Jia Ji History of Computer Gaming: Case History Henry Lowood March 18, 2002 Where Have All the Adventure Games Gone? The computer is chameleonic. It can be seen as a theater, town hall, an unraveling book, an animated wonderland, a sports arena, and even a potential life form. But it is first and foremost a representational medium, a means for modeling the world that adds its own potent properties to the traditional media it has assimilated so quickly. As the most powerful representational medium yet invented, it should be put to the highest tasks of society. Whether or not we will one day be rewarded with the arrival of the cyberbard, we should hasten to place this new compositional tool as firmly as possible in the hands of the storytellers. - Janet Murray. Hamlet on the Holodeck.2The origin of computer gaming finds its roots in adventure gaming. Ever since we’ve been able to display text on a screen, we’ve wanted to tell a story with that text. As computing power increased over the years, graphics, AI, and improved interactivity were added, but in recent years adventure gaming seems to have become the “invisible genre.” In an article published in February of 1998, Rosemary Young and Gordon Aplin wrote that, “It's a disturbing trend that there are fewer and fewer adventure games being released at the moment. Although this trend has been evident for some years now it seems that adventures have well and truly slipped to the bottom of the priority list when it comes to designers deciding what sort of game they will make. There's obviously more money in action games so the lure is set. Adventure games are destined to suffer.” (Aplin “Sad State”) The article refers specifically to the decline of traditional two-dimensional adventure games in favor of more arcade/action style games. In another article voicing these concerns, Gordon Aplin writes, Now the call for adventure games to change has sprung up again. It probably never really went away. Some say change is already happening and proudly welcome it, others are concerned that the changes actually threaten the genre…With the rush to embrace these changes, seemingly without question, and the move to redefine the adventure genre to be whatever anyone deems it to be, the question no one seems to be asking is what is to become of the traditional adventurer? Those who so lovingly nurtured the genre and loyally supported the adventure game developers, where are they to go now? For no matter how strident the voices for change become there are many, many adventurers who simply cannot accept combat in an adventure game and who object to keyboard or gamepad navigation. Their concerns are legitimate and yet they are being completely ignored by many developers and publishers. (“Adventure Games”)3However, at the same time, interactive fiction, the progenitor to two-dimensional adventure games, is experiencing a modern day renaissance. The “Interactive Fiction in 1995: The Year in Review,” a yearly report by the interactive fiction news site XYZZY News stated that: Mainstream interest in text adventures may also be picking up again. This year we've seen a substantial increase in the number of both IF-related Web sites and online hyperfiction (multiple-path stories in which readers follow different links to influence the plot). Numerous Infocom-related home pages and guides have made it easier for users to locate and use the GMD [interactive fiction] archive. The summer re-release of the classic Infocom adventures through Activision may rekindle players' memories of text adventures, and a number of computer books and magazines have had disks or CDs containing text adventures packaged along with them. The possibility of packaging the entire GMD archive on CD-ROM, and the upcoming InfoMac CD, have also generated discussion on Usenet. (Foreman) A year later, the report noted that: Interest in IF has grown substantially over the past 12 months. There was a far more active competition this year, with 26 entries compared with 12 in 1995. As Magnus Olsson put it, “I have a feeling that it's changed character a bit, being no longer an underground movement but rather something on the fringe of the mainstream. I also have a—rather vague—feeling that we've reached some sort of break-even; that we don't need to be so concerned about the survival of the genre at the moment.” (Foreman “IF in 1996”) Obviously, this raises the question, why are “point and click” two-dimensional adventure games (ala Sierra and LucasArts style) are all but extinct nowadays while interactive fiction has a strong, thriving community behind it creating new games? To answer this question, first we have to take a few steps back to look at the history of adventure gaming and how it evolved.4A Brief History of Adventure Gaming “You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.” Adventure (circa 1975) The origins of adventuring gaming can be traced back to the unlikely candidate of spelunking in the early 70s. Will Crowther and his wife were avid cave explorers charting out the Mammoth Caves in 1972. When the marriage broke up, Will missed the caving expeditions and he missed his kids even more. Depressed, he threw himself into programming and created a computer text simulation of the Mammoth caves to amuse his children. He wanted the game to be accessible to novice computer users like his children so game interaction was done through typed commands in plain English instead of computer jargon, an innovative concept at the time. The game made its way around ARPANET, the predecessor to the modern internet, and fascinated another young programmer named Don Woods, a researcher at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence lab. His version, entitled Adventure, added monsters, traps, puzzles, more treasures, and more to explore. Adventure was an instant success and was passed throughout the ARPANET, becoming "the oldest, most famous, most modified, most ported, and most pirated game in the history of Interactive Fiction” in the words of one historian (Cree).5 Adventure spawned hundreds of clones, known collectively as "Adventure-like games" and eventually simply as adventure games. Among those inspired by the game were a group of students at MIT (Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling) who started
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