Dear Esther is a video game, because... if I tell someone I'm going to sit down and play a video game and I sit down and play Dear Esther they aren't going to do any worse than sneer, but if I tell someone I'm going to sit down and play a video game and I sit down and eat a sandwich they are going to think I've lost my mind.

Would like to extend a thanks for putting the game titles at the corner of the screen.

Three slices of bread aren't a sandwich. They're Vice President Pence.

"I certainly can't have an opinion in fewer than 20 minutes anymore" is now my most cherished quote. I feel ya..... I feel ya.

What philosophers call "qualia" we call "prototype semantics" in linguistics. People don't actually walk around with a fully-formed verbal definition of "car" in their heads, even though that's how philosophers and lawyers generally treat words and their meanings. Instead we learn what "car" means by interpreting, thoughout our lives, what _other people_ mean when they say "car". The kind of things most often called "car" are the most prototypical -- evoking most clearly the composite, culturally specific, abstract mental image we have of "car" -- while other cars are less prototypical, and other vehicles may or may not evoke the image enough to be considered "cars" at all. And because it's practically impossible to put a complicated, subjective, abstract notion like this into words, legalistic verbal definitions are usually unsatisfying and lead to weird unintuitive inclusions/exclusions. They're basically post-hoc attempts to rationalise an "irrational", subjective concept. The Berlin interpretation of "roguelike" is a sort of hybrid that acknowledges this by trying to verbalise the prototypical features without insisting on a strict cutoff.

"You must be new here" is my favorite line.

“Art is interactive” THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! Though not the main point of the video, that is a belief I hold dear and true to me. Art requires some level of action, whether physical or mental, to be appreciated. Otherwise, it’s just ink on paper, pigments on canvas, dried up lumps of clay, vibrations in the air, discolored celluloid, digital code, etc. things that it’s made up of rather than the feelings you get from it. As you brought up, a list of ingredients rather than a recipe.

In linguistics there is a concept called prototype semantics. Basically building something like a radar-view of circles with the innermost circle presenting the most prototypical expression of a given thing. And it is descriptive and not normative and totally dependent on the cultural context. Example: in germany the most prototypical bird is a sparrow and outliers are penguins. For americans the innermost might be the sparrow. Another example: what constitutes a chair? Four legs? A backside? What about those ikea chairs swinging freely from like two legs? Prototype semantics says that a four-legged chair is close to the.center, the ikea chair a bit more out there. And since it is descriptive it can change. Could be applied here, but oh well.

I find it neat how 'Doom Clone' eventually evolved into 'First Person Shooter.' I wonder if we'll end up seeing a similar change to a mechanics-focused definition of what is currently referred to as 'Souls-Like' games.

"What even is genre?" -Okay... "The answer to which is a bit beyond a KZfaq video essay..." -Oh. Bummer. "Or it would be on anyone else's chanel..." -Wait... "But this is Innuendo Studios" -yes. Yes! YES! "Welcome to WSGT, a philosophical interrogation into the meaning of genre in and beyond the gaming idiom with the adventure game as out guide." -YEEEEEES! WOOOHOOO! This right here is why this chanel is my favorite on all of KZfaq.

This is actually really helpful for me as an amateur game dev. A lot of writing on games is on primary mechanics to the exclusion of incidental mechanics, with the idea that incidental mechanics distract from the supposed core of the gameplay (e.g. Mario jumping is good, and Mario being able to accomplish a lot by jumping is very good, so therefore anything Mario has to accomplish by not-jumping is a sort of failure or missed opportunity on the part of Nintendo to integrate the gameplay). That's usually pretty good praxis, but it never sat completely well with me. As a kid, some of my favorite moments in games came from things unique to the gameplay and unique to the world, like finding the Master Sword at the bottom of the sea in The Wind Waker, or reading a really sweet letter by a dead woman in a Paper Mario game. I would get really embarrassed trying to explain to anyone why stuff like that mattered to me; neither me, nor my friends and family, nor most games writers really had any language to talk about it, so most of the time I just passed it off as nostalgia as quickly as I could and let it be. But now, having watched this, I feel like I sold out some genuinely lovely moments for no good reason. Why should all game design be based around things you're always going to be doing? Life itself is so much smaller and so much less beautiful without moments of incident, and games are no different. Thanks for putting into such great words what my weird gut feeling could never hope to articulate

Holy crap the point at 16:46 blew my god damn mind. This explains it so well. I never thought about how the mechanics of how you control adventures games, is what gives them the ambiguity necessary to be ADVENTUROUS. This is also why all the quests in games that use minimaps and compasses to point you directly at the objectives feel so narratively empty. Thank you for this video so much.

