Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design | Hacker News Reader

Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design

filfre.net

92 pointsingve26 comments

Some of these games (eg, SQ) essentially little post-modernist satires of their own genre, in that they make save/restore part of the game mechanic, and when you hit an obstacle, the search space isn't just the four screens you can walk to now, but the game thus far. Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy played this up in a very fast and funny way -- where there's about eight things you need to do in quick succession to get the Babel Fish from the vending machine, and it keeps coming up with outlandish ways to thwart you, and you need to have brought the junk mail from your doorstep.

Most of the best Fighting Fantasy books in the 1980s did the same thing -- turning down the wrong corridor would result in an imaginative and gruesome death, knowing full-well that the reader has their fingers and thumbs in the three previous pages.

Essentially, you're solving a maze through the game state -- you are supposed to hit several dead-ends before you find the right path.

I did also find it rather daft that the author of the article devotes a paragraph to complaining about being insulted -- when that's clearly the humour of it (that the designer is pouring out mock insults on you for him making that screen overtly pernicious).

There was a hacking adventure game I remember from the 1980s, where if I recall they didn't put the code you needed for one of the puzzles anywhere in the game -- because you solve that one by dumping the game code and finding it (so you get to feel like you've hacked the hacking game). Part of the point of 1980s adventures was imaginatively breaking the conventions of how games are "supposed" to work, and being "unfair" so you have to find a tricky way to make it easy.

I side with the author. Not every bad game design has to be post-modernist satire of something, and how could it be, of a genre that was that new? Seeing it that way is a coping mechanism, and I bet that it is replacing just normal failure with something that is not there.

I remember such a Fantasy book and dying by taking the wrong way. The interesting part is that I still remember it, the concept of a playable book was totally fascinating for me at that time. But that it was unfair – there was no way of knowing which way of the cave, up or down, would kill you – I did not like even back then.

As a side note: This blog, The Digital Antiquarian, makes an absolutely excellent job to chronicle the home computer history from a gamers point of view.

Have a look at the table of contents to see just how comprehensive Jimmy Mahers ongoing work is: http://www.filfre.net/about-me/sitemap/

I grew up playing King's Quest and Space Quest, and none of his complaints really bothered me. When KQ changed from typed commands to mouse-clicking, I felt it lost a lot of the magic. But that's just taste. What's more interesting is how these early games were just like programming. You had to learn the syntax and vocabulary. "Look under the bridge" didn't work, but "Look under bridge" was okay. Standing on the wrong pixel was a little frustrating (reminds me of being Rosella stuck in the ogre house for weeks), but it's a lot like misplacing a semicolon. Those games taught me the blind spots of the computer brain. Some other commenter somewhere was complaining that today's "learn to program" games are too literal, and I completely agree. The Sierra games were great "learn to program" games.

Chris Crawford, who the author quotes, has written a lot of books on game design, which I've read some of and find interesting, but he has not written a game I enjoyed.

I think the reality of Sierra and games of the era was they were enjoyable because they looked beautiful and told a cool story in a new medium.

You needed pixel perfect challenges else the game was over and you had nothing else to play. Plus you made friends discussing them and the stupid bits. Different times.

But I think people really underestimate how hard it is to create challenges that are just logical, this is very very hard. But I think people in their heads think it's easy even though they have never done it.

That's why I love Monkey Island so much. You can't do anything wrong so that it becomes impossible to finish the game, and you can't (really) die. Although it is possible to "die" and get the "credits" or a "load old save" screen, you come back to live through some miracle (like the rubber tree).

I recently played The Talos Principle, which is basically just a puzzle game. They included a little making of featurette that included a great line about how every player experiences puzzles differently.

What one person thinks of immediately, another player could spend an hour trying to solve. The makers of this game did extensive testing and some brilliant level design to allow for this variation.

