Jane Jensen

Influential Video Game Designers

Series Editors:

Carly A. Kocurek

Jennifer deWinter

Jane Jensen

Gabriel Knight, Adventure Games,
Hidden Objects

Anastasia Salter

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Preface

Foreword

1Introduction: Long Ago at Sierra

2Being Gabriel Knight: Character and Research-Driven Interactive Narrative

3Hidden Objects: Crafting Mystery through Dazzle and Reward

4Down Pinkerton Road: Jensen and the Adventure Game Renaissance

5Jane Jensen: In Her Own Words

6Legacy of a Writer-Designer

Gameography

Notes

Works Cited

Index

List of Figures

1.1Screenshot of King’s Quest VI

1.2Screenshot of King’s Quest IV

1.3Screenshot of Manhunter 2: San Francisco

1.4Cover of EcoQuest supplement manual

1.5Screenshot of EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus

1.6Screenshot of Pepper’s Adventures in Time

1.7Illustration of “string of pearls” model

1.8Screenshot of King’s Quest VI

2.1Screenshot of Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within

2.2Image of the GK3 design bible

2.3Screenshot of Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned

2.4Page of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers introductory comic

2.5Screenshot of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

2.6Screenshot of Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within

2.7Screenshot of Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within

2.8Screenshot of Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned

3.1Screenshot of Inspector Parker

3.2Screenshot of BeTrapped!

3.3Screenshot of Mystery Case Files: Huntsville

3.4Screenshot of Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile

3.5Screenshot of Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile

3.6Screenshot of Women’s Murder Club: Death in Scarlet

3.7Screenshot of Women’s Murder Club: Death in Scarlet

3.8Diagram from Death in Scarlet design bible

3.9Comparison of Death in Scarlet design sketch and game screenshot

3.10Comparison of Death in Scarlet design sketch and game screenshot

3.11Location and plot diagram from Dying for Daylight design bible

3.12Screenshot of Dr. Lynch: Grave Secrets

3.13Screenshot of Deadtime Stories

4.1Screenshot of Frozen Free Fall

4.2Screenshot of Gray Matter

4.3 Moebius design bible

4.4Screenshot of Moebius: Empire Rising

4.5Screenshot of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition

Acknowledgments

I grew up on adventure games. I played my first Gabriel Knight game as a kid, and the voodoo-filled nightmares it fueled haunted me in a way no other game had. I remember seeking out every new game in the genre, and particularly following all the news of Jane Jensen’s upcoming projects. Without my parents introducing me to those games, there is no way I’d be in the field I am in now. Thank you first and foremost to Jane Jensen and her fellow designers for building a genre that showed me what interactive storytelling could be. Several people made this book possible: series editors Jennifer deWinter and Carly Kocurek provided invaluable feedback and guidance throughout the process and introduced me to a new way of writing about authorship in a field of study where we are often more concerned with objects. While writing this book, I stayed in Rochester, New York, to research in the collections at The Strong National Museum of Play. Thanks to Christopher Bench and the fellowship team for providing me with funding to make the trip possible, and thanks to the amazing team at the archives for all your help.

Throughout my work I have relied on feedback and support from the community of the Electronic Literature Organization and our annual conference. To name only a few (in alphabetical order): Kathi Inman Berens, Stephanie Boluk, Leonardo Flores, Jacob Garbe, Dene Grigar, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Flourish Klink, Kari Kraus, Deena Larsen, Liz Losh, Marjorie Luesebrink, Mark Marino, Nick Montfort, Stuart Moulthrop, John Murray, and Mark Sample. Many other games scholars have provided insight and inspiration, including Bridget Blodgett, Edmond Chang, Shira Chess, Nick Sousanis, and Laine Nooney. Also, at the University of Central Florida, thanks to my colleagues and students in the Games Research Group and the Text & Technology program for ideas and inspiration, with particular thanks to Rudy McDaniel, Joseph Fanfarelli, Peter Smith, Matthew Mosher, Barry Mauer, Mel Stanfill, Natalie Underberg-Goode, and Anne Sullivan.

Preface

Each of the designers featured in this series demonstrates their own approach to design; Jane Jensen is no exception. Jensen began her career at Sierra On-Line, and her work at Sierra, in particular the Gabriel Knight series, is what she is best known for. But as Anastasia Salter demonstrates, Jensen’s best-known work is only part of a larger body marked by unorthodox approaches. Salter forwards that Jensen is a writer-designer, someone whose writing functions as a design process. Writing was Jensen’s entrée into the industry and is foundational to understanding her unique approach.

Writing for games—and creating games by writing—are both timely topics. The advent of Twine and other interactive storytelling tools have made the production of narrative games accessible to novices and invited experimentation and innovation from new and experienced designers alike. Contemporary books like Evan Skolnick’s Video Game Storytelling: What Every Developer Needs to Know about Narrative Techniques and Tobias Heussner, Toiya Kristen Finley, Jennifer Brandes Hepler, and Ann Lemay’s The Game Narrative Toolbox are aimed at an audience of established and aspiring developers interested in writing and narrative as key tools for game production. Games writing, along with the rest of the industry, is professionalizing and for good reason.

Currently, many players seek out games rich in narrative, and contemporary designers often incorporate narrative elements in innovative ways. For example, indie darlings Never Alone (E-Line Media 2014), Gone Home (The Fullbright Company 2013), and Life is Strange (Dontnod Entertainment 2015) use narrative as game mechanic, reward, and a means to elicit empathy and self-reflection. Such complex narrative feats require both careful design and careful writing. Jane Jensen is an example of the type of developer prepared to do both, and throughout are numerous compelling examples of the resultant innovations yielded by this articulation of narrative and game design.

Jane Jensen: Gabriel Knight, Adventure Games, Hidden Objects is the third in the Influential Video Game Designers series. Jensen is someone who has tested the boundaries of the industry, pushing forward the maturity and narrative complexity of games with her work on the Gabriel Knight series, producing complex and elegant puzzles, incorporating painstakingly researched realism—so much so that her settings are practically themselves characters—and bringing these approaches with her to diverse forms and genres. Jensen’s highly successful casual games, while less well known, truly show how distinctive her design vision is. The same types of design and narrative decisions that fuel Jensen’s work at Sierra are equally evident in her hidden object games—games that stretched the limits of an often dismissed but much beloved form. Quality games can come from any genre, and Jensen’s trajectory shows that the work of a thoughtful designer can produce engaging experiences across platforms and styles.

Carly A. Kocurek and Jennifer deWinter
Series Editors
September 2016

Foreword

Christa Charter
Kirkland, Washington, September 2016

You hold in your hands the book I’ve been waiting for my whole life. Or at least my life since playing Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. It was 1995, and I was an assistant editor at InterAction magazine, Sierra On-Line’s in-house magazine. I was a little bit of an editor, but mostly, I was an administrative assistant and I was getting my big chance: to write a story on the making of Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within.

I’d never played a game like GK1. Within a scene or two, I was in love with Gabe, wanted to be Grace’s best friend, and mostly, was in awe of Jane Jensen. So my first big assignment: The small plane ride from SFO to Fresno dipped and dove through a storm, and I feared for my life. Once safely on the ground, I was told my luggage was still in San Francisco. I rented my first car, pointed it toward Oakhurst, then promptly had to pull over and wait for a sudden deluge to pass. Arriving in Oakhurst, I checked into the first hotel I’d ever stayed in by myself, lamented the fact that I couldn’t change my clothes, and sat on the bed feeling like the most inadequate human alive. Here was my shot at being a “real” writer, and everything was going wrong. The last words my boss had said to me before I left had been, “You don’t need to mention to anyone that you’re a part-time secretary.” Is that what I was? I tell you all this so you’ll understand just how small and unworthy I felt to meet the number two hot-shit designer at Sierra, a woman who’d drawn this relatively unenthusiastic newbie gamer into her fictional world so strongly that—true story!—when I visited New Orleans for the first time ten years later, I recognized Jackson Square from the game.

I can’t remember if I first met Jane Jensen in her office at Sierra’s Oakhurst office or in the studio, but I vividly recall the hammering of my heart. I was a part-time nobody and she was ... Jane Jensen. It would be a cool end to the story if I could say we became BFFs and she took me under her wing and mentored me. She wasn’t that sort of woman. She was very clearly in charge. She was there to do a job, and so was I.

I sat with Jane at the studio Sierra had built for Roberta Williams and the groundbreaking Phantasmagoria, and we watched the crew film a scene with Joanne Takahashi, who played Grace. In front of the giant blue screen, there were only three real things: Joanne in a trench coat, a metal bar that swung, and a trio of lit candles. Jensen flipped through a giant binder containing the design bible. This was her show, and she had absolute control and confidence.

My favorite memory of that trip and the article that followed was Jane telling me how she had selected the actor who played Gabriel Knight. She showed me a bunch of headshots, and when she got to Dean Erickson, my jaw dropped. It was Gabe. Jensen saw the look on my face, and we had a moment of complete understanding. She confided, “When I auditioned him, he was telling me the way he’d approach the role, and I looked down at his arm, and right then I realized he was Gabriel Knight.” I included that anecdote in my article because I thought it was powerful and showed that for a designer known for painstaking research and meticulous planning, she was also intuitive. But when she read the first draft of my subsequent article, she made me take it out. I finally got to tell people about his arm, Jane!

In the next issue of the quarterly InterAction, I wrote another story on the still-unreleased GK2. This time, I interviewed Jane at her home in Washington State. She loaned me books on the mad King Ludwig and werewolves from her personal collection. (More long-term influence: When I see a photo of Neuschwanstein Castle, I don’t think Disneyland; I think about the mad king and Gabriel Knight.) We sat down at her kitchen table to talk, but first, she had to clear off a large landscaping plan for her new backyard. It was incredibly detailed and done by a professional landscaper, but whenever I read about Jane’s design documents and diagrams, I think of that small backyard world rendered in fine pencil on a field of white. It’s the image that springs to mind whenever I hear the term “world building.”

Because that, above all, is what Jane Jensen does better than anyone in games before or since. She creates a world that perfectly depicts reality in its details and history and then populates it with memorable flawed-but-charming characters, mysterious goings-on, believable evil, and a compelling story that keeps you turning virtual pages toward the (always satisfying) end.

How does she do it? Why does she do it? How did she influence adventure gaming and storytelling? What happened after the Gabriel Knight series and what is Jensen working on now? I’ll leave it to Anastasia Salter to tell you that tale. And it’s a doozy—I learned so much about game design as a calling, a skill, and a business. I know you’ll enjoy it as much as I did. Even if you haven’t been waiting twenty years like me.

1

Introduction: Long Ago at Sierra

A narrator’s voice sets the scene—“Long ago, in the castle of a kingdom called Daventry”—as we see a young prince clad in green, sitting forlorn, head in his hands. His thoughts are far away with Cassima, a princess from the Land of Green Isles, whom he had glimpsed only once and now was the subject of his ongoing obsession. The prince’s mother tries to shake him out of his funk but can’t convince him to turn away his thoughts from the princess. Once she leaves, dramatic music plays and the camera focuses on a magic mirror behind the prince, which begins to glow, speaking with a woman’s voice: “Alexander ... I wish you were here.”

Figure 1.1 Opening cinematic of King’s Quest VI.

Source: Unless otherwise mentioned, all figures are from the author’s collection.

Alexander sails to her rescue and ends up crashed on an island when the game begins, moving from the passive 3D of the intro cinematics to the hand-drawn island where Alexander’s quest begins. From there, Alexander’s initiative fades as the player steps up, guiding him through explorations of objects and puzzles in search of Cassima’s home across five differently themed mystical islands populated by familiar and unusual characters. As an early computer game, the player is guiding Alexander through these islands using a mouse (introduced as a game interface only a few years before Alexander’s journey begins) in a “point and click” exploration of the islands. Despite the fantastical setting, the game is mostly free of combat and relies on wits and puzzles for the player to advance the quest. These are the opening moments of King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow (Sierra 1992), a collaboration between game designers Roberta Williams (already an industry legend at the time, and the woman responsible for creating the adventure game genre) and Jane Jensen, a rising star making some of her first marks on the genre.

Jane Jensen’s career began as a writer and designer, working on an in-house collaborative team Sierra started to fuel their ambitious plans for advancement in the PC games marketplace. Jensen’s contributions as a designer and writer span over two decades in the industry, with King’s Quest VI as the first game to bring her into the spotlight. She is best known for introducing the world to Gabriel Knight, a graphic adventure game anti-hero with a Southern drawl and a tendency toward entanglements with the supernatural. Her work pushed at the boundaries of PC gaming and a range of technologies, from 2D graphic adventure games to full-motion video and 3D graphics, all the way to the rise of mobile platforms and casual gaming on the outskirts of the mainstream gaming industry. In this book, I examine Jensen’s impact and her role as a designer. Jensen’s work brought the 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. I look at several genres Jensen has helped transform, including graphic adventure games, hidden object games, mobile games, and educational games. Her legacy as a designer sits outside of what the industry’s definitions and territories embrace. In this chapter, I examine Jane Jensen’s roots and early work as a game designer in the context of a burgeoning adventure game industry, an industry which she would play a pivotal role maturing—even as the industry resisted the push to grow up.

As a designer who approached game-making through a writer’s toolset, Jane Jensen brought new depths to narratives and characters that continue to inspire designers today. She introduced complex narrative structures to a genre that had previously relied heavily on fairly tales and other familiar archetypes, beginning with the multiple endings of King’s Quest VI and evolving to include multiple viewpoint characters and new mechanics for exploring character relationships. In her role as a designer-director, Jensen models a detail-oriented approach to design where each element is carefully controlled and reflects her vision as an author, allowing her works to strongly carry her voice and intention even with large teams involved throughout the production. Despite her many awards and successes, she has historically struggled as a woman designer, often working outside of mainstream game genres and studios, and her perseverance in the face of continued obstacles demonstrates the challenges yet facing an industry hostile to diverse voices. In her work, we see not only strong answers to that lingering question that hovers over the industry—are video games art?—but also an inspiration for the future of interactive narrative.

Jensen didn’t set out right away on the path to interactive narrative; she began as a computer programmer with a love for puzzles and a passion for stories and writing. This diverse background would give her unusual strengths in designing for the adventure game genre and later for experimenting beyond that genre in other emerging frontiers. This raw potential would be honed through a series of crucial mentorships and partnerships at Sierra, a hub of adventure game design and central company in the early history of computer gaming with a then-unusual emphasis on story and character. Her mentors and collaborators at Sierra, including three key women—Gano Haine, Lorelei Shannon, and Roberta Williams—helped to shape Jensen’s approach to the craft.

Jensen’s arrival at Sierra

Jensen’s career began as a systems programmer at Hewlett Packard, where she put her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Anderson University, Indiana, to work with mainframe computing. She notes that what drew her to computer science was solving puzzles: “I took a CS 101 class my first semester, because it was a pre-req ... I enjoyed it and found I had a gift for it. I love logic and logic puzzles, and programming is essential [sic] one big logic puzzle” (Wallis 2007). This same love for logic and puzzles naturally translates into the central mechanics of the adventure game genre. Jensen’s process connects some of the logical organization of programming to the scripting of game design, as she describes: “Each scene, whether a large story scene or a one-line voiceover message, gets its own entry. These are keyed by noun, verb, case, sequence number, in that order. For example, in the location KITCHEN you might see an entry for STOVE LOOK ALL 1 ‘It’s a stove’” (Saltzman 2000, 93). This ordered approach to design would allow Jensen to communicate her vision to large teams and approach complex problems in interactive storytelling and puzzle design in her later work.

Yet Jensen explains that she found her career in programming frustrating for its lack of opportunities for originality and innovation, so she looked for a way to turn her passion for writing into a career: “At the time, I was writing fiction on the side and was trying to publish a novel and various short stories, and about that time, I discovered my first computer games, which were King’s Quest IV and Manhunter: San Francisco. I was totally hooked by them ... I tend to get really obsessive about things once I get into them” (Taylor 2015).

