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We considered various options for replacing the ceremony:

• IRC only, as in the good old times
• Chat only, but using Discord
• A discord voice call with a shared powerpoint presentation
• No ceremony at all, the result is just posted in the thread

I don't play as many AGS games these days, so feel free to ignore me. I suspect this idea has been considered and dismissed. But if a goal of the awards is to draw attention to the best games made in the engine, perhaps the ceremony should be something anyone can attend/re-watch without having to downloading the (brilliantly put together and obviously a huge amount of work) client. Why not a livestream on twitch/YouTube that nominees could share among their followers on social media?

EDIT: Yes, unsurprisingly you've thought this through! I'm sorry - I had missed that the recent ceremonies had been streamed as well.

And of course the thing with hearing a joke is that you're usually waiting for the punchline. It's a very different experience if you don't realize that what someone is telling you is a joke, and the punchline comes out of nowhere. Usually you don't know exactly what the punchline is going to be (sometimes you do), but the enjoyment is as much the anticipation as the reveal.

I have just a couple of thoughts on this. I always thought an un-signposted joke ought to be funnier than a joke that's presented as A Joke, because the punchline would be more of a surprise. In fact, I think the opposite is true. People laugh more when they are primed to believe that the next thing they hear will be funny. Perhaps there's a parallel with narrative twists there too.

Also, there are lots of jokes where the punchlines do come in an unexpected place, so even though the audience is expecting a gag they are still taken by surprise. I'm thinking of garden-path jokes like the kind Emo Phillips is famous for, or even the (very dated) "take my wife... please".

Thanks for the recommendation, it was a fun read and I loved the illustrations (it's a pity novels for adults don't have such nice illustrations). @Ali did you choose the illustrator or was she decided on by the publisher? In any case, good choice.

Yes, I think Claire is brilliant and she was my first choice - I'm lucky she came on board! And I don't want to hog the thread, but Snarky's guess is, of course, correct.

What do you think will help drive the genre forward? Make it more mainsteam? Maybe have an AAA adventure game?

No, I don't think a AAA adventure game is at all likely, or particularly desirable. Like heltonjon said, mainstream games assimilated what was groundbreaking about classic adventure games - story-driven action, cinematic scope, good writing, interesting characters etc. In the end, we won!

The closest you're going to get is games like Detroit: Become Human. Which are... well... if David Cage wasn't the worst writer in the universe... I guess the graphics are nice.

Interesting that you mention it. I loved the game, the mechanics, the story, but it didn't feel like an adventure game to me. It felt like Cluedo on a ship.

I would say one of my favourite FMV adventure games is the unjustly forgotten 1996 Clue/Cluedo game. It's as arch as you would expect, but the writing is much better than many FMVs and it holds up remarkably well in terms of design by comparison with later detective games.

I don't mean to say that Obra Dinn is especially similar to Monkey Island or Space Quest. I just think that, if it had come out in 1998, it would be regarded as a classic, and no one would be interested in drawing the boundaries of the genre in such a way as to exclude it.

My view is that there are hardcore fans who insist on an ever narrowing understanding of true point-and-click adventure games. For these fans, no modern games will ever be as good as the classics, because any game that innovates is reclassified as a different genre. Unless it's a 2D, third person, mouse-driven game with 1000 inventory items, it's not an adventure game. (Even though there are numerous oldies like Myst and the Last Express which fall outwith that definition.)

Respectfully, I think these people are nostalgia hounds who should be politely ignored. For me, any reasonable definition of the graphical adventures would include massive indie successes like Her Story, Obra Dinn, Outer Wilds, Unavowed, Firewatch, Walking Dead and Disco Elysium. These games are easily as good as the adventure games of the 90s and significantly better than the average point-and-click from the early 2000s.

In terms of sales, I remember Charles Cecil talking about Broken Sword 1 selling a million copies (over a certain period) which was regarded as a big success and made them number 2 in the charts after the original Grand Theft Auto. His point was that the market has grown so much that selling the same number of copies today would be regarded by publishers as a failure for a game with that budget. So we have to accept that modern adventure games are something of a cottage industry.

Oh, then this book isn't for me after all. I'm not into supernatural stories. Considering this, would reading Rebecca be a good idea? This book I can order easily.

I've enjoyed every Daphne du Maurier thing I've read. Rebecca is great, but may not be the twistiest of her tales. I still recommend it, along with the ones I mentioned above, there's also My Cousin Rachel, and the short stories The Blue Lenses and Not After Midnight - which adventure game fans will surely enjoy. Having said that, there are elements of the supernatural in the shorts, and in Don't Look Now.

So congratulations on the publication! I hope the book and the whole series are a success. There's a Norwegian edition coming out next month, which I take to be a good sign.

Thank you for the review, Snarky!

In a lecture by Borges, it was correctly mentioned that the more striking part is about how a character there dies (and suggestion of other means), not the reveal.

I also found the solution, while clearly important in the history of the genre, annoying. Do you have a link to that Borges lecture?

I love mystery stories, and I love stories-with-a-sting-in-the-tail. I even enjoy several M. Night Shyamalan films. But I think it's hard to recommend stories with twists without giving something away.

And, I think there's a reason why stories with twists aren't regarded as respectable. It's the easiest thing in the world to write a twist (at least, the first thing I wrote had one!) because all you have to do is withhold information from the reader or the audience. The quintessential student film or short story ends by revealing that the protagonist who you were supposed to like is actually... the bad guy! Wow! Looks like I, the author, really wasted your time, huh?

