Amidst the cavalcade of blockbusters, handheld eccentricities, and Rock Band I’ve been indulging in over the summer, a grand season now a mere two weeks from being officially dead, I’ve been getting a crash course in one of gaming’s most respected and forbidding forms: the adventure game. Though I started playing games during the genre’s heyday, I’ve always been somewhat less than literate when it comes to the many point-and-click and text-commanded classics crafted by Sierra and Lucasarts. My only real experiences came from visiting my aunt Donna. At the ripe age of seven years-old, she introduced me to the wonders of Kings Quest and, er, Leisure Suit Larry. Yeah. It’s not that I didn’t have fun with these eye-openers – they certainly expanded my vocabulary – I was just more interested in walking from left to right, jumping, and shooting when it came to videogames. I always knew that I was missing out on something, listening to friends chortle over playing Space Quest and even later, as a teenager, looking at lush screens of Grim Fandango. I’ve only gotten around to them recently thanks to three conditions working in concert. One is that there are new, easy to access (read: on Wii) point-and-clickers being released with regularity by folks like Telltale Games. Two and three regard vintage software: Hooksexup is equipped with numerous PCs capable of running things machines in my home twenty years ago could not, but also (and most importantly) I have a guide.
It’s easy to approach Telltale’s Strong Bad games because they move at a brisk pace and they work on a very simplified version of classic point-and-click language: see something, point at it to interact with it. Got an item? Point at it, click, then point the item at what you want to use it on. Repeat playings of King’s Quest V left me acclimated to both the process and the occasionally obtuse logic at work in these sorts of games, so it’s been a painless process and a reminder of the genre’s charms. Playing through the first two episodes of Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People (more on Episode 2 when I’m allowed to talk about it) has, however, made it abundantly clear that adventure games are not inherently relaxing in comparison to more action oriented fare. Nothing on earth is more frustrating than wandering around not knowing what the hell you’re supposed to do. In a platformer, if you keep losing, you know it’s because the challenge is a difficult one, tasking your reflexes and timing. If you keep dying in a shooter, it’s because you aren’t shooting the things shooting you fast enough. When you get lost in an adventure game, you’re just plain missing something and, unlike when you lose your keys or you forget what you’re doing when you walk into a room, the answer isn’t always right in front of you. You are at the whim of a designer’s train of thought, your agency stripped away. The problem is even worse in older adventures where you literally have to talk to the game.
This is why I’ve needed a guide. Pointing and clicking are fine for me, but when it comes to text interfaces, my illiteracy becomes a barrier too high to overcome. Pete Smith urged along my education in adventure, insisting I start with Conquests of Camelot and Quest for Glory. I played Quest for Glory for about twenty minutes before quitting. I spent the majority of this time swearing at everything I could interact with (hey, it worked in Leisure Suit Larry.) But even when I tried to get going, I couldn’t figure out what words the game wanted me to use to accomplish anything. I watched the Quest for Glory and Conquests of Camelot played instead of playing them myself and, now, I feel that I could comfortably tackle an adventure game with a text interface again. But if I hadn’t had someone playing the whole thing in front of me, explaining how to actually play the game at every step, I just wouldn’t have taken the time.
That inability to progress has got me thinking about what happens when you try to go back and play vintage games. Gaming has aged to the point where a modern player isn’t equipped with the language and experience to even play a lot of older software. I see my experience with Quest for Glory mirrored in the online testimonials of people playing Bionic Commando Rearmed, staggered by its difficulty and the demands that type of game makes of players. While games are finally entering an era of preservation through services like Gametap and the Wii’s Virtual Console, how do players get around this sort of cognitive dissonance? Let me know your theories in the comments.
(Yeah, I know. FAQs. But who wants to use a FAQ?)
Related links:
WiiWare: Nintendo, Babe, It Just Isn’t Working Out
Quickies: Homestar Ruiner
Unsolved Crimes and the New Setting
Lucasarts Classics on Nintendo DS?