Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood? | Genre and the Adventure Game
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- Опубліковано 25 чер 2024
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transcript: innuendostudios.tumblr.com/po...
The Berlin Interpretation of Roguelikes: www.roguebasin.com/index.php?t...
Andrew Plotkin, Characterizing Interactive Fiction: eblong.com/zarf/essays/ifdef....
Clara Fernandez-Vara, The Tribulations of Adventure Games: smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream...
Dr. M. Ritchey and Mike Merrill, Is This a Sandwich?: / is-this-a-sandwich
David Shute, Are Videogames [sic] Games?: davidshute.wordpress.com/2012...
Rick Altman, A Syntactic/Semantic Approach to Film Genre: www.jstor.org/stable/1225093
Samuel R. Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction: muse.jhu.edu/book/2405 - Розваги
Dear Esther is a video game, because...
if I tell someone I'm going to sit down and play a video game and I sit down and play Dear Esther they aren't going to do any worse than sneer, but
if I tell someone I'm going to sit down and play a video game and I sit down and eat a sandwich they are going to think I've lost my mind.
No, they will just tell you it's a hot dog
@@GameBubbles is relish a sauce?
@@aliak530i is cereal soup?
@@Kobolds_in_a_trenchcoat is lasagna a sandwich?
@@Kobolds_in_a_trenchcoat no cereal is porridge
Would like to extend a thanks for putting the game titles at the corner of the screen.
Yes, I appreciate that, too. (Also, movie titles.)
Three slices of bread aren't a sandwich. They're Vice President Pence.
Have a like you... You...
Damn, that was dumbly good
No, Vice President Pence is a sandwich!
@@youtubeuniversity3638 an idiot sandwich
Very true
@@spirithawk6580 An idiot sandwich is a sandwich!
"I certainly can't have an opinion in fewer than 20 minutes anymore" is now my most cherished quote. I feel ya..... I feel ya.
What philosophers call "qualia" we call "prototype semantics" in linguistics. People don't actually walk around with a fully-formed verbal definition of "car" in their heads, even though that's how philosophers and lawyers generally treat words and their meanings.
Instead we learn what "car" means by interpreting, thoughout our lives, what _other people_ mean when they say "car". The kind of things most often called "car" are the most prototypical -- evoking most clearly the composite, culturally specific, abstract mental image we have of "car" -- while other cars are less prototypical, and other vehicles may or may not evoke the image enough to be considered "cars" at all.
And because it's practically impossible to put a complicated, subjective, abstract notion like this into words, legalistic verbal definitions are usually unsatisfying and lead to weird unintuitive inclusions/exclusions. They're basically post-hoc attempts to rationalise an "irrational", subjective concept.
The Berlin interpretation of "roguelike" is a sort of hybrid that acknowledges this by trying to verbalise the prototypical features without insisting on a strict cutoff.
I think its also worth pointing out that for a great many terms we actually have a set of prototypes to choose from - and we can be primed to pick one over the other when determining how "thing-like" something is by changing the context.
so we don't run around with a dictionary definition in our heads. we just see stuff, and the right neurons fire off. but it's perfectly okay to ask "which things will cause that recognition experience, and which won't, and how can we summarize that complexity in a way that is useful for predicting that recognition, and avoiding disagreement and confusion?" and then doing it
"You must be new here" is my favorite line.
In linguistics there is a concept called prototype semantics. Basically building something like a radar-view of circles with the innermost circle presenting the most prototypical expression of a given thing. And it is descriptive and not normative and totally dependent on the cultural context. Example: in germany the most prototypical bird is a sparrow and outliers are penguins. For americans the innermost might be the sparrow.
Another example: what constitutes a chair? Four legs? A backside? What about those ikea chairs swinging freely from like two legs? Prototype semantics says that a four-legged chair is close to the.center, the ikea chair a bit more out there.
And since it is descriptive it can change. Could be applied here, but oh well.
“Art is interactive” THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! Though not the main point of the video, that is a belief I hold dear and true to me. Art requires some level of action, whether physical or mental, to be appreciated. Otherwise, it’s just ink on paper, pigments on canvas, dried up lumps of clay, vibrations in the air, discolored celluloid, digital code, etc. things that it’s made up of rather than the feelings you get from it. As you brought up, a list of ingredients rather than a recipe.
