Adventures in gaming.

I've always considered video games a form of media. They tend to serve the same purpose, and a lot of games end up acting as stories in and of themselves, which is part of the allure of any piece of media. (Well, that and gratuitous violence.) Me, I grew up on the original Nintendo, that innocuous gray box that sat under our television for most of my formative years (we got it when I was five and didn't get a Super Nintendo until I was in the sixth grade). Some of my fondest childhood memories are watching my parents play games like Dr. Mario, Silent Service, The Legend of Zelda, and Duck Hunt. While most first graders aspired to be doctors or vets, I desperately wanted to design the first The Little Mermaid Nintendo game. My friend Eric and I spent tireless days discussing the different levels. I made endless sketches.

But I'm a "grown up" now and with that comes a whole new level of gaming interest. Frankly, I'm still a Nintendo nerd, and as I type this, my DS is sitting about two feet away, complete with my Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass decal and five three-game protective cases with my current conquests lovingly organized. I've got a GameCube and a PSX, as well (not a PS1; it's that old school), and I dream of the day when a Best Buy delivery truck overturns in my presence and I can make off with a Wii. But I digress, because this isn't about the fact that I am devoted to my reputation as a nerd.

This is about gaming in general.

There was a day that the fact that I was a girl and liked video games made me something of an oxymoron. Blame the ex-boyfriend who sat me down and forced me to play a half-hour of Final Fantasy VII, moving me from the girl who occasionally played pick-up games of Dr. Mario with her less-coordinated siblings to something of a game nerd. Over the years, I started to pick up games that interested me, and found that the genres I (predictably) enjoyed best were RPGs, "adventure" games (not in the sort of Indiana Jones vein as much as in the Myst one), and real-time strategy. I could rattle off the games I ended up with, but some of my favorites were in the glory days of Sierra, when King's Quest wasn't a joke and games like Shivers and Phantasmagoria were out there. I loved going through creepy-as-hell mansions, dungeons, museums, ghost towns and finding the right penny to put in the right jukebox to play the right song and then unlock the demon. And no, I'm not kidding.

Somewhere down the line, though, adventure games fell to the wayside. I don't know why, and I'm not going to sit here and try to figure it out. The fact is, there aren't many out there, and the ones that are bank less on the using your brain and more on the "freakout" factor. I went shopping this weekend looking for a good Mac game--more on that in a moment--and decided the best place to look for a good game was Fry's Electronics, the home of every piece of technology you could ever want, period.

I was really disappointed.

In terms of games in general, there really weren't that many "adventure"-style games that weren't rated Mature and promising me, right there on the cover, blood, guts, gore, death, violence, destruction, and terror. I don't want to be scared out of my wits every time I turn on a game, so that ruled most of them out. The others either fell into the category of Myst-style brave-new-world exploration or Nancy Drew adventures, and trust me, I'm not joking about the latter.

What's more, in the Mac section, my choices were limited to real-time strategy games (several of which I already own) and every Sims expansion pack known to man. I'm not kidding. That was the range of game available to me as a Mac consumer.

So here is the question: what happened, gaming industry? Where have all the adventure games gone? I can't imagine that there's absolutely no market for them, and yet the ones that are out there, all ten or fifteen titles, are thriller-style crap that seems to bank more on being Saw: The Game than a legitimate adventure. Never mind the fact that the Mac doesn't even offer a crappy choice of adventure game.

The glory days are over for adventure games, it seems, and just at the time when I have (occasionally) the disposable income to invest in a video game here or there. I ended up buying a game that is based off Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, but I'm not particularly enthused by it. Maybe I'd love it if it were on my Mac. Or maybe I'd love it if we could step away from the low-hanging fruit of adapting a book to a video game (I mean, really?) and focus on original plots again. Remember The 7th Guest? Now there was a game.

Maybe I'm just waxing nostalgic for my youth of gaming. But moreover, I think I'm wondering if the days of clever games have been replaced by first-person shooters and games where you make an avatar of yourself and have it sleep with your best friend, boss, neighbor's wife, or just an Italian-looking stud named Rubio. I miss when my mind needed a challenge, when a game made me shout and scream and pace for the difficulty of the puzzle, and when I really felt satisfied with an ending.

Feels like it was a long time ago.