This video gave me the feeling you get when you take a road for the first time and suddenly end up at a location you know, and your whole mental image of the area does a big damn jump, and your brain tickles as you go "oh shit, THAT'S where I am!?". That, only for the abstract concept of genre.

Your point of genre being about how it feels is basically a perfect one. I sort my movies at home by number of entries in the franchise and then alphabetically, which many people find confusing and noone's able to guess if they try to figure it out on their own. Many guess that it's by genre or ask why it isn't, to which I always answer that genres don't really exist, they're just an attempt to generalize how something feels, and all my movies are so personal and individual to me that I wouldn't be able to quantify or sort them in any way that represents that. That, they understand. It's the same for them. They just usually don't think about it.

Damn... we're shooting Guybrush Threepwood again after so long.

I find so interesting how it seems that we are slowly changing all definitions and concepts from being switches of states to being spectrum, it changes so much about everything and it make so much sense Funny enough, the first approximation that i had with this change of perspective was from gender, that in Spanish (my actual language) is the same word as genre: Género lmao

"This is a discussion too long for a normal video-essay on KZfaq... or at least it would be, but this is Innuendo Studios. We'll take the long road" - Holy fucking shit, sir, I love you so much just for this line alone

A good joke from The Big Bang Theory: The gang are watching the Sandra Bullock movie "28 Days" and Sheldon is riveted by it because Penny has successfully convinced him it's 28 Days Later and he thinks zombies are going to invade at any minute. That idea makes all the weepy drama he'd normally hate spellbinding.

The discussion of definitions and genre reminded me strongly of the obsession TERFs and other transphobes have with defining "woman" and "man" by a set of rigid parameters for the purpose of exclusion. No one actually uses words that way, you don't see a woman and think "this is an adult human that is of the class that produces large gametes", as they claim to define the word.

This reminds me the conversations about whether or not "Old Town Road" is a country song

This is talking about genre, but it really applies to gender, and any identity that is better reflected in qualia and spectrums rather than binaries. Or, as said to Stevonnie: "You are not two people. And you are not one person. You are an experience!"

"And that's the end of our journey!" heh. Journey.

Samuel R. Delaney and Innuendo Studios Name a more iconic duo I'll wait

Wow, this video on discussing the meaning of Adventure games is really making me hungry.

Next time you cringe at the mere question of "is a hot dog a sandwich?", you can ask the better, parallel question: "is tea a soup?"

I've never seen the other episodes in this series. I thought this was going to be some kinda Monkey Island theory, but this is better lol.

Me: this video kinda boring- Innuendo Studios: We’re doing sandwich discourse. Me: nOw We’Re TaLkInG!

I wonder how this can be said to relate to Japanese Visual Novels. After all, the Ace Attorney/Phoenix Wright games likely sprang from that tradition, but, in the West, have been marketed as traditional "Adventure" games.

"A sandwich is not merely an object" - Ian Danskin 2019

Oh my god, Small World! That was such a foundational experience for me, I can't believe I forgot about it! Also, really good video. Right up there with "This is Not a Tomato" and your one on The Beginner's Guide

Never expected to hear 'chip butty' in an American accent, felt strange.

Innuendo Studios masterfully picks apart alt-reich talking points and that's great, but man it's good to see this channel go back to some videogame analysis. It feels like it's been a loooong time since the monkey island video.

Wittgenstein's "family resemblance" concept. Wittgenstein used games as an example of something that is related by a family resemblance and lacks one essential feature that all games share.