A twist is often a bit of cleverness designed to make the writer look smart. It can be undramatic. It's structuring a narrative like a joke, with a punchline that has to be kept hidden. But when it works, I love it.

I haven't read We Need To Talk About Kevin but Lynne Ramsay's film is excellent, and it breaks every rule they teach about screenwriting. It simply unfolds the story for the audience - the protagonist already knows the ending - and yet it's gripping.

I'd recommend, in addition to Rebecca:

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Jamaica Inn and Don't Look Now. Also, We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Lovecraft's short story The Outsider. They're more about suspense than surprise, though.

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If algorithms and media gatekeepers are promoting bad writing, that is hardly the fault of writers. If bosses are sacking writers, to replace them with AI-generated pablum, that's also not the writers' fault. I can't understand the resentment people feel towards writers and artists who are likely to be sacked so that a computer can produce a significantly cheaper and immeasurably worse product.

[The Honjin Murders]

And I recently read Seishi Yokomizo's The Honjin Murders (1946), a classic Japanese locked-room mystery recently available in English. I found it more interesting for its portrayal of Japanese society before and after WWII (the main narrative takes place in 1937, with a frame story set right after the war) than for the mystery itself, which is convoluted and strained.

I really enjoyed the 1975 film adaptation, called Death at an Old Mansion in English. The title is particularly enjoyable, because that's the premise of every whodunit. It's a little plodding, but I suspect that the solution is one of those explanations that are more plausible when you see it happening. That said, the whole concept of a locked room mystery is somewhat different in a country where walls can be made of paper.

I seem to remember that Evil Under The Sun involves some Latin (or Italian?) wordplay. Perhaps it isn't worth digging deeper into Glass Onion, I just don't think it's irrational for a character not to do what you would do in that situation.

We're getting deep into spoilers here, but I'm afraid I still don't understand the objection!

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It makes sense for the billionaire to hold their regular get-together as usual, because acting differently (cancelling the meeting, or not sending an invitation to Andi) would indicate that he knew she was dead. It would be foolish for him not to act as if Andi were still alive.

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It's an outlandish premise, certainly - but as far as I can tell, the logic is coherent.

Come to think of it,

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what was the point of the party? They'd all already know the other person was dead, if the detective himself didn't see to postpone the news, so is there any sense in having them all there with him? (assuming they'd even come, which they would not)

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You're entitled not to enjoy it, of course! But I find this criticism a little confusing.

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Yes, gathering all the suspects together in a remote location with a detective is a silly plan, and something no one would do in real life. But it's also a staple of the whodunit, for obvious reasons. If they hadn't held the party, there would have been no film.

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[The Last of Sheila]

It has also been pointed out that Glass Onion owes a lot to Stephen Sondheim's (and Anthony Perkins') The Last of Sheila (1973), which explains his cameo. I haven't seen that, but now I want to.

The Last of Sheila is good, well worth tracking down, but very hard to find. It's playful, but quite a bit darker than Glass Onion - but I can't do content warnings without spoilers. Apparently, it was inspired by the Murder Mystery evenings Sondheim and Anthony Perkins used to throw in Hollywood.

I also don't think Glass Onion is a Dan Brown spoof. I suspect Dan Brown is just borrowing from the same sources. I think the Mona Lisa is there because it's a philistine's idea of a cool painting.

I'm sorry I didn't post about it here! I can only recommend joining the mailing list, because I'm not going to be as involved in future, and I think the other organisers are not so active on here. The #AdvX22 hashtag on twitter has quite a few nice pictures.

I love Wilkie Collins, and I think he's more satirical than he might look with modern eyes. He certainly scandalised people in his lifetime. Most of his plots would unravel if a female character just told someone trustworthy about the nightmarish scheme she was caught in. But that's the point, I think, that women in particular were trapped by Victorian sensibilities - that social codes could be weapons in the hands of (admittedly, sometimes foreign) villains.

I didn't think his kind of sensational story would work in the modern era, but the first series of The Sinner (a whydunnit) manages to come very close. Perhaps the real story of Britney Spears's conservatorship is the kind of thing Collins would have written about.

I watched Rebecca. It has a nice style - Hitchcock - but it's not a detective story. The protagonist is a bit too one-sided imo.

No, certainly not a fair play detective story. It's a Gothic mystery like My Cousin Rachel or Uncle Silas. The BBC has adapted The Moonstone about three times, and I've never seen any of them (though I've heard the one from the 70s is a classic). And that's a great story and an interesting case, because it's sort of a proto-detective novel. Apart from August Dupin, I think Sergeant Cuff is one of the first proper detectives in literature.

I enjoyed that version of An Inspector Calls, and somehow I didn't know the ending. It's the quintessential set text in the UK, so it's one of those classics that everyone is a bit sick of. I probably should have read it in school...

I'm a huge fan of murder mysteries, and there are never enough good ones. Somehow, I didn't realise that the TV series Foyle's War is a classic whodunnit written by Anthony Horowitz (who wrote Midsomer Murders when it was half decent). If you can forgive it being an ode to broadminded English small-c conservatism, it has some terrific episodes. (At least until they stop shooting on film and switch to digital and I start sulking.)

In terms of classic films, have Les Diaboliques and Rebecca come up yet? For Agatha Christie fans - Agatha and the Truth of Murder on Netflix is both a straightforward whodunnit and a witty parody of the conventions.

Also worth looking at is PowerQuest from Powerhoof: https://powerhoof.itch.io/powerquest

It's a name-your-price Unity plugin and I've seen it used in Intergalactic Wizard Force, which certainly feels AGS-y from a player's POV.

Now do the Monty Hall Problem!