The Importance of a Plot

If you think about games and gaming and what it comes to games having a strong inner story, a plot, you can have many opinions. There are two extremes. Some might think that there should be sort of interactivity and action in games and that a plot is just something that doesn’t have such an importance.

This of course depends a lot about what kind of a game you are experiencing. If you have a shooter, maybe a first person shooter, you don’t necessarily want to follow something that is comparable to a story or line that walks you throuhg the game. You are happy to just shoot everything that moves, right?

What about adventure games? Here the plot has more meaning. Also in advneture games the dialogue and conversations bring a lot to the content. You also have some puzzles to solve. You have objects to pick up and use in some situations. That’s how adventure games work.

Can you think about a role playing game wihtout a plot? I hardly can. But of course in a role playing game you are also very interested how your main character or characters develop. Usually there are also choices made inside the game that vary how the story keeps moving on. Some games have a solid story line while others might have various events launched by a decision that the player has made.

If you want an example of a storydriven role playing game I would have to bring up Fallout and Fallout 2. These games had a deep and interesting story that also formed based on the desicions that the player makes.

So is strory or a plot important to you as a player? If we compare games to other mediums like books and movies we can think that games differ from them in that that they have this interactivity in them. Player can move a character or characters and make decisions that make an impact. You could hardly think of a movie that has no plot at all. But if you think about a classic game like Doom you could do fine wihtout understanding it’s story line.

Some games give a plot a lot of importance. Some games give us a slight idea of what is going on and deliver some action instead. Some games, maybe some simple games, might not have a plot at all. There are as many games as there are types of players. And we can say that that is many indeed.

Sierras early adventure games – Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards

As I am born in the 80s this game was one of those first games I played as a small child. It was released by Sierra in 1987. It uses a game engine called Adventure Game Interpreter or for short AGI that was originally created for producing the first Kings Quest game back in 1984. Again this was something we gamers had never seen. Suddenly you had graphics instead of staring at a screen that had just some text on it.

Before Sierras innovative way to create graphics to adventure games fans of adventure game genre had to content themselves to bare text parser with no graphics at all. These games had graphics but the actions the player makes have to be written. You can move the character and sometimes when you perform some command you need to be in some place inside the games inner world. And you can move from screen to another screen. I wasn’t even born when first text adventures came to markets but I can see how this kind of an improvement would be like.

Leisure Suit Larry was based on a text based adventure game originally released in 1981. Al Lowe copied most of this games ideas. It was almost the same game with only graphics added. This is my view. You can propably find a copy of this game and play it yourself and you will understand better (I can’t publish this games name).

My experiences with this first Larry game are strongly represented in my memories of my childhood. I learned to write some words with computer keyboard playing this game. Back then I didn’t understand games details. I for example didn’t understand what is a prophylactic. And graphics of this item in this game were blurry enough to let my imagination handle it as some sort of a gem. The game has some controversial content but it is understandable that you maybe would let a child play this game. Of course there are many other games that might be more suitable for a young kid. But this is how I got started with Sierra.

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