I'm so happy you mentioned LOOM! It's still one of my favorite games, from the concept to the music to the originality of the core mechanic. The worldbuilding and writing always made me feel the whole thing would have also worked as some kind of fantastical sci-fi novel. Beneath A Steel Sky had that flavor too (but less fantastical, more cyberpunk). (And on that note, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream actually *was* based on a short work of sci-fi. Something about literary-ish sci-fi lends itself really well to Lucas Arts-style adventure games, and vice versa, maybe? I never thought about that til now).

"Action-adventure" Oh boy, see you in 2030 if you're gonna deconstruct why that one makes sense.

i hadn't realised that Berliner definition of rogue like used a completely different conception of definition to a traditional vent diagram.

“Tonight is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel” is one of my favorite songs

"i can't have an opinion in less than 20 minutes" is a mood

The existence of qualia as a function of human pattern recognition is why AI is so damn far from human-level intelligence.

I love this video. I love the Berliner rogue-like approach to definitions, I love that you put [sic] on Andrew Plotkin's unnecessarily gendered pronoun for the player, I love that two of the people you quoted leave out the space in videogame like how I do, I love the thing about how knowing a story is a mystery changes how the reader interacts with it, and I love that guacamole-and-egg sandwich being eaten with knife and fork at the end of the sandwich section. I still think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is exactly what I want from a science fiction movie, but I'll admit that it might not satisfy every sci-fi fan as much as sci-fi fan myself.

Love the adventure games discussions. The semiotics of genre is a brilliant direction too. its own adventure.

You can't imagine how FUN these videos are to watch. The way you build your arguments get me smiling, all excited, as if I was watching the most thrilling of action movies. Your sense of rhythm is delicious and as much as I love your political videos, I'm glad you still get time (and motivation) to write about videogames. Love your work.

As soon as you said “The horizon does flips,” “Tonight Is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel” popped into my head. I was very excited when it turned out we both had the same idea.

I am now going to link this whenever someone claims that Smash isn't a fighting game

God damn, this was good. I love it when I think I'm reaching the end of a video and see that the runtime is still halfway. So _meaty_ !

It's so great to see another essay about video games. Thank you for finishing this one. Good luck with all the other ideas you will put to video!

thought this was a re upload, pleasantly surprised.

AN ADVENTURE GAME EPISODE?! It's been so long since we got one of these from you.

Now that it has been 4 years again, perhaps a new installment is in order? 🤔 I really hope so cause these are awesome and thought-provoking

Ah, so good to see another video from you. You got pretty meta at a few points there.

It’s interesting that you mention crime fiction as a good example of interactivity in books and film since they’re often called whodunnit’s or howcatchem’s based on the rules we expect to follow

You took my perception of a genre and made it go into a roller-coaster of a definition change.

Im so glad you made another one of these!! They're so fascinating. ❤️

I always love it when you use video games to talk about more than just video games, and this video hits the spot!

Please make another one of these, I could watch nothing but this series, so bloody good mate!

recently discovered your channel because of this video and wow, thanks for all the ideas that you are bringing, it is a delight

Bit about associations is spot on. Just because it's association doesn't mean we're not allowed to look for patterns!

Two minutes in, I'm thoroughly refreshed on why I love you, man You are deeply missed when you are gone