He makes some really god points, such as the magic pixel locations, blind alleys to the no win-scenario, and the guess-the-verb syndrome, but other points are simply opinions that are highly arguable. One is the elaborate death messages in the SQ games. Those aren't there to simply make you feel bad, they're part of the humor. One may not LIKE that type of humor, but then one probably wouldn't play too many SQ games were that the case. It's like saying Abbot & Costello or Seinfeld were bad simply because you didn't like them.

The elaborate death messages insulting the player: a matter of taste.

These messages not including a "go back to last non-fatal point" button: objectively horrible.

I generally have a beef with games that will criticize the player for choices the game forces you to make.

Imagine a game where you have to work with an NPC - an NPC that you have no doubt will betray you, but you have no choice to advance in the game except to cooperate.

Surprise! The NPC betrays you. You are then chastised (often at length) by other NPCs for your folly. That just bugs me.

Yup, that's what I said. :)

Some gems of adventure games are among my all time favorite games and I revisit them once every couple of years but I still have to admit that the genre is almost always broken.

Adventure games very often rely on puzzles based on lateral thinking, it makes a lot of sense on paper in order to entertain the player and make him feel smart but I can't remember how many times I thought up a good lateral thinking solution, just to be thwarted by the game. It was just not the solution the designers expected, and the game does not even bother explaining why and push the player in the right direction.

Not to mention frantic pixel hunting & obscure death conditions forcing you to check a walkthrough.

Having a player die in an action game usually means that he will need to replay the last segment. It is a bit bothering if it happens too often, but these action sequences are why the player is here and with good emergent gameplay playing twice the same sequence can turn out very differently and be extremely entertaining.

In an adventure game, it just means that you will have to listen again to the same dialogues, and make the exact same actions, with just a slightly different step somewhere along the way.

I agree with this article. Classic adventure games have a lot of terrible, frustrating design.

On the other hand... I think there's something to be said for obscurity as a mechanic.

Games these days tend to be easy and digestible. They're built on systems that we're all intimately familiar with, and we can usually tell how a game's going to go from the first 15 minutes. So when I played Metro 2033 for the first time, I suddenly found myself in unfamiliar territory. My mask could get smudged and break. My filters could run out, as could my ammo. I knew that I could easily box myself in and ruin my save if I didn't manage my resources carefully. So I found myself running around and exploring some really terrifying nooks and crannies — air running out and ammo on the low! — just for the chance to get some extra bullets or scavenge the filter off a corpse. At one point, in a dark cavern surrounded by dangerous monsters, I even found myself switching to my rare currency-ammo — something I would never do in any other action game — just because I hadn't brought enough supplies with me. I eked out with just a few bullets remaining, wondering if they'd last me until the end of the mission. It was truly exhilarating.

Another great example is the metroidvania platformer La-Mulana. From an outside perspective, that game is incomprehensible. You can go in one of a dozen different directions. There are obscure phrases scribbled on the walls, each corresponding to a puzzle somewhere in the ruins. Pushing a button is as likely to open a door right in front of you as it is one across the map. You find strange items all over the place, none of them with any obvious function. Some traps insta-kill you or wall you in, and some items can't be found again if you approach them the wrong way. A real mess, right? But this sense of mystery — that I'm in way over my head — is something that truly excites me, rekindling distant memories of exploring strange shareware worlds through my creaky, yellow-tinted CRT. Back then, as a kid, the world past my backyard was a nebulous, murky unknown to me, and games were an extension of that feeling. Now, as an adult, I mostly understand how the world works. That frontier is closed. But that feeling can still be found in those few difficult, incomprehensible games that don't follow the trends. You're not coddled by them. There are no rails. You're in a hostile world that wants you out, and it's up to you to figure out how to survive it.

I don't like consulting walkthroughs. I don't like instant-death traps. I don't like stumbling around aimlessly looking for a solution. And yet, when I'm deep in a game like this, I somehow find that I can't pull myself away.

> Back then, as a kid, the world past my backyard was a nebulous, murky unknown to me, and games were an extension of that feeling. Now, as an adult, I mostly understand how the world works. That frontier is closed.

I really doubt that that's true. Have you tried, say, moving to Zambia?

