Dave Gilbert: “Adventure game fans [are] a very insular kind of community.”

These are the words of outsider adventure game creator Dave Gilbert, author of games such as the Blackwell series, and also the publisher of many fine independent adventure games at Wadjet Eye Games. Here’s the whole quote from his interview at Gamasutra:

What's important for a lot of developers to learn to do is to break out of the—I don't want to say 'clique' exactly—but making adventure games clearly for adventure game fans was more challenging, because it was a very insular kind of community.

His disillusionment with the community seems to stem from the way they demand that adventure games continue to exist as they were back in the day: with difficult, oftentimes illogical puzzles that kill the pace of the story. But outside the old guard, the vast majority of people much prefer narrative flow to unrealistically hard brain-teasers that were, it should be remembered, originally designed that way to make players pony up for strategy guides. “You can’t just think of them as adventure games. They are games, and games are for everyone. They're stories, and everyone likes stories,” Gilbert says.