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Comment by darkwater | Hacker News Reader

This style of game died because the median attention span across the population decreased over the last 2 decades and something. I don't see a problem in getting blocked and try to brute force your way out of it. Games should be fun but this trend to have perfect, non frustrating gameplay 100% of the time is also part of the problem, IMO.

And now, I'll go back yelling at some cloud.

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I disagree. I write and play in long-form puzzle competitions, so for many people I know attention span isn't the issue. What is the issue is that writing fun puzzles is a skill. A totally different skill from designing or implementing video games.

Anyone can design a hard puzzle. Guess the number in my head. Unscramble this 200-character anagram.

The real magic is in the "Aha!" moments where the solver makes a connection and is able to proceed. Great puzzles are supposed to make the player feel like they are smart, not that the author is smart.

Many point and click games fall apart here. Brute force isn't fun. Games where you think you'll need something in the future but the game won't let you take it now just so you'll have to backtrack when the game wants you to do that aren't fun.

A lot of modern point and clicks are by people who don't understand that and think suffering and click mashing are the point. I don't remember much of playing Thimbleweed Park, but VirtuaVerse was very much that.

The canonical criticism is Old Man Murray's Death of Adventure Games describing one mad puzzle in Gabriel Knight 3 (1999) with an improbable solution which admits no simpler or more logical solutions. Not to pick on it, because the adventure game market had been making more and more convoluted puzzles and reached peak idiocy some time ago.

https://oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

> Who killed Adventure Games? I think it should be pretty clear at this point that Adventure Games committed suicide.

What I quite like in Joe Richardson's Death of the Reprobate is that Joe breaks the fourth wall and admonishes the player character for feeling sad that Joe told him the puzzle solution and robbed him of a "Eureka moment". "IF THE PUZZLE DIFFICULTY IS PITCHED JUST RIGHT, THAT'S MY TRIUMPH, NOT YOURS" says Joe.

Graphic adventures ceased to be popular before YouTube and smartphones started to damage the average capability to focus. The famous post https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html illustrates how the genre became too contrived and self-referential (even poking fun at those who blame “television-atrophied attention spans”).

But the rest of your point stands. I keep reading young gamers complaining about adventures and role-playing games being “too difficult” whenever they don't put big flashing arrows on the next character or place to interact with. I cannot understand that: if one can solve a puzzle without grit, what pleasure does that bring? It's the same as watching TV.

Very much agree.

I'd also observe that "brute force" here is an O(source * target) problem, where a source/target pair is some expressible command. e.g., you can't usually combine two locations on the screen, but you can try to combine any item with any screen location, and in some games, any item with any item. Some games add a term for "verb" to that as well, though most games nowadays wisely realize that's not really helpful.

You can see the core reason why people complain about "moon logic" isn't really that the logic is weird. I don't think that specifically bothers too many people. Often it's part of the fun in a way. The problem with "moon logic" is that it means I can't cut down on that search space with common sense or clever-but-grounded logic. In reality rubbing my cat with a piece of tape to pull some hair off of it so that I can wear that tape as a fake mustache is not a sensible option to consider, which is a real part of a real puzzle [1], not just something I made up. A game that consider that a solution to a problem is a game I have to rub everything on everything and it is not just "gamers being lazy" that they don't want to perform hundreds or thousands of possible actions, where all but one of them will result in failure, and depending on the game, some of them may even result in "game over". That's terrible design and that's not the player's fault.

[1]: The classic Old Man Murray article, for today's 10,000: https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/78.html The rest of the puzzle isn't exactly a tour de force of logic either.

> Graphic adventures ceased to be popular before YouTube and smartphones started to damage the average capability to focus. The famous post https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html illustrates how the genre became too contrived and self-referential (even poking fun at those who blame “television-atrophied attention spans”).

Partially agree, but I also think that they were victims of the graphic cards revolution where each year you could have shiny new GFX and visuals, and that drove new games development (and funding). But indeed being contrived and self-referential didn't help.

Or maybe adventure games were always a niche genre for a niche of people, it just happened that the niche of computer/console players in the early days coincided more.

> Partially agree, but I also think that they were victims of the graphic cards revolution where each year you could have shiny new GFX and visuals, and that drove new games development (and funding).

True as well; the race towards photorealism and natural immersion (mostly first-person 3D across various genres) had an almost suffocative, and sometimes obliterative, quality.

> The famous post https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html illustrates how the genre became too contrived and self-referential (even poking fun at those who blame “television-atrophied attention spans”).

That's a name I haven't heard in a long while. And the "Cat Stache Puzzle", once an infamous case-study of virtual insanity in game design, now nearly forgotten...

I reckon there's an important difference between a challenge being frustrating because it's hard, and a challenge being frustrating because there's no interesting way to approach it. Hard puzzles can be fun and satisfying to solve (albeit frustrating at some points along the way) when the process of solving them involves doing something clever or creative. But when the difficulty arises because the solution is basically arbitrary, and so I just have to do a brute force search, that's a tedious waste of time.

The boundaries can be blurry, and a puzzle can wrongly seem to fall into the tedious category because I'm missing something. But, in my opinion, classic adventure game puzzles too often really are arbitrary and boring.

I agree but IMO it's better to have a puzzle that's frustrating because, like you say, there is no interesting way to approach it rather than just have easy puzzles.

Nah, the genre died because of the rise of 3D graphics and Microsoft’s push into the console market with Xbox and Halo.

The whole industry changed when the Xbox came to town. Microsoft really fostered that bro gamer culture to sell Xboxes to normies and fast paced violent games took over to the detriment of other genres and styles of play.

I’m really pleased to see a bit of a revival of adventure games because I think that the tablet form factor and UI is absolutely perfect for them.

I’m so happy to hear that there’s going to be a Thimbleweed Park 2.

Graphical adventure games were already dead before the Xbox even arrived, and besides that the first Xbox was not that popular outside North America so it could not have affected other regions.

They may have been dead by the original xbox, but they definitely had a pulse at the time of the original ps1

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