I've always held the opinion that before video games, books (novels, novellas, whathaveyou) were the primary interactive medium. A reader's input is required (deciphering the words on the paper and supplying whatever the author chooses to leave out) to create the whole experience.
Thoughts on this?
Bia T I think that’s a fair point. Not to mention that literature often requires the most of the audience physically, mainly page-turning. That may not seem like much, but many writers, especially for comic books, utilize the page-turn to build suspense, mystery, and anticipation. But I haven’t thought about it from a “fill-in-the-gaps” perspective. I’d say you made a good point!
@@Little1Cave I had not thought about the page layout of comic books much in this context, but you are correct in that it can create a feel of "cinematics" and can even be a tool to create suspense. I'm more of a prose reader, and the closest prose/novels get, I suppose, is the separation of chapters/requiring you to turn the page. With the advent of ebooks, it's become more difficult for an author to set which words are on which page (what with readers able to set the font, font size, and page margins) but paragraphs and chapter separations for the most part still exist.
In regards to "the reader filling in the blanks", if you think about it, most skilled writers don't painstakingly describe every single aspect of a scene. The standard example is character descriptions. J.K. Rowling never gives us an exact numerical value of just how tall Harry is; instead, she gave us very basic pointers: green eyes, glasses, messy black hair, scar on forehead. If you asked fifty Harry Potter fans to draw Harry (and if you excluded the movie version for argument's sake) you'd end up with fifty different renditions of the same character that all have these basic pointers down, but the details will be different. That is what I mean with a reader's contribution to the text. One of my favorite writers, Tad Williams, likened the process to a man and a woman having sex and making a baby. They both contribute in their own way, but the "end result" is more than the sum of its parts.
I once dated someone who was adamant that abstract art was a waste of time. I tried to convince them otherwise. I really believed that it was only so because they refused to bring any part of themselves into the equation. If you're not willing to be vulnerable to yourself, art will never truly be art.
sorry if this is a silly question or if I'm misunderstanding stuff (I struggle with this kind of information as a result of a brain disorder but I'm trying my best) but can someone explain to me how art is interactive in the case where nobody sees/interacts with it? Is that not still art?
For example, if an artist draws something but doesn't show anyone else ever?
Or if a machine creates an image somehow without human interference, and nobody is ever there to witness it?
Can someone explain if/how these instances are interactive? And also, given that answer, are/how are these instances art?
I hope my question makes sense :( Thank you!
"What even is genre?"
-Okay...
"The answer to which is a bit beyond a UA-cam video essay..."
-Oh. Bummer.
"Or it would be on anyone else's chanel..."
-Wait...
"But this is Innuendo Studios"
-yes. Yes! YES!
"Welcome to WSGT, a philosophical interrogation into the meaning of genre in and beyond the gaming idiom with the adventure game as out guide."
-YEEEEEES! WOOOHOOO!
This right here is why this chanel is my favorite on all of UA-cam.
truly the vibe
This is actually really helpful for me as an amateur game dev. A lot of writing on games is on primary mechanics to the exclusion of incidental mechanics, with the idea that incidental mechanics distract from the supposed core of the gameplay (e.g. Mario jumping is good, and Mario being able to accomplish a lot by jumping is very good, so therefore anything Mario has to accomplish by not-jumping is a sort of failure or missed opportunity on the part of Nintendo to integrate the gameplay). That's usually pretty good praxis, but it never sat completely well with me. As a kid, some of my favorite moments in games came from things unique to the gameplay and unique to the world, like finding the Master Sword at the bottom of the sea in The Wind Waker, or reading a really sweet letter by a dead woman in a Paper Mario game. I would get really embarrassed trying to explain to anyone why stuff like that mattered to me; neither me, nor my friends and family, nor most games writers really had any language to talk about it, so most of the time I just passed it off as nostalgia as quickly as I could and let it be. But now, having watched this, I feel like I sold out some genuinely lovely moments for no good reason. Why should all game design be based around things you're always going to be doing? Life itself is so much smaller and so much less beautiful without moments of incident, and games are no different. Thanks for putting into such great words what my weird gut feeling could never hope to articulate
I find it neat how 'Doom Clone' eventually evolved into 'First Person Shooter.' I wonder if we'll end up seeing a similar change to a mechanics-focused definition of what is currently referred to as 'Souls-Like' games.
