Evolution of Choose Your Own Adventure Games
Adventure games. More Specifically, Choose Your Own Adventure games started off as books that’s meant for children.
The Cave of Time by Edward Packard, the first book in the series
Edward Packard, an American author, came up with this concept from telling bedtime stories to his daughters. Packard stated, "I had a character named Pete and I usually had him encountering all these different adventures on an isolated island. But that night I was running out of things for Pete to do, so I just asked what they would do.” Packard’s two daughters came up with different paths for the story to take and he thought up an ending for each of the paths. In the books, whenever the reader came to a “decision split” depending on the reader’s choice, they will flip to a different page of the book to continue the story where their decision has changed the environment; ultimately the ending. Through this interaction, Packard helped found the Choose Your Own Adventure genre of books starting in 1970.
Colossal Cave Adventure (Gameplay Screenshot)
These books eventually evolved into video games. One of the earliest forms of choose your own adventure games in video games were interactive fiction (started 1976) where the players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Will Crowther developed first text adventure game called Colossal Cave Adventure (originally called ADVENT). The game was based on the real life Colossal Cave but with fantasy elements such as dwarves and magic bridges. These text based adventure games are similar to the choose your own adventure books however the player has more freedom as they are not bounded to a few preset decisions. Although, due to the freedom of the player’s actions, the game is a lot more difficult to play and is easier to get mentally lost in what to do next.
In order to solve this problem, text-based adventure games evolved into graphic adventure games. (Images were added into the adventure games) The first graphic adventure game is Mystery House developed in 1980 which still used the same command line gameplay. Japan and America eventually helped push the graphic adventure games genre into two sub-genres, Visual Novels and Point and Click Adventures respectively, in effort to make the games more immersive and fun.
Point and Click Adventure games attempted to solve the issue by allowing the player to interact with the environment directly using their mouse instead of typing into a command line to perform an action.
Maniac Mansion (Gameplay Screenshot)
Maniac Mansion (1987) is the first point and click adventure game which was released on the Commodore 64. This game utilized a game engine and scripting tool called SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) which helped push forth more point and click adventure games for the latest generation of computers. Point and Click Adventure games allowed the players to visually see and interact with the world around them creating a sense of realism and interactivity between the game and the player.
Visual Novels tried to solve the problem by turning the game into a first person point of view game rather than a 2nd person point of view game. Visual novels were not very well documented back in the 1980s thus making it hard to determine which specific game started the genre, however many video games in this genre are considered to be and started off as erotic games otherwise known as “eroge.”
Flyable Heart (Gameplay Screenshot)
Visual Novels play similarly to the Choose Your Own Adventure books where the player reads long lines of text and choose from a preset list of decisions at a branching point. Visual Novels take it a step further by:
Adding voice actors to the character. (traditionally leaves the protagonist's voice out)
Having multiple character sprites with various poses and emotional faces.
Have generic backgrounds for each location in the game.
Almost never show the protagonist/player’s character (especially the face)
And is fairly common for the primary structural unit to be the day rather than the chapter, with formulaic awakenings and returnings to bed framing each day's events.
In order to increase player’s immersiveness in the game, to make the player believe that they are actually the protagonist or the main character, and to trick the player to think that world portrayed in the visual novel is real. Visual Novels and Point and Click Adventure games fixed the issue of a lack of interaction and immersiveness in two vastly different methods, both being extremely successful in its own regard.
Amnesiacs is a game that takes away mostly from the SCUMM games with the layout of the game being presented as a visual novel.
Amnesiacs (Gameplay Screenshot)
Amnesiacs implements the concepts of SCUMM through the use of constant interactivity with the player where the story progresses as the player makes decisions. Through this concept, we hope to create a relationship between the player and the character so that the player would feel regretful of making a bad decision. Amnesiacs uses the layout of Visual Novels in order to achieve additional immersiveness in the world. Since the image takes up two-thirds of the screen, the player can feel as if they are looking at the world through the eyes of the character. By creating this emotional and mental attachment to the character and the world, we have the ability to evoke emotions and tell a story that is real to the player.
