players would never see.

So I say it’s good to keep it non-linear, but not essential. (Portal and Half-Life 2 are both completely linear, and there are few I’m-stuck-so-I-give-up-forever moments in those). Even if you have 3 branches to solve, being hopelessly stuck on one branch is no fun. I think the real problem is finding how to avoid that binary feeling of either moving too fast or being completely stuck, that you mentioned in your original post. We need to find better ways to let the player chip away at a puzzle and gradually solve it, feeling like he’s making progress the whole time.

Great analysis and I will state some of the points I made in my original article I’m not sure I 100% believe anymore. Consider it a young designer slowly figuring out how he feels about design of different genres and trying to put it on paper (or e-paper as it were). My own thoughts are pretty fluid on a day to day basis… part of learning and growing I suppose.

Is the core problem really that puzzles act as full gating mechanisms usually? Look at a game like Super Mario Galaxy… you don’t need to get every Star, just enough to open the next area. As long as you can get SOME you are good to go. But in adventure games, usually you have to solve puzzle X, then Y, then Z. Is there a non-linear way to give the player puzzles but still tell a story(Sam & Max started to do it in Season 2, and I liked those moments the best)? I don’t know the answer to this – I grew up playing the old Sierra and LucasArts adventure games and I love the genre, but I’ve never actually designed one (maybe I should do that).

And I want Sam & Max Season 3! :) Hurry up and announce it!

And while I’m at it: every single puzzle in Strong Bad 105 is just a joke about one videogame cliche or another.