Advent Calendar 19: Pointed Observations

The advent of the mouse was a revolution in computing technology. It did nothing to augment the brains of the computer, but it did a lot bridge the communcation gap between the computer's brain and the user's. Early home systems only spoke their own language, and you had to learn computerese to get anything out of them; early consoles only knew left-right-up-down and fire. Most computing histories only cover the mouse in terms of accessibility of the OS and filesystems, but the mouse was also integral to games.

After text-based interactive fiction and before full-motion video, there was the point-and-click adventure. These games built environments out of still pictures, sometimes with limited animation, and took full advantage of the mouse cursor's mobility to put interaction points anywhere on the screen. If you could see it, you could use the mouse to poke it, and if you poked it right, it might do something. IF's eternal game of "guess the verb" was simplified down to a list of clickable words -- sometimes even icons -- and inventory. Stuck players could, and often did, brute-force their way through puzzles by methodically trying every verb on every interactive point they could find until they found the proper combination to progress the plot. 

Point-and-clicks were largely, though not entirely, a product of mouse-bearing computers. They did come out for consoles, working the interface via D-pad with only four possible directions of movement was awkward at best. You certainly could play Maniac Mansion on an NES, but did you really want to? 

A closely related form, also a branch off of interactive fiction, was the visual novel. Rather than presenting a series of pictures to interact with, VN games let the player navigate through a branching plot using mainly dialogue choices. These too were more popular on computer than on console, as the large amount of text lent itself better to close-up viewing and navigation on a monitor than the typical console setup, with the player some distance from a television. While computer point-and-clicks were fairly popular in the the West, driven by classics like Return to Zork and MYST, console versions, visual novels, and games that combined elements of both were more popular in Japan. A few received North American releases, like Déjà Vu, and some others are now available in fantranslations that can be played in emulators, like Famicom Detective Club.

One of the absolute classics of the genre is The Secret of Monkey Island. The brainchild of Lucasarts' Ron Gilbert (Maniac Mansion, Zak McKraken & The Alien Mind-Benders, Day of the Tentacle) assisted by Tim Schaefer (Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, Full Throttle, Brütal Legend), The Secret of Monkey Island kicked off an entire series about the adventures of Guybrush Threepwood, who wanted to become a pirate. Clever, hilarious, charming, and packaged with some good old-fashioned feelies, the Monkey Island family of games is beloved of anyone who plays these things, and has been remade repeatedly for newer platforms. The Xbox Live Arcade version is unusual in that it allows you to swap from the new hi-res environments to the originals at will, in case your need for nostalgia overwhelms your desire to actually focus on the screen.

Post-FMV, the point-and-click died out for a while. Visual novels continued to be a genre in Japan, but few of them made the leap overseas, even projects like Radical Dreamers which were based on a property -- in that case, ChronoTrigger -- popular in North America. The market was considered so small that the huge localization project wasn't worth it. The customary console interface remained the D-pad for all major makers, and computer games had jumped to full 3D environments with direct controls, leaving little room for still vistas full of interactable pixels.

What point-and-clicks really need is an environment where you can jab the screen directly on the thing you want to investigate. And this came back with a vengeance in 2004, when Nintendo released its portable console, the Nintendo DS. Variously expanded as "Developer System" or "Dual Screen", the DS smashed even the sales records held by the Gameboy, becoming Nintendo's best selling console ever, the best selling handheld overall, and second-best selling console in history, right behind the PS2. Two screens working in tandem gave developers a place to put the gameplay separate from the interface, always a problem when working on a handheld with limited pixel space, and the bottom touchscreen made it easy to interact directly using the stylus. Increased cartridge capacity made large amounts of text no problem, and holding the console close solved any problems with readability.

Though there were a few hybrid VN/point-and-clicks released close to the DS's launch, like Hotel Dusk, the resurgence of the genre properly started with Capcom's unexpected smash hit Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. Originally released as a Gameboy Advance title, Capcom opted to include an English localization with the Japanese DS re-release, for... honestly, no real reason I can find, other than English is cool in Japan and Takumi Shu is a little strange. The script is a little rough and has some typos, but because it wasn't expected to be officially released to an English-only audience, the localizers had crazy fun with it, and once they had it, well, why not give it a shot? The first game was a little difficult to find for a while, as the original North American print run was well under 100,000 copies, but Capcom got right on that once they got over the surprise, and sales for the series are well into the millions now.

Since then, the point-and-click genre has been further extended by games whose main mechanism is environmental puzzles, rather than inventory/verb. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, also by Takumi Shu, has some of the most beautiful animation I've ever seen in a DS game, and makes excellent use of the multi-touch capacity of the DS' bottom screen. 

If you want to try your hand at creating your own games, much like Inform 7 for interactive fiction, Ren'Py is a game engine for homebrew point-and-click/visual novel projects. Based on Python, it's relatively simple to start with, but can be leveraged to create just about anything you can think of, up to and including the famously terrifying Doki Doki Literature Club (WARNING: the intro is not kidding, it starts cute and end up in full-blown horror).