Hijinx and Deconstruction

The last of the adventure genre’s greats (Interactive Storytelling, Part 1)

When I wrote the previous article on so-called interactive storytelling, I was repeatedly reminded that while I had taken a year to finally look at Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, that work’s genre deconstruction had missed the boat by a quarter century. 1993 saw the release of two important entries into the adventure game genre: Sam & Max Hit the Road (S&MHtR) and Gadget: Invention, Travel, & Adventure (Gadget).

It’s worth mentioning Myst was also released in 1993. The game was a sales juggernaut, moving over 6.3M units worldwide. Despite this impressive market penetration, I am not alone in counting Myst a massive step backwards, not only for the genre, but for games as a whole. Next Generation magazine termed it “gaming’s bleakest hour”.¹ There’s some gatekeeping nonsense about how Myst’s fans aren’t real gamers, but the gist of the actual criticism runs:²

[B]ehind its slick graphics and enigmatic sense of mystery, Myst was hopelessly shallow. The entire game consisted of puzzles locked behind puzzles, and while those enigmatic riddles were devious, they were also limited.

The interaction consisted of things like going to one room, seeing a door that needs to be opened, backtracking to a different room, throwing a lever, returning to the first room and noting the result… over and over forever. And, as noted above, the payoff for solving a puzzle was yet another puzzle:³

The puzzles are based exclusively on trial and error: the epitome of poor game design. […] The designers were good at creating a facade of mystical nonsense: you weren’t stuck because the game was bad, but because you just didn’t “get it.”

So, from a gameplay standpoint, the game falls well short of elevating the genre. Even three years on, one critic said:⁴

Myst led many publishers to believe that pretty screens meant more than pace and logic. We’re still recovering.

Having lived through this era, I can confirm the wrong lessons were learned by management in the games biz. The success of Myst served to further amp up the usual focus on flashy trash.

But the lessons were wrong in a more fundamental way than anyone recognized at the time. The industry looked at Myst and saw “pretty graphics sell.” What had actually sold 6.3M copies was presence—the sense of being inside a place. Myst wasn’t a bad adventure game; it was a spatial-exploration game that had no category to call its own in 1993, and so inherited the adventure genre’s interface by default. Its audience wasn’t looking for puzzles. They were looking for somewhere to be. The publishers who chased Myst’s success by building prettier adventure games were misidentifying the species: they saw the scales and assumed fish, when the thing was a snake.

Myst is even regarded as having negatively impacted the success of actually good games in the genre like S&MHtR.⁵

PC gamers who had cut their teeth on Myst found it difficult to switch mental gears from the funereal elegance of Cyan’s work to the cartoonish whimsy of Sam & Max Hit the Road.

But these players weren’t adventure gamers who liked the wrong adventure game. They were exploration players who’d never been adventure gamers at all—handed a genre controller that happened to be the only one on the shelf. Of course S&MHtR confused them. It was asking them to solve jokes when they wanted to inhabit rooms.

S&MHtR continued the tradition of LucasArts’ SCUMM-engine games, of which The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) remains the best entry. I already mentioned some of the important gameplay improvements present in this series. Monkey Island even directly referenced lame genre tropes, for instance, having a literal Red Herring inventory item. To be clear, this refers to items that seem to be useful, but are not. Appropriately, in Monkey Island, the item goes to feed a troll.

I was a fan of Sam & Max from its first incarnation as a funny book during the indie comix explosion of the mid-’80s. It was a standout for originality, humor, and amazing art. These elements are carried through to the game, making it excellent as well.

The self-aware humor is amped up, with the protagonists taking every opportunity to reference being in an absurd video game. There are fourth wall-breaking moments aplenty, including one where repeatedly directing Sam to pick up an item results in him starting to cry, and Max addressing you directly:⁶

Max: Now you’ve done it! You’ve broken Sam’s spirit with your stupid attempts to pick up that silly object!