Third Person rough combat.
Counter Argument: Rogue-Likes are still called Rogue-Likes.
I sometimes wish adventure games adopted the name interactive fiction for the entire genre and text adventure games would simply be called text based interactive fiction.
The name interactive fiction neatly describes what this genre is about - telling stories through player interactions and mechanics that are built around storytelling.
I see people using the name 'adventure game' to refer to any game with a story or for open-world games, reasoning that the genre is about adventuring.
Alternatively the term point and click is sometimes used but this ignores text based adventure games and choice based adventure games (like many visual novels, which yes, I count as adventure games).
Holy crap the point at 16:46 blew my god damn mind. This explains it so well. I never thought about how the mechanics of how you control adventures games, is what gives them the ambiguity necessary to be ADVENTUROUS. This is also why all the quests in games that use minimaps and compasses to point you directly at the objectives feel so narratively empty. Thank you for this video so much.
Your point of genre being about how it feels is basically a perfect one. I sort my movies at home by number of entries in the franchise and then alphabetically, which many people find confusing and noone's able to guess if they try to figure it out on their own. Many guess that it's by genre or ask why it isn't, to which I always answer that genres don't really exist, they're just an attempt to generalize how something feels, and all my movies are so personal and individual to me that I wouldn't be able to quantify or sort them in any way that represents that. That, they understand. It's the same for them. They just usually don't think about it.
I've been (friendly) debating with my mom about whether or not Eternal Sunshine is a RomCom or not. We will likely never find concensus. She believes that it isn't funny or romantic, I believe that it hits all of the plot beats of a RomCom and then perverts them into something tragic. For her it is akin to cosmic horror, so that's what it is. To me it has the structure of a RomCom, so again, it is one. We agree to disagree and watch 'Being John Malkovich' instead
"This is a discussion too long for a normal video-essay on UA-cam... or at least it would be, but this is Innuendo Studios. We'll take the long road" - Holy fucking shit, sir, I love you so much just for this line alone
Damn... we're shooting Guybrush Threepwood again after so long.
It's been a long walk but we are Here Now
this is weird but since im seeing you again i thought it might be a sign to tell you that a couple days ago i saw a comment from you on big joel's black mirror video and was like "hey is that silver" so i went on a quest to find that specific piece of art from you and indeed confirm that it was silver. so now that im seeing you here its kind of wild, thank you
anyway cute icon hfdgjj
dragonairlover same, though I had a moment of “wait, I recognize that icon and name, where did I see that before?” Yeah, it was the Big Joel Black Mirror video. Small world, I guess.
Anyway to the original poster I really like your name and icon! Cool to see it again in the comments of another video I’m watching
Wow Looks Like I'm UA-cam Comments Famous This Blew Up Follow My SoundTwitter
This video gave me the feeling you get when you take a road for the first time and suddenly end up at a location you know, and your whole mental image of the area does a big damn jump, and your brain tickles as you go "oh shit, THAT'S where I am!?". That, only for the abstract concept of genre.
I love that experience you're describing, and to use it as a metaphor for something abstract is really clever!
The discussion of definitions and genre reminded me strongly of the obsession TERFs and other transphobes have with defining "woman" and "man" by a set of rigid parameters for the purpose of exclusion. No one actually uses words that way, you don't see a woman and think "this is an adult human that is of the class that produces large gametes", as they claim to define the word.
Saw this woman the other day with the most exquisite pair of X chromosomes, sheer perfection.
It is not that way - they do not use definitions to exclude. They want precise definitions so that they know how far can they twist their speech without being labeled hateful or transphobic (while obviously being actual transphobes).
It is the same reason alt-righters and their sycophants want very strict, precuse definitions of hatespeech or racism or white nationalism/supremacy, like Stevie Chowder and the gang.