Figure 1.2 Screenshot of King’s Quest IV.

Figure 1.3 Screenshot of Manhunter 2: San Francisco.

Both the games Jensen references are adventure games from the early years of the genre: Manhunter 2: San Francisco casts the player as part of an insurgent rebellion against alien overlords. One of these early objects of Jensen’s interest was particularly exciting as a historical moment for the game industry: King’s Quest IV featured the first playable woman protagonist for the series and indeed one of the first women protagonists in computer games (Dovey and Kennedy 2007, 148). It was also the work of designer Roberta Williams, a woman with whom Jensen would eventually collaborate. These games featured many of the trademarks of Sierra adventure games at the time: complex inventory puzzles, conversation and people with problems to solve, and plenty of unexpected ways to die along the way. They are also games that would feel very odd to the modern computer games player: slow-paced with death coming mostly from traps and not from failure of reflexes, and lots of pixel-hunting puzzles that demanded the player’s careful attention to the limited graphic environments of the era.

These games captured Jensen’s imagination, and with this inspiration in mind, Jensen went job-hunting in 1990:

I wrote Sierra and offered to do just about anything ... I told them I could program, or write, or whatever. I sent them a sample of a short story. A year later they replied. They were starting a group of writers, which were to be staff writers who would write documentation and manuals for the games, as well as additional texts and dialogs for the designers, and I was hired on in that group. (Taylor 1996)

This group was one of the first of its kind, as computer game studios were growing rapidly, but only a few (such as Infocom and LucasArts) paid much attention to writers as a major part of the design team. As game complexities grew, writing teams became more essential, with companies such as Obsidian, Blizzard, and Bethesda relying on creative teams to power their fantastical and science-fiction-driven world-building. Sierra On-Line had caught Jensen’s attention during its golden age. Founded in 1979, the company was run by a wife and husband team, Roberta and Ken Williams, and they’d already assembled an impressive team of designers, including Al Lowe, who brought his humor to the Leisure Suit Larry series (Sierra 1987); Jim Walls, lead designer of the procedural Police Quest series; and Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy, who collaborated on the humorous mishaps of a space janitor in the Space Quest series. These designers would become Jane Jensen’s colleagues and, more importantly, mentors in her early career.

Sierra’s company headquarters was situated in Oakhurst, CA, which still hosts a plaque naming the town “the birthplace of computer gaming” (Nooney 2014). Many Sierra games were released with comic books, additional stories in the manual, and other extensions of the narrative through playful manuals and tie-ins, all of which play an important role in the player’s experience and understanding of games, particularly in an era where the main game could otherwise seem fragmented and inaccessible (deWinter and Moeller 2014). This was an era of big-box games, when opening the package was itself an adventure, with plenty to contextualize the experience (and enable copy-protection through codes or words within the manual) and provide “feelies” to draw the player into the world (Kocurek 2013). Sierra adventure games emphasize characters and their exploration advancing the series rather than reflex-driven mechanics like those at the heart of first-person shooter games like Doom (id Software 1993). Playing Doom is very different from playing King’s Quest VI, for instance: While the opening sequence described earlier takes care to situate us in Alexander’s quests and longings, Doom drops the player right in a world of violent monsters and red skies, with a portrait of a grimacing space marine at the bottom of the screen the only indicator of a character. Doom and its ilk don’t leave much room for conversation; every enemy shoots on sight, and the governing sense of purpose is survival and victory. This is a defining quality of the genre that sets adventure games apart: “An adventure game involves a player seeing a story through from beginning to end, following the experience of a viewpoint character—the player’s avatar—on a quest shaped by the world and story crafted by the designer” (Salter 2014, 4). Sierra’s commitment to computer gaming allowed it to focus on adventure games and similar genres suited for a complex environment with a keyboard interface, rather than drawing on the mechanics of arcades and controller-based console games. Keyboards lend themselves to language and contemplative typing and adventure games translated this into text-based commands for exploring a world. This also allowed PC games to keep their ties to textual and literary elements, which would play a key role in Jensen’s own work as a designer.

While Jensen was settling into her new role at Sierra, the industry was shifting. Personal computers were rapidly rising as family machines. Sales were helped in part by the release of Windows 3.0 in 1990 with PCs growing in sales up to 37 million units a year by 1994 (Reimer 2005). The new Windows operating system brought with it significant improvements to the graphical interface and usability, with ads prominently featuring the message “Kiss it Goodbye” with a picture of the MS DOS “C>” prompt (Microsoft 1990). This promise of a family-friendly interface on Windows grew more appealing thanks to the launch of the World Wide Web on August 6, 1991 (Ward 2006). Sierra responded to this rise in the home computer by announcing a new educational initiative, with Ken Williams explaining the company’s direction:

Our plan is not to build software for schools, but create entertaining software which will increase children’s interest in learning. My feeling is that after children spend eight hours in school and then an hour on homework, they deserve some time for fun. Our software ... is something that kids will want to do, with the added benefit of socially redeeming value. (quoted in Greene 1991a)

This initiative falls squarely into the genre of edutainment, a term that fuses “education” and “entertainment,” and in doing so brings to mind children’s programming akin to Sesame Street. Laine Nooney observes that games of this era played a strong educational role even outside of direct edutainment marketing:

In the span of less than twenty years, many Americans went from having never seen a computer to interacting with these machines in many facets of their daily lives. Gaming is the first form of computational technology most of us ever handled ... Games taught us principles of interaction and screen responsiveness, about coordination between hand and eye, how to type, how to sit, how to look at a screen. (quoted in Lafrance 2016)

These trends informed some of the first projects Jensen would work on at Sierra.

Early collaborations at Sierra

Jensen’s first major assigned role at Sierra was as part of the design team on the edutainment title EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus (1991). While EcoQuest followed the formula of Sierra’s other quest-based adventure game series, including King’s Quest, it was marketed toward younger players as part of Sierra’s Discovery Series, which usually came bundled with a book (in this case, a practical guide to environmental acts for kids, shown in figure 1.4).

Figure 1.4 EcoQuest bundled book.

In EcoQuest, players take on the role of Adam, a child left to care for an oil-covered gull and an injured dolphin. Adam discovers that the dolphin can talk and gets drawn in to a journey to save the ocean. While the game introduced only a few new mechanics (such as allowing the player to recycle for extra points), reviewers writing recently still look back on the game as a remarkable example for its story:

The care put into every aspect of the game—from the wondrous descriptions to the witty dialogue and thought-provoking remarks on ecological risks of mindless progress—ensures that EcoQuest is both entertaining and educational. Moreover, the writers succeeded in filling Adam’s adventure with a heart-warming sense of wonder toward nature’s mysteries and marvels that is captivating not only for children, but also for adults. (Morstabilini 2009)

While EcoQuest was developed by a large team, Jensen’s credited role was second designer, listed after Gano Haine, another woman designer at Sierra with a particular talent for educational games and story. A discussion of the design process reveals the emphasis Haine and Jensen put on developing these character interactions. As Jensen described in an interview in Sierra’s in-house magazine, “The characters’ voices and personalities are used to humanize their plight, giving a voice to the faceless victims of our carelessness ... [and] hopefully, learning to like these characters will bring home the ecological message to the player” (Shannon 1992a, 19–20). One of the most pivotal characters is Delphineus, a rescued dolphin. Adam has to gain Delphineus’s trust first through caring for him and providing him food, and in exchange, Delphineus relies upon him to help clean up and save his threatened kingdom. Adam comes to the aid of several denizens, including a turtle professor named Erroneous who swallowed a balloon:

Adam: “That was a balloon I pulled out of your throat! Why’d you eat that?” Sea Turtle: “I mistook it for a particularly delectable dark comestible. My error—and a nearly fatal one. My throat, you see, is quite miniature. The rubbery texture of that balloon blocked it completely.”

Details about real-world behaviors and the threats presented by man-made materials to sea creature habitats were thus embedded into the dialogue itself, inviting the player to care about the characters impacted. This character-driven focus made it clearly an adventure game in line with Sierra’s developer philosophy, while also foreshadowing some of the emphasis Jensen would bring to all her works as a designer.

As an educational game, it stands out for its meaningful integration of learning with the game’s environment and narrative:

Perhaps the most elegant aspect of EcoQuest is the attempt by the designers to make the learning feel incidental: even the child most suspicious of forced learning through games could take comfort in a storyline as simple as finding and rescuing a dolphin. There were certainly no math equations floating in the water, no science experiments lurking on the sidelines. (Salter 2012)

Yet the game was grounded in research and hands-on experience. Jane Jensen and the rest of the team worked directly with the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito. Jensen explained in an interview describing the approach she and Haine took to the design process: “We wanted to depict the latest and most accurate information about the habitats and characteristics of marine mammals and the problems they face. The Center really helped fine-tune that aspect of the game” (Greene 1992). The team’s design process was intensive: “The designers researched reams of documents and watched miles of documentaries about each of the hazards to gain a better understanding of each problem. The more information the team received, the more EcoQuest developed into a believable fantasy rooted firmly in fact” (Greene 1991b). This reliance on research to build an environment (figure 1.5) would become a characteristic of Jensen’s games as well as a major approach within the industry, with detailed research informing the landscapes of worlds such as Bioshock’s (2K Games 2007) alternate history 1960s city Rapture or the detailed Italian Renaissance cities of Assassin’s Creed (Ubisoft 2007). Historical games and simulations take these trends even further, with the Games for Change movement valuing historical and social accuracy as a way to educate and persuade (Swain 2007).

Figure 1.5 Exploring underwater in EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus.

Much of the research was delivered to the player directly through interactions with the characters. Confronted with a vessel spewing bilge, for instance, Delphineus the dolphin explains the impact of boating waste on his ocean kingdom. Sierra’s design and marketing team even carried their commitment physically into the design, packaging the game in recycled boxes using soybean ink printing, including the book on saving the planet mentioned previously, and donating a portion of game sales to the Marine Mammal Center (Greene 1991b).

The attention to dialogue and the integration of research into gameplay and environment construction would become a hallmark of Jensen’s work. She was assigned to another Sierra edutainment title, Pepper’s Adventures in Time (1993), which features the adventures of a young girl trying to set right the revolutionary era after her uncle wreaked havoc with a time machine. Her work on the game was far from extensive. She was brought in and shifted from the project, and is credited as second designer, again working alongside Gano Haine. The text and dialogue is credited to Lorelei Shannon, another woman writer/designer at Sierra, who would later be known for horror writing. Their collaborative work demonstrated some of the best from Sierra’s writing team. One of the memorable scenes includes Benjamin Franklin as a hippie, too busy hanging out in a colonial hot tub to worry about working (figure 1.6). As both of these games were aimed at children, they also included fewer dead ends and easier puzzles. The writing of the game drew attention for being potentially above its audience, as Young (1995) notes in her review: “the writers seemed to completely forget about their audience part of the time as the game is littered with Monty Python jokes as well as various other more mature allusions such as cracks about academics.”

Figure 1.6 Meeting Ben Franklin in Pepper’s Adventures in Time.

The game’s design also experimented with an unusual type of playable character: the dog, Lockjaw. As Jensen explained the character in an interview in Sierra’s in-house magazine: “Lockjaw’s a great character because you have to think like a dog—a really sneaky dog, to solve his puzzles” (interview by Shannon 1992b, 54). An article in Sierra InterAction further described the playful nature of the dog’s interface: “Your special ‘Dog’ icon bar includes a ‘Nose’ icon for sniffing out trouble, a ‘Paw’ icon for digging yourself out of tough situations, and a ‘Mouth’ icon’ for eating everything in sight and biting the occasional posterior” (ibid.). One of the most memorable puzzles involves controlling a captured Lockjaw through a stranger’s bedroom, biting a butler, and escaping by using Lockjaw’s teeth to enlarge a rat hole. Such complexity (compared even to EcoQuest) demonstrates the expanding creative expectations of the adventure game genre.

As a Sierra writer, Jane Jensen was also assigned to several other projects. She voiced a memorable minor flapper girl character in The Dagger of Amon Ra (1992), a new installment in the Laura Bow series of murder mystery games. She also took over as writer on Police Quest III: The Kindred (1991) after Jim Walls left Sierra. This saw her moving into a different genre from her previous work as she tackled a mostly realistic series that had previously been grounded on Jim Walls’s own experiences as a police officer in California. The game still featured Walls heavily, and he appeared on-screen as the policeman narrator. One reviewer noted Jensen’s role in “bolstering the narrative flow and story,” which is particularly visible in her thematic additions (Plato’s Cavern n.d.). The story includes a Satanist cult featuring in the crime scenes, which resemble some of the themes Jensen would explore in Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (1993). Police Quest III received mixed reviews at the time of its release, thanks primarily to the incoherence of combining Jensen’s writing with Jim Walls’s tendency towards stereotyped characters and “true crime” procedural narratives. Looking back on the series, one reviewer observed that the realism Jim Walls insisted on in the representation of police work had become a problem for the series: “The story was just getting too bogged down in minute details of police work. Testifying at a trial, getting paper work sorted” (Sheridan 2010). However, at the time of its release, Computer Gaming World named it the “best of the series to date” (Lambright 1992), while Rock Paper Shotgun put it at #24 on their list of the top 25 adventure games as recently as 2015 (Walker 2015). Police Quest III would effectively mark the end of the original direction of the series, and Jensen was moved on to other projects at Sierra.¹

Apprentice today, designer tomorrow

Jane Jensen’s early collaborations brought her opportunities to work alongside and learn from a number of Sierra’s in-house designers, but her most successful collaborative project placed her alongside Roberta Williams herself as co-director of King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow (1992). Roberta Williams was the most recognized women in game design at the time, and as Laine Nooney notes, Williams’s work helped create the idea of game designer as noted author rather than an unnamed part of a team. Williams’s image appeared on the back of game boxes, and her signature was printed on the covers, an emphasis on designer attribution that culminated with the Roberta Williams’ Anthology (Sierra 1996)—“likely the first release of games encompassing the work of a single designer,” a notable distinction for any designer but particularly in one where women remain dramatically underrepresented (Nooney 2013). Williams strongly influenced Jane Jensen and served as a game design mentor and collaborator for her early work. Just as Jensen would do, Williams placed story first in her design process, as she described in an interview:

In my day, when creating a new adventure game, my first thoughts, before even thinking about any “framework” were: What is the story? Who are the characters, especially the main character? What is he/she trying to do, i.e. what is the quest? In what sort of “world or land” is this game going to be played? In other words, I always thought first of the story, characters, and game world. I needed to understand those before I could even think about any game framework, “engine,” or interface. (quoted in Jong 2006)

Williams clearly placed story, characters, and world-building before play and interaction design. This is a very different pattern from mechanics-driven design practices. This mindset could be seen throughout Sierra’s titles and would definitely influence Jensen’s own approach as an emerging game designer.

The love story following Prince Alexander’s quest to find Cassima was also the next installment in the King’s Quest series that had inspired Jensen to apply to Sierra in the first place. Like the other women designers Jensen had worked with, Williams came from a different background than Jensen—she didn’t start out a programmer and had no experience with computers before collaborating with her husband on their first game. J. C. Kristensen notes that Roberta Williams had worked at projecting herself as a woman who worked from home rather from a technical office: “[T]‌he home was represented as Roberta’s creative hub, where she attested that her games were best designed at the ‘proverbial’ kitchen table” (2010). The change in title is significant within Sierra’s team hierarchy as Jane Jensen was credited on the project as the co-director, designer, and writer, and correspondingly had much more influence over the game than she did in earlier collaborations. She is also directly credited with the creation of the game’s guidebook and the text and dialogue of the game itself.

