Disclaimer: backer here. I knew what I was getting into.
There are bad players, bad puzzles and bad designers. Bad players don’t make an effort to understand the game’s mechanics, bad designers create games filled with bad puzzles, and bad puzzles come in all shapes and forms. A specific type of bad puzzle is one that requires the player to notice and remember something that is only seen or mentioned ONCE and no further clue is given on that matter. I don’t think it’s fair to blame the player for not noticing or forgetting about a necessary piece of information that isn’t given again. For example, the puzzle with the TV set in the hotel: the player needs to remember that that specific TV set was on the lying on the floor and to (correctly) assume that it hasn’t been picked up since.
There’s a reason why pixel hunting, insta-death and dead ends disappeared: they’re bad and unenjoyable. Also, games are usually remembered for their good qualities, people still talk about old games because of the enjoyable parts. I’m sure there are LOTS of people who didn’t enjoy adventure games back then and were put off by all of the issues that were common to the era, but they don’t run communities like “people who stopped playing adventure games after dying for no reason in a Sierra game or not knowing how to exit the dungeon in MM”. If a game was considered “fun” back then but not anymore, it means the game wasn’t good to begin with, it was just better than the alternatives.
Rant: It’s very common to read “kids these days play games the wrong way” in adventure games forums, but the context tends to be ignored: at the time people usually only had one gaming system and a handful of games. There were fewer games available and adventure games had a larger market share. There were also people who didn’t like adventure games and probably even people who weren’t patient while playing. And PC’s and consoles were slower, so games had to be slower and more simplistic. Nowadays, there are more alternatives: people have several gaming systems (including phones) and hundreds of unplayed games on Steam, and tons of new games are released each day. I don’t think it’s a matter of shorter attention span, but a matter of choice: if I want to play something new, I can try a game and, if I don’t like it, I’ll move on to the next one. Choice wasn’t really an option when there were only two (or ten) games compared to today’s thousands.
Adventure games are a niche. Most newcomers probably have some experience with other genres and, based on that experience, some expectations on the game mechanics. They have to first unlearn what they expect. Oldtimers already know how to play adventure games, but also that we like them. I for one would be happier if there were more good adventure games instead of more Call of Shooter’s and Zombiecalypse Survivor Z’s, but it’s fine if people have different tastes (and there are some great shooters that I like too).
TL;DR: Adventure gamers are old and yell “kids these days!”. Note to self: start yelling, stop ageing.
I´m sure if one looks back one might realize that even back then there have been more action games/shooters/jump and runs/fighting games/etc. etc.
Sometimes it sounds like back then adventure games were all the rage and nowadays they are a niche. They were that even then except that the niche was a little bit bigger in comparison.
Even then the majority of players wouldn´t even touch games like that. So not much at all really has changed. Only you notice them more easily now. One game reviewer and Let´s Player does them all now while the magazine back then probably handed their review to their resident adventure player expert.
Well, it’s just my opinion, but I think that it’s possible to observe a phenomenon and analyze or discuss it with a different goal than blaming someone. I wear glasses but when people notice it and conclude that I’m nearsighted it would be incorrect to assume that they are blaming me for something.
I’m aware that on the Internet we can find people who like to rant or that try to evaluate any scenario under emotional lenses that make them believe that someone is acting in an unpleasant or improper way, but luckily there are also people who can contribute in an interesting way to discussions, trying to understand whether an issue actually exists, which is the first step to understand how we can address and possibly fix or minimize it. This forum is full of discussions about how to improve user interfaces or adventure game mechanics, for example, and being aware of the behavior/preferences/psychology of the players is an important prerequisite to take better design decisions.
Personally, I don’t think that the observation “quickly move the mouse around, missing important items” is a phenomenon strongly related to the age of the player and my suspicion is that the slow-paced kind of gameplay that adventure games require is uncommon if compared to what is required for other genres of games. I have found interesting some opinions shared in this thread about the possible causes of this phenomenon (assuming that it actually exists) and I have appreciated the fact that nobody has dismissed a topic that (I think) it’s interesting as an excuse to rant about something.
I see. But then, it was not enough to observe the monitor; you also needed to solve a puzzle. But the spirit of your original question was: why do people brute-force instead of just observing more? Can’t the answer simply be “because, in that case, it wasn’t enough to observe”? (You also had to solve a puzzle, and one of dubious logic by the way. I don’t think it can be solved without meta reasoning)
The scenario that I described in the first post was “they quickly traverse entire locations and they quickly move the mouse around, missing important items”. It’s about speed.
Different scenarios, involving puzzles, are not simply a matter of observation.
@LowLevel, I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. You mentioned in the OP that players who have trouble with the game do so because they aren’t paying enough attention. My first point was that bad puzzles can lead to brute forcing - like in the hotel, which you mentioned. My second point is that not everyone likes playing adventure games and that newcomers can expect a different kind of gameplay.
The last line was meant as a joke, hence the emoji.
Not always. Often the opposite. The reason is that most walkthroughs put things in the “wrong” order. i.e. they tell you to do things before it makes sense to do them. (in order to make the walkthrough shorter). So if you read a walkthrough, it is likely you’ll believe the game is unfair, even if the game actually isn’t.
(when I was a kid, I remember I had a walkthrough of monkey1 and, reading that, I did not even understand that that game could be played logically, without the walkthrough. Example: it tells you in the beginning to walk to the right of the plank to make the seagull go away and get the fish. And you say “how was I supposed to know that I had to focus my mental energy on getting that fish?”. Because you still hadn’t got to the part of the game where you needed a fish. So when you read that, you are convinced the game sucks. you don’t know that, later, the game will give you a reason to focus on that fish )
In addition to this, there are puzzles that, even after reading the walkthrough, don’t make sense if you had missed a clue. Example: the puddle puzzle. If you had missed the clue that people step on the puddle, reading the walkthrough won’t make you feel ashamed, but make you blame the game.
