Game/AI

Funny, Ron Gilbert's rant sounds a lot like what Chris Crawford was incoherently screaming about at AIIDE.

"I obviously haven't played a game for more than 15 minutes in the last ten years ... but that won't stop me from claiming there's no innovation going on anywhere and the industry is hopelessly stuck in a rut!"

No wonder Ron Gilbert is a "grumpy gamer." I'd be grumpy too if I let the marketing hype on the back of the boxes drive all of my game-buying decisions.

After spending so much time working in the industry, you'd think the man would have enough of an idea what's going on to not be bowled over by some bad box art and a couple of meaningless marketing tag lines.

Play some World of WarCraft, Mr. Gilbert. And if that's too lowbrow for a sophisticated, narrative-centric gamer such as yourself, then I'm sorry, there's just no hope for you.

My own knee-jerk reaction whenever anyone says "Embrace the uniqueness of your medium!" is to respond with "Yeah? And then what?" Stories are told in a variety of media, but they have rules in all of them. I think we've got a better handle on the rules of interactive storytelling today (the practical shipping kind, not just the academic intellectual kind) then we've ever had in the past. But clearly, in any case, the rejection of the "filmic" paradigm is not a license to not have a paradigm at all.

And I think that's one of the reasons why adventure games died. Not because they were bad games (which they certainly were, from a gameplay/interaction point of view) but because they were bad STORIES as well, by ANY standard, filmic, theatrical, literary or otherwise. Having gone back recently and played some of the early Sierra and LucasArts games (note, games that form one of the foundations of my childhood!) I'm amazed at how plain dumb most of the shit I had to do was. They constantly forced you to pursue the illogical, to perform the irrelevant and the ridiculous, to consistently ignore what SEEMED to be the problem at hand in order to proceed. Anything went. THAT was sloppy, undisciplined story-telling. It was the hunt-the-pixel puzzle. And there are only so many pixel-hunts a player will go on before he stops playing.

(All that being said ... my fondest gaming memories still come from the early adventure games, so clearly they were doing SOMETHING right. Or maybe I was less discerning at the time.)

The problem with Ron Gilbert's entry is that he's referencing PC games. The PC space has been dying a slow and painful death for quite some time, and really the only people left are the hardcore sword and sorcery comic book nerd fanatics (of which I am one). He has merely to take a step to two aisles over to the console games space to see that games are innovating and expanding horizons on a daily basis. You could call Prince of Persia another licensed piece of drek, but you'd be wrong in that you judged it by it's name, and not by the fact that is a compelling puzzle solving game with a well told story integrated into it.

I have no time or patience for people who can't see that sequels and licenses are just ways to get new and fresh game experiences out there and recognized by the public. There are so many games I want to play that I can't play them all, compared to the days of the SNES where I'd buy maybe one game every 4 months, beat it, play it until I couldn't stand it, and then patiently wait for the next game to come out.

> The PC space has been dying a slow and painful
> death for quite some time

I suppose that's true, but for me personally, when I look at all the games I'm looking forward to over the next year so, all but a handful of them -- including Spore, Supreme Commander, Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends, Half Life: The Lost Coast, and Battlefield 2: Special Forces, to name a few -- are PC-only.

I have to wonder if the huge combined price tag of a PlayStation 3 + Xbox 360 + Nintendo Revolution + HDTV for the PS3 and Xbox 360 will start to reverse the trend, and make some gamers wonder if they're better off just buying a PC ...

"My own knee-jerk reaction whenever anyone says "Embrace the uniqueness of your medium!" is to respond with "Yeah? And then what?""

Use the medium. Enjoy the fact that it's actually a medium, rather than a bastard amalgam of more popular ones.

Use the medium to Say Things. Allow the player to Say Things. If that seems stupidly open-ended, that's because it's actually an *art medium* rather than a software platform, a cheap thrill, a moneymaking scheme. Which will be Good (certainly better than things are at present).

I understand you're playing Devil's Advocate, but frankly the potential of the medium is undersold far too often, under-understood by far too many, for me to start adopting the "well, where do we take things from here?" (Here being "Legitimacy") stance.

As for the cause(s) of death of adventure games, you're right. However I would point out that "storytelling" has endured into this day and age, whereas adventure game design concepts have not. I'd say that the primary failure of the genre lay in its inept design... even if the stories were often bad as well.

The LucasArts adventures actually hold up reasonably well today... the company had a design philosophy (mostly predicated on what *not* to do) as well as some good writers and creative types. Sierra et al's games are mostly unplayable trash by comparison.