I was thinking exactly the same thing, I don't need to define why trans men are men and trans women are women it just feels like they are so we don't need to get caught up in the minutia. I guess TERFs feel passionately that hotdogs aren't sandwiches though and I can kind of see why but who cares, just enjoy your hotdog.
@@nonoctoro4933 c00l b8 m8 it's no l0nger 2008
@@nonoctoro4933 You are lying. Dragonkin don't type because it is a shameful display of unscaled privilege.
I find so interesting how it seems that we are slowly changing all definitions and concepts from being switches of states to being spectrum, it changes so much about everything and it make so much sense
Funny enough, the first approximation that i had with this change of perspective was from gender, that in Spanish (my actual language) is the same word as genre: Género lmao
That is called thinking ahead of the curve. ;)
"And that's the end of our journey!"
heh. Journey.
don't stop believin
I had the same reaction when he said adventure at the end.
@@GREATGAIWAIN I thought it was about the game "Journey"
This reminds me the conversations about whether or not "Old Town Road" is a country song
Samuel R. Delaney and Innuendo Studios
Name a more iconic duo I'll wait
Wow, this video on discussing the meaning of Adventure games is really making me hungry.
This is talking about genre, but it really applies to gender, and any identity that is better reflected in qualia and spectrums rather than binaries.
Or, as said to Stevonnie: "You are not two people. And you are not one person. You are an experience!"
Also, in many languages genre is the word for gender and for genre. Etymologically they’re linked, not just experientially.
Also to anyone familiar with music genre identification arguments, it neatly captures how there’s many flavours of human, and also sometimes multiple words for the same thing which people can be passionate about only identifying with one of them and not the rest. Or even disagreements on whether they’re actually the same thing or not. And so on.
A good joke from The Big Bang Theory:
The gang are watching the Sandra Bullock movie "28 Days" and Sheldon is riveted by it because Penny has successfully convinced him it's 28 Days Later and he thinks zombies are going to invade at any minute. That idea makes all the weepy drama he'd normally hate spellbinding.
Sounds like the experience I had playing Gone Home. Fifteen minutes in I'm wondering if zombies are going to start showing up.
I got through a big chunk of Serial Experiments Lain waiting for the action sequence from Noir's opening credits.
(In retrospect, I kinda wish I'd just finished watching Lain because Noir ended up not being my cup of tea, but oh well)
The Office had a similar joke about Pam watching 28 Days Later despite her horror because she was confident Sandra Bullock in 28 Days was about to appear at any moment. So like, it is funny, but I’m skeptical Big Bang Theory didn’t just take and reverse that joke.
@@jackkerger164 Which may be true, but weirdly The Big Bang Theory version is just a better gag. The idea that a zombie movie may begin looking like a weepy drama is more superficially plausible than that a middlebrow romantic drama could begin with the apocalypse, and Sheldon is a sitcom character better suited to make that mistake than Pam.
When I was 7, my parents showed me Mars Attack. When I asked them what it was about, they jokingly told me it was about peaceful martians coming to Earth to build a friendly, long-lasting relationship with the humans. I was very naive and believed them. Then, I watched the movie, waiting with an increasing trauma when the martians would stop melting faces and start the peace talks. I ended up terrified, but that gave the whole experience a very interesting vibe...
"A sandwich is not merely an object" - Ian Danskin 2019
Me: this video kinda boring-
Innuendo Studios: We’re doing sandwich discourse.
Me: nOw We’Re TaLkInG!
Next time you cringe at the mere question of "is a hot dog a sandwich?", you can ask the better, parallel question: "is tea a soup?"
Soup is mostly liquid with chunks in it right ? Then again we got tomato soup and French onion soup...and then what is the diff between broth and soup?x - x . then you got stew vs soup..with stew usually being more chunk and less liquid but some soups are wayyy liquid compared to others...
Well, when you consume tea, does it feel like a soup or something else?
I've never seen the other episodes in this series. I thought this was going to be some kinda Monkey Island theory, but this is better lol.
thats what the other ones are lmao
I thought it was a game called "who killed guybrush threepwood" because meta or something
It is a general examination of adventure games, downfall and rebirth in the recent decade.
