Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design

The Common Elements of Adventure Games

In most adventure games, the player's avatar is presented with an explorable area containing a variety of puzzles or problems to be solved. Solving these problems opens up new areas for exploration or advances the story line in some way, giving the player new information and new problems to solve. Exploring the environment and manipulating items in it is a key element of most adventure games, although this is not an absolute requirement. It's theoretically possible to develop an adventure game that consists entirely of conversations with nonplayer characters (NPCs), but we haven't yet seen one.

Setting

In some kinds of games, such as chess and Quake, the setting is almost irrelevant. Serious players ignore ...