Let me clarify that: I do not dispute that Snow Drop does not qualify as an adventure game, I dispute that it does so on basis on it’s interface, which is not so.
Before I get into this, some cursory video game history: the genre called the adventure game can be traced entirely back to a single source, a mainframe game from the mid 70’s called ADVENT, or Adventure, or Collossal Cave Adventure, depending on who you ask. It was a fairly simple game about a treasure hunt set in a large cave system. Designed by Will Crowther and Don Woods, it would go on to be one of the most replicated and ripped-off games of all time. The first was Dungeon, designed by a group of MIT students. It eventually evolved into a trilogy of PC games, the ZORK trilogy. At about the same time, an entrepanuer named Scott Adams (no relation to the Dilbert author) used ADVENT as a basis for a game of his own, which he called Adventureland. He sold it through a computer magazine, thus becoming the world’s first commercial game designer. Between them, these three games formed the foundation of the genre known as the text adventure, which prospered throughout the 1980’s.
At about the same time ZORK I was released commercially Sierra On-line pioneered the graphic adventure with Mystery House. The game faired poorly, however Sierra caught the attention of IBM, which contracted them to create a game for their new PCjr. system. The result of this deal was King’s Quest, the first in a line of games that would become the origins of the graphic adventure. Lucasfilm is another early pioneer of the genre, releasing Maniac Mansion in 1985(?) and a number of games thereafter.
And then, there was Myst.
Myst is a historically significant game for a number of reasons: it was the one of the first games in the CD-ROM format to become widely popular, it was one of several games that catalyzed the renniassance of PC gaming in the mid-1990’s, and it was easily the most popular and best-selling adventure game to date, meaning it was the one all others tried to imitate. The text adventure, unable to compete with the visuals of the graphic adventures that followed Myst, died out commercially, and moved into the realm of freeware, where it continues to prosper amongst enthusiasts to this day. Meanwhile, graphic adventures experienced a boom that lasted through about 1997. Unfortunately, today pure adventure games are almost unheard of commercially. The console-raised crowds of the 1990’s weren’t terribly into puzzles, particularly the badly-designed puzzles that plagued far too many commercial adventure games, and the genre petered out, eventually being absorbed into the action-adventure genre pioneered by the Tomb Raider series.
Throughout all this, one characteristic has set the adventure game apart from the faster action games or more intricate RPGs that split most of the serious gaming scene between themselves. The adventure game is rigidly deterministic. There is no element of chance or timing (or if there is, it’s considered antiquated, or at least questionable, design philosophy). An adventure game can be mapped out to a series of cause-and-effect relationships, and is easily completable once you know how. With other games this isn’t so. An action game will require quick thinking and reflexes, an RPG will require planning and forethought. The adventure game requires merely knowing what set of cause-effect relations to persue to get you to your goal.
This is not to diminish the genre, indeed it can even elevate it. Free of the need to provide action at regular intervals, the designer is free to focus on plot and character. Thereby the game becomes more about telling a story then about providing an obstacle course of challenges for the player to overcome. Properly designed, the adventure game can even recruit the player to be a co-author, and write part of the plot himself, commonly through choosing the path of the main character’s action.
So then, the primary characteristic of an adventure game is a deterministic nature where all possible game states and the means to reach them are mappable, given enough paper. A secondary characteristic, applicable only to more recent games, is a focus on story rather then challenge factor. By these criteria, both Snow Drop and TCI qualify as adventure games, and with all due respect and luv to Kimiko, the idea that they are seperated by range of movement is erroneous.
Now, the definition of an RPG is another issue entirely…