I wonder how this can be said to relate to Japanese Visual Novels. After all, the Ace Attorney/Phoenix Wright games likely sprang from that tradition, but, in the West, have been marketed as traditional "Adventure" games.
Actually, in Japan those games are explicitly considered adventure games (Or 'ADV' as it's often referred to there). As far as the video, I would say that almost all of it applies to VNs, even the literal definitions of the adventure genre discussed.
It is interesting though. Ace Attorney has incredibly limited rigid verbs. Even the inventory system is less "each of these items is a verb you can use" and more "you have one verb, the ability to object, and you can use it to combine any inventor item and any dialog"
Julian Sterling Then again there are other verbs outside of the courtroom segments like Present, Move, Talk, and Examine. Even during the courtrooms you can choose to Press instead of Object.
Yeah but sometimes it feels visual novels are just prototypes for anime or manga. Maybe even adaptations. I can still see a Visual Novel and tell to myself, "this is not an adventure game" because I'm not as involved as the characters in the development of the story...somehow. It's like a new genre where instead of me doing things, more things happened to me or the characters. It's like Italian Neorrealism or something like that.
I'd say that visual novels are a sub-genre of adventure games, which generally have an "anime" visual aesthetic, tend to lack a directly navigable "game space environment", and the majority of puzzles are dialogue based.
“Tonight is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel” is one of my favorite songs
Literally went through the comments to see if anyone mentioned this. The second he said "the horizon does flips" a little part of my brain was hearing the song. The amount of shit I lost when he actually referenced it was catastrophic.
Oh my god, Small World! That was such a foundational experience for me, I can't believe I forgot about it!
Also, really good video. Right up there with "This is Not a Tomato" and your one on The Beginner's Guide
weird experiential flash games made me the pretentious gamer I am today
Wittgenstein's "family resemblance" concept. Wittgenstein used games as an example of something that is related by a family resemblance and lacks one essential feature that all games share.
I'm so happy you mentioned LOOM! It's still one of my favorite games, from the concept to the music to the originality of the core mechanic. The worldbuilding and writing always made me feel the whole thing would have also worked as some kind of fantastical sci-fi novel. Beneath A Steel Sky had that flavor too (but less fantastical, more cyberpunk).
(And on that note, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream actually *was* based on a short work of sci-fi. Something about literary-ish sci-fi lends itself really well to Lucas Arts-style adventure games, and vice versa, maybe? I never thought about that til now).
Beneath a Steel Sky was a game I was absolutely in love with as a kid, really captured my imagination :)
Weirdly I only played Loom later on...
Love the adventure games discussions. The semiotics of genre is a brilliant direction too. its own adventure.
Never expected to hear 'chip butty' in an American accent, felt strange.
Imagine being an American and wondering what the fuck a chip butty is. Then seeing one and wondering what Lovecraftian construct inspired such an idea.
@@downsjmmyjones101 I mean, some people in America put chips (crisps for any Brits reading this) on sandwiches, so is having a fry sandwich all that much stranger?
french fry po'boys are delicious, actually
@@maddie9602 Yes. I only put chips on my tuna sandwiches when I was like 6 and I never heard of anyone else doing it.
Plus it's fucking peanut butter and potatoes like wtf.
@@downsjmmyjones101 I've seen people putting chips on a ham and cheese or similar sandwich quite a few times. Might be primarily a Midwestern thing, like putting a cinnamon roll in a bowl of chili.
Innuendo Studios masterfully picks apart alt-reich talking points and that's great, but man it's good to see this channel go back to some videogame analysis. It feels like it's been a loooong time since the monkey island video.
God damn, this was good. I love it when I think I'm reaching the end of a video and see that the runtime is still halfway. So _meaty_ !
You can't imagine how FUN these videos are to watch. The way you build your arguments get me smiling, all excited, as if I was watching the most thrilling of action movies. Your sense of rhythm is delicious and as much as I love your political videos, I'm glad you still get time (and motivation) to write about videogames.
Love your work.
thought this was a re upload, pleasantly surprised.
AN ADVENTURE GAME EPISODE?! It's been so long since we got one of these from you.
As soon as you said “The horizon does flips,” “Tonight Is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel” popped into my head. I was very excited when it turned out we both had the same idea.
