"Burn it all down, Colin..." "Yes, Colin. Make them all pay!"

I’ve been playing adventure games since I was pretty young, and I believe they’ve wired my brain to deal with obstacles in my everyday life in a unique and efficient way. Traditionally, this “adventure game logic” has helped me to solve simple tasks, but recently I’ve been confronted with a new adventure game that is making me wonder what other parts of my life this type of problem solving can be applied to.

Although it now exists pretty much only as an aspect of various other types of games, adventure games were once one of the most popular video game genres going. In them, the player followed along with the story and solved various puzzles in order to advance the sequence of events. So, to use the most overused and basic example possible, if the player needed to get something or someone that was locked behind a door, they’d have to find a key to open it.

Adventure games operated under this principle almost exclusively; King’s Quest, Day of the Tentacle, Myst and even Doug TenNapel’s surreal The Neverhood all held fast to this basic formula. You were introduced to the characters, then you’d find objects and use them to advance the story. You would often use the objects you found to overcome an obstacle that was holding the main character back from the next step in their journey. Finding a battery to use for your phone to call for a ride because your car broke down or finding a list of ingredients to make a magic potion that would let you grow wings and fly home. That sort of thing.

As time went on I started to notice myself utilizing this same type of logic in my everyday life, kind of like how Tetris players see tetriminos everywhere they go. After a problem would present itself I would start to scroll through a mental Rolodex of all of the immediately available objects (known to adventure gamers as their “inventory”). “Okay… can’t shave at the sink because my girlfriend keeps too much stuff around it and I don’t want to get it covered in hair… Where would it be okay for me to get stubble everywhere?… The shower!… But there’s no mirror in there… I can grab the hand mirror out of the bedroom and hang it from the shower head!” or “We had to put the couch on it’s back to get it through the front door, but it’s too heavy to lift and we don’t want to tear the back up dragging it across the bottom of the door frame… we can fold up the tarp that Mark lent us last week and put it under the couch, and then just drag the couch out by the corners of the tarp!” A problem solved using a series of items, letting the events of the day advance.

And so it went for a long while. Then, I was given a copy of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. I remembered seeing it mentioned on the Internet as a bizarre adventure game. Apollo Justice (actually the fourth in the “Ace Attorney” series of games) is not what you would conventionally think of as a video game, but is actually what’s called a “visual novel”. Most of the time you’re not “playing” in any sense of the word, but reading conversations between the judge, defense and prosecution and cross-examining witnesses with elaborate dialogue trees. The game is Japanese both in origin and tone; the courtroom is a dramatic, flamboyant place where particularly intense revelations are met with shielded eyes and wind-blown hair. It has a complete disregard for the way the legal system actually works.

Everyone, including people on the stand, yell “Objection!” whenever they feel like talking. But what’s really interesting about the Ace Attorney series is it’s variation on the classic adventure game formula. In order to advance in the story, you don’t need to solve an incidental puzzle. The story IS the puzzle to be solved, and your ability to process and interpret all of the information contained in it determines your ability to succeed. For example, in order to get stubborn witnesses to tell you more of the story, you have to find the evidence (or rather, the object in your inventory) that you know will force that particular character’s hand. In this way, the Ace Attorney series integrates it’s puzzles directly into the story of the game. Traditional adventure games’ puzzles are action based. Ace Attorney’s are story based.

I only just recently found out about Ace Attorney, so it’s effects on my decision making process have yet to be determined. Honestly, I didn’t really think it could be applicable. When would I encounter a dramatic mystery that I could use evidence and testimony to solve? Am I going to track down the people who smashed my car window, or find the parent of the baby that was left on my doorstep? I didn’t see it happening. But then, a few days ago, my girlfriend got sick. “What could have made me so sick?” she groaned. And my mind started turning in that familiar way: “What time did you start feeling this way? What did you have for dinner? Have you eaten that before? Did you have wine? How many glasses? Do you usually have that many?…”

Tags: adventure games, Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, puzzles, Roger Wilco, Space Quest

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.