Comment by alberto-m
9 hours ago
Graphic adventures ceased to be popular before YouTube and smartphones started to damage the average capability to focus. The famous post https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html illustrates how the genre became too contrived and self-referential (even poking fun at those who blame “television-atrophied attention spans”).
But the rest of your point stands. I keep reading young gamers complaining about adventures and role-playing games being “too difficult” whenever they don't put big flashing arrows on the next character or place to interact with. I cannot understand that: if one can solve a puzzle without grit, what pleasure does that bring? It's the same as watching TV.
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: https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/78.html The rest of the puzzle isn't exactly a tour de force of logic either.
> Graphic adventures ceased to be popular before YouTube and smartphones started to damage the average capability to focus. The famous post https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html illustrates how the genre became too contrived and self-referential (even poking fun at those who blame “television-atrophied attention spans”).
Partially agree, but I also think that they were victims of the graphic cards revolution where each year you could have shiny new GFX and visuals, and that drove new games development (and funding). But indeed being contrived and self-referential didn't help.
Or maybe adventure games were always a niche genre for a niche of people, it just happened that the niche of computer/console players in the early days coincided more.
> Partially agree, but I also think that they were victims of the graphic cards revolution where each year you could have shiny new GFX and visuals, and that drove new games development (and funding).
True as well; the race towards photorealism and natural immersion (mostly first-person 3D across various genres) had an almost suffocative, and sometimes obliterative, quality.
> The famous post https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html illustrates how the genre became too contrived and self-referential (even poking fun at those who blame “television-atrophied attention spans”).
That's a name I haven't heard in a long while. And the "Cat Stache Puzzle", once an infamous case-study of virtual insanity in game design, now nearly forgotten...