After watching Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer discuss Adventure Games, I realized two things: one, I have never played an adventure game, and two they kind of made me want to try one.
Anyways, I digress. I tried to pick one topic they discussed to analyze and agree or disagree with, but they had a few pieces I really found interesting. One point they brought up was that adventure games may not have grown in popularity due to impatience in gamers today. I find myself agree with this point mainly because I'm part of that demographic they were referring to. Take the latest Uncharted game. I love it, everything about it. However, I've also found myself stuck at certain puzzles, and when I get stuck, I just sort of wait until the game reveals the correct way to solve it and I move on. I am unconsciously fixated with the action parts of the game, so much so that the "adventure" parts fall by the wayside. Take Call of Duty as an example. It is the highest selling game of all time (don't quote me on that). What is the most used feature in CoD? Multiplayer. Multiplayer for CoD was created for twitchy, adrenaline filled people. There's no real strategy, just constant maneuvering and trigger pulling. It's fast paced. I'm not being bitter here, I'm just connecting the dots logically. The most popular game in the world right now is fast paced, in all facets. Games are quick, killing is quick, scoring is quick. Everything is designed to fit a shorter attention span. That's not to say that gamers and people as a whole have lost touch with their patience or ability to focus, it's just that the society we live in has everyone processing information a lot more quickly. It's a natural progression for a service/entertainment industry to follow that trend, creating games that suit the consumers needs or wants. Not having played adventure games, I can't really attest to their speed or attention requirement, but going off of what Schafer and Gilbert said, I'd have to assume they take a little more time to fully grasp. That's not where the market is right now.
The other point that I'd like to discuss is their assertion that games don't have great or funny interactive dialogue anymore. I'd have to say I agree again. I'll use Uncharted as an example here again. Uncharted has quick, funny dialogue. However, it's not interactive. It's all during cutscenes or pre-rendered quips that characters are programmed to say at certain times. It has nothing to do with my response or actions towards them. Then I tried to think of the games that do have interactive dialogue, things like Skyrim, Knight of the Old Republic, Heavy Rain, Mass Effect; then I thought a little longer and realized that I can't recall any memorable moments of dialogue in any of those games. Was it poorly written? No, not by my standards at least. Was it exceptional, did it have that extra quality that made it stick out? No again. It seems like dialogue is now used as more of a means to an end. It's not really a focus anymore, and perhaps that goes back to the attention span argument above. People don't want to read a lot of dialogue, and generally no one cares about character conversations. Games are designed now to be beaten, and beaten within a reasonable time. Dialogue and talking take away from that. However, I find myself kind of upset by that notion. I've always loved dialogue, I am a creative writer, and so words and interactions mean a lot to me. If there is less of an emphasis placed on those things, then the game isn't necessarily an experience for me. It's just a way to waste some time, play online with friends. That can then be traced by to Ebert's argument about games not being art because they're not a completely enveloping experience for the people playing them. I want an experience though. I want to learn about characters and have a story unfold in front of me, or to allow me to unfold the story for myself. Maybe that's too much to ask right now, or maybe the gaming industry sees me as a minority. I just know that games need to bring depth and character back, and dialogue is a large part of that.
There's my two cents.
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