Jensen’s guidebook sets the stage for the game’s world, written as a first-person account by Derek Karlavaegen, a scribe and historian of the game’s fictional kingdom of Daventry. The character was first introduced not in the game series but in a book, The King’s Quest Companion (1989), by Peter Spear the. The King’s Quest Companion is an unusual volume, acting simultaneously as a narrative description of the game and as a hint guide for players. Unlike most hint guides, which tend to be produced without significant involvement of the game’s designers, the volume and its subsequent editions were produced in consultation with Sierra and with Roberta Williams’s endorsement. This almost makes the guidebook part of a transmedia experience of the series, a concept Henry Jenkins (2010) defines as building consistent narrative experiences across multiple media forms. However, Jane Jensen was the first one to take Spear’s scribe character into the official world of the series and also the first to include an extensive storybook with the game itself. The Guidebook to the Land of the Green Isles (fifty-two pages) is entirely written as a narrative and thus necessitated the inclusion of a separate manual for technical information, while previous installments of the series had used only a single game manual for backstory and technical information. This blurs the line between Spear’s transmedia, fan-like production of an outsider archivist character and the main game world, demonstrating a sophisticated approach by Jensen in integrating potential “insider” humor and drawing on paratextual discourse. The guidebook (written by Jensen) sets the stage for the game’s mystical land:

Lest this record be put down to the fevered imagination of a madman or the fiction of a notorious liar, let me assure you, Dear Reader, that the Land of the Green Isles does indeed exist. One can hear the name of The Land whispered in roadside inns off dusty roads from the hills of Daventry to the sea of Tamir—especially on nights when the wind howls and the rain plays havoc on the window panes. The storytellers inevitably take on that same tone of voice they use when speaking of the Fairy Kingdom. I cannot vouch for the Fairy Kingdom since I have yet to get a leprechaun in a position of compromise, yet, the Land of the Green Isles ... Ah! ... that is a place where the feet of a man can find solid ground and his eyes feast on such wonders! (Jensen 1992, 1)

This type of character insertion is now common in games, exemplified by similar nods, such as the integration of fan legend Leeroy Jenkins into the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game (Upper Deck Entertainment 2005) and an in-game achievement by Blizzard (Holmes 2015). In this early Jensen text, some of her stylistic elements emerge, particularly in the use of figurative language and fantastical elements, as well as the narrative structures and voice that she infused into the King’s Quest series.

The writing on the game itself was likewise a step forward for the series. The game brought a depth to the series that previous installments lacked, particularly thanks to the integration of inspiration ranging from the classical mythology to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll 1865). In an interview, Roberta Williams explained her decision to take on a co-designer:

I wanted to train Jane ... because I didn’t want Sierra to be dependent on me. Someone else needs to know how to do a “proper” adventure game. [I]‌n my opinion, the best way to learn it properly is side by side. Overall it was a positive experience, and it was very good for the series because Jane brought in some new ideas. (“Roberta Williams—The Imagination Behind the Quest” n.d., 10)

Roberta Williams typically worked with a collaborator. As Jensen explained in an interview, “She typically did work with another designer to do the day-to-day stuff,” and it was precisely that project management and writing Jensen would take on (interview by Fenlon 2014). Jensen also noted the importance of the experience as a design apprenticeship:

Roberta liked to just sit down with a huge piece of paper and map out a world—locations, where you pick up what, very basic characters ... I’m much more of a detailed story/plotline kind of designer. But it was terrific to see her technique and I do still try to “back away” to that high-level view and do that once in a while during my design process. (Wallis 2007)

The significance of the world and using locations to drive the story would be seen not only in King’s Quest VI but also in Jensen’s own later work, woven in with her own emphasis on story and plot.

Roberta Williams described the decision to make a game that could be explored in a range of ways: “Players can take the easiest route to the end of the game, but they will discover less than half of the puzzles and regions. [O]‌ur goal was to make it easy for people who were beginners, yet include lots of optional paths and puzzles for those who wanted more of a challenge” (Sierra 1992). This was possible thanks to an approach Jensen learned for crafting narrative through interaction by working with Roberta Williams, which she describes as particularly pivotal to allowing for player agency in a linear narrative:

The answer is the old “string of pearls” approach, which was first described to me by Roberta Williams when we were working on King’s Quest VI. The idea is to picture each major plot point as the beginning of a pearl on a string. It has one central point, which is fixed. This could, for example, be the beginning of the game, or the beginning of a chapter or time block. You know where the player is at this point, you’re in control of what he knows, and you convey the next large chunk of story. After this comes the “wide part” of the pearl. There may be 3 or 8 or 15 different little scenes or actions the player can trigger, and he can trigger them in any order. Thus, these smaller actions are “nonlinear.” But once the player has done all of these things (or, at least, all that are required for the story—some might be optional), the game registers this fact and comes back to a central point—ending the chapter or section of the game by giving another big story chunk and thus “closing” the pearl. (quoted in Saltzman 2000, 97)

Here’s a way to visualize the “string of pearls” approach, which Jesse Schell notes is now one of the most common approaches to game story design (Schell 2008, 265):

Figure 1.7 Diagram of the “string of pearls” narrative approach.

An example of this approach in King’s Quest VI occurs when the player first gains access to a magic map allowing teleportation to four different islands. Each island contains fragments of the story, along with objects that need to be gathered in any order to gain access to the catacombs and continue on his rescue mission. The combined strengths of the two designers resulted in a game with great depth in puzzles and content, as well as some surprising difficulties. Jane Jensen described this as part of the fun of the project: “Roberta and I would often sit and chuckle over the nasty, terrible things we were going to put people through. [W]‌hile I think all the puzzles are fair and logical, we deliberately made the game really challenging” (DeBaun 1992, 24). This challenge and variety of play paths have helped make King’s Quest VI endure as the most complex and replayable installment in the series, with a strong combination of environments and character-driven questing.

The King’s Quest VI design document, representing the work of both Williams and Jensen as well as their collaboration with the team, is a hefty binder of carefully structured notes (Williams and Jensen 1992). The majority of the design document is laid out by location, with each main setting in the game occupying its own space with corresponding maps and breakdowns of locations, characters, items, and actions. For instance, the game’s primary action begins on the Isle of the Crown, where Alexander goes in search of his lost love. The location includes twelve nodes, each with their own screen (a standard of 2D adventure games). These nodes often include colocated settings where the player has to walk to one end or another to reach the “next” screen, which creates a noticeable transition unlike the movement of a side-scroller or platformer where the player’s location determines the viewable area. Some portions of the design clearly reflect Jensen’s influence, and the text of the dialogue is credited to her work on the project. An encounter with the Head Druid (as laid out in the design document) is particularly reminiscent of Jensen’s later work, with detailed descriptions of mysticism and legends, building depth to the hero’s quest and surroundings:

Head Druid: It is true that legend has it that it is the right of any human to challenge the Lord of the Dead in order to save his own life or the life of another already passed, but the knowledge of how to do this was lost centuries ago. All I can tell you is the story I’ve heard of a young knight who came from a land far away to challenge the Lord of the Dead for the soul of his dead lover. The story says that he tamed the Lord of the Dead’s pet, a black winged beast named Night Mare. Night Mare sometimes flies to the human world to feed on Nightshade, you see. It is said that she can be tamed by filling a human skull with fire embers and then adding brimstone (more commonly known as sulphur) to the skull in her presence to create the luring scent of the Underworld. Night Mare took the knight away to the Isle of the Dead, but neither the knight nor his lover ever returned. If there was a means for challenge, it was lost with the knight. (Williams and Jensen 1992, 580.5)

Later, Alexander finds the dead knight on his way to the Underworld to pursue his own parallel quest. The arrangement of the game design document for King’s Quest VI is thus entirely nonlinear, with the exception of the introductory animation, which is detailed in the front matter. The player has to revisit some locations repeatedly in order to progress, which gives the player a sense of changing characters and situations in the game world. Areas are not static, and the player’s actions matter to other characters in advancing the narrative. The sophistication of the design (and document) is a sign of Jensen’s work to come.

At this stage of graphic adventure games, the text was still a vital component of the player’s ability to understand and navigate the quest. Jensen’s primary responsibility was completing this textual portrait. While King’s Quest VI was developed during the beginning of the “talkie” revolution (a CD version, released two years later, would include voice acting by professionals), narrative and dialogue text was still primarily displayed, and actions are described in terms of either printed results or displayed animations. The language of the game document recalls a play, referring to each screen in terms of its exits, features, props, actors, and objects. A referential fairy tale logic clearly guides each section: for instance, on the Isle of the Crown, Alexander encounters Beauty:

[T]‌he beautiful, unwanted stepdaughter that is the perfect match for the Beast of the Isle of the Beast. Once during each act, the player will be given a hint about Beauty’s mistreatment and love for roses—if the player enters this screen during the act, that is. Once the player walks on this screen with the Beast’s ring in inventory, Beauty will be close to the path (in previous hints she’s back on the porch). (Williams and Jensen 1992,250.1)

Figure 1.8 Visiting hell in King’s Quest VI.

Other islands take different inspirations and demonstrate elements of Jensen’s approach to design. For instance, the Isle of the Dead (see figure 1.8) consists of eight screens, including the Gates of the Underworld and the Banks of the River Styx. The aesthetic is described in the physical description as “creepy and surreal,” with a mood that “should be oppressive, threatening, and dream-like” (Williams and Jensen 1992, 600.1). Portions of the island also draw on popular culture. For example, the document describes the Gate to the Underworld: “The gate looks like just a gate at first, but once Alexander tries to open it, an evil face will ‘transmogrify’ from the door (like the liquid metal guy in Terminator 2). The face should animate and look very nasty” (670.1). This intertextuality is essential to Jensen’s approach, and these types of references are strewn visually and textually in her games. Compared to previous installments in the King’s Quest series, these details particularly suggest a depth of space and a darkness that take the “interactive fairy tale” genre forward (Nitsche 2007).

Jensen’s collaboration and new ideas paid off. In a retrospective review, Gamespot called it one of the best adventure games ever, noting:

Though the game is a traditional boy-meets-girl, boy-pines-for-girl, boy-wins-girl back love story; the tale is told in such an interesting, outstanding, and sometimes downright humiliating way that it holds much more appeal than typical damsel-in-distress stories. Alexander and Cassima don’t always behave like typical heroes and maidens, a pleasant and expected result from having two female authors on a video game script. (Gouskos 2006)

The game also featured multiple endings, with the player’s actions allowing the storyline to progress to several potential outcomes that still felt like satisfactory conclusions instead of offering a straight linear path (the model for most games in the genre, including all previous King’s Quest titles). The range of outcomes and player agency is best on display in the breakdown of the end game cartoon, which is always fundamentally the same:

Alexander and Cassima are finely dressed in wedding garb. Captain Saladin is standing in front of them, performing the ceremony. Cassima’s parents, King Calliphim and Queen Allaria, might or might not be there. If there, they are standing next to Cassima. Alexander’s family, King Graham, Queen Valanice, and Rosella might or might not be there. If there, they are standing next to Alexander. (Williams and Jensen 1992, 165.2)

Some of the variation is minor: If Alexander didn’t recover his royal insignia ring, he can’t give it to Cassima as a wedding ring. If Alexander didn’t save the King and Queen from the Isle of the Dead, they are absent and Cassima is disappointed, saying “If only my mother and father could be here to see this day, then I could be truly happy.” Likewise, Alexander’s family will only appear if he saved the Genie and reopened communication between the islands. Even the political situation changes: If the player failed to save the stolen treasure, the islands are still enemies.

The success of King’s Quest VI powered Jensen’s transition from codirector to lead director and designer, a move that would enable her to leave fairy tale worlds behind in favor of darker terrain. In Sierra’s team hierarchies, this new role would also let her take much more artistic control of her projects, even as she pushed the boundaries of what Sierra games typically explored. The works of her Sierra apprenticeship had allowed her to refine her approach to research-driven, intertextually laden game development while exposing her to the mentorship and collaborative influences of a number of other Sierra designers. She would bring those design techniques forward to her next project, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (1993), a game about as far removed from the quests of dolphins and princesses as it was possible to get. As one reviewer would comment on Jensen’s dramatic transition after the release of Gabriel Knight, “her sweet streak having been sated by the adventures of Prince Pubescent in the Land of Cute, Jensen now unleashes her sour, her acrid, her steamy, and her vicious streaks all at once” (Ardai 1994, 34). The resulting work would be a landmark of the adventure game genre and a significant masterpiece in Jensen’s oeuvre.

Uncovering Jensen’s legacy

Jensen’s work played a pivotal role in the coming of age of computer games. As reviewer Arinn Dembo described Sins of the Fathers:

Sierra On-Line’s Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is, in my opinion, the best horror game ever made. Jane Jensen, the writer and designer of the game, is without doubt the most important factor in Gabriel Knight’s success. The dialog she has written is of literary quality ... [T]‌he elements she uses to drive the action—sex, violence, love, sacrifice, betrayal, and worship both holy and profane—give the story incredible power, as well as a welcome maturity. (Dembo 1995, 58)

The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery (hereafter Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within) (Sierra 1995) received similar accolades, including Computer Gaming World’s Game of the Year in 1996. The accompanying article noted the sophistication of Jensen’s exploration of humanity: “As the title [The Beast Within] suggests, Jensen’s script addresses humankind’s desire to embrace the primitive and how that base nature can overpower us. Yet, she doesn’t preach to us or even offer a final answer. She merely used wordplay and symbolism to illuminate, rather than to bind” (“Game of the Year” 1996, 82). The release of the twentieth anniversary edition of Gabriel Knight was accompanied by a video with several developers addressing the games influence. Agustin Cordes (Scratches [Nucleosys 2006]) noted that Gabriel Knight demonstrated how “mature and serious” games can be, while Ragnar Tornquist (Dreamfall Chapters: The Longest Journey [Red Thread Games 2014]) noted the game’s influence on the ability of games to tell dark interesting stories. Laney Berry (The St. Christopher’s School Lockdown [in development]) recalled playing Gabriel Knight and drawing particular inspiration from the music (Admin 2014).

As a writer-designer who has always identified as a writer first, Jane Jensen defies the usual placement of writing on the bottom rung of game development and brings narrative to the forefront of every genre she works with. Jensen notes that writing for games can feel “frustrating and difficult ... You have this great scene, but you have to write five times that much around it ... to provide options. When your focus is on telling the story, that can feel like busy work and a waste of time” (quoted in Marx 2010, 214). Yet Jensen describes her love of both media:

I really enjoy them both, as cop-outish as that sounds. The books are wonderful because I feel I’m learning a new art form—the novel—and I love the challenge. I’m a big reader, and I really want to write a novel that’s literate but also exciting and entertaining. That’s an important and stimulating goal for me as a creative person. The games are something else—they use parts of my brain that aren’t exercised as much in the books—it takes a lot of logic and programmer type thinking to lay out a game design. And it’s great to work with a team, and see your story come to life with art and animation and music and voices. The interactivity, also, as tedious as it can be to write, makes a story different somehow—more intimate, more personal. (Interview by Wright 1999)

Jensen’s exploration of the intimate and personal through adventure games is essential to her design legacy: her characters bare their souls to the player, inviting us into their bedrooms, desires, and failures. This hybridity of a programmer’s mindset with a novelist’s attention to research, settings, and character makes Jensen’s work stand out even among other graphic adventure games.

Jensen’s games are a reflection of her philosophy as a game designer, and the emphasis on great storytelling, complex and diverse characters, and well-researched settings that she brought to her games provide some of the best evidence for narrative’s potential as part of play. Jensen’s work fuses narrative with interaction, fiction, and real-world research. Her game design serves as a model for a story to be meaningfully integrated into play with powerful results. This book examines multiple facets of Jane Jensen’s career as explored in this introduction while diving further into the pantheon of Jensen’s works. Jane Jensen’s integration of a novelist’s love for well-researched, character-driven stories with a background in programming and passion for logic puzzles pushed the adventure game genre forward during the classical era of gaming. At the height of adventure games, it brought her tremendous success. Later, those same qualities would play a part in driving her to the outskirts of the industry, away from mainstream studio productions, and ultimately bringing her work back to the form of novels and short stories from which her passion for narrative emerged. I argue that Jensen’s work in the casual game market and her subsequent reinvention of the studio format to attempt to sustain independent adventure games aimed outside the hardcore gaming market are vital as acts of resistance that push at the mainstream definition of gaming. Jensen’s story is not the typical experience of an AAA, or big studio, game designer; her work draws our attention to the potential of the very qualities of games that the industry has often dismissed, undervalued, and frequently derided. As acts of resistance, even her less commercially successful or recognized work serves to challenge our assumptions of what games might be.