Still, I’ll admit the hijinx of Sam & Max aren’t for everyone. In fact, though they made it to the small screen in 1997, their animated adventures were canceled after a single season, retaining cult status.

What S&MHtR added to the SCUMM tradition wasn’t just humor—it’s visibility. The self-aware gags are doing structural work: they make the player’s mechanical relationship to the game into an object of comedy. When Max turns to the screen and scolds you for breaking Sam’s spirit, the fourth wall doesn’t just crack—it reverses polarity. The game is no longer a world you look into. It’s a world that looks back. The genre has noticed it has an audience, and it finds the audience’s behavior absurd.

But the best work deconstructing the interactive narrative form for my money is Gadget. Its gameplay is fairly standard to the genre but doesn’t present the usual false choices. In fact, it’s entirely linear—you can’t do anything or go anywhere that isn’t scripted.

Where the game really shines is in the atmosphere its discordant soundscape, deliberately uncanny-valley visuals, and rambling, sometimes incoherent dialogue creates:⁷

Each second of the game is filled with paranoia and dread. Every cryptic story about mind control, every abandoned and unexplorable railway station, and every allusion to an apocalyptic future builds on a suspenseful and overpowering darkness.

The reason for this is Shōno Haruhiko came at the whole project from a different direction:⁸

[T]he work’s emphasis was not on action or gameplay, but to give a strong sense of presence to the game world and its environment. With the oppressive atmosphere and the preservation of tension and mystique, I was aiming to derive a quiet catharsis, based heavily on an element of ambiguity.

Myst achieved gameworld presence through open spatial wandering; Gadget through claustrophobic linearity. Neither is really an adventure game. Both are presence machines dressed in adventure game clothes—which is why adventure game metrics miss the point in both cases.

I can make no claims as to Shōno’s awareness of Umberto Eco’s definition of the open work (opera aperta)—that’s not something we ever discussed—but he seems to have arrived at its structural logic. Eco describes the open work as a “construction kit” offered to the interpreter: organized ambiguity within structural limits, where the audience completes the meaning the artist deliberately left unassembled. A successful open work produces what Eco calls “controlled disorder”—not chaos, but a bounded field of possible readings that remains the world the author intended.⁹

Gadget fits this framework with uncanny precision, and not only in its ambiguity. Shōno’s earlier game, Alice (1991), had given players more interactive freedom, and he found the result unsatisfying:¹⁰

ALICE had many small contrivances, but this was because the concept of the Interactive Museum required as much interactivity as possible, and inevitably this resulted in a high degree of freedom. […] I was fussing over the details of interactivity, because it was my first video game.

He also notes that this freedom without structural spine produced ambiguity, but the wrong kind. For Gadget, he deliberately constrained the structure:¹¹

[W]e clarified the story and the importance attached to freely interactive events was reduced and the structure became more linear. I also think that this linear structure was necessary to maintain tension and to increase the persuasive power of the fictional world.

This is an exact inversion of the standard design assumption that more player choices produce more meaningful engagement. Shōno discovered that fewer structural choices generate more interpretive openness—Eco’s controlled disorder achieved through control itself.

The Sensorama device at the heart of the plot demonstrates Eco’s “field of relations with specific structural limits”.¹² Scientists insist it “draws out latent powers”; skeptics insist it’s a mind-control device.¹³ The game sustains both readings without collapsing into either. The ambiguity isn’t vague—it’s fenced. Two poles the player oscillates between for the duration of the game.

It’s worth noting Gadget’s critical reception inadvertently documents exactly the kind of formal innovation Eco identifies as the source of openness in art. Reviewers complain “there is no real puzzle to be solved anywhere” and the game is “completely linear”¹⁴—but this is adventure-game cruft being stripped away, not a design failure.

Although Gadget failed to find a big audience outside Japan, its influence can still be felt. One of the game’s spinoffs was The Third Force: A Novel of Gadget, penned by Mark Laidlaw and edited by yours truly. Laidlaw’s name might ring a bell if you’re familiar with the Half Life series which he went on to write for. I certainly detected some distinct Gadget flavor when I first played Half Life, and put two and two together when I read the credits.

