From "open mailbox" to context mechanics: shifting levels of abstraction in adventure games
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Author(s)
Fernandez-Vara, Clara
Date Issued
June 2011
Journal
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games (FDG '11)
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
Clara Fernandez-Vara. 2011. From "open mailbox" to context mechanics: shifting levels of abstraction in adventure games. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games (FDG '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 131-138.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Abstracting the fictional world to essential components is one of the first steps to design the system of a game. The amount of detail with which the fictional world is implemented as the system determines the level of abstraction of the simulation of the game [9]. This paper is a historical analysis of the design of a specific genre, adventure games, and how the levels of abstraction have shifted through time. Early adventure games, such as Zork or The Lurking Horror, had a wide range of possible actions and had more detailed simulations of the game world. Through the more than thirty years of history of adventure games, such as Space Quest, Myst, Indigo Prophecy or the recent Machinarium, the nuance of the simulation has diminished, as well as the variety of possible actions. There are two basic reasons for this simplification: first, to make the interface easier to use, and second, in order to facilitate players finding and identifying the elements of the puzzles and advance the story. This historical exploration of adventure games design provides insight on the trade-offs of choosing different levels of abstraction in the design, which may be extensible to other videogame genres.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/2159365.2159383