I realize this is from a year ago, and I’m about five minutes in, but for the sake of putting it in text somewhere on this page; Adventure games have always been games which eschewed classical physics/collision based mechanics of preceding video games and relied instead on a static, abstract input/output model of UI/UX. Part of the reason “Adventure” was the best anyone could do was for the exact reason you highlight in regard to how other games tend to be genred-player UX. Without having an interface which involves a traditional “concrete” UX between User Input and program Output (simulated physics reacting to player controlled collisions, initiated through a specific means of physical UI procedure/controls, requiring a specific skill to be employed by the user), Adventure games couldn’t really be labeled, even before game genres were outwardly memetic. What would you call them? Typers? When they started to incorporate more physical UI, like mice, they became “Point-and-Click Adventures,” following traditional convention. The reason games like Zelda inherited the word “Adventure,” is similar. Games like Zelda, and Adventure, just didn’t fit the standard model for what video games tended to be when they were made. They weren’t linear, they weren’t time restrictive, and they weren’t player prescriptive to the same degree other games were. The primary focus of these games was the “adventure,” with less focus put on hand-eye coordination, timing, and mechanical skill. The latter three things, while not the primary focus, did still play a role in the UX of the games, so “action” was added to the genre label to help people understand what they would be experiencing when they played. The exact same convention was used when role-playing games inherited some of the Zelda-isms Nintendo had conceptualized for their games in the Action Adventure genre, becoming “Action RPG’s.” The addition of hand-eye coordination, timing, and mechanical skill to the UX made the games more “Action” oriented from that player experience perspective. Video games aren’t a narrative medium. Narrative plays a role as a wrapper that decorates and contextualizes an interface experience, but it’s secondary to those interface mechanics. As such, it would make no sense to genre them by narrative. So, they’re genred based on UX. Even “horror” itself isn’t a game genre. Games with horror narrative elements are usually genred by a mix of narrative genre and Player experience, like “survival horror” or “action horror.” So, I’d say it’s not just association that leads to games being labeled “Adventure” games, but a lack of, or reduction of, skilled-based UI experiences in a game’s implementation, instead swapping the traditional relationship between mechanics and narrative, putting narrative first. Any game that puts any design element before mechanics, but still follows an anthropomorphic aesthetic for the UI/UX, is some type of “Adventure” game. What type of adventure game it is depends on how much of the mechanics, if any, requires traditional player skills. Edit: So I finished the video, and it seems you got to this by part 8, though I think it might have taken you more than a few paragraphs because it’s difficult for you (possibly) to conceptualize games as a non-narrative medium. Narratives are second-hand and linear (there is a purely coherent and derivative beginning and end that follows a controlled [by a second party] sequence). Video games are first-hand and non-linear (the user determines much of the pacing and the importance of individual, experiential events [even those that would be otherwise inconsequential]). Video games by their nature can’t be a narrative medium, but they can use elements of narrative to decorate and contextualize the mechanics puzzle/challenge at the core of the experience (which is the actual art form).

OMG, I just re-watched the first part of the series and you gift us a new video! ♥

So glad you're back! I missed you and your content!

You never cease to amaze me with the quality of your content.

I'm glad to see a video with a larger focus on games again, I naturally appreciate all of your content and you in general! But I live and breathe games, so it's what I'll feel most connected to. Thank you sir

Damn dude. I found your channel via The Alt-right Playbook coming up in my youtube suggestions, but I continue to be blown away by every video of yours I watch, even when you're presenting on a topic that isn't as personally relevant to me (ie Phil Fish or COD). Your ability of analyze, contextualize, and entertain all at once is very great indeed. The topics you choose to dissect are important as well. I know this is a weird place to leave a comment like this. I've just been kinda marathoning your stuff lately and wanted to voice my support somehow. Anyway... *please* keep doing what you're doing.

This is a good case study on what your channel is. You published a video years after announcing it, and slid into a long discussion few others would attempt here. Innuendo Studios: Rare, thoughtful, and impractical.

Years after seeing it, still one of my favorite video essays on this site. Wonderful work

Absolutely loved it. You're an excellent educator for showing not what to think, but new ways of thinking, and I wish I'd found your videos back when I was in college.

Thanks for the continued fantastic content and great conclusions here. My favorite video essay channel on KZfaq right now. 👌👌👌

This makes me think of Wittgenstein’s familial relationships. That all “adventure games” may not have a list of characteristics that overlap, but rather all connect to each other through the familial inspiration of the previous title that you mentioned in the video. It’s all like a complicated web, rather than a open space all adventure games sit.

Mind blowingly interesting, well written and expertly paced essay. Thank you for the ride

Thank you for including the titles for each game, saved me a bunch of googling.

Goddamn. Your art analysis really is the best!

I watched this video when it first came out, and today I rewatched it. I wish I could give it another like. Great take that stands up to scrutiny and time.