Jensen’s career as a designer-director begins with her most successful franchise, Gabriel Knight. In Chapter 2, I examine Jensen’s landmark Gabriel Knight series with attention to the game’s groundbreaking development of a gothic atmosphere and change in tone from the conventions of the era. I place the games alongside Jensen’s novelizations and original novels as a case study in interactive narrative to illuminate Jane Jensen’s detailed approach to building interactivity through dialogue and nonlinear player actions by examining her design documents alongside the finished games. As Gabriel Knight draws heavily on text and includes both novels and comic books among its transmedia elements, I further demonstrate how Jensen applied and advanced techniques for cross-media integration with game design that are still relied upon today. The three original Gabriel Knight games provide a perfect opportunity to consider the influence of platform on the design of interactive narrative as the move from 2D graphics and comics to full-motion video and finally to 3D graphics brought new constraints and design challenges. I demonstrate how Jensen’s research-driven approach and successful adaptation to a changing technological landscape played a pivotal role in games’ coming of age.

In Chapter 3, I examine Jensen’s work after the fall of the adventure game genre—a complicated change in the industry in which she herself is often credited as playing a substantial part. Jensen sought to carve out a new space outside the borders of the mainstream industry through pushing at the potential of the emerging Hidden Object genre, which brought more complex narrative to the casual game market. Her casual game design, including the Agatha Christie and Women’s Murder Club series, integrated elements of her adventure game design process with new audiences in mind. Jensen’s work in this genre complicates the already problematic division between casual and hardcore games, which I examine through the lens of the growing debates surrounding the definition of games and gamer identity. Jensen’s bold leap into the casual game market (where most “hardcore” gamers and game designers did not tread) paved the way for increasing complexity in casual games, bringing story and depth to simpler mechanics aimed at a broader base of players. Jensen pushed casual games forward as a storytelling medium, creating several notable adaptations of novels and working as part of the transmedia experience of a property.

Finally, I examine Jensen’s role in the adventure game renaissance through the creation of an independent family-run studio, which has drawn inspiration from her commitment to sustainable agriculture to build a new model for a gaming studio (Mulrooney 2011). The last few years have seen an incredible resurgence in adventure games produced, and most of them have been funded through Kickstarter. Tim Schafer, designer of Monkey Island (1990) and Grim Fandango (1998), launched the craze with his overfunded campaign in February 2012; he asked for $400,000 and raised over three million dollars to support the making of a classic graphic adventure game (Double Fine and 2 Player Productions 2012). Jane Jensen took to Kickstarter in 2012 with a different model: Instead of asking for funding to make a single game, she sought to launch the studio Pinkerton Road through a model of supporting memberships not unlike a community supported agriculture project. The campaign was successful, and Pinkerton Road has since released the original adventure game Moebius: Empire Rising (2014) and a twentieth-anniversary remake of the first Gabriel Knight (2013). Nevertheless the industry itself has changed; the sustainability of projects of this size and the disproportionate expectations of players ultimately doomed the model while reflecting the intense challenges that still face designers seeking to work outside of the mainstream system. However, this outsider positioning is valuable for the freedom it offers designers. The characters emerging from these games defy stereotypes and include landmark representations for gender and diversity. When placed in the context of the ongoing tensions over the role of money and the traditional studio model in the making of games, Jensen’s work draws our attention to the challenges game designers face within this industry.

Jensen’s current projects have taken her away from the games industry, and her latest novel is a would-have-been game design turned story. In my final analysis of Jensen’s legacy, I briefly examine these texts as a reflection of the challenges facing authors in both games and novels. Jane Jensen’s work as a novelist occupies a highly gendered and mature space, with her alter ego Eli Easton serving as a credited author on a number of works that she only recently connected publicly to her Jane Jensen, game designer, persona. This choice (and the works themselves, which include fan fiction) reflect some of the challenges Jensen has faced in fitting into an industry that does not easily make room for authors, much less women.

Throughout this book, I draw on Jane Jensen’s own words as expressed through interviews (both contemporary and historical), game design documents, essays, novels, and her games. In the final chapter of this book, Jensen further reveals her vision and attitudes in a new interview. I also place Jensen’s works in a gameography from her classic to current works, demonstrating that the adventure game as a genre is far from dead, and indeed, Jensen’s impact on game design beyond this genre has only begun to be recognized.

Adventure games reached an audience of players that many other genres of gaming abandoned or disdained as a target market, and their renaissance is a reflection of the demographics of the gaming market (Salter 2014). Jensen’s position as one of the formative women designers in an industry that remains male-dominated is perhaps best reflected in her success at reaching underserved audiences through efforts such as Oberon Media. The current tensions surrounding gaming culture have echoes of older debates within the gaming community regarding gender and maturity and certainly demonstrate the importance of Jensen’s work in expanding the gaming audience. Her dual status as writer and game designer offers us important insights into the intersections of these practices as well as the different challenges that accompany the act of writing a story for interaction. Jane Jensen’s adventure games have rightly been canonized, and the release of the twentieth anniversary edition of Gabriel Knight in particular serves as a reminder of how a great interactive story can stand the test of time and serve as a model for what games could be even as the industry continues to struggle to define itself.

2

Being Gabriel Knight: Character and Research-Driven Interactive Narrative

I just think there exists a larger potential in videogames for players to bond with the story and immerse themselves because they are acting as the protagonist—not just reading about him or her passively.

Jensen, quoted in Edge Staff 2009, 4.

While Jensen’s early work at Sierra had been collaborative and built her experience through mentorship from a number of Sierra’s in-house writers and designers, her next project gave her the chance to pitch and explore her independent vision. The design of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (Sierra 1993) would mark both a departure for Jensen and a major change for Sierra. Jensen proposed a game focused not on fantasy or space but on a close-to-reality New Orleans with an edge of supernatural mystery. She explained that her influences were mostly from horror: “I’d always been interested in horror and darker stuff, and that’s the kind of fiction that I read. I loved graphic novels like Sandman and Hellblazer, so that’s what I wanted to do—something along those lines” (interview by McDonald 2014). Horror films popular at the time included the psychological procedural The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Joss Whedon’s campy Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), the precursor to the famous television series of the late 1990s. However, Jensen was working with such themes before series like those would really take off. For example, The X-Files was under development but not airing until 1993. Ken Williams was particularly skeptical of the move toward horror:

It was actually a really hard sell, because at the time, Sierra only did really family stuff like King’s Quest and Quest for Glory and of course Larry, which was sort of the pornographic, dirty uncle of the Sierra world. But they really had not done anything dark and serious and gothic and Ken [Williams, CEO of Sierra On-Line] wasn’t thrilled about it. He actually told me, I’m going to let you do this, but I wish you would come up with something lighter or funny. (Quoted in “Legendary Game Designer Jane Jensen” 2012)

With her mature focus, Jensen was clearly leaving behind the worlds of talking dolphins and fairytale creatures. She notes that even others at Sierra were skeptical of this dark approach to gaming:

[T]‌here were a number of, I would say, doubters at the company who weren’t sure it was going to work, because it was a darker game and Sierra up to that point had pretty much just done humor and family-based products. So that sort of shook my own faith of like, “Am I really doing the right thing? This is my chance. Am I going to blow it?” (Interview by PCGamer 2014)

Sierra’s internal philosophy (and the trust Jensen had earned after the success of King’s Quest VI) made this risk-taking possible, but it was definitely Jensen’s big chance.

The risk paid off. Jensen launched a landmark franchise exploring mature themes and redefining adventure games as a genre through several generations of technical changes and the rise of 3D gaming. Indeed, the series resonated so much that Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers has held frequent spots on lists of the best adventure games of all time: #10 on PCGamer (Cobbett 2015), #16 on AdventureGamers, with sequel Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within (1995) taking the #3 spot (AG Staff 2011), #7 on USGamer (Davidson 2014a), and countless more. The franchise has even recently been reborn through a crowd-funded revitalization with a twentieth-anniversary remake of the first game. The impact of the Gabriel Knight series on adventure games and PC gaming as a whole can be seen in four primary areas: development of character, environmental storytelling, research-driven puzzles, and evolving with changing platforms. Jensen’s work in these areas demonstrates her skill at designing and directing increasingly complex narratives despite constantly changing platforms and technologies, highlighting the applicability of her techniques to a changing media landscape. I examine Jensen’s choices throughout the series and her risk-taking and innovative approaches as a writer-designer to pushing the adventure game genre further toward maturity and complexity, particularly as she invites players to occupy diverse characters and perspectives to understand their views on the world. Her work imbues game environments with depth and complexity drawn from historical context and research, emphasizing realistic experiences even in apparently supernatural tales. Jensen’s work on the series is particularly notable for a sophisticated integration of narrative, character, and environment into every element of the game’s design.

Playing as Gabriel Knight

The identification of the Gabriel Knight series by its title character is a reflection of his importance to the game series: Gabriel Knight is a personality unlike any other adventure game character before him. Writing at the time of the Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers release, reviewer Charles Ardai notes: “[he] comes to life in a way that no previous Sierra characters have. You don’t know what King Graham drinks with breakfast or what Roger Wilco worries about when he turns out the lights at night; with Gabriel you know both and many other things beside” (1994, 36). Knight’s characterization draws on a skewed version of the classic hero. Angela Tenga notes that the series rewrites the “Arthurian knight” in the tradition of film noir, a bad-boy antihero who establishes his questionable relationships with women in the first moments of game (2013, 69). In the first game, Gabriel Knight solves a series of voodoo murders and learns that he is a German-descendant “Shadow Hunter” tasked with fighting the supernatural. The religious overtones of Gabriel Knight’s heroism are in keeping with the religious themes of the conflicts he faces and are echoed throughout his personal symbolism. His very name, Gabriel Knight, recalls both the angel and the knighthood, while he is the owner of St. George’s Rare Books and keeps a model dragon under the counter. Connie Veugen notes that Gabriel’s mythos suggests an arc toward hero-king, but everything from his poor sense in love affairs to his scoundrel nature holds him back from that ideal (2015). This type of suffering, near-religious figure is common to the horror genre and recalls the tormented yet desirable antiheroes of horror novels, particularly Anne Rice’s Lestat, or John Saul’s often-doomed investigators of the supernatural or deadly. But before Gabriel Knight, such figures rarely stalked computer game corridors, although antiheroes would later emerge as an important aspect of masculine characters in games (Kirkland 2009).

Much of the game’s success was owed to the resonance of the title character Gabriel Knight, whom Jane Jensen has described as informed by romance novel archetypes and an explicit attempt at a “hot” male character:

Gabriel is a classic bad boy, rake, or rogue type of character. He’s flirtatious with any attractive woman, has had a string of one night stands, and never takes relationships seriously. His voice is deep and he has a southern drawl, so when he has sexy lines flirting with women in the game, you feel it in your toes. His attractiveness is reinforced in the first game by the quick-and-hot liaison with the gorgeous Malia Gedde and the slower-burn, I-should-resist-you-but-I-can’t affection of his brainy shopkeeper, Grace. (Jensen 2014)

The idea of male characters designed specifically to appeal to players as a romantic interest is still incredibly rare in video games, with romantic characters such as Link and the androgynous men of the Final Fantasy series most notably filling that role (Judice 2015). Jensen took the appeal a step further by casting Tim Curry as the original voice of Gabriel, as bringing the voice of an actor of that caliber added to the character’s perceived emotional depth and nuance. Yet the game never suffered from a “pink-box” effect: Despite the design of Gabriel Knight with the potential for the women’s gaze clearly in mind, Gabriel also resonated with male players as the many admiring reviews quoted here demonstrate. Gabriel is thus the heir to generations of sexy but manly crime-fighting heroes from homicide detective Chris in the Silk Stalking series (Cannell 1991–1995) to fellow attractive demon hunters Sam and Dean Wincester in the Supernatural series (Kripke 2005–present).

Gabriel’s romantic appeal is realized in his character arc, which Roberta Sabbath has described as a recasting of the gothic novel, playing his part in Jensen’s interrogation of “black and white” morality with room for ambiguity that is often missing in the moral landscape of games (Sabbath 1997). As Gabriel, the player enters a love affair with Malia, a possessed woman, and gets to empower his character development:

In both endings, Malia dies as punishment for the sins she carried out in the name of her vengeful patriarchal heritage. But Gabriel has a choice. If he refused to try to save her ... he dies, representing the deadly consequences of denying love in one’s life. If he tries to help her, he lives to love again. In that one moment, he is metamorphized from a dispirited, cynical character into one who recognizes the powers of human love and commitment. (Sabbath 1997)

This is an example of creating the illusion of agency in a scene with only one ideal outcome that advances the overall narrative. Jan Simons suggests that the illusion of player agency in narrative is enough to create meaningful play: “The trick of the trade of game design is indeed to make the player believe she is in control” (Simons 2007). Sins of the Fathers makes use of this belief and further offers the player enough choices to create more than the illusion of agency; the player’s exploration of Gabriel’s character throughout, along with the player’s choices in building a relationship with Malia, factor into a critical moment of agency. By investing the player in Gabriel’s growth, Jensen brings us closer to him, inviting us to help him overcome his own worst traits.

Playing as Gabriel Knight thus requires embracing his perspective on interactions and problem-solving throughout the game. While all of the Gabriel Knight games take place in the third person, the player is continually invited to occupy Gabriel’s head in order to solve puzzles and investigate the environment. Laurie Taylor observes that this interface can support making a connection as third-person perspectives place the player within Gabriel Knight’s gaze and allow the player to look back and study the character from an outsider’s perspective (2003). This also invites us to judge him, and certainly his choices invite that gaze. Yet the central investigation of the game is not merely studying an environment or events but more an exploration of the psyche of Gabriel himself. Steve Honeywell’s hint guide, published in Computer Game Review magazine, appropriately takes the form of a first-person story told from Gabriel’s point of view:

Mosley let me look at the other markings they had found at the other murder sights. I wanted a copy, but the police can be very touchy about evidence and such. So, I made up a story about wanting an author/cop picture for the book. Making an excuse about needing to fix my hair, I went out of Mosley’s office and photocopied the important parts of the file, putting the folder back on Officer Franks’ desk when I was done. (Honeywell 1993)

Throughout this retelling, Honeywell writes as if he is in Gabriel’s head, thinking about motivations and choices even when offering a strategy for tricking a childhood friend. While Gabriel’s investigations seem to be centered on a place and external murders, his real mysteries are internal and demand the player to participate in building his self-awareness.

