Excepting some extreme and rare circumstances, it is difficult to make a friend, fall in love, or change your heart in two to five minutes. What’s much more common is to have these experiences unfold over the course of several hours: a road trip, a dinner that never ends, a sleepless night. And so it is with works of art, and so it is with games.
Who killed the graphic adventure game? According to Richard Moss’ excellent article, you could blame 3D screensavers like Myst, full-motion-video nonsense, and the rise of the first-person shooter. The latter was a part of the casualization process which has today culminated in the wild success of hyper-brief games on iOS. Now, let me be unequivocal: this is not a “bad thing”. There’s no reason why most games shouldn’t, in fact, be shorter overall, and playable in shorter bursts.
However, this process has been burning the field from all sides: games are more casual because the platforms are more casual; they’re more casual because people use them for shorter periods of time, since they are portable; more casual because a wider audience plays them that they’re playable on things everyone has in their pockets. This process is squeezing out the genre I will always consider the absolute artistic highpoint of the medium. (That’s just me, and I love Portal and New Super Mario Bros, too.)
There are at least 40,000 people who will pay $35 or so for a new adventure game done in the classic old style, so things aren’t deathly grim just yet. They are grim enough, however, that I hear this over and over from talented fans of the genre with every motivation and ability to make a new graphic adventure of their own: it’s a lot of work and there’s no way enough people will buy it. Does the success of Double Fine Adventure belie this? Sure… if you’re Tim Schafer. And I bet you’re not.
So here’s the thing. I want more Tim Schafers. And to get that, I’m going to humbly ask you for a favor. It’s not to give an unknown developer - I don’t know, Kim Thafer - your time or money. It’s to do whatever you need to do to convince yourself not to quit that $.99 iPhone game the next time it’s a bit hard or frustrating or, let’s be honest, crummy.
(This quick-bailout move, incidentally, is the single greatest problem iOS games have to solve, in my opinion. The user is literally one button-press away from accessing anything else in the universe. Unless you resort to things I consider unholy arts, like virtual currencies and incessant unlockables, you can only keep the player playing by pulling them in, and pulling them in deep.)
I often drop games too early myself; god, do I ever. Life is short, and I can’t spend it beating level 7 of every puzzle game I get. But when there’s a promise of an adventure - I mean adventure in the non-game sense now, adventure as an unexpected journey that leaves you a changed person - then you have to break some time-eggs to make adventure-omelet.
All I want is a world where we can give a game as much time as we’d give a good book. The author should do their best to capture us from the first sentence, of course. But as an audience, I’d like us all to look at the remaining 2.5” of the book and go not “ugh, stuff”, but “yay, art!” Then we can have ourselves an adventure.