"i can't have an opinion in less than 20 minutes" is a mood
It's so great to see another essay about video games.
Thank you for finishing this one. Good luck with all the other ideas you will put to video!
I always love it when you use video games to talk about more than just video games, and this video hits the spot!
"Action-adventure"
Oh boy, see you in 2030 if you're gonna deconstruct why that one makes sense.
Because Zelda is not an RPG and it's also not an action game, so we needed a new term.
Especially with all the games calling themselves action adventure games.
@@aghayejalebian7364 Except it most definitely IS an RPG in that it asks you to play the role of Link in his quest to save Hyrule/Zelda/Himself. And what is a role-playing game if not a game in which you play a role?
@@ShjadeNexayre
Then all games are rpg and action. Halo and GoW are rpgs too.
Genres are meant to discriminate aspects into commonality. A roguelike isn't even a genre. It's whatever genre it is with rogue elements that explains the aspects to be predicted. Soulslikes are just action rpgs. Dumb it down enough and its just zelda.
@@furyberserk Sure, and if you want to go that route all handheld foods containing foods are sandwiches, but that doesn't help anyone, does it?
Zelda games are action RPGs as much as most Soulslikes are. Action adventure also works, sure, but calling them that doesn't make them *not* roleplaying games.
There's a reason I enjoy Zelda games in particular over a number of its contemporaries, and playing that role in its setting is a big part of it. But if you're really dedicated to arguing against Zelda games being RPGs, okay: what makes, say, Link to the Past not an RPG? You can add a qualifier to that - action RPG maybe, or adventure RPG, whatever - but how is it not an RPG? What common aspect of RPGs is it missing?
The existence of qualia as a function of human pattern recognition is why AI is so damn far from human-level intelligence.
That doesn't sound right to me. Neural networks are actually very good at pattern recognition because they emulate the way actual neurons work, but they are nevertheless still far from human-level intelligence.
@@plumune1705 yet the patterns they detect are often very far removed from the qualia the humans training the model initially expected to be detected. That’s a qualitative difference, not just the quantitative one you outlined in your own comment.
Uh, wrong. Presumably worms experience qualia, and they don't have human level intelligence either
Im so glad you made another one of these!! They're so fascinating. ❤️
I love this video. I love the Berliner rogue-like approach to definitions, I love that you put [sic] on Andrew Plotkin's unnecessarily gendered pronoun for the player, I love that two of the people you quoted leave out the space in videogame like how I do, I love the thing about how knowing a story is a mystery changes how the reader interacts with it, and I love that guacamole-and-egg sandwich being eaten with knife and fork at the end of the sandwich section.
I still think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is exactly what I want from a science fiction movie, but I'll admit that it might not satisfy every sci-fi fan as much as sci-fi fan myself.
Years after seeing it, still one of my favorite video essays on this site. Wonderful work
Please make another one of these, I could watch nothing but this series, so bloody good mate!
i hadn't realised that Berliner definition of rogue like used a completely different conception of definition to a traditional vent diagram.
OMG, I just re-watched the first part of the series and you gift us a new video! ♥
So glad you're back! I missed you and your content!
You never cease to amaze me with the quality of your content.
I'm glad to see a video with a larger focus on games again, I naturally appreciate all of your content and you in general! But I live and breathe games, so it's what I'll feel most connected to. Thank you sir
Now that it has been 4 years again, perhaps a new installment is in order? 🤔 I really hope so cause these are awesome and thought-provoking
You took my perception of a genre and made it go into a roller-coaster of a definition change.
Ah, so good to see another video from you. You got pretty meta at a few points there.
Brilliant. Genre being the way you parse the experience is really insightful.
The talk about defining genre was so very good. Thank you so much for this
I watched this video when it first came out, and today I rewatched it. I wish I could give it another like. Great take that stands up to scrutiny and time.
Been waiting for another part for this series!
recently discovered your channel because of this video and wow, thanks for all the ideas that you are bringing, it is a delight
Thank you for including the titles for each game, saved me a bunch of googling.
Damn dude. I found your channel via The Alt-right Playbook coming up in my youtube suggestions, but I continue to be blown away by every video of yours I watch, even when you're presenting on a topic that isn't as personally relevant to me (ie Phil Fish or COD). Your ability of analyze, contextualize, and entertain all at once is very great indeed. The topics you choose to dissect are important as well.