We also get to accompany Gabriel as Grace Nakimura. While Grace appears in the first game as a non-player character (NPC), she is playable in the later installments of the series. Her gaze is particularly critical of Gabriel, and his weaknesses are her strengths—she is introduced as a graduate student and a researcher. Grace is a rare playable character heralded for her stand-out attributes among women game characters, as one reviewer observes:

Grace Nakimura is a bit of an anomaly in modern video games. A young scholarly Japanese-American college student, she looks like a bookworm and doesn’t dress in sexy outfits or have out-sized proportions. Instead, Grace is armed with as much wit and intelligence as any female character in the history of games. (Wright 2007)

Labeling Grace Nakimura an anomaly is an understatement: her lack of hypersexualized characteristics and her role as a playable character in two of the games makes her remarkably different from her most famous counterparts, who tend toward the model of the damsel in distress exemplified by Princess Peach from the Mario series or the hypersexualized woman, embodied by the arcade-violence ready buxom women of the Street Fighter games (Miller and Summers 2007). In American games, representations of nonwhite women and diversity of characters overall are rare (Williams et al. 2009). While Sierra hired many women designers as compared to other companies (most notably Jensen’s mentor, cofounder Roberta Williams), most Sierra adventure games—and indeed, most games—relegated women to the role of non-player character rather than a viewpoint character. Grace Nakimura, as a viewpoint character whose design does not cater to the male gaze, marked a significant step forward in the types of playable women characters the medium had ever seen. Decades later, there are still almost no representations of women in games that compare to Jensen’s characters as I will examine further in Chapter 4. For women players (including myself), Grace was a welcome change of pace as an intelligent and sarcastic viewer of Gabriel’s at-times misogynist tendencies. As one retrospective describes her significance even today, “Nakimura, meanwhile, remains one of the best, most realistic female characters in game history. Intelligent, honest, forthright, non-sexualized and completely immune to Knight’s flirtatious ways” (Davidson 2013). Nakimura is a forerunner of several important women characters who play similar roles, such as Portal’s Chell, a notable standout in a genre of “a veritable vacuum of diversity” (deWinter and Kocurek 2015, 38).

Crafting memorable playable worlds

While Gabriel and Grace are the central characters in the franchise, the spaces they occupy are at least as important to the player’s experience. Jane Jensen’s early collaborations at Sierra on environmental storytelling paid off in the detailed works of EcoQuest and King’s Quest VI. Her research-driven approach allowed her to bring more realism and life to each new environment she crafted. Sins of the Fathers is set in New Orleans, and both real and imagined or altered places in the city’s landscape are made available as they are brought to Gabriel’s attention through research, dialogue, and the passing of days. This is a prime example of environmental storytelling as Connie Veugen and Felipe Quérette note: “[W]‌e see that in GK1 the place of action and the game fiction interlock. But New Orleans does not only form the backdrop of the story and the primary source of puzzle information, it also sets the game’s boundaries” (2008, 218). Jensen’s New Orleans draws on a rich literary tradition of cities as characters (Rotella 1998). Gabriel Knight series composer Robert Holmes explains that the environments themselves become the characters that inspire the composition of the game’s music: “[I]t’s almost easier and more prevalent in the GK’s to treat the rooms and environments as characters and write for those” (interview by Heyn 2006b). This approach recalls the game design process of Jensen’s mentor Roberta Williams and the environment-oriented logic from the King’s Quest VI design process (detailed in Chapter 1.) Each location in Sins of the Fathers is treated similarly, and as noted in the introduction, several designers continue to be inspired by the landscape of Jensen’s New Orleans. Robert Holmes is Jensen’s continual collaborator, providing the moods to most of her game worlds. He’s also her husband—the two met while Jane Jensen was working on Pepper’s Adventures in Time, which Holmes was producing. As Holmes recounts, “We were trying to hide our courtship from the team because we felt it would make it uncomfortable for them. This went on for several weeks. Then, one Friday night we were at a movie together, and in walked about half our team. Cover blown!” (Holmes 2014). The two worked together regularly, and Holmes recounts how he played a large role on the team for Gabriel Knight:

I was working as the Producer for the game as well, I was more connected to the team and every aspect of the games development and evolution. The momentum of all that served as a daily stimulus and fed my creative process. I also felt, as much of the team only knew me as their producer that I had something to prove creatively to earn my stripes as that part of the team. It was great to have a desk set up in the middle of the team where part of the day I spend as producer, and then I had keyboards set up at my desk as well, and I would just turn around and write music whenever it came to me. (Heyn 2006c)

This partnership comes through in the moody notes of the soundtrack, which plays a major part in the player’s reactions to each of the New Orleans locales. Such an approach to detailed environment construction, and particularly the intertwining of music and set, is particularly alive in the world-building of the often empty-yet-haunted halls of the Bioshock series’s Rapture.

With The Beast Within, Jensen took her use of environments a step further by shifting to Germany and using a research-driven approach to build an authentic setting. Bernard Perron observed that as a whole, “movie games are more about narrative plot than environment,” a trend that can in part be blamed on the difficulty of creating environments to blend with video using then-cutting-edge technology (Perron 2003, 251). Several full motion video (FMV) games offered fairly jarring combinations of rendered environments with filmed actors, including Sierra’s own Phantasmagoria (1995), a FMV horror adventure game designed by Roberta Williams. Jensen defied these low expectations of the form by taking her environments directly from international locations. The process of preparing the backgrounds that form the core of the environmental storytelling in GK2 set a new standard for game design through a writerly practice of immersion and research. As Johnny Wilson reported in his preview, Jensen traveled with a photographer to Germany as part of the production process and returned with more than a thousand photos that would serve as the game’s landscapes and sets (“A Gabriel Knight Mystery” 1995, 22). This allowed the environment to remain as much a part of the character of the game (as shown in figure 2.1) as it had been in the comic book style drawings of New Orleans in Sins of the Fathers.

Figure 2.1 A photograph of Neuschwanstein castle integrated in the game as a background.

Jensen’s detailed environments set a model that game designers still imitate. As Matt Conn, the designer of San Francisco-based cyberpunk adventure Read Only Memories (MidBoss 2015), explains: “You play a game like Grand Theft Auto [Rockstar Games 1997] or Watch Dogs [Ubisoft 2014] and although they get the buildings and the actual city correct it doesn’t play like it’s that city. It could really be anywhere. With Gabriel Knight it couldn’t have taken place in any other spot. There’s so much of the voodoo culture or superstition that was intertwined with the story” (Interviewed in Sandoval 2014). In Gabriel Knight, the city served as another character. Nate Fox, creative director for InFamous 2 (Sucker Punch Productions 2011), likewise cites Gabriel Knight’s strong influence on their take of New Orleans: “I loved looking at the overland map, going to grandma’s house, going into the voodoo shop, or when you go to Jackson Square and you’re cruising around ... It gives quite a strong sense of moving around the environment, and the life, the texture of the city plays such a role in the story” (interview by Hamilton 2011). This detailed building of a world (which turns the game into an explorable and interactive theme park) is now a common design practice as environmental storytelling is now as essential to making games in narrative genres as the building of character and plot (Carson 2000). Jensen’s approach anticipated the significant roles environments could play in games and pushed the limits of the available technology to demonstrate that craft, not graphics, is essential to the impact of a game’s world.

Puzzling through Jensen’s worlds

Jensen’s approach to designing the series begins with story but is always mediated by interactivity. As she explains, “with a game you’re creating an entire world for your audience, and it comes much closer to immersing them in a story than any linear tale can do” (1997). The type of immersion Jensen describes comes through interactivity, or becoming part of the game’s world through play. Janet Murray (1997) defines this type of immersion as a feeling of being part of a place and situation, which allows the player to engage with and care about the events. To build that type of interactive experience and control each aspect as a designer, Jensen focuses much of her early design work on writing a thorough game design document (GDD):

The GDD or bible is the first and core design document. It outlines the entire game including story and puzzles and sequencing. It generally doesn’t have detail to the dialogue level, though if dialogue pops into my head when I’m writing the GDD I’ll put it in there so I don’t forget it. You can compare it to a screenplay, but it’s more complex since a game is interactive. In my games, the GDD changes surprisingly little during development. If you were to read the GDD for GK1 or Gray Matter, you’d see that 99% of it is the same in the final game even though the GDD was created before a single piece of art or code. (Allin 2012)

This approach is clearly visible in the Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned (Sierra 1998) game design document excerpt, which describes a scene where Gabriel can take several actions to gather evidence from an overheard phone call and some suspicious characters he might follow (figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2 Gabriel Knight 3 Game Design Document Excerpt (Allin 2012).

As shown, Jensen’s GDDs combine story, dialogue, and puzzles, with detailed descriptions of each element. Jensen approaches story and puzzles as an integrated problem, though often the story comes first in her process, which she describes thusly:

Usually story comes first unless the puzzle is particularly significant—like solving the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau in GK3. In that case the story was more designed around the core puzzle. The insertion of puzzles can be obvious, in the case of an investigative story line, or less so. In general the story must be broken up into very small pieces that are revealed by something the player does—and those actions are the puzzles. (Allin 2012)

This modular thinking allows the story to function both as motivation and reward for play, and it relies upon the “string of pearls” method Jensen learned from Roberta Williams (as described and illustrated in Chapter 1).

Jensen’s environments and research inspire some of her most memorable puzzles, and as a puzzle designer, Jensen has continually demonstrated brilliance in detail-oriented design. Successful play demands the player’s attention and engagement in the details of the world as puzzles can be embedded in an understanding of characters and thematic context. For instance, in Sins of the Fathers, one puzzle involves opening a secret compartment on a clock. Jensen explains how the many clues (dream imagery, a snake painting, an image in his grandfather’s sketchbook) underscore the story: “In this case, the puzzle was really an emphasis of the point the story was trying to make, that Gabriel’s nightmares have a meaning, and that they’re the same nightmares his father and grandfather had” (Allin 2012). Not all puzzles have that same emphasis on narrative—another puzzle requires manipulating a mime to distract a cop, while another requires the player to turn up the thermostat to get an officer to remove his jacket and leave his badge available for “borrowing.” The integration of narrative, environment, and character in these puzzles became a hallmark of her design, and a similar approach can be seen at work today in games such as Life is Strange (Square Enix 2015) and The Last of Us (Naughty Dog 2013).

Jensen’s puzzle design was at its heights in Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, where she built a complex puzzle out of a fictitious cipher inspired by religious debates and research surrounding the possible existence of a bloodline originating with Jesus Christ. Adam Bormann, design assistant on Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, noted that some team members left the project because of its controversial religious themes (Mooney 2002). Subject matter of this kind had never before been addressed in a game. Yet Jensen proved that a game could be an ideal space for addressing a mystery of this kind. Andrew Wearring observes: “the player is allowed to feel as if the characters are effectively discovering the secrets, known only to a handful of secret society members ... for the first time” (2008, 181). The fictitious cipher in question is also one of Jensen’s most involved puzzles and indeed one of the most ambitious puzzles in the genre. As she describes,

I took a real poem, Le Serpent Rouge, and changed it quite a bit in order to make it solvable. [T]‌he circle and square and grid idea came from David Wood’s books and the idea of the final location of the treasure from “Tomb of God,” but much of the other elements of the puzzle I had to work out on my own. (interview by GK Mysteries n.d.)

In a retrospective review, Adventure Gamers called Le Serpent Rouge’s complex wedding of wordplay, cipher, and location-based solution “one of the best puzzles ever made,” describing how Grace uses a computer system within the game’s interface in an innovative way “to analyze diagrams and maps, translate passages from Latin and other languages, and perform cryptographic and anagrammatic functions, all towards the end of solving a fascinating over-arching enigma” (Ravipinto 2004). The puzzle consists of a series of riddles played out over multiple chapters (or pearls, to recall the string of pearl design metaphor) as the player tries to find a kidnapped child who is revealed through the investigation as a descendant of Jesus. The hub for the investigation is the computer system Grace uses to pull all the data together, SIDNEY.

Figure 2.3 The SIDNEY interface and puzzle in progress.

Jane Jensen emphasized the puzzle’s nonfiction roots in her introduction to the game’s strategy guide:

You are embarking on a story that is only partially fiction. We have gone to great lengths to put into this game everything that is involved in the real-life quest of Rennes-le-Chateau. Here you’ll find the church of St. Mary Magdalene—a place that is supposed to contain innumerable encoded clues to the mystery—reproduced in precise detail. You’ll find the parchments that Sauniere allegedly dug up and the paintings he copied. You’ll find Mount Cardou and other landmarks in the area ... and finally, you will solve the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau. (Barba 1999, vii)

The guide details the complex process of deciphering the puzzle:

Focus on the first stanza, Aquarius. Note the excerpt, “I laid down the path of RA and was illuminated.” Then remember what the church pamphlet refers to as “the sunlight phenomenon.” On July 22 of each year—the feast day of St. Mary Magdalen—the sunrise line runs directly from the church to the Chateau de Blanchefort. Path of the sun, path of RA—any correlation? (Barba 1999, 94)

From there, the player uses SIDNEY (shown in figure 2.3) to map the path and discover its intersections. This is only the beginning of a puzzle that involves applying geometric analysis to text and paintings, all toward completing a map. The level of observation required to make these connections is intense as the guide captures:

Take another peek at the Virgo passage. It says, “Sixteen form the center.” The SIDNEY map grid, like a chessboard, is 8 by 8. The two center rows would be 16 squares in a rectangle with a width four times its length (same as the Temple of Solomon). But in which direction should the rows run? Virgo says “I pray to St. Paul for direction and he answers with a simple gesture.” Aha! In the Teniers painting, St. Paul gestures to the northeast, toward Mount Cardou. (Barba 1999, 117–18)

It’s particularly impressive that all the work using SIDNEY to translate findings into the “real world” of the game is handled by Grace. In previous games, Grace served as a researcher, but her work was mostly static: Gabriel would ask her to look something up, and she would provide an answer the next day. Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned takes Grace’s research to an extreme, with most of the game’s deep puzzles happening through careful research and intertextual problem-solving at Grace’s hands. This is significant both for its forward-thinking approach to gender roles in gaming and its incredible demands on the player’s attention and active role as a researcher.

Rebuilding Gabriel Knight in new dimensions

The Gabriel Knight game release dates span six exciting years for computer game history. Jensen’s consistent commitment to advancing the quality of characterization, environmental storytelling, and puzzle design was undaunted by the incredible technological changes facing the series. No two Gabriel Knight games would use the same engine or technologies, a result that could have made the series feel disjointed. However, Jane Jensen used these rapidly changing technologies to her advantage. The series spans four platforms integral to the narrative experience: comic book, 2D graphical adventure game, FMV game, and 3D game. I examine how Jensen adapted and expanded on the strengths of each platform to its full potential. Each element builds a different aspect of the experience, drawing on different strengths toward Jensen’s goals for character, environment, and narrative.

Comics and transmedia

The Gabriel Knight series is a transmedia franchise, a media approach that Henry Jenkins defines as “a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience” (Jenkins 2007). A key part of transmedia is the use of each medium to accomplish what it does best in the service of a larger story. In the case of Gabriel Knight, the central components of the franchise include three video games, two novels, short stories, and comics. Jensen uses each medium involved to further our empathy for Gabriel and his world. Throughout each of the installments, we follow Gabriel’s journey from bookstore owner and author to “Schattenjäger,” or hunter of the supernatural. In the games, the player controls that journey directly, while in the novels the same storylines are revisited with a linear telling and a stronger focus on the internal development of the characters. The novels are adaptations and offer what Linda Hutcheon notes as the joy of recognition that accompanies the translation of previous experiences and understanding to a new media form of a familiar story (2012). The comic books, on the other hand, offer wholly new stories integral to the development of the game worlds and even to the solving of puzzles during play.

Two comics were released as paratexts accompanying the games. Sierra as a company was already strongly invested in the concept of paratexts as the previous chapter’s examination of the books and other materials included with games such as EcoQuest noted. However, Jensen’s use of paratexts was highly integral to the narrative of the game, and Jensen’s approach changed with each iteration of the game. The first Gabriel Knight included a graphic novel focused on a historical romance involving Knight and his would-be lover’s bloodlines.

Figure 2.4 Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers graphic novel.

