Jane Jensen: Gabriel Knight, Adventure Games, Hidden Objects

Influential Video Game Designers

by Anastasia Salter, Carly A. Kocurek (Editor), Jennifer deWinter (Editor)

In the 1990s, the Personal Computer (or PC) was on the rise in homes, and with it came new genres of play. Yet most of the games in these new genres featured fantasylands or humorous science fiction landscapes with low stakes and little to suggest the potential of the PC as a serious space for art and play. Jane Jensen's work and landmark Gabriel Knight series brought a new darkness and personality to PC gaming, offering a first powerful glimpse of what games could be as they came of age. As an author and designer, Jensen brought her approach as a designer-writer hybrid to the forefront of game design, with an approach to developing environments through detailed research to make game settings come to life, an attention to mature dilemmas and complex character development, and an audience-driven vision for genres reaching beyond the typical market approaches of the gaming industry. With a brand new interview with Jensen herself, Anastasia Salter provides the first ever look Jensen's impact and role in advancing interactive narrative and writing in the game design process.

Genres: Video Games, Games

200 pages, Hardcover

First published April 6, 2017

Reviews

[Mjhancock]

This book was a really interesting read, and I'd recommend it for anyone unfamiliar with Jensen's games but still wanting to find out about PC and mobile game history. Essentially, this is the second book in a series that looks at influential game designers through the lens of game studies. (I think the first book is a look at Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario, Zelda, and numerous other Nintendo franchises.)

I wasn't sure what I wanted out of this book going in. I'm familiar with Salter's writing from her great book on adventure games, but I've played very few Sierra games, and I'm pretty sure I haven't played any games Jensen was a prominent creator for (despite having the full Gabriel Knight set on Good Old Games. The gamer's backlog is real). As such, her work is something I've heard of, but never experienced fully, except for infamous bits like the dreaded mustache puzzle, or scholarly writing that looks at the games through the lens of the gothic. I think one of the biggest take aways is that Jensen demonstrates how varying a game career is, if it lasts and isn't anchored to a single game studio. I also appreciated learning more about her creative work outside of the 90s era PC games she's best known for; I'm definitely going to be looking into some of the later puzzle games, and see how they tick, as well as her novels. It's a very accessible book; personally, I wouldn't have minded a tad more on the theory side, but I recognize that doing so would shift it from the series' goal. All in all, I'm glad I read it, and I'm very glad that this resource exists.

[DropOfOcean]

This book was more like analytical essay about Jane Jensen than something much more compelling like autobiography written by Jensen.

[Christa]

I'm a huge Jane Jensen fangirl and I absolutely loved every word of this entertaining and scholarly book.