Possibly one of my favorite articles on the subject with special emphasis on Sin #1 is detailed in an article from back in 2000 on Old Man Murray, titled Who Killed Adventure Games

http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

It has given me my favorite phrase to use on coworkers who are engaged in unnecessary work:

"The first step in [disguising yourself as] a man without a moustache, is not to construct a fake moustache."

I miss Old Man Murray, they wrote some really wonderful (if not quite polite) scathing critiques. One of my favorites is when they savaged Origin for not having the server component finished by the retail ship date of an Ultima Online expansion:

"In these two short paragraphs, Origin has effectively ended what will someday be known as the golden age of games. They've broken the sacred bond of trust between gamer and gaming mega-corporation: that there is actually a game in the box you're purchasing."

http://www.oldmanmurray.com/news/288.html

Since a lot of this adventure-gaming-retro-examination comes on the heels of the King's Quest revival...I think it's worth noting that the original KQ suffers from quite a few of these "sins"...and yet, from my hazy memory, it was one of the most open-ended adventure games, back then and even today.

There are at least a couple of key puzzles that can be solved in several ways...and in different order. The one that comes to mind is the dragon in the cave. Yes, it's also very easy to be completely and irrevocably stuck...but other than Maniac Mansion, it's hard to think of another adventure game that gave you so much freedom to solve puzzles with different combinations of items and in a non-linear order. I don't recall there being multiple ways to solve puzzles in the Police Quests, or the LucasArts Indiana Jones in Atlantis game, or more modern games such as Grim Fandango. For a game of KQ's era to have that kind of coherent branching is pretty impressive.

Check out the Quest for Glory games. They are open world, the puzzles can be solved in any order, and each puzzle has three possible solutions (roughly corresponding to fighter/wizard/thief methods of problem solving). Also, many of the subquests are optional and you can beat the game after solving only about 50% of the puzzles. There was recently a free spiritual successor called Heroine's Quest which was pretty enjoyable as well.

I agree with MANY of these points. In enjoyed this category of games, both in my youth and when there was a post-Curses revival in interactive fiction/text adventures.

I was never able to get through Zork because of the inherent illogic (e.g. if I go west, going east should take me back).

Hitchhiker's Guide was perhaps the only one of these games that I finished, and that because it had a built in hint system. As I recall, it was nonetheless guilty of at least two of the listed sins, but the combination of the hint system and vague connection to the book got me through it.

> I was never able to get through Zork because of the inherent illogic (e.g. if I go west, going east should take me back).

Zork is a graph, not a grid. It makes sense, it just isn't rectilinear. For instance, You start by the mailbox, west of the white house. Going north takes you to the north of the house. From there you have to go west back to the west of the house. On a map it looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/g9Wd39x.png

Note the inside of the house makes perfect sense, as I'd argue the areas around the house do to, once you picture them.

The areas that aren't like that are purposeful. The forest is confusing because it's easy to get lost in forests. The maze is also intentionally confusing. Quite a bit of zork takes place in an underground cave, and so it makes sense that leaving one room through a tunnel that curves will make you enter the new room from a different direction than you'd expect. It may be unfair to not mention that in game, though.

Wow, Space Quest was the MOST fun game I ever played! Yeah, it frustrated the crap out of me, but my imagination soared. My favourite was Space Quest III.

Great article, with rules that can be applied in other UIs, too.

The exclusive use of female pronouns for 1980s adventure game players is quite amusing to me, though.

As much as I don't like these games, I remember writing a bunch of these for my first ever CS class in Turing. One way to win, take a wrong turn and die. But we're they ever fun to make.

If this article hadn't picked on space quest I would have liked it a lot more.

This article makes me feel a lot better that I always got stuck on those games...

I grew up on these games.

I guess you had to be there, since all of his complaints are not applicable to the games. They were designed that way on purpose. If you don't like them now, decades later, that's understable, but the feedback and complaints are ridiculous for old games.

Back then they were 100% fantastic! Missed an item at the start of the game? It was no problem, we loved the games and had no problem with that (for example).

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