The graphic novel that accompanies the game (see figure 2.4) shows the story of a doomed love affair between an apparent witch and a witch-hunter, which Gabriel Knight starts to learn about through a journal entry that appears in both the graphic novel and the game:

Dearest Father: I offer these final words as apology for the failure I have made of my life and the harm I have done our sacred family office. Last night I learned that the women I wrote of, Tetelo, was the witch I sought. I committed terrible crimes, Father. First, I loved this witch. Second, I betrayed her. Third, I used our sacred family power to free her and aid her in destroying this colony. The talisman is gone—Tetelo took it. I can but pray for thy eventual forgiveness, for thy swift recovery of the talisman, and that my punishment in Hell will be long and bitter. Thy undeserving son—Gunter. (Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, 15)

Jensen relies on this book as a supplemental text as well as many texts that are embedded in the game; several of the books in Gabriel Knight’s stores have readable sections, and Gabriel references his father’s sketchbook and maintains his own journal. These paratexts are not merely narrative embellishment but are essential to the game’s plotline, with clues that allow the player to decipher puzzles and make sense of Gabriel’s dreams. Interestingly, Jensen has adapted this use of paratext for the release of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition (Phoenix Online Studios 2014). As the computer game market has moved toward digital downloads with physical editions of games now usually limited to collector’s editions, the comic is included as an option on the menu of the game itself. It is otherwise preserved in its original form.

Jensen’s reliance on comics as paratext continues in Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned (GK3), which includes a graphic novel that serves as the prologue. This time, Gabriel and Grace have been called in to protect a baby from a mysterious set of “night visitors.” The graphic novel sets up the tension for the game: The baby is abducted on their watch. Gabriel Knight is knocked out on a train at the end of the comic and awakens on that same train at the beginning of the game. In this instance, the transmedia component is essential to the player’s understanding of the game as it serves as part of the sequential narrative and fills in some of the gaps between where the player left Gabriel in Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within and the first playable moments of the third game. Carly Kocurek notes that this type of paratext cannot be separated from gameplay: “Feelies and other aspects of game packaging are not mere vessels—the recyclable bottle left after the wine has been drunk—but an integral component of a game’s narrative framing” (2013, 297). Such narrative framing gives the player additional insight into the character’s motivations and invests the player in the game before they’ve even installed the disc. Jensen pushes this concept to its limits in her reliance on the player’s reading of the graphic novel, demanding what Jennifer deWinter terms mega-literacy, or “the ability to read across different modes and create meaning” (2004, 75). While this approach is becoming more common (as deWinter notes, The Matrix transmedia franchise is a mainstream example of a work that unfolds across multiple literacies), Jensen was among the first to make these types of demands on her audience in the context of computer games. Jensen’s choices constructed an extraordinarily well-organized and compelling transmedia franchise that foreshadowed many future series, from the novels, comics, and games of Warcraft to the cross-media bombardment of Pokémon. She continues to work with this type of narrative today. She recently released another comic, Temptation, which picks up where the story of Gabriel Knight 3 left off, with foreshadowing of what might be forthcoming if a sequel becomes possible (Jensen 2015).

Building characters in two dimensions

Sins of the Fathers emerged during a pivotal moment for computer graphics. As Andrew Hutchison notes in his examination of two other landmark games from 1993, “We now have the visual rendering capacity to make the faces, to make the faces animate, and to give the faces beautifully backlit hair, but the faces still cannot have a conversation with you. Computers are much, much faster since 1993, but not much cleverer” (2008). Jensen’s big advance was not in graphics but in her intensely structured and elaborate dialogue system, which comes closer to this dream of conversation than any other game of the era. Greg Smith noted in 2002 that dialogue had received little attention in the study of games, despite the significance of the shift in the use of language from text adventures, which relied heavily on description and narration, to graphic adventure games, which primarily replace description with imagery and thus can rely more heavily on character interaction and dialogue.

The Gabriel Knight series is an exemplar of conversation in game design, and dialogue is one of the most significant ways that the game moves forward, with each character offering an intense range of options for discussion, including casually chatting or asking the character about herself or the city (figure 2.5). Often, these exchanges are not plot-related but instead build the characters and environment by allowing the player to explore through dialogue. As one review noted soon after the game’s release, “you’ll get involved in conversations as complex and unpredictable as any you might have in real life. The number of topics you can discuss increases as you unravel the plot, thread by thread” (Giovetti 1994, 101). These dialogue sections can feel like a hypertext novel as many paths of discourse can go unexplored based on the player’s choices and interests.

Figure 2.5 An example of a conversation options screen in Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers.

It is particularly notable that in the early nineties when many developers were experimenting with what the CD-ROM format allowed, Jensen chose to invest the space in voice actors. And not just any voice actors; Sierra hired Tim Curry (of The Rocky Horror Picture Show) to voice Gabriel Knight, Mark Hamill (of Star Wars fame) to voice officer Mosley, and Michael Dorn (of Star Trek: The Next Generation) to voice Dr. John, the owner of the Voodoo Museum. Hiring a cast of this quality was an expensive move, particularly compared to the amateur and in-house voice acting that was still fairly standard for video games¹ but essential given Jensen’s attention to dialogue as a fundamental mechanic of play. The game is playable in its floppy disk release, but the voice acting for the impressive quantity of dialogue is available only on the CD version.² Sierra heavily promoted Jensen’s choices, announcing in a press release: “Taking the next step in the fast-moving convergence of Hollywood and the computer industry, Sierra On-Line rolled out Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers to CD-ROM hungry consumers today. The release of this CD marks the first time an all-Hollywood cast has been used for an interactive game” (Linn 1993). The combination of the dialogue system with these high-quality voice actors made Jensen’s conversations even more remarkable. Her insistence on a high-quality Hollywood cast anticipated a coming age of such collaborations.

From Hollywood voice cast to film

Jensen would have to adapt her approach dramatically for her next game. Even though only two years would pass between the release of Sins of the Fathers and The Beast Within, technologies were changing rapidly. Ken Williams observed the new landscape in his letter to stockholders in 1995:

During 1994 more PC’s were sold into the home in the US than to businesses and educational establishments combined. Personal computers outsold television sets for the first time in history ... the ability of the PC to deliver an entertaining experience rose sharply over the past year as the shift to CD-ROM accelerated and multimedia computers became increasingly affordable. Over 65% of our software revenue was from CD-ROM products versus just over 36% last year. (Sierra Online, Inc. 1995 Annual Report)

Thanks in large part to the move to CD-ROMs, a new trend was pushing 2D game development to the wayside: full motion video, or FMV. For Jensen, reimagining Gabriel Knight for FMV would require recasting the characters, as the original voice actors didn’t match the physical looks from their avatar counterparts. This would also require recruiting actors to film seemingly endless and repetitive video sequences, which would in turn be reassembled to represent the player’s actions throughout the game. Computer Gaming World awarded it with game of the year, and even skeptics of FMV applauded it: “Fortunately, the strong direction by Jane Jensen has ensured that, once again, the story and gameplay are not overshadowed by technology. The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery is therefore a rare example of success in the use of this interactive medium” (Jong 1996). FMV also forced a relative simplicity of the interactive puzzles as every action a player could take had to be anticipated and performed by the actor in advance. Jensen notes this allowed her to shift the focus in gameplay and turn a potential weakness into the game’s strength: “I don’t think it’s necessary to make things hard. With Beast, I wanted to engage people’s minds with questions that weren’t ‘How do I find the code to open the safe?’ but ‘Why did he say that?’ and ‘Who left that note there?’ In other words, to be complex, without having to put hard puzzles in” (Interview in Rice 2007). Thanks in part to this accessibility and elegance of gameplay, The Beast Within has a clear legacy in games such as L.A. Noire (Rockstar Games 2011), The Walking Dead (Telltale Games 2012), and Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream 2010), which similarly rely on cinematic inspirations with simple investigations and interrogation methods. Many of these games directly incorporate the interactions with characters into the progression of game relationships.

While most FMV titles tried to reproduce the interfaces of games, Jensen draws on the conventions and feeling of cinema throughout The Beast Within. The game opens with a video prologue, not unlike the credits of a movie. The howling of a wolf and the movement of a character locking a door alternates with the designer and writer, as well as the directors, casting, make-up, costumes, and other necessary team members for a FMV game. These cinematic sequences are frequent in the game; the player has relatively limited controls but can direct Gabriel’s investigations by indicating objects and some actions on the film stills, which in turn shuffles in the next actions.

Figure 2.6 The Beast Within gameplay sequence.

The transitions are sometimes awkward due to the movement of the camera and character, and moments before the player chooses a next action can feel awkward with the actors waiting in stillness for the next event (figure 2.6, with gameplay menu at the bottom). However, once the events occur, the camera shifts angles in a way that recalls the dialogue screens from the previous games. Characters occupy the main frame when they are speaking, and when the player interacts with smaller objects the camera moves with them to focus on everything from Grace’s books to a key on a table. The perspective shifts even more dramatically for cut scenes (figure 2.7).

Figure 2.7 The Beast Within cut scene.

Carl Therrien notes, “live-action conversation sequences couldn’t be assimilated and skipped as easily as their text-based predecessors, changing the typical pacing of the genre” (forthcoming). This move from literary to cinematic meant that cut scenes unfolded for viewing rather than skimming, and long sequences of dialogue couldn’t just be ignored if a player wasn’t interested in it. Jensen understood these limitations; dialogue was much more limited and out of the player’s control in The Beast Within, but the resulting conversations drew more on cinematic conventions, allowing the player to focus on the character’s portrayals and tensions.

Using the techniques of cinema to support an interactive experience can seem inherently contradictory; video games ask us to invest and move, while cinema invites us to sit back and observe (Veale 2012). Jane Jensen tackled this potential disconnect by embracing cinematic qualities to create narrative tension and fear, particularly in shots of the werewolves that recall the horror movie genre (figure 2.7). PC Gamer awarded it adventure game of the year, noting the convergence of genres: “If it had been just a movie, The Beast Within would easily beat 99 percent of what passes for horror on the big screen these days. But it’s more than a movie—it’s an honest-to-goodness game” (PC Gamer Awards 1997, 82). Computer Gaming World selected The Beast Within for their hall of fame, labeling it as “the rare game we can seriously consider to be a work of art” (The CGW Hall of Fame 2003, 121).

Escaping Flatland: The shift to 3D

While Jensen’s contributions to FMV pushed the medium forward, the industry was already shifting to a new dimension: 3D. The decision was being made for designers, as Jensen explained in an interview in 1999: “[A]‌ year after GK2 shipped, when I was discussing GK3 with Sierra, it was pretty clear that nothing would get approved unless it was 3D. Ken Williams, still around at that time, and the other execs were pretty convinced that FMV was dead and 3D was the future. And, having seen in early prototypes, I thought they were right” (interview by Wright 1999). Right or not, the move to 3D would prove expensive for the company while demanding Jensen to rethink her entire approach to design: “3D has a lot more freedom of play than 2D. It truly is as radical as the difference between being stuck in a two-dimensional world ala ‘Flatland’ and being in a three-dimensional space like our own” (ibid.). This freedom brought with it a new potential intensity for Jensen’s design process, which required imagining and describing every object and space in great detail.

Sierra developed the new G-engine to power Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned and bragged in their internal magazine that it “will be much like controlling the cameras and main character in a movie” with features for detailed environments and lifelike characters (Twelker 1998, 85). Of course, this was early for 3D, and the lifelike characters Sierra was banking on would in practice be stiff and polygonal. The cinematic quality Sierra envisioned for the engine was at odds with Jensen’s typical approach as a designer: In The Beast Within, Jensen and the director had carefully controlled the camera at every angle. Now, environments would be developed through which the players could continually redirect their gaze, controlling not only the camera but also the perspective. This new gaze (shown in figure 2.8) gave Jensen a new layer to interactivity to work with. Where dialogue and the embodied point-and-click interface served as the dominant metaphor of system-user interaction in the previous games, the addition of 3D added a new metaphor connecting system and user (Ryan 2011). In the postmortem for Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, programmer Scott Bilas explained the decision to give the players control over the camera: “this single feature changes the game radically, making it more like an interactive movie and less like an interactive comic book ... [T]‌he idea was that players could be the director and choose their own camera as the action was unfolding” (2000). Connie Veugen and Felipe Quérette address the consequences of this change in their discussion of the disconnect between player and character gaze in adventure games:

[A]‌lthough GK3 uses third person perception it shows a world no longer seen from a certain distance as in GK1, but “from within” ... the player can’t see a whole room anymore, but has to browse and explore the space as if she actually were part of it ... In GK1 and other games like it, the visual field of the character is not the same as that of the player ... We see, therefore he knows can be seen as a game convention (which is so intuitive that it goes unnoticed by most). In 3D games like GK3 this incongruence is less of an issue, as the camera (the player’s sight) is placed inside the scene. (Veugen and Quérette 2008, 233)

Thus, the player’s gaze moves independent of (and around) Gabriel but exists inside the space rather than through the screen. Cut scenes use the camera positioning to dramatic effect. The player may see Gabriel looking off-screen and not know what has caught his eye until an attack moments later. However, the in-game interface shifts the power to the player to direct the camera, which can lessen the impact of a scene and change the player’s perception of the environment.

Figure 2.8 An example of the difference between character and camera gaze in Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned.

This presented an opportunity for Jensen that unfortunately would go unrealized. In her previous titles, Jensen continually made the most of detailed environments that became part of the cast of characters. However, the elaborate settings she described in her game design document would fall flat when rendered in 3D: As one reviewer noted, the 3D engine is “serviceable in terms of drawing geometry but seems to be missing any kind of complex lighting effects. As a result, every scene is flatly lit and utterly lacking in atmosphere” (Wolfpaw 1999). These diminished visuals and effects came at much higher costs and often required sacrificing elements of Jensen’s puzzles and stories as the entire project was downscaled.

These problems did not reflect on Jensen so much as on an entire industry in flux, with Sierra about to close its doors. Writing in 1999 on the fall of adventure games and the rise of 3D, designer Ernest Adams observed the changes he saw at work in the industry. While 3D was bringing increased freedom and speed, in the resultant “rush to make the games ever faster, we’ve sacrificed the visual richness of our settings. What’s the point of having a stunningly beautiful environment if you’re going to race through it ignoring anything that doesn’t shoot at you?” (1999). The failure of games such as Grim Fandango (LucasArts 1998), a 3D adventure game with an imaginative landscape drawing on the land of the dead, to capture an audience suggested that it would be some time before 3D games were places for exploration. By contrast, 3D-driven action games such as Unreal (Epic 1998) were drawing in huge audiences with graphically rich intense combat and first-person shooter mechanics. 3D engines of the era were acquiring much more sophistication for these purposes, while adventure game engines (previously optimized for 2D and FMV development) were lagging behind in their ability to craft compelling gameplay.

Gabriel Knight and the end of an era

The Gabriel Knight series ends with the suggestion of a new mystery and a note from Grace implying the beginning of a sequel that would never be realized. Adventure games were already clearly suffering in the market: Critically acclaimed LucasArts 3D adventure game Grim Fandango had failed to achieve profits only the year before, and the margins required for success with a 3D game made Blood of the Sacred a preordained financial loss. As Jensen explains:

as one of the last big adventure games made during that “golden age,” GK3 became the scapegoat for the death of adventure games, at least to a handful of gleefully anti-story journalists. It was hurtful, given the amount of work and research that went into that game, working a “real life” solution to the cryptic Rennes-le-Chateau mystery and mapping out the most challenging puzzle I’ve ever designed, Le Serpent Rouge. But depth of story and research was not what people wanted—in fact, there was a strong backlash against story of any kind. (Jensen 2012a)

The backlash also attacked some of the puzzles, allowing some journalists to use Blood of the Sacred as a model of everything “wrong” with adventure games. Scott Bilas, the lead technical designer, describes some of the fallout:

Jane had a puzzle that we had to kill which was unfortunately replaced with the famous “cat hair mustache” puzzle that the game’s producer designed. The gaming site Old Man Murray gave us an award for killing adventure games because of the cat hair puzzle, as I remember. The team hated that puzzle, but we were trying to ship a game, and so we just let it go. (Jong 2007)

That puzzle (which required affixing cat hair with maple syrup to create a fake mustache) remains a common shorthand for the obscure and illogical actions that adventure games can require, just as “Le Serpent Rouge” remains its most complex and inspired.

