Tag: Adventure

Eric Swain Game Essays

Deponia: Down in the Dumps

(I was assigned to do a review on Deponia, was given a review copy and everything from Nightmare Mode. It was written, editing and ready for posting. Then the day before it was scheduled Nightmare Mode went on hiatus to restructure itself into its present form. I was given my review back and allowed to find it another home. Another site took it, but it fell by the wayside for various understandable reasons. I remembered recently that this existed and I asked for it back and the editor graciously said yes. | more

Eric Swain Recent Posts, Thoughts

The RPG Lineage Chart

Way back at PAX East I got to talking with some people over dinner Saturday and one of the topics that came up was my Dragon Age II Lineage post I did the year before and the research that went into it. I described what I did and that I ended up making a chart. In looking through my collection of business cards from that weekend I believe it was Scott Macmillan that asked to see that chart if he could. Well, I found it recently after the recent home renovation in a pile of papers and roleplaying books. | more

Eric Swain Game Issues, Recent Posts

A Clarification of Genre: Adventure

Please read the Introduction entry as this post will be building off of the foundation stones and concepts put forth there. That post also contains some clarifications for how I will be writing this series. You can read the previous entry on Action here. Adventure Adventure games are a little more difficult to talk about than Action games. There is a mentality that sticks with them because Adventure games were always understood as this very narrow brand of games. | more

Eric Swain Game Issues, Recent Posts

A Clarification of Genre: Introduction

Several months ago, I tried to explain some of the problems I saw with the discussions of video game genres. These conversations around what are Adventure game and RPGs keep popping up every couple of days in posts and all over twitter and I wanted to address some concerns with what I saw taking place in these conversations. I didn’t convey my ideas well at the time. Also, spawning off of this post I realized that while people debate genre there is a lot of annoyance at these debates at the perceived uselessness of the idea of genres. | more

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

The Supergenres of Action, RPGs and Adventure Games

I wrote a piece for Gameranx asking the question, ‘What is action/adventure?‘ This is part of the larger question about game genres, one that’s been discussed at length over twitter and several posts have come up as well with regards of what certain genres are. As much as the genre debate is generally one of semantics, or in the case of Action/Adventure pigeonholing, I feel there is a necessary undercurrent of philosophy and focus behind the question of what they are that is generally lacking in the current discussion. | more