Videogames are abstract environments. The players who control virtual characters cannot lend them their own physical strength, good looks or other bodily attributes. What they do provide them with, however, is their intelligence: the players make their characters do the right thing at the right time, understand the world the characters live in and devise a strategy to overcome obstacles in the path of their hero. Or do they? yes, they must guide characters from the start of a level to its end, but what happens between levels - why the characters must perform this or that task - is largely decided during cutscenes over which players have no control. In other words, players have little impact on the global strategy followed by their hero. Players don’t get a chance to have the clever idea that will save the day. All they are asked is to keep their characters safe from gunfire or other hazards until the level objectives (decided by someone else) are fulfilled. Players don’t solve mysteries. They collect visible clues until a cutscene make them all fit together and provide the explanation.

In that context, does such games really challenge the intelligence of players? Do they require them to stop moving and start thinking? To solve problems instead of just following leads? Because if they don’t, they can’t reward that intelligence either... which is precisely what a game should do.

Mortville manor, 1987, PC

Any self-respecting cellar should have a secret passageway...

To answer this question let’s go back in time to the late 80s. Back then, Mortville manor (Le manoir de mortevielle) was quite a smash hit, especially here in France. Reviewers were most impressed by the finesse of the graphs and by the speech synthesis capacities of the title: developers used the 8-bit hardware of the time to the maximum and each character actually spoke. By today standards, all of this is quite anecdotal. However, in a time when games are accused of being too linear, the out-of-the-box thinking needed to solve the game is definitely worth mentioning.

Beating Mortville is not easy. A typical ’80s game, it was designed by a "riddlemaster"-type author who expected the player to do precisely this and that, or lose. Like in today’s "escape the room" titles, there are a couple of pixel-clicks or observation puzzles. Random also plays a role. That being said, sometime after the game was released, a few magazines published step-by-step walkthroughs on how to beat the game (those were the days before the web!). That enabled many people to complete it, and quite a few of them wrote back to magazines complaining that the ending had nothing to do with the game. And that’s precisely the beauty of Mortville. You can complete the game without understanding what is going on. Or you can try to find out the story behind it all, detective-style. Your approach has absolutely no consequence on the outcome. You could recreate the story for yourself, imagine what happened but that won’t use the game mechanics. You wouldn’t get extra credit or a different ending. You just "get it".

Mortville manor, 1987, PC

The dining room of the manor.

At the beginning of the game, the hero, a private investigator, receives a letter, an invitation from an old friend, Julia, to the Mortville manor. During the intro, he says that he fondly remembers playing in the manor as a kid, although it was in a fairly bad shape. When he actually reaches the manor, he finds out that his friend has passed away. But all the rooms of the manor seem in mint condition. That is supposed to be a hint for the player. That should help them understand what really happened, but it won’t directly get them any closer to beating the game.

The hero is stuck in the manor because of a snow storm, so he has no choice but investigate, ask questions and that kind of things. He soon finds out about Julia’s friend, Murielle, who disappeared about one year ago. He also learns that Julia’s husband, Leo, has won a lot of money at the races, which he used to restore the manor. He will also learn tons of stories about Julia’s relatives which will turn out to be not relevant for the story.

In fact, what really happened one year ago is that Leo and Murielle, who were both archeology buffs, discovered a secret passage underneath the castle. They explored it and found a chest full of gold, but also triggered a trap which killed Murielle. Leo could have called for help and possibly saved Murielle, but that would have meant telling everyone about the gold. So instead, he took the treasure and let Murielle die. Julia, somehow, found out, but she was very sick herself and knew she would die soon. That’s why she organized everything to set Leo up. She thought the hero would be able to expose him.

Back to our question. In adventure games, in investigation games, what is the merit of the player who just follows a scripted scenario? In those games who are supposed to celebrate the intellect, the ingenuity of the player, how can they outsmart the game if the best they can do is to replicate a walkthrough step by step?

Heroes take risks, they dare to try different things which may or may not work. But in modern games, there is only one way to overcome one problem. Finding a creative approach to a problem is not possible, as the solution imagined by the game designer is the only one that works. If the player doesn’t manage to do what they must do, they can always restart the level or reload a saved game.

This problem arises partly because modern games are supposed to send back to the players a glorified image of themselves, the implicit contract being that by buying the game, a player also buys the right to win the game in a reasonable amount of time and the right to be congratulated by the game environment for the performance.

Modern games also have to offer a denser gameplay with more interactions that require skill, rather than the contemplative gameplay of Mortville where the player must sit and listen conversations, take notes, and find out outside of the game environment what is going on. In Resident Evil, the player no longer searches an entire room for a key which fits in a a 5x5 pixels block like in the old days. Doors are opened by passkeys which come in vivid colors like red and blue, are about one square foot in size, are put in the most exposed part of a room and which also often glow in case some players miss them. But the challenge is to get this key without being hit to hard by the two zombies that stand in between, possibly by killing them but using as few bullets as possible. So an adventure game is no longer about solving a mystery but rather about a journey to complete, where the player is slowed by physical obstacles that they must overcome.

Part of this evolution can be explained by the generalization of the internet. In the case of Mortville, walkthroughs were published a good 6 months after the game proper. Today, even the most complex RPGs are extensively covered in gamefaqs a couple of weeks after their Japanese release. Needless to say, the availability of a complete explanation of the game would have greatly reduced the interest of the game.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, 2004, DS

There is only one way to understand what happened in this office, and to get your client discharged

But the real reason is that modern games do not handle failure well. Typically (this was true in Sierra adventure games, and still is in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, for instance), the player is stuck until they perform the action that will allow them to continue the adventure. Until they understand what they have to do, they can be stuck indefinitely.

In the First Degree, 1995, PC

Slightly more realistic than Capcom’s Phoenix Wright.

This isn’t true in Mortville, or in other adventure games such as In the First Degree (1995). In this game, the hero was a DA who was investigating on a murder case, and had to prove that a suspect was indeed guilty of manslaughter in the first degree. But depending on how the player would interview suspects, and on the evidence they could find or not, the outcome of the trial could be quite different - the homicide could be considered self-defense, involuntary, non-premeditated, or, if the player played all of his cards right, murder in the first degree (hence the name!). What was interesting in this title is that it was possible to go through the game without taking only the best decisions, noticing all the options, and so on. Interestingly, this is also the case with games of a different vein such as Sim City, Civilization or other 4X games. In Sim City, the city you build may not be perfect (does such a city exist?) but that doesn’t prevent you from continuing developing it. In Civilization, you could do a major strategic error which will inevitably lead your people to disaster. That doesn’t prevent you from continuing your game, but it definitely gives more value to a victory in the hardest difficulty setting. In Mortville, In the First Degree, Sim City or Civilization, the player is allowed to fail, this is taken into account by the game mechanics. And this is precisely what makes winning worthwhile.

These mechanisms of creative failures and of rewarding a more clever behaviour should not be limited to ancient adventure games or niche strategy games. Indeed, there should be a creative way to use them in mainstream titles.