Strangely, the game and its ancillary items, particularly the art book Inside Out With Gadget, found an eager audience in Hollywood, including directors Guillermo del Toro and David Lynch.¹⁵ Indeed, this is how I came to (briefly) work with the latter.

I’ll spoil Gadget’s ending—it’s a 21-year-old game, so get over it. It’s one of the best twists I’ve ever encountered in a game. In games, and particularly adventure games, as a player, you generally need to buy into their premise, no matter how far-fetched. When you follow all the clues and reach the final scene in Gadget, you learn you are the 13th patient, and the mind-control experiment performed on you is declared successful. Of course, this is only my reading, as it’s ambiguous.

And that ambiguity is the point. Eco distinguishes first-degree openness—any artwork sustains multiple readings—from second-degree openness, where the work is literally incomplete and requires the performer to finish it, as in Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke or Calder’s mobiles. Gadget occupies a strange third position: structurally closed but experientially open. Because you can’t change anything, interpretation becomes your only available form of agency. The linearity is the construction kit. You are the 13th patient, and the experiment is declared successful—because the experiment was always your attempt to make meaning from controlled disorder.

S&MHtR exposed the interface; Gadget weaponized it. Grim Fandango (GF) did neither.

Five years after Gadget came the absolute death knell of the adventure game in the form of GF. A critical darling bedecked with accolades, it bombed so hard commercially, not only LucasArts, but their main rival Sierra Online—of which Blizzard was a subsidiary when I worked there—canceled their planned offerings in the genre.¹⁶ Indeed, lacking the knowhow to retool for other game types, these giants would walk the earth no more.

GF’s reviewers praised the characters, setting, and story, but weren’t so accepting of the actual mechanics:¹⁷

Charming as the characters are, I found “Grim Fandango’s” gameplay intermittently grating. Some of the puzzles in the game are so idiosyncratic that they seem predicated less on the deployment of practical reasoning than on the achievement of a mystical mind-meld with the game’s project lead, Tim Schafer […] I sometimes found myself mashing the interact button while Manny patrolled a tiny area searching for the appropriate pixels.

While Gadget’s linearity and limited interactivity compared to that of GF might seem to make for a worse game, it doesn’t. The level of gameplay in Gadget is consistent with the rest of the game, and the elements work together to create the type of experience Shōno was interested in. As for GF, players may have taken issue with the inconsistency between its gameplay and the sophistication of its other elements.

Read previous articles in the Interactive Storytelling series

Part 1: Lizzie’s Game

Part 2: Those Frumious Jaws

Notes

1. “Crib Sheet”, Next Generation, November 1996.
2. Jeremy Parrish, “When SCUMM Ruled the Earth”, 1UP.com, June 2011.
3. Next Generation, 1996
4. Ibid.
5. Parrish, 2011.
6. Sam & Max Hit the Road, 1993.
7. Phil Salvador, “GADGET: Invention, Travel, & Adventure”, The Obscuritory (website),
8. Dieubussy, “Haruhiko Shono: A Prophet of the Digital Age”, Sorrel Tilley, trans.,  CoreGamer, January 2009.
9. Umberto Eco, Opera aperta (The Open Work), 1962, Anna Cancogni, trans., 1989.
10. Bruno de Figueiredo, “Prophet of the Digital Age: Haruhiko Shono [sic]—Profile and Interview”, CoreGamers Archive (Substack), September 2022.
11. Ibid.
12. Eco, 1962.
13. 庄野 晴彦 (Shōno Haruhiko), 『GADGET』, 1993.
14. Tom Lenting, “Gadget: Invention, Travel & Adventure”, Adventure Classic Gaming (website), August 2007.
15. Salvador, 2014.
16. “Adventure Series: Part III Feature”, The Next Level. November 28, 2005.
17. Christopher Byrd, “Grim Fandango Remastered review: A witty but tedious classic”, Washington Post, February 2015.