Old Man Murray

Throughout the 1980s, Sierra sold a ton of games with horrible EGA craphics, but which were basically cinematic games with fairly simple decision-tree gameplay.

This has always struck me as one of the most interesting aspects of computer game history.

Back in the old days, adventure games were all about the story and experience, not the gameplay. This even continued into the 90s in some cases, with games like Planescape Torment, which contained over 800,000 words of text, and the ill-fated (but brilliant) Last Express, a game whose graphics was made by rotoscoping tens of thousands of scenes made by professional actors!

These games weren't about brilliant game mechanics, in-depth strategy, or competitive experience. But few deny that they were great games. Of course, the genre basically died towards the end of the 90s--and many claim that it killed itself ( see http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html ).

Interestingly enough though, I've noticed that despite the proliferation of seemingly mindless entertainment these days, there has been somewhat of a revival of the genre of "games with lots of text". The genre of visual novels, once just an offshoot of silly Japanese dating sims, has begun to turn out some seriously impressive material. The most impressive to date, IMO, has been Umineko no Naku Koro ni ("When the Seagulls Cry"), a murder mystery reminiscent of a cross between The Last Express, The Usual Suspects, and Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. …

Oh, man. I played Borderlands all the way through (once, anyway), and my reaction to all the things Steve praises was exactly the opposite.

* I had no idea that there was a special benefit to playing the game through a second or third time. That's because the game doesn't tell you that. So the only people who will ever discover this are the hardest of hard-core OCD types.

* Even if it did tell you that, it's ridiculous that it would push the "good stuff" out to the second or third playthrough. Old Man Murray said it best, more than a decade ago (http://www.oldmanmurray.com/longreviews/63.html):

> Here's a note to developers regarding what we hope will become an industry-wide policy: if your game has some good parts, try to put them at the fucking beginning. It takes us ten hours of dismal labor to earn enough money to buy your game, so please commence the entertainment early on. If possible, pack something fun right into the box, for instance a balloon...

> Developers have one goddamn job: entertain us. And we mean now, goddamnit, not in six hours.

* The huge number of randomly generated guns may create a token economy, but it also forces the player to spend way too much time trying to figure out whether Gun # 712,924 is better than Gun # 712,925. Sid Meier is supposed to have said that "a game is a series of interesting choices," and the problem with Borderlands' guns is that choosing between them is usually not interesting, because the differences between most…

Very much agree.

I'd also observe that "brute force" here is an O(source * target) problem, where a source/target pair is some expressible command. e.g., you can't usually combine two locations on the screen, but you can try to combine any item with any screen location, and in some games, any item with any item. Some games add a term for "verb" to that as well, though most games nowadays wisely realize that's not really helpful.

You can see the core reason why people complain about "moon logic" isn't really that the logic is weird. I don't think that specifically bothers too many people. Often it's part of the fun in a way. The problem with "moon logic" is that it means I can't cut down on that search space with common sense or clever-but-grounded logic. In reality rubbing my cat with a piece of tape to pull some hair off of it so that I can wear that tape as a fake mustache is not a sensible option to consider, which is a real part of a real puzzle [1], not just something I made up. A game that consider that a solution to a problem is a game I have to rub everything on everything and it is not just "gamers being lazy" that they don't want to perform hundreds or thousands of possible actions, where all but one of them will result in failure, and depending on the game, some of them may even result in "game over". That's terrible design and that's not the player's fault.

[1]: The classic Old Man Murray article, for today's 10,000:…

> The minor tragedy in all this was not so much the end of interactive movies, given what intensely problematic endeavors they so clearly were, but rather that the latest games’ vision proved to be so circumscribed in terms of fiction, theme, and mechanics alike. [...] A shocking percentage of the new games being released fell into one of just two narrow gameplay genres: the first-person shooter and the real-time-strategy game.

Citation needed? This feels like fuzzy language used to protect an unverifiable claim. What is a "shocking percentage?"

Looking at (say) Wikipedia's list of notable games from 1998 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_in_video_games) I see a reasonable mix of genres. In fact, "shooter" games (searching the page for the number of uses of 'shoot') seem to share the top spot (21 results) with "role-playing" and "sports" games, the latter genre being neglected entirely in the article. (Noting that some games are listed as multiple genres)

From the article's earlier longing for the simpler time of gorgeous, hand-crafted 2D art, I wonder if the author simply misses classic-style adventure games. In response to that idea, however, I point out the Old Man Murray article (https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html) on the death of adventure games: in brief Murray argues that the genre became so wrapped up in its own puzzle conventions that it became impenetrable to new players.

Interesting and amusing read. Of course Ron Gilbert is a well-known authority on Adventure Games, but the original Old Man Murray article is even better (and funnier). In case anyone hasn't read it yet: "Who Killed Adventure Games?" http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

(As an amusing aside, point-and-click adventure games were considered to be for "clever" gamers in 90s Spain and Latin America; gamers who mocked action games as simplistic. But there was nothing "clever" or "cerebral" about most adventure games; they were mostly arbitrary and nonsensical. And fun, of course!)

Before I read the Old Man Murray article I was already frustrated with (some) adventure games, even though I absolutely loved the Space Quest series (the original, 16 colors and text input!), and of course Interactive Fiction (aka text adventures). IF games in particular had something of a rennaissance some years (or decades?) ago and they evolved into something way more complex and with better UX than what we remember from the old Zork days.

The canonical criticism is Old Man Murray's Death of Adventure Games describing one mad puzzle in Gabriel Knight 3 (1999) with an improbable solution which admits no simpler or more logical solutions. Not to pick on it, because the adventure game market had been making more and more convoluted puzzles and reached peak idiocy some time ago.

https://oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

> Who killed Adventure Games? I think it should be pretty clear at this point that Adventure Games committed suicide.

What I quite like in Joe Richardson's Death of the Reprobate is that Joe breaks the fourth wall and admonishes the player character for feeling sad that Joe told him the puzzle solution and robbed him of a "Eureka moment". "IF THE PUZZLE DIFFICULTY IS PITCHED JUST RIGHT, THAT'S MY TRIUMPH, NOT YOURS" says Joe.