I know this is a weird place to leave a comment like this. I've just been kinda marathoning your stuff lately and wanted to voice my support somehow.
Anyway... *please* keep doing what you're doing.
Actually godly content, its great having found your channel
Mind blowingly interesting, well written and expertly paced essay. Thank you for the ride
Two minutes in, I'm thoroughly refreshed on why I love you, man
You are deeply missed when you are gone
I'm glad I was here with you, too.
I've always struggled with genre, in part because I am a writer and people are constantly asking me what I write. Trying to compress everything I create into a single word is impossible to me, and thus the idea of genre has always escaped me.
The idea that genre is the mechanics of the narrative, that it is a direction of attention? Suddenly it makes sense. This helped a lot, and I'm so happy you made this video.
Looking forward to the next time you get analytical with games; its always an adventure ☺️
Thanks for the continued fantastic content and great conclusions here. My favorite video essay channel on UA-cam right now. 👌👌👌
This is a good case study on what your channel is. You published a video years after announcing it, and slid into a long discussion few others would attempt here. Innuendo Studios: Rare, thoughtful, and impractical.
Bit about associations is spot on. Just because it's association doesn't mean we're not allowed to look for patterns!
I realize this is from a year ago, and I’m about five minutes in, but for the sake of putting it in text somewhere on this page;
Adventure games have always been games which eschewed classical physics/collision based mechanics of preceding video games and relied instead on a static, abstract input/output model of UI/UX.
Part of the reason “Adventure” was the best anyone could do was for the exact reason you highlight in regard to how other games tend to be genred-player UX. Without having an interface which involves a traditional “concrete” UX between User Input and program Output (simulated physics reacting to player controlled collisions, initiated through a specific means of physical UI procedure/controls, requiring a specific skill to be employed by the user), Adventure games couldn’t really be labeled, even before game genres were outwardly memetic.
What would you call them? Typers?
When they started to incorporate more physical UI, like mice, they became “Point-and-Click Adventures,” following traditional convention.
The reason games like Zelda inherited the word “Adventure,” is similar. Games like Zelda, and Adventure, just didn’t fit the standard model for what video games tended to be when they were made. They weren’t linear, they weren’t time restrictive, and they weren’t player prescriptive to the same degree other games were. The primary focus of these games was the “adventure,” with less focus put on hand-eye coordination, timing, and mechanical skill. The latter three things, while not the primary focus, did still play a role in the UX of the games, so “action” was added to the genre label to help people understand what they would be experiencing when they played.
The exact same convention was used when role-playing games inherited some of the Zelda-isms Nintendo had conceptualized for their games in the Action Adventure genre, becoming “Action RPG’s.” The addition of hand-eye coordination, timing, and mechanical skill to the UX made the games more “Action” oriented from that player experience perspective.
Video games aren’t a narrative medium. Narrative plays a role as a wrapper that decorates and contextualizes an interface experience, but it’s secondary to those interface mechanics. As such, it would make no sense to genre them by narrative. So, they’re genred based on UX.
Even “horror” itself isn’t a game genre. Games with horror narrative elements are usually genred by a mix of narrative genre and Player experience, like “survival horror” or “action horror.”
So, I’d say it’s not just association that leads to games being labeled “Adventure” games, but a lack of, or reduction of, skilled-based UI experiences in a game’s implementation, instead swapping the traditional relationship between mechanics and narrative, putting narrative first.
Any game that puts any design element before mechanics, but still follows an anthropomorphic aesthetic for the UI/UX, is some type of “Adventure” game. What type of adventure game it is depends on how much of the mechanics, if any, requires traditional player skills.
Edit:
So I finished the video, and it seems you got to this by part 8, though I think it might have taken you more than a few paragraphs because it’s difficult for you (possibly) to conceptualize games as a non-narrative medium.