I'm glad I was here with you, too. I've always struggled with genre, in part because I am a writer and people are constantly asking me what I write. Trying to compress everything I create into a single word is impossible to me, and thus the idea of genre has always escaped me. The idea that genre is the mechanics of the narrative, that it is a direction of attention? Suddenly it makes sense. This helped a lot, and I'm so happy you made this video. Looking forward to the next time you get analytical with games; its always an adventure ☺️

PLEASE IAN, TALK MORE ABOUT VIDEOGAMES [sic, I guess?] TO US THIS IS PURE BLISS I'VE BEEN REWATCHING YOU OLD VIDEOS FOR A WHILE NOW

Been waiting for another part for this series!

Actually godly content, its great having found your channel

I own that Barenaked Ladies album. I really should've realized that's where the phrase came from before you said so.

The talk about defining genre was so very good. Thank you so much for this

you think of everything! I'm always about to write in the comments something like "what about portal? is that an adventure game?" and then you start talking about it. gdi

Brilliant. Genre being the way you parse the experience is really insightful.

watching KZfaq videos is an adventure game

Came for the adventure game discussion, stayed for the justified thrashing of Socrates. He really was a buttface. XP

I recall that you made a video about developments you thought *could* propel adventure games to a new state of being. Since then all the games you listed have been released, so: what are your thoughts now?

Honestly, I always thought "interactive fiction" was a far better catch-all for the genre. Sure, it still sound vague and fuzzy, but those two words cut closer to the heart of the genre: "interactions" that drive a complex, unique narrative "fiction". "Mechanically-agnostic", though...that is a pretty good qualifier. Funnily enough, I'm old enough to remember when the genre started moving into graphical representation and people would start to qualify "adventure" with words like "text", "graphic", and "point-and-click" to distinguish between them (those qualifiers still actually find their way in Steam description tags and retro game sites).

Even though I'm a big fan of the Alt-Right Playbook, it's good to see you going back to the videos you love.

Excellent, great, video. It blew my mind and made a lot of things about categorizing genres clear to me.

This was so worth the wait!

Thank you, this was great. Happened to watch it exactly during a period of time where I was asking myself what makes an adventure game (point and click specifically) good. I almost feel like I want to talk to you about these ideas, such a good video this is

I am glad you are still alive lol Just kidding - really liked this, it kinda covered stuff I think about concerning adventure games and so-called walking simulators and whatnot.

This was fantastic and worth the wait, thank you.

The philosophical question of what something is (sandwich), is something I always found most satisfying in answering with some linguistic principles. Excuse me for forgetting the exact term but the principle tells us this: A word is only a word because it's not another word. Let's take "tree" for example. If you are trying to school someone who never spoke or heard a word in his life and you pointed at a tree and said "tree", will he know exactly what you mean? Probably not. For him, you could mean the branch, nature as a whole, the color brown, so on and so on. Only when you begin differentiating "Tree" from "Branch", "Stump", "Green", "Nature", ... will the person and you be on the same ground of understanding. That is the basis of verbal communication. What I find most interesting about that is, that you still won't communicate 100% what you mean because your assumptions of what a Tree is are different from those of other individuals. So after this long rant, what I wanted to say is: A sandwich is which it's not (and we all make these definitions for ourselves).

Me: this will be a fine video to watch while my dinner in the oven, nothing about adventure games should make me particularly hungry. Ian: :)

I love listening to you talk

i don't play many adventure games but I live for these kinds of videos because this is true game analysis. I love filmcrit youtube because interpreting and deconstructing art just to see how the cogs turn is fascinating to me and you, Hbomberguy, Dan Olson, and a very very few other media critics/annalists are actually critically examining and interpreting videogames as art, examining how the player navigates the fascinatingly unique inter-activeness that only games has, and the art of design. You're actively elevating games as medium with work like this because you're engaging with the art you consume on a fundamental level, something that so so so so few people in geek culture actually do

That was one hell of an adventure.

What a fantastic video. Thanks for making it!

YES! I missed your videos so much!

Lol. Using the language of this video, my graphic novel is a coming of age story built out of lovecraftian horror

I don't have much to add to this video, but thank you for bringing even just a glimmer of attention to Grim Fandango. It's my all-time favourite game, and I wish it got more attention and notoriety when it came out back in the 90's.