RIght, this mechanism was always in place. But maybe in the beginning people were more tolerant of it, because the graphics of adventures, at that time, was much better than the graphics of arcade games.
… this isn’t true. I knew kids (and adults) with boxes full of discs with thousands of games - even in the mid-80s. Most of these games were action games or jump and runs. Back at school we were only a handful of kids that played adventure games.
And some of the kids/my friends had more then one computer (first the C64, then Amiga/ST, later PC) and a console (first Atari, then (S)NES, later PlayStation).
That’s also true if you’re trying get unstuck. When I had no idea what to do in the hotel I wandered around solving all the little puzzles I bumped into. Most of the time with absolutely no reason to do that. After I brute-forced the hotel lobby (and looked into the walkthrough to zap the door ) I was in fast-forward mode for about two hours moving from location to location just to put in the final piece (which could not be done before that). It felt like a chore to be frank.
It’s 76? Then I still have a couple of good years left!
Then I’m probably misjudging the popularity adventure games had then. But how many kids played adventure games relative to kids who played videogames, and how many is it now?
I’m sure most people today have more gaming capable devices in their immediate reach than they owned 30 years ago. Consoles weren’t as ubiquitous, nevermind handheld consoles or smartphones.
Good question. I can only speak for Germany and my own childhood: At the end of 80s nearly all my of my best friends had a computer (even some female schoolmates). But we were only -hm- only four friends who played adventure games regularly.
At the end of the 90s a lot of kids bought a PlayStation, especially to play FIFA and other sports games. They had never a PC or a console before. In addition nearly each household got at least one computer (for example to use the internet). So today far more kids are playing videogames (compared to the 80s). But most of them prefer casual games, sports games (in Germany especially motor race and football/soccer) and action games (Battlefield et al). These games are “eye candy” for the kids - and we all know that kids love candy. But this is all my own impression - I don’t know how much kids are still playing adventure games.
Especially @RonGilbert: We’re missing games like Freddy Fish - adventure games for kids and the whole family. (Yes, this is a shameless hint!) These games could “lead” the kids (back) to adventure games.
Yes, that’s right. But everyone who had a computer or access to a computer has played games. (For example Larry was famous in offices.)
I’m aware of the average quality of walkthroughs but I still think that the mere fact that a player is resorting to a walkthrough (regardless of how good the walkthrough is) is an implicit admission of failure.
Moreover, if a player wants to use a walkthrough just to pass a single specific point, it’s very likely that the player will just search the walkthrough for that specific information instead of reading the entire document. As a consequence, how well that specific information is organized within the entire document might not be perceived at all or not be an important aspect.
Are we talking about the same players who collect any object they see, well before they know if and when they will need them? In my opinion the player who just wants to proceed will read that walkthrough and will execute the action.
Heck, I immediately took that fish the first time I played “The Secret of Monkey Island”, because I just assumed that sooner or later that item might have come in handy.
But, again, in my opinion it isn’t so important to evaluate how much the player will care about this aspect, because most of them might already feel ashamed or guilty, unless they have good reasons to believe that the game is flawed.
this conversation has gone astray from the original question, however, when you are stuck, you don’t know if the game is unfair or you have missed a clue. In your opinion, what will most people tend to believe? That the game is illogical, or that they are not geniuses after all? I tend to believe the game is illogical. Unless I know the game is from Ron Gilbert, I will assume it is unfair, not that I missed something. I expect most people to consult a walkthrough with this same expectation. Not as an implicit admission of failure, but expecting a confirmation that the game is flawed.
(I did not imagine that someone might not read a walkthrough sequentially. I am careful to read it one line at a time, for fear to inadvertently read spoilers unrelated to what I am looking for)
Anyway, there’s no particular point I am making.
The core of your question is interesting to me: why do people do this: “quickly move the mouse around, missing important items”. It does not seem to me a strange behavior. They want to quickly arrive at the roadblock, before they start making mental effort. Before you have arrived at the roadblock, why on earth should you waste time looking at all kinds of things?
I think the same behaviour can be seen in almost any genera. I’ve watched people play platformers that just beat their head against something and never realize what they should be doing. Same with FPS and “taking cover” or “crouching”. Tutorials are good for explain how to use a UI, but can’t help with greater logic like puzzle solving or strategy. You can try, but puzzles just get complex at some point and you either like that type of game or you don’t.
As far as the puzzle finding the room, I think it’s a good and fair puzzle. It’s not easy. We debated if we were going to allow brut forcing of that puzzle and opted to. We also decided not to add more clues to it. It’s a hard puzzle. At some point you’ve spelled too much out and wrecked the puzzle. When designing and testing, you have to look at what the vast majority of players/testers have issues with during testing, very few people got tripped up by that puzzle.
In retrospect, we could have tried to detect brut forcing and had the character say something. That’s also hard because you can get false positives and then the “clue” will mislead people.
Right. But Columbo does not examine every object in every place. Not all rooms are equally likely to hide a clue. I think we should ask exactly what rooms these players were quickly traversing, and what important items they were missing. Do you remember, LowLevel? It would be interesting to know.
more in general… even when you are trying to solve a murder, you are still conscious that a game is, in some sense, “a sequence of roadblocks”. So it still makes sense to quickly arrive at a roadblock before you start solving the murder.
GhOsT! 
But this is all my own impression - I don’t know how much kids are still playing adventure games.