Adventure Game Genre

An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story that is driven by exploration andpuzzle-solving instead of physical challenges such as combat. The term originates from the 1970s computer game Adventure and relates to the style of gameplay pioneered in that game, rather than the kind of story being told.

The adventure genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, such as literature and film. Adventure games encompass a wide variety of literary genres, including fantasy, science fiction, mystery, horror, and comedy. Nearly all adventure games are designed for a single player, since the heavy emphasis on story and character makes multi-player design difficult.^{[citation needed]} Because these games require strong characters and plots, character development tends to follow literary conventions of personal and emotional growth, rather than growth that affects gameplay.

In the Western world, the genre's popularity peaked during the late 1980s and mid 1990s when many considered it to be among the most technically advanced genres, and it is now sometimes considered to be a niche genre. According to the Entertainment Software Association, in 2007 Adventure Games comprised 4.3% of Video Game Super Genres by units sold in the US (up from 3.4% in 2006) and 5% of best-selling Computer Game Super Genres (down from 5.7% in 2006), although it is not clear how the Super Genre was defined. In East Asia on the other hand, adventure games continue to be popular in the form of visual novels, which make up nearly 70% of PC games released in Japan.

History Early development The first adventure games to appear were text adventures (later called interactive fiction), which typically use a verb-noun parser to interact with the user. These evolved from earlymainframe titles like Hunt the Wumpus (Gregory Yob) and Adventure (Crowther and Woods) into commercial games which were playable on personal computers, such as Infocom's widely popular Zork series. Some companies that were important in bringing out text adventure games were Adventure International, Infocom, Level 9 Computing, Magnetic Scrolls and Melbourne House, with Infocom being the most well known. Older adventure games told the story as if the player himself inhabited the game world. The games did not specify any details about the protagonist, allowing the player to imagine him- or herself as the avatar. Sub-genres Text adventure Text adventures, also known as Interactive Fiction, convey the game's story through passages of text, revealed to the player in response to typed instructions. Early text adventures, such as Adventure,"Hugo's House of Horrors" and Scott Adams' games, used a simple verb-noun parser to interpret these instructions, allowing the player to interact with objects at a basic level, for example by typing "get key" or "open door". Later text adventures, and modern interactive fiction, can interpret far more complex sentences. Graphic adventure Graphic adventures are adventure games that use graphics to convey the environment to the player. Games under the graphic adventure banner may have a variety of input types, from text parsers to touch screen interfaces. Point-and-click adventures are a common type of graphic adventure in which the player uses a pointer, typically a mouse, to interact with the environment and solve puzzles. This input method remains popular in the genre, and is well-suited to interaction with the environment, as opposed to direct control schemes which emphasize character control. Puzzle adventure Puzzle adventures are adventure games that put a strong emphasis on puzzle solving, at the expense of elements such as item gathering, item use, character interaction, or plot. Instead, they typically emphasize exploration and deciphering the proper use of complex mechanisms, often resembling Rube Goldberg machines. The plot of these games can be obscure, and may be conveyed only through interaction with the puzzles. Many puzzle adventures are played from a first person perspective with the player "moving" between still pre-rendered 3D images, sometimes combined with short animations or video. Examples of the genre include Schizm, Atlantis: The Lost Tales, Riddle of the Sphinx,Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure, and Myst, which pioneered this game style. One kind of puzzle adventure is the Escape the room sub-genre, consisting of short games where the sole object is to find a way to escape from a room. These games are typically implemented in a graphic point-and-click style, which (owing to their popularity on the Internet) are often delivered in Adobe Flash format. Examples of the sub-genre include Submachine-series, Mystery of time and space and Crimson room. Visual novel An image of a visual novel: Visual novels are commonly characterized with dialog boxes and sprites denoting the speaker. A visual novel (ビジュアルノベル bijuaru noberu?) is an adventure game featuring mostly static graphics, usually with anime-style art. As the name might suggest, they resemble mixed-media novels or tableau vivant stage plays. Visual novels are especially prevalent in Japan, where they make up nearly 70% of PC games released.[7] They are rarely produced for video game consoles, but the more popular games are sometimes ported to systems such as the Dreamcast or the PlayStation 2. The market for visual novels outside of East Asia, however, is limited. Visual novels overlap with Japanese adventure games in many ways, including a menu-based interface for all navigation and interaction, reminiscent of ICOM games. Japanese adventure games very seldom feature on-screen avatars or inventory based puzzles in general, and visual novels have an even further diminished emphasis on puzzles, or indeed gameplay. Instead these titles are driven by narrative, focusing almost exclusively on character interaction, in a structure similar to a Choose Your Own Adventure story. Visual novels frequently feature romantic storylines in which the main character may end up with one of several possible mates. This premise is similar to dating sims, but they are distinct from them in that they lack stats-based sim elements in which the player builds up his character, instead relying on simple choices of dialog, actions, or navigation. Visual novels have been a staple of PC software sales in Japan and other East Asian countries for over a decade, so much so that popular titles are open ported to consoles, and some even have famous manga and anime series based upon them; such titles include Kanon (1999), Air (2000) and Clannad (2004) by Key; Rumbling Hearts(2001) and School Days (2005) by Age; Higurashi no Naku Koro ni (2002) by 07th Expansion; and Fate/stay night (2004) by Type-Moon. Visual novels are sometimes called "dating sims" in the West, because many visual novels track statistics that the player must build in order to advance the plot. This is also because many visual novels permit a variety of endings, allowing more dynamic reactions to the player's actions than a typical linear adventure plot. The cultural differences between Western and Japanese adventure games are closely related to those in role-playing games, such as the storyline being more linear and tightly-scripted in the latter.