The real blame for the death of adventure games can certainly be shared between a number of factors: changes in budgets and profit margins for determining successful titles along with shifting expectations driven by increasingly fast-paced and graphics-heavy console systems. However, Jane Jensen shouldered some of the blame personally thanks in part to the failure of Gabriel Knight 3 to spur a resuscitation. Old Man Murray’s article was particularly unforgiving, taking apart the infamous cat hair puzzle in disparaging detail before declaring:

Remember how shocked you were at the end of the Sixth Sense [1999] when it turned out Bruce Willis was a robot? Well, check this out: At the end of this puzzle, you have to affix the improbable cat hair moustache to your lip with maple syrup! Someone ought to give Jane Jensen a motion picture deal and also someone should CAT scan her brain. Who killed Adventure Games? I think it should be pretty clear at this point that Adventure Games committed suicide. (Erik 2000)

Under such heavy scrutiny and with her home company and indeed her entire genre of work closing down, Jensen was left feeling like “the last dinosaur on the block” (Wallis 2007).

Jensen’s influence on the industry could have ended there, and indeed, many adventure game designers (including Roberta Williams) disappeared from the pages of gaming history at this time. It doesn’t help that with the changing definitions of mainstream and hardcore games, adventure games would be seen as at best a casual genre and at worst a relic of a bygone era of gaming for many years to come. This is despite the clear influence of Jensen’s work and designs on many of the landmark games of other genres: From the carefully, historically influenced streets of Assassin’s Creed to the neo-noir development of antihero Max Payne (Remedy Entertainment 2001) and their many successors, the legacy of Gabriel Knight’s design techniques can be seen throughout the industry. The Gabriel Knight franchise also continued to inspire players. “The Gabriel Knight 4 Campaign” demanded a sequel, explaining: “This richly plotted and stunningly characterised game series, together with the novelisation by game creator, Jane Jensen, is not finished. It aches, it SCREAMS for completion” (Heyn 2006a). Other fans, not content to wait for an official follow-up, speculated and imagined their own endings for the characters. The Gabriel Knight series even inspired a parody fan game The Young Gabriel King Chronicles (McCrea 2005). Released by Steve McCrea in 2005, The Young Gabriel King Chronicles is a one-room adventure game built with Adventure Game Studio, a free tool for making classic point-and-click adventure games popular with fans of classic 2D games. The game features a young Gaby on a quest to retrieve a cigarette lighter for his mother. He has to solve a number of puzzles, including acquiring a voodoo book that he reads with Mrs. Nakamura. These echoes serve as reminders that Gabriel and his compatriots were now homeless as far as games were concerned (the Sierra files were mostly thrown in the dumpster during the acquisition with no one expecting them to have continuing value as intellectual property), but they were not forgotten among gamers. And like her characters, Jane Jensen was determined not to fade so quickly from gaming. More pressingly, she (and her fellow Sierra employee husband) needed a new job. The last day of Gabriel Knight 3 was also the end of the Sierra design team, sending the designers determined to keep working in games scattering to form studios or change genres. Jensen set out to find a new terrain outside of the mainstream industry.

3

Hidden Objects: Crafting Mystery through Dazzle and Reward

I was, and still am, very intrigued by the demographics of the casual gaming market ... [M]‌y goals were to find a new audience for adventure games; to finally reach a demographic—older people and more women—who would like story-based gaming.

Jensen, quoted in Wallis 2007.

When Sierra On-Line fired most of its employees during its reorganization in 1999, Jane Jensen was one of many adventure game designers abruptly unemployed. Many ex-Sierra employees didn’t have an easy time looking for work as the industry seemed to have left them behind. Roberta and Ken Williams exited the games industry entirely. The turn of the century brought many major changes in the industry. New genres of PC games were topping the best-seller charts, such as 3D life simulation game The Sims (Maxis 2000) and action-adventure Diablo II (Blizzard Entertainment 2000). Adventure games disappeared from the release schedule, with LucasArts announcing the cancellation of Full Throttle 2 in 2003 and long-lasting series Space Quest coming to an end with the buyout of Sierra. LucasArts released its last original adventure game Escape from Monkey Island (the fourth installment in the popular series) in 2000, not long after Gabriel Knight 3. With both major studios abandoning the genre, adventure games moved to the fringes, found mostly in European imports and indie games. In an interview with Adventure Classic Gaming, Jensen addressed the adventure game industry from which she had now been separated for a few years:

I think the bulk of games are made by guys for guys. Most women (and I say most with full knowledge of the fact that there are exceptions) do not like to play shooters or RPG games. If you don’t like to play something you’re not going to end up designing it. Adventure games have always been an exception in the industry. We had many female designers at Sierra. Besides myself and Roberta there was Lori Cole, Lorelei Shannon, Christie Marx, Gano Haine ... that sounds a lot more remarkable now than we realized at the time! (interview by Michaud and Jong 2003)

While Sierra had started the careers of many women game designers and writers, the visibility of women in the mainstream game industry was waning along with the death of the adventure game genre itself. When Jensen looked to reenter the games industry, she found existing companies to be less than welcoming. So she founded her own.

Jensen cofounded Oberon Media in 2003 with Ben-Kiki Tomer. She had some dreams of creating a successor to Sierra: “My goal was pursuing the casual audience, which was brand new at that time, as a great audience for adventure games ... I thought that in a few years, we’d have a studio able to deliver full adventure games” (interview by Kollar 2012). However, the time for that type of company producing story-driven games seemed to have passed, particularly as far as the mainstream industry was concerned. Instead, Oberon Media’s business plan focused on the “casual” audience Jensen identified as ripe for what Jesper Juul characterizes as “downloadable casual games,” which are “generally two-dimensional games that take place in screen space” (2012, 18). This transition meant leaving behind the graphics cards wars of PC and console gaming in favor of simple and rapidly produced games—the types of games a new company could hope to produce at a sufficient margin to sustain itself. In this chapter, I examine how Jensen translated her game design practice to a new and broader casual audience through three categories of games: early puzzle-driven games, adapted transmedia narratives, and original hidden object games. These games represent understudied genres, often derided for poor design quality and rote mechanics. I demonstrate how Jensen brought her design philosophy of narrative-driven, character-focused play into this space and pushed for new levels of narrative and play while rethinking the centrality of difficulty to a game’s value. This introduced user-centered design practices to her design process. When looking at Jensen’s casual games, and the design approach behind them, her methods for adapting the writer’s toolkit and novelist’s mindset to fit new genres become apparent.

The casual games market

Jensen designed several games during this time, including Inspector Parker (2003), BeTrapped! (2004), Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (2007), Agatha Christie’s Peril at End House (2007), Women’s Murder Club: Death in Scarlet (2008), and Women’s Murder Club: A Darker Shade of Grey (2009). Notably, many of these games are adaptations of novels. The Women’s Murder Club series adapts the bestselling James Patterson novels, and thus were well suited to some adventure game-like elements to match the investigative tone and character-driven series. Through these games, Jensen brought her narrative focus to the hidden object genre:

All of my hidden object games had a lot of story in them. I usually sit down first and write out “what really happened” (especially with a mystery). And then I break that up into small nuggets of info and figure out where to put those nuggets in the game so that the player can find them and piece together the story. (Jensen, quoted in Squires 2012)

Jensen noted that one of her interests in moving to casual gaming was to reach a different audience: “I was, and still am, very intrigued by the demographics of the casual gaming market ... [M]‌y goals were to find a new audience for adventure games; to finally reach a demographic—older people and more women—who would like story-based gaming” (quoted in Wallis 2007). Her fusion of genres to reach this audience is particularly apparent in Deadtime Stories (2009), which returned to New Orleans as the setting for a paranormal hidden object game with spells, ghostly encounters, and other adventure game elements for a casual audience.

Jensen set out into this emerging market hoping to find an untapped player base for adventure games, but instead the realities of casual gaming demanded an entire rethinking of her style and approach. The grueling pace of casual games, which have an inherently limited shelf and tend to be overtaken by new releases rapidly, combined with the genre-driven expectations of many of the players, worked against her vision. Ultimately, Oberon Media would never reproduce Sierra’s collaborative environment. Instead, Jensen’s experience with the casual games industry pushed against the conventions of those emerging genres with only limited success. However, it had a lasting impact on her own approach to games, and her work during this time moved in the opposite direction of the increasingly difficult, puzzle-focused adventure games of her previous success.

When compared to “hardcore” game genres, casual games are relatively understudied. Jesper Juul produced one of the few major studies of casual gaming, defining the genre mostly by its oppositions to this hardcore gaming mindset (2012, 18). The economic market for casual games is shaped very differently than that of traditional studio releases. The boundary between hardcore and casual games is also uncomfortably gendered. Hardcore games are associated with violence and hypermasculine norms.¹ Critics noted the male-dominated skew in avatars and the few positions provided to women in hardcore game worlds. An examination of 150 games across platforms from this same era (approximately 1999–2009) shows a dramatic overrepresentation of men as lead and playable characters, as well as a tendency toward only white playable characters (Williams et al. 2009). By contrast, casual game designers would have to think about women as a primary potential audience, a consideration with the potential to shape very different games and genres. The precise demographics of casual gamers are hard to determine, just as the borders between hardcore and casual games are murky. The 2007 report from the Casual Games Association gives one of the clearest portraits of the casual game market as Jensen would enter and shape it. The gender demographics of casual games seem balanced at first: 48.3 percent men. However, an examination of the paying players found that 74 percent of the paying audience for casual games were women (Nutt 2007). One of the distinguishing factors of casual games as targeted by companies such as Oberon is their ease of play on nondedicated gaming devices: thus, they are cheap and require low commitment for players to try.

The moniker of casual combined with this demographic data could be misread to suggest that this audience included less serious or committed gamers. Yet this new audience Jensen turned to is not necessarily any less dedicated than the avid adventure gamers who had been her core audience in years past. Mia Consalvo’s analysis of the community of so-called casual gamers surrounding Mystery Case Files: Return to Ravenhearst (Big Fish Games 2008) reveals that games in this genre can inspire the same enthusiasm and intensity as any supposedly hardcore title (Consalvo 2009). New publications and blogs were emerging to cover the casual games market even as Jane Jensen entered it in 2003. Many companies were trying to dominate the same space: Big Fish Games (known for Mystery Case Files: Huntsville [2005] and many sequels) opened in 2002, and PlayFirst (Diner Dash [2004], Chocolatier [2007]) launched in 2004. Gamezebo, a review site dedicated to casual games, launched in 2006. PopCap Games (launched in 2001) had already made a big name for itself thanks to Bejeweled (2001), the gem-matching game that was released to browsers and brought with it an addictive genre of pattern-based puzzle-solving. Many of these casual games took advantage of the increasing popularity of the web as a form of distraction. The rise in popularity of social media over the course of the next decade would help advertise these casual games to more and more viewers. Many of the current titans of social networks were only in their initial phases (Facebook launched in 2004 to a limited-access network of college students), but the distribution hubs of casual game developers served a similar role in providing continual new content and game advertisements.

In this crowded marketplace, Jensen would have to bring a new speed to her design process to create stand-out games with enough character to draw players away from gems and into playable mysteries. She would also have to reconsider the type of mechanics that would be central to the design when players were expecting to be able to pick up and put down a game with bursts of gameplay rather than long sessions of exploration. Developing with this casual audience in mind changed Jensen’s approach to game difficulty. Oberon Media focused on using user-centered testing and design to ensure puzzles were reasonable and satisfying. Adopting user-centered design into her process gave Jensen new insight into how new players might approach her games:

One of the things Oberon Media does is play testing, where we go in and watch people play behind two-way glass. And it’s amazing how long it takes people to get stuff. We had a jigsaw puzzle that was 12 pieces, so simple to put together, and people would spend 10 minutes on this thing! And they’d like it and feel rewarded when they were done, so it was a success, but ... that’s what’s really hard about being a game designer: I want to make things a lot harder than they probably should be. I always have to rein myself back in, and we end up adding hints and adding hints. The point is, it has to be intuitive and fun for most people or you’ve failed. (interview by Rice 2007)

This was a big leap from Jensen’s work on the third Gabriel Knight game, which included some of the adventure game genre’s most notoriously complex and compelling puzzles. However, it presented an important new opportunity that no other adventure game designer was taking—to see some of the genre’s conventions reborn and reimagined for a broader audience not already immersed in its vocabulary and conventions.

Jensen’s new company briefly became a powerhouse in the casual game market. At the time, the casual games market was being colonized by companies who created game-distribution portals. In 2007, a study of the most powerful developers and publishers of casual games listed Oberon Media among the top three, noting that this convergence of developer and game portal was a unique phenomenon of casual games (Carrol 2007). This trend directly matched Jensen’s play for a new, broader audience. Casual games eschew the traditional sales of a physical games stores and instead rely on shorter games, released quickly, and distributed directly to the consumer on the web. Through this new venue, Jensen created a space to explore her design philosophy and narrative-driven gameplay with a new market in mind. Her design process would have to change dramatically to accommodate a changed production cycle. As Jensen explains, “The main difference is that casual games have a short timeline and lite budget. So things happen very fast. You have a month to do the design, in another month you’re seeing weekly builds and in 5 months you’re shipping” (interview by Allin 2008). For Jensen, this meant continuing in her role as director and designer and overseeing builds and design while working with a remote team:

The casual games are also done with a remote team, and I work from home every day. Of course, you miss being able to just get up and walk over to someone’s desk and have a conversation, but it doesn’t ultimately impact the process as much as you might think. I have emails in the morning—art to check, builds to play, questions to answer. (Allin 2008)

Jensen adapted her detail-oriented design techniques to fit this new, fast-paced production style. It was essential for her design documents to be precise and complete, minimizing iterative time in development.

Jensen’s early casual games and puzzle-driven design

When Oberon Media entered the market, many of the genres that would come to define casual gaming were still being brainstormed. The first game Jane Jensen designed for release was Inspector Parker: The game is reminiscent of the board game Clue (Parker Brothers 1949) and similarly invites the player to fulfil the role of the investigator of a murder mystery. Jeff Gertsmann commented on Inspector Parker’s relationship to more traditional titles thanks to the inclusion of a story mode:

The game has a sort of story mode that has you working through puzzles of increasing complexity, but there’s also a mode that lets you choose the difficulty and go on from there ... [T]‌he interface is easy to understand, and the logic puzzles are fun to decipher. Ultimately, this is a nice-looking and extremely addictive game that puzzle fans should have a great time with. (Gertsmann 2005)

It feels like one of Jensen’s adventure game puzzles pulled out of a broader context and placed at center stage for its own game, and as such, it clearly demonstrates how Jensen was already thinking about transforming her design priorities to fit the new platform and potential player demographic.

The reviewer’s reference to Inspector Parker possessing a “sort of” story mode already distinguished it in a market of casual games wherein story was rarely prioritized. Reviewers and players would immediately pick up on the influence of Jensen’s adventure game work: The ad copy for a boxed bundle version of Inspector Parker and its sequel even declared the games to be “the popular web-based adventure game created by Jane Jensen.” Visually, the game relies on repetitive elements to create a Victorian mansion and its inhabitants. The inhabitants appear mainly as portraits during dialogue, using a mode not unlike the interrogation screen of Jensen’s earlier games.

Figure 3.1 Looking for clues in Inspector Parker.

The sequel BeTrapped! was released in 2004. A sign of the new, more rapid design cycle Jensen was beginning to take on as a casual games designer, this game brought in even more of Jensen’s adventure-game styling and attracted the notice of her usual audience. One reviewer noted on Adventure Gamers, a site dedicated to adventure game fans:

You’ll be quite surprised at how much more depth there is to the story than what you’ve been led to believe. There is a pretty large cast of characters, all of whom are feuding/plotting/sleeping with most of the other characters in one way or another. BeTrapped! at least passes the Notepad Test—as in, you’ll have trouble keeping up with all the various characters and their motives and relationships without a notepad next to you. The story is enhanced by various methods of eavesdropping and first-hand conversations, which take place in a style very similar to that of the first Gabriel Knight—you’ll basically be clicking on a list of topics until they’re all gone. (Dickens 2004b)

This description captures Jensen’s strategy as a casual games designer: She brought with her adventure game elements such as responsive and diverse characters to the casual game genre, and with it a focus on conversation that invited her audiences to explore a more complex story without any necessary increase in the difficulty of the game. The reviewer even described BeTrapped! as a “Trojan horse” aimed at casual gamers with an unexpected message: “look, we can actually wrap a pretty interesting story into your puzzly goodness” ( Dickens 2004b)

Figure 3.2 Identifying traps using the visual cues in BeTrapped!

