Why adventures still matter

I spent a good amount of time this past weekend playing through Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney.  I enjoyed it very much.  The game kept me sufficiently glued to my currently neglected handheld.

When the Phoenix Wright series saw its debut release (or, technically, re-release) on the DS, it got a lot of positive critical reception.  But each new title seemed to garner successively less interest in the gaming media.  It feels like the gaming audience at large is beginning to consider the franchise as just another cog in Capcom’s sequel-laden money-machine (a la Mega Man).

That’s a real shame, because I’m still in love with the series.  I got around to thinking about what made it strike such a chord with me.  After all, the core gameplay across the entire series has, for the most part, remained unchanged.  As a staunch advocate of innovation, I, myself, am baffled as to why I’ve tolerated this supposed “stagnation” across four (!) different titles.

And the more I thought about it, the more I kept coming back to the nature of adventure gaming as a genre.  The “adventure” term is typically applied as a fallback classification to describe any number of primarily explorative or non-combative games.  But for me, the words “adventure game” are always automatically and implicitly prefixed with the word “point-and-click”.  Yeah – point-and-click adventure games – those decrepit games of yesteryear with the pixelated sprites rendered atop gorgeous, hand-drawn backgrounds.  Adventure games were a huge chunk of my childhood gaming experiences.  My earliest memories of them were of playing King’s Quest V and Lucasarts point-and-click demos that came packaged with various shareware/freeware CD’s that my dad picked up at a local computer hardware swap meet.  (We weren’t exactly rich at the time – games were truly a luxury.)  After perusing the contents of those discs, my attention always came back to those intriguing adventure games.  Eventually, I got a hold of the full version of King’s Quest V and instantly fell in love with the genre.  My loyalties continued through the next two King’s Quest titles, and I continued to maintain interest in similar titles.  My interest was piqued again with the advent of the Myst series.  I played the first title alongside my best friend in junior high, and I more recently played through Riven and Exile with my then-fiancee after I purchased a Myst collection for cheap.  Syberia, The Longest Journey, Indigo Prophecy – all great adventure titles of recent years.  It wasn’t much longer until I stumbled upon what brought me to this topic in the first place – Phoenix Wright.

To me, the Phoenix Wright series has been a real triumph in the genre.  Sure, it’s got great characters, hilarious dialog (thanks to the superb localization efforts), and an engaging story.  But there’s something about the series that really sets it apart, and, if you’ve read enough of my posts, you’ll know that it all comes down to the gameplay.

With the “games as art” movement picking up in recent years, there have been countless discussions regarding “narrative” and its role in games.  And with all of the philosophizing and applied intellectualism, narratives have increasingly become assigned to the role of “context” – the idea that gives life and meaning to the otherwise mechanical functions of the underlying gameplay.  In other words, narratives are becoming a strict output that is simply layered on top of the gameplay.  There are the game’s core mechanics under the hood, with which the player interacts, and the narrative “skin” that typically has little influence on the play itself.

If you think about it, it’s quite easy to imagine many modern games being stripped of their narratives without really breaking the gameplay.  After all… Andrew Ryan, GLaDOS, President Eden?  They’re all ultimately just voices that can be muted.  Many shooters thrive on reskinning the FPS experience.  RPG’s can still retain the thrill of battles and character development without the thousands upon thousands of lines of character dialog.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that a game’s experience as a whole would remain unaffected by removing or altering that narrative layer.  I’m making the point that many games, even in the absence of their story, would remain largely playable.  This clean separation of narrative and gameplay is easily spied in that not-insignificant subset of players that just want to “skip the cutscenes”.

But this is where adventure games fundamentally differ.  At their core, point-and-click adventures really are as mind-numbingly bland as the genre’s name implies.  You point at different things.  You click on them.  Something on the screen changes.  Repeat.  These games (generally) do not require twitch reflexes, rhythm, strategy, or tactics like many of their modern-day peers do.  However, adventure games do something that the majority of their counterparts do not – they truly integrate the narrative into the gameplay.  In an ideal adventure game, the player interacts with the underlying game mechanic (i.e. pointing and clicking on objects) in a way that is strongly influenced by the player’s understanding of the narrative.  To look at it a different way, without the narrative, an adventure game is little more than random clicking.  One cannot easily swap out the narrative of an adventure game without having to alter all of the interactions in the game.  To reskin an adventure game is essentially equivalent to creating an altogether new one.

Of course, adventure games have integrated their narratives with their gameplay to varying degrees of success.  In reality, a lot of adventure games still have some remnant of this ludo-narrative separation.  On the extreme end of the spectrum, you have the “interactive novel” Hotel Dusk: Room 215, which, although I enjoyed it, really just ended up telling you the story while you walked around and played completely unrelated minigames.  Also similar in separation is the Myst series.  The majority of puzzles throughout the various ages are mostly self-contained and do not typically have any fundamental connection to the story itself.  In these two examples, the narrative could be completely altered without having to change much of the actual play that the player engages in.

A lot of other adventure games will also typically present self-contained challenges that require the player to find objects on the screen and combine them to overcome some obstacle.  Again, a lot of these are mostly narrative-independent.  For instance, one can easily adapt a wide range of narratives to require the player to find an object that opens up some previously inaccessible location.  However, as various parts of the game become inter-dependant (i.e. as your character is required to use multiple objects from different times and/or places throughout the game to proceed) it becomes harder and harder to separate the game’s narrative from the player interactions.  This is because an altogether different narrative would still have to justify all of the interactions.  I would say the majority of adventure games fall into this middle ground of ludo-narrative interdependance.

Finally, we come to the Phoenix Wright series.  What makes it such a great adventure game?  It is such an engaging experience because its narrative is so deeply intertwined with the gameplay itself.  The series’ core mechanic tasks the player with presenting evidence to reveal contradictions in a character’s testimony during a trial.  Doing so inevitably requires the player to truly comprehend the narrative – the crime and its circumstances, and the characters and their motivations.  Furthermore, the gameplay goes beyond a simple “reading comprehension” test.  Knowing what has transpired is often not enough to succeed – the player is also expected to draw implicit conclusions and stay one step ahead of what has been revealed.  In other words, the game is indelibly linked to the player’s discovery and exploration of the narrative.  The narrative is the game.

And it comes as no surprise.  After all, mysteries and crime novels have been around for centuries.  But perhaps what readers enjoyed about those novels the most was the fact that underneath the plot and prose laid what was, fundamentally, a game of sorts – one intimately married to its narrative.