As the underground cult of indie development surges to the surface and crowdfunding allows vague ideas to transform into products, the scope of gaming bubbles and changes. Games now span spectrums of physical input and emotional amplitude, and our perspectives change with them.
Amid this upheaval is an age-old genre that for some reason resists attempts of acceptance in the "hardcore" gaming audience: point-and-click adventures. They're just choose-your-own-adventure stories; they're interactive novels; the choices in them don't matter – all arguments against adventures as true games, while shoot-die-respawn titles play on, unchallenged.
Joystiq's own Top 10 of 2012 list includes
The Walking Dead, a high-profile and famously intense point-and-click, and my own Best of the Rest has
Yesterday, a gritty adventure from Pendulo Studios. Obviously, we consider both of these games to be
games. Other players, maybe not so much – so let the argument begin.
In order to debate whether adventure games are, in fact, games, we first need a shared definition of the term. Without definition, you could argue that
The Walking Dead isn't a game and I could just as passionately espouse why it is, and we could both be correct within the worlds of our own, secret definitions. While mutually assured correctness sounds like a wonderful conclusion, in reality it does nothing to examine the question at hand and leads to huffy frustration, leaving the debate unresolved forever.
What we're really arguing is the definition of a "game," rather than any particular sub-genre, which are all just variations of that main theme. This is my definition.
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