A few weeks ago, Gamecenter ran an article in which they declared that adventure gaming was "dead and buried". The Gamecenter employees who write the titles for articles apparently don't coordinate their efforts with the people who write the subtitles for articles because even before the banner graphic was completely over, someone in the subtitle department had upgraded the condition of adventure games to merely "vanishing". Still, no matter which part of the logo you choose to look at, adventure games are in trouble. Gamecenter blames Myst for killing adventure games. Or at least the Gamecenter employees who write the first paragraph of Gamecenter articles do. Again, this department may not be in direct contact with the team responsible for paragraph four, in which it is clearly stated that: Now it seems people want more action than adventure. They would rather run around in short shorts raiding tombs than experience real stories. As far as I can tell, the Gamecenter "death of adventure" timeline goes something like this: The action-packed Myst introduces casual gamers to the pleasures of Tomb Raider. Genius adventure gamers come to the painful realization that the same equipment they use to explore the complex fantasy world of Leisure Suit Larry can also be utilized by stupid people to run Quake. Thanks to their television-atrophied attention spans, these casual gamers are mentally incapable of spending six hours trying to randomly guess at the absurd dream logic Roberta Williams has applied to the problem of getting the dungeon key out of the bluebird's nest. Horrified by the knowledge that somewhere someone is playing a game that is not an adventure, genius adventure gamers abandon the hobby in droves and resort to their backup source of entertainment: various combinations of Babylon 5 novels and masturbating. Gamecenter mentions Jane Jensen's Gabriel Knight 3 as the last title of note in the genre. I'd like to use Gabriel Knight 3 to illustrate my alternate theory of who killed adventure gaming.