Narratives are second-hand and linear (there is a purely coherent and derivative beginning and end that follows a controlled [by a second party] sequence). Video games are first-hand and non-linear (the user determines much of the pacing and the importance of individual, experiential events [even those that would be otherwise inconsequential]). Video games by their nature can’t be a narrative medium, but they can use elements of narrative to decorate and contextualize the mechanics puzzle/challenge at the core of the experience (which is the actual art form).
PLEASE IAN, TALK MORE ABOUT VIDEOGAMES [sic, I guess?] TO US THIS IS PURE BLISS I'VE BEEN REWATCHING YOU OLD VIDEOS FOR A WHILE NOW
This was so worth the wait!
Absolutely loved it. You're an excellent educator for showing not what to think, but new ways of thinking, and I wish I'd found your videos back when I was in college.
Goddamn. Your art analysis really is the best!
This was fantastic and worth the wait, thank you.
YES! I missed your videos so much!
this was amazing, you are great!!!
God, I love this channel so much
Excellent, great, video. It blew my mind and made a lot of things about categorizing genres clear to me.
What a fantastic video. Thanks for making it!
I'm so glad i have insomnia I get to see Innuendo before bed!
That was one hell of an adventure.
This makes me think of Wittgenstein’s familial relationships. That all “adventure games” may not have a list of characteristics that overlap, but rather all connect to each other through the familial inspiration of the previous title that you mentioned in the video. It’s all like a complicated web, rather than a open space all adventure games sit.
I don't have much to add to this video, but thank you for bringing even just a glimmer of attention to Grim Fandango. It's my all-time favourite game, and I wish it got more attention and notoriety when it came out back in the 90's.
Thank you, this was great. Happened to watch it exactly during a period of time where I was asking myself what makes an adventure game (point and click specifically) good.
I almost feel like I want to talk to you about these ideas, such a good video this is
I've always loved your comedic timing, those little beats, and I gotta say -- that little 'I'm sorry" might not have been meant as a joke, but it still made me laugh.
I just discovered your channel and i love what you're doing!
i don't play many adventure games but I live for these kinds of videos because this is true game analysis. I love filmcrit youtube because interpreting and deconstructing art just to see how the cogs turn is fascinating to me and you, Hbomberguy, Dan Olson, and a very very few other media critics/annalists are actually critically examining and interpreting videogames as art, examining how the player navigates the fascinatingly unique inter-activeness that only games has, and the art of design. You're actively elevating games as medium with work like this because you're engaging with the art you consume on a fundamental level, something that so so so so few people in geek culture actually do
I am glad you are still alive lol
Just kidding - really liked this, it kinda covered stuff I think about concerning adventure games and so-called walking simulators and whatnot.
I recall that you made a video about developments you thought *could* propel adventure games to a new state of being. Since then all the games you listed have been released, so: what are your thoughts now?
I've been writing them up on Tumblr as I get to them, as well as some other adventure games: innuendostudios.tumblr.com/tagged/capsule-review
YOUR VIDEOS ARE AMAZING!
It’s interesting that you mention crime fiction as a good example of interactivity in books and film since they’re often called whodunnit’s or howcatchem’s based on the rules we expect to follow
Even though I'm a big fan of the Alt-Right Playbook, it's good to see you going back to the videos you love.
I am now going to link this whenever someone claims that Smash isn't a fighting game
something tells me that people who don't think smash is a fighting game are not gonna watch a half hour long video about genre.
@@MK.5198 yeah that's fair lol
Yeah,this was very entertaining.Keep up the good work
The philosophical question of what something is (sandwich), is something I always found most satisfying in answering with some linguistic principles. Excuse me for forgetting the exact term but the principle tells us this: A word is only a word because it's not another word. Let's take "tree" for example. If you are trying to school someone who never spoke or heard a word in his life and you pointed at a tree and said "tree", will he know exactly what you mean? Probably not. For him, you could mean the branch, nature as a whole, the color brown, so on and so on. Only when you begin differentiating "Tree" from "Branch", "Stump", "Green", "Nature", ... will the person and you be on the same ground of understanding. That is the basis of verbal communication. What I find most interesting about that is, that you still won't communicate 100% what you mean because your assumptions of what a Tree is are different from those of other individuals.
So after this long rant, what I wanted to say is: A sandwich is which it's not (and we all make these definitions for ourselves).
I love listening to you talk