While the survey is inherently biased (since this site naturally attracts adventure game enthusiasts) and while I am not exactly a statistician, the survey does give some rough insights into the opinions and demographic makeup of Adventure Gamers readers.
Particularly telling are your answers to the question, ''Are you more or are you less interested in adventure games than you were five years ago?''. This question was only given to those who had indicated more than five years of experience with adventure games. 48% said ''about the same'', while 37% said they were more excited about the genre than they were five years ago.
Although we don't have a previous survey to compare against, it does seem that adventure gamers are particularly upbeat about the genre. Such excitement makes sense. I remember five years ago the Adventure Gamers staff was struggling just to find enough good games to feature in the Hype-O-Meter, which is our regular top 10 ranking of games that people are excited about. The ''death''of adventure games was one of the most-discussed topics at the time. But the quantity and quality of adventure game releases has clearly gone up dramatically in the past several years. Now the staff struggles just to narrow the list of Hype-O-Meter candidates down to 10.
The survey also asked about some basic demographics. Adventure games are known to be popular amongst women and it's not surprising to see that reflected in the survey: 27% of the respondents were female. For reference, only 3% of GameSpot visitors is female, and 5% at 1UP.com (this is according to their corporate pages).
The average age of Adventure Gamers visitors also skews higher than usual. 7% of the respondents is below 20. The ages 20 to 34 together account for 68% of the Adventure Gamers audience. Check out the graph for more details:
We're honored to have received five survey responses from gamers over the age of 70. Computer games haven't exactly been around for very long, and I envy anyone who at an old age can enjoy a still relatively new form of entertainment. (I hope when I'm over 70 I'll be able to figure out whatever we'll use to play games then... some kind of full-body digitization retinal projection thingamagig? I have no idea what I just wrote.)
More results from the survey will be included in another blog post. For now, I'm curious how interested you are in the genre compared to years past, but more importantly why. Which specific games most affect how you feel about adventure games right now? As per usual, sound off in the comment section!'Just thought it was an interesting article, thought I'd share it around and see what people think of it. I was under the impression that most adventurers had lost faith in the adventure game genre. Personally, I think adventure games would still be very popular if the gaming media didn't seem to try to purposely keep the spotlight away from them.Adventure games viewed more favorably by their fans than often thought?
Wow, that's really great to read.I pretty much started gaming with text adventures, so it was a genre I got into early. In my early and mid teens I had stuff like Monkey Island and Broken Sword to play, and things were just great. More recently, I'd been totally disillusioned with the adventure genre, until I played Sam and Max Season 1. It's just wonderful, and it totally restored my faith in the future of the genre.It's good to know that so many other gamers are still so into the genre - a genre I like to consider the archetypal PC genre. I just hope more developers would realise that there is a market for adventure games. Quality and quantity are on the decline - and have been for some time. There are still developers out there keeping the flame burning, but most of them don't seem to be doing a very good job, sadly.Adventure games viewed more favorably by their fans than often thought?
[QUOTE=''mfsa'']Quality and quantity are on the decline - and have been for some time. There are still developers out there keeping the flame burning, but most of them don't seem to be doing a very good job, sadly.[/QUOTE]Maybe so, but I don't think even that has been to the degree that it's often depicted as. For instance, going by Gamespot's adventure game reviews, at least half, and probably more along the lines of 75% or higher, of the adventure games out there are god awful garbage that somehow physically damage you to play them. Now look at many of those same games' reviews at an adventure-specific site like Adventuregamers or Justadventure, and the reviews' contents and scores seem a little fairer.It's as though the reviewers at other sites for many of these games aren't true adventure gamers, and if the game isn't the same quality as a Myst game or other high profile adventure, they simply can't tolerate it and give it a review based on their biased outlook, unable to look at it objectively because they have this overly-narrow image of what adventure games have to be, what guidelines they have to follow. To be honest, almost all the Gamespot reviews for adventure games left me feeling like I hadn't got the whole picture, hadn't been given a rundown of the game objectively or at all conservatively (IE, they crucified the game for things that don't sound like they would ruin it if you tried to give it a chance). Not so with reviews from Adventuregamers, though, my go-to review site for new adventure games now that I've found it.To summarize, it seems to me like many of the professional reviewers for adventure games on sites not specific to adventure games shouldn't be reviewing them in the first place because they just don't know how. And because there are so many of these types of reviewers today, adventure games start looking like they're on a decline, when that's not necessarily the case. My advice? Take the adventure reviews of non-adventure-specific sites with a grain of salt (hell, don't even read them if necessary), and go to adventure game sites for all your reviews of them.
