Life & Mortality Quote by Roberta Williams

There is a quiet defiance in Roberta Williams framing adventure games not as a product category but as a form of narrative life support. Coming from a designer who helped build the genre’s grammar at Sierra, the line reads less like nostalgia and more like a claim to lineage: adventure games descend from campfire stories, mystery novels, oral tradition. If you accept that, then declaring the genre “dead” starts to sound like declaring storytelling dead - a fashionable tech-world obituary that confuses market cycles with cultural appetite.

The intent is partly protective. Adventure games have been pronounced obsolete every time the industry’s center of gravity shifts: from text to graphics, from keyboards to controllers, from boxed PC games to consoles to mobile to live services. Williams is pushing back on a specific kind of amnesia that treats innovation as replacement instead of expansion. Her argument smuggles in a rebuke: if you think adventures are over, it may be because you’ve narrowed “games” to reflexes, spectacle, and monetization rather than curiosity, interpretation, and choice.

The subtext also flatters the player. Adventure games assume you want to read, notice, infer, and linger - behaviors the broader market often labels “slow.” Williams insists that slowness isn’t a defect; it’s a human preference that resurfaces whenever people get tired of noise. Context matters here: modern revivals (indies, narrative-first hits, stream-friendly mysteries) prove her point. The genre mutates, but the appetite for being told a story you can touch refuses to disappear.