Bump
I agree with you for the most part. One thing the mainstream press seems to have a lack of understanding about is exactly what it is that the adventure gamers want and what draws them to those games. I think the Gamespot reviews of Scratches is an excellent example, as well as Barrow Hill. The review seemed to be more about criticizing the interface than actually talking about the games. Adventure Gamers have extremely varied tastes but for the most part they enjoy taking their time and thinking through a situation, getting deeply involved in a story that unfolds, and developing feelings for the characters in the game.Those games are not about 'wowing' players with high frame rates or loads of effects - they go much deeper than that.I think it's unfortunate that the mainstream press doesn't seem to understand that and their reviews reflect it. When I read the GS review for Barrow Hill and there was a comparison to it and Silent Hill because they both had the word 'hill' in them, all I could do was shake my head. Downing it because ''this adventure based on authentic archaeological digs in the UK doesn't live up to its almost-namesake,'' was such a stretch as to be completely ridiculous. One game is an action/survival horror game and the other is a slow paced adventure game. Heck, they are completely different genres. Not only that, but one of them was made by a team of developers with a huge budget and sold for $40+ dollars, while the other was made by one man and sold for $20. How can anyone try to hold those side-by-side? I really can't believe GS let that slide by.If you don't like the game, fine. Say why you didn't like it and don't use your reviews as a platform for telling the world what you think is wrong with the adventure gaming genre today.That's my 2 cents for what it's worth...
Very well formulated post, Sanctum, thank you. Anyway, bump.
BumpEDIT - By the way, anybody else get a giggle out of the fact that only 3% of Gamespotters are female? :P Not surprising, of course, but still humorous.
LOL, JP! With all these bumps you've given this and lack of interest, I think it says a lot for the genre's standing in the mainstream. Now before people start thinking I'm some AG-fanboy, I do love them, but probably play more FPS games than anything else - although I pretty much play ALL genres.
i used to love adventure games back in the 90s. the last great adventure game was grim fandango. and then there was that great drought, with only the longest journey making a dent in that drought. but now, with its sequel and sam %26 max series making a strong showing, it's starting to blossom a bit, but it's nothing like it was in the 90s. just look at these titles: indiana jones (last crusade %26 fate of atlantis), loom, monkey island series, sam %26 max hit the road, full throttle, day of the tentacle, grim fandango, space quest series, king's quest series, police quest series, quest for glory series, leisure suit larry series, gabriel knight series, phantasmagoria (+sequel). and that's just listing dynamix/sierra and lucasarts games.you know what seems to have killed adventure games? the end of cartoon 2d graphics (just like disney's tradition of 2d cartoon movies being killed off around the same time - just took too much time and effort). ever since, games like gabriel knight and phantasmagoria have tried to find an alternative to the 2d cartoons in live acting, but that just didn't pan out because at the time gamers didn't care for live actors (and video games weren't that mainstream back then, so actors didn't care to star in video games). so the genre suffered as a result, cuz it had no palette upon which to realize its vision. now that we have great 3d graphics, i think that may be what's triggering adventure games' comback. there is technology to back up artstyle and create the type of games the devs are envisioning. just a theory.
[QUOTE=''Hidden_Sanctum'']LOL, JP! With all these bumps you've given this and lack of interest, I think it says a lot for the genre's standing in the mainstream. Now before people start thinking I'm some AG-fanboy, I do love them, but probably play more FPS games than anything else - although I pretty much play ALL genres.[/QUOTE]Nah, it doesn't show the mainstream's standing, it shows Gamespotters' standing, the majority of whom let the whims of the gaming media guide them like a little lapdog, and as we've just gone over, the media tries to keep adventure games out of the spotlight a lot. Adventure games just appear to be dying in the mainstream because the media, the one with the biggest voice, says they are. And those who don't try to see for themselves believe them, so of course adventure games have lost some of their popularity. But I think the bigger part of that is that all the other genres out there have become much bigger, flashier, and more high-profile, so that further makes those who don't look deeper into things drawn toward those games instead of adventures.Even though adventure games have been shoved out of the way a lot by the big, snobby genres on their way to the gates of success, they haven't been knocked down and stampeded on like the media depicts them. I think they're still on their feet, a little ruffled, but still standing and walking.Anyway, I'm the same in that adventures aren't my favorites. I might sound like a huge adventure fan myself with the amount of time I spend talking about them on this board, but I'm not, I'm just the only one trying to get people to pull their heads out of their asses and see for themselves that this stuff isn't as bad as the reviewers who think they know what should and shouldn't be about a genre (that is, they keep giving biased reviews because they're not into what adventure games are about) keep saying.I, myself, love FPS more than anything. RTS is fun too, and RPG isn't bad. But adventure games are right up there with them in my opinion.
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