The sequel, like Inspector Parker, takes place in a mansion with Minesweeper-esque (Microsoft Corporation 1989) mechanics: Bombs (or traps) are laid under the floor, and the player uses visual clues to identify their locations in order to explore the level. The name highlights the puzzle aspects of the game, echoing the title of casual powerhouse Bejeweled and suggesting similar types of addictive, mechanic-driven play. When the player removes the traps from each of the mansion’s rooms, the characters hiding within are available for interrogation, offering a mode of gameplay that recalls Gabriel Knight’s investigation model. Investigation-driven deductive gameplay is at the heart of many game experiences, including the Ace Attorney series. The series relies on a fusion similar to Jensen’s approach, offering playable visual novels which draw on adventure game and casual mechanics to simulate courtroom trials, letting players choose from a range of questions (Fernández Vara 2009). The potential of such games seemed so exciting for adventure game reviewers that they coined a new term for the genre: casual adventure. This new hybrid form took the adventure game storytelling form and removed some of its inaccessible elements, reflecting Jensen’s philosophy of privileging story over difficulty and other hardcore markers of value, including difficulty and replay-ability (Dickens 2004a).

Another distinguishing feature of Jensen’s work at Oberon is found in the game’s music. Jensen’s husband, composer Robert Holmes, accompanied her to Oberon and continued to provide the atmosphere and mood of her story-worlds. However, he noted the difficulty that the new environment brought to the creative process and his aesthetics:

They started off similar as Jane and I would put our heads together and talk about direction, etc., but those games were much more victimized by what is politely described as “Design by Committee.” By the end of the process, there would be many people who were not necessarily creative in nature chiming in and offering feedback or even influencing decisions. One symptomatic line of feedback I still chuckle over was “There’s too much space between the notes . . .” Good times. (interview by Heyn 2006c)

Jensen’s designs would similarly face some of these challenges, with the condensed timeframes of the casual games industry amplifying the problems. The creative team and production team were also separated in space—Oberon contracted with outside teams to do the development on projects, resulting in less collaboration throughout the design process.

These two games marked a starting point for the aesthetic and philosophy Jensen brought to the casual games market. However, in these games, the puzzle sequences feel disconnected from the fragments of story and investigation that happen in between active play. Moving forward, Jensen pursued new strategies for integrating puzzles with story, working with the challenges rising from the assumptions and expectations of the casual game audience. These expectations include a more limited playtime for each session (as casual games are often fit in between other activities or alongside them) as well as the slow progression of difficulty without the frustration that can accompany traditional adventure games.

Adapted worlds of hidden objects

The isolated puzzles of Bejeweled and its color-matching ilk were unlikely to provide a lasting outlet for Jensen’s skill as a designer. However, something new was on the horizon for casual games with unexpected potential: hidden object games. Hidden object games are driven by a core mechanic as simple as the name implies. They embody a mechanic that often causes frustration, the pixel-hunt, taken to its logical extreme. Each scene of a hidden object game presents the player with a detailed environment and a list of hidden objects. What ensues next is not unlike an enhanced version of Where’s Waldo or I Spy: The player seeks items on the list, clicks them, and moves on to the next. Hidden object games started out from scavenger hunt mechanics, incorporated with a mystery theme by Adrian Woods, Bill Meyer, and Patrick Wylie into Mystery Case Files: Huntsville, shown in figure 3.3 (“The History of Hidden Object Games” 2013). The design team noted that they saw inspiration in games for children, including a digital version of I Spy, I Spy Spooky Mansion (Scholastic 1999). While the earliest examples of the genre are primarily downloadable casual games or Flash games, the introduction of tablets and mobile phones extended the longevity of the genre by allowing a more direct interaction with the images through touch.

Figure 3.3 Hidden object hunting in Mystery Case Files: Huntsville.

Hidden object games are in part enabled by the rise of higher resolution as they ultimately depend on the ability to render detailed small objects within a complex landscape. These environments resemble the rooms of two-dimensional adventure games but with the added complexity of red herring objects to throw the searching player off the scent. As Shira Chess has noted, the labor of object-hunting is inherently gendered: “At its core the hidden object mechanic is not a puzzle so much as a cleaning mechanic ... [C]‌leaning, as a leisure activity, helps establish a complicated relationship between work and leisure in the game world” (2013). This is very different from the typically masculine-encoded activities of aggression and ownership in the so-called hardcore gaming genres.

Eric Zimmerman laments that one of the greatest disappointments of the downloadable casual game market is the apparent lack of innovation:

When downloadable casual games started, the optimism was that great things would come of making small-scale budget games ... [D]‌ownloadable games could be a renaissance for innovation in terms of theme, content, and gameplay ... but in fact, the downloadable casual games industry has evolved into something more clone-driven and genre-bound than the so-called hardcore game industry that it sought to make an end-run around. (interview by Juul 2012, 217)

On the surface, hidden object games appear to be the embodiment of the clone-driven games Zimmeran attacks. The repetitive mechanic of searching the screen often involves ignoring the specific objects in order to focus on patterns for ultimate success. However, such repetition is not unlike the mechanisms of investigation itself, a similarity Jensen would seize upon and attempt to breathe new life into the genre.

Jensen’s move to the casual game market brought with it an opportunity to explore new stories. She looked for inspiration from existing franchises and started a new tradition for the casual games market with the adapted novel. The three source authors for Jensen’s major adaptations at Oberon Media share a number of traits in common with Jensen and one another. Each writes character-driven stories with deeply embedded murder mysteries. Jensen’s choice to focus on this style of adaptations adds her work to a tradition of narrative gaming ongoing today through franchises ranging from the Nancy Drew adventure game series to the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series. An examination of Jensen’s adaptations illuminates how she built on existing narratives and characters to craft story-driven casual games with meaningful interaction through deceptively simple puzzles and mechanics.

Being Hercules Poirot: Adapting murder mysteries to hidden objects

The first writer Jensen looked to for inspiration was Agatha Christie, famous for her detective fiction: “a form of entertainment which also enables a reader to test his intelligence and perception ... it is an intellectual game; though the detective and the criminal are opponents, the real intellectual activity is between the author and the reader” (Bargainnier 1980, 8). This description could be applied equally well to Jensen’s work as a designer, and thus her adaptations extend the original intentions of the works. Her adaptations of Agatha Christie’s sleuth included three games: Death of the Nile (2007), Peril at End House (2007), and Dead Man’s Folly (2009), and her experience crafting detective stories through the adventures of Gabriel Knight would not be wasted here as she found an opportunity to build on the parallels between the conventions of the hidden object genre and the act of investigating. The Agatha Christie games showcase the integration of story and hidden object puzzles that would be a trademark of Jensen’s approach to the genre. Throughout, the investigation of people is as important as the exploration of hidden objects, as demonstrated in the interrogation of suspects through conversation choices as shown in figure 3.4.

Figure 3.4 Interrogating potential suspects in Death on the Nile.

Each game took Hercule Poirot on a different murder mystery investigation with the search for clues translated into hidden object gameplay to investigating different crime scenes. As one reviewer commented on the first game, “What’s particularly impressive about Death on the Nile is the way that the gameplay elements and story are intertwined, which creates a sense of realism and cohesion that is sometimes not as strong in hidden item games” (Bell 2007). The game won the People’s Choice Award for Casual Game of the Year in 2007 at the Zeebys Casual Game Awards (Alexander 2008).

Each game has a strong sense of a historical setting (for instance, Death on the Nile’s luxury cruise ship the S. S. Karnak) and requires players to find objects appropriate to the historical setting. Thus, some players found that the game’s hidden object prompts required them to do a little research of their own. As one reviewer noted playing Peril at End House:

What do you do when you are asked to locate a “Whatever” and have no idea what it is? My solution was to pause the game and visit the internet to find a description and picture! Remember, the game’s story-line takes place in the 1920s; there are items of that era that are rarely seen or even known about these days. (Bade 2008)

These items were not only chosen to be historically accurate but were also specifically chosen by Jensen in each case to reflect the occupant and provide details appropriate to developing the character. This helped balance the potentially arbitrary feeling of the hidden object mechanics. In a review, Hallas noted, “I was reasonably impressed by the extent to which the items within each room were appropriate to the setting and the supposed occupant, and I felt that Death on the Nile was the least implausible hidden-object game I’ve come across to date, quite aside from being the one with the best story” (2009). For these elements, Jensen relied on adapting an existing story; the characters and even the outcome of the murder would be familiar to readers of Agatha Christie’s novels or viewers of film and television adaptations. Each hidden object investigation scene in Jensen’s Agatha Christie series used cut scenes reminiscent of silent film to advance the story in between puzzles, recalling some of those other adaptations. These internal sequences are constructed similarly to Jensen’s adventure game cut scenes and often focus on dialogue and the movement of characters (see figure 3.5). Reviewers noted the intense similarity to multiple Death on the Nile film adaptations, along with the use of vintage film as a visual metaphor for cut scenes.

Figure 3.5 Screenshot of Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile.

Jensen found another genre; the hidden object conventions lent themselves to the deliberately slow yet driven pace of crime scene investigation, thematically similar not only to her work on Gabriel Knight but also to her early experiences with Police Quest. But at this stage, the dominant action from the player was still in pixel-hunting. With her next games, Jensen would take the act of adaptation even further.

Playing at Murder Club: Authoring diverse women characters

Detective stories fueled the right level of drama and story for hidden object games, and Oberon Media turned to other sources for recognizable characters that players might identify with. They found a match in James Patterson’s Women’s Murder Club series. The best-selling book series focuses on four women who play different roles in investigating homicide. Jensen explains that the collaboration allowed her to write entirely new stories, unlike the adaptations of the Agatha Christie series:

I was asked to look over his properties and see what I thought would work well, and I really liked the Women’s Murder Club books and thought that they would be able to translate to games. What was really nice about that was I was able to do an original story using his universe and characters, so each one of the games that we did in that series was a story written by me with his characters in a new murder mystery. (Interview by Salter in Chapter 5 of this book)

With these new stories, Jensen would also take the hidden object genre to new levels, adding some of the most complex mechanics of any of her casual games. Jensen’s previous games had included several playable women protagonists. Gabriel Knight’s research assistant Grace remains one of the most notable women characters in gaming. Jensen’s casual games feature more playable women characters than ever before, and the murder-investigating women of Women’s Murder Club are striking not only as Jensen characters but also as powerful women game avatars.

The Women’s Murder Club games center on three playable women: Detective Lindsay Boxer, medical examiner Claire Washburn, and reporter Cindy Thomas. (The club also includes a district attorney, Jill Bernhardt, but she isn’t featured as a playable character.) James Patterson’s Women’s Murder Club book series includes fifteen novels and has been adapted into a television series. This focus on a team of all women is already remarkable; the group meets regularly for breakfast or drinks in the game’s cut scenes, not unlike the women of HBO’s series Sex and the City (Star 1998–2004) but with decidedly different ideas of appropriate cocktail conversation. The book series received praise for challenging the typical gender dichotomy in stories of this kind: “The stereotypical image of middle-aged white men sitting around a table, puffing cigars and drinking cognac is turned inside out and their overarching power is usurped by the dynamic, beautiful and hard-working women of the Women’s Murder Club” (Fox 2011). Each character brings different strengths, and while the games always center on hidden object gameplay, the characters have their own challenges: As Lindsay Boxer, the player investigates crime scenes looking for details and searches in the police database for records; as Claire Washburn, the player gets fingerprints and samples from bodies and takes them back for examination in the lab (shown in figure 3.6); and as Cindy Thomas, the player goes out into often dangerous situations in the pursuit of gossip or clues.

Figure 3.6 Claire’s forensic lab in Women’s Murder Club: Death in Scarlet.

Jensen’s experimentation on these games was mediated by her new awareness of user-centered design principles and her interest in designing for the broad audience of casual games, which she describes in an interview following the announcement of the new series: “We are sort of baby-stepping our way towards a full adventure game while still keeping the elements that I believe are really good about casual games ... meaning that it has to be immediately intuitive with no barriers for entry and it has to be immediately rewarding” (French 2008). She served as creative director as well as designer on all the games, continuing her approach of hands-on monitoring and control of the process with Patterson’s support. As James Patterson said in the same interview, the games presented an opportunity to reach his core audience in a new way: “Look at the book business. The audience is 70-something-per cent female. My readers are 70-something-per cent female. And the majority of people who play casual games is the same. So I think the market for what we’re doing—games that are more sensitive and are centered on character, not shooting—will be monstrous” (ibid.). Patterson’s parallels of the audience for literature and the audience for casual games is very different from the usual rhetoric surrounding games, which after the death of adventure games, was rarely being associated with the act of reading. Jane Jensen wrote three new detailed stories for the Women’s Murder Club game series and designed and directed the games Death in Scarlet (2007), A Darker Shade of Grey (2008), and Twice in a Blue Moon (2009). In this series, Jensen demonstrates both her refinement of the hidden object genre and its potential to move forward.

The experience of playing a Women’s Murder Club title may be disconcerting for a player used to Jensen’s adventure games; each game features two dramatically different graphical styles. Simple drawings or animation are used for the narrative, while extremely detailed drawings are relied upon for the game interfaces and object-hunting screens. This approach highlights the rapid production process and different expectations of the casual game genre wherein players would expect to spend a majority of their time focusing on the active hidden object screens and could thus treat the cut scenes as a separate experience. Jensen experimented with different methods for incorporating the narrative in each game. In A Darker Shade of Grey, the player is invited into the game through cut scenes that feature static animation and text conversations between the women of the murder club. These sequences play an important role in representing the relationships between the women and their collaboration, which the player directly experiences only through one viewpoint character at a time during play.

Detailed design for mystery

While the game design documents for Jensen’s hidden object games are less weighty than the tomes behind her Gabriel Knight games, they include remarkable amounts of detail and place every element of the narrative into context. These documents demonstrate the depth of Jensen’s writerly approach on every project. The design document for Women’s Murder Club: Death in Scarlet is ninety-one pages long and contains over 25,000 words, including all of the major dialogue for the game as well as the structures for every investigation screen and puzzle. The design document proceeds linearly through every scene of the game. Unlike with adventure games, Jensen’s hidden object games are “on rails” and require the player to follow a particular path through play.

Each detailed description from Jensen’s design document lays out the motion and dialogue of the cut scenes, as in this segment from the opening sequence:

She’s asleep in bed and the phone is ringing.

Lindsay groggily picks it up. “Yeah”

(text from over the phone, Jacobi): “Lindsay, it’s Jacobi. I’m at Marin Vista Point. It’s a homicide. Weird, one, too. Listen to this ...”

A couple of panels of Lindsay now sitting on the bed listening to the phone.

She runs her hands through her long hair, upset as she listens.

Tight shot showing her face for the first time, looking upset and determined. “Don’t touch her. I’m on my way.” (Jensen 2007, 1)

The details of this sequence demonstrate how carefully Jensen lays out every aspect of the game’s progression. While some details may change during play-testing and throughout the art process, the overall consistency of Jensen’s vision is very clear. This is particularly impressive given the remoteness of the production team from Jensen, so every detail had to be communicated strongly in the design document itself. The final comic from the game’s introduction shows this same dialogue and progression of panels, with the “brngg” of the phone and Jacobi’s voice introducing the first murder (figure 3.7). These games are produced more rapidly (and on smaller budgets) than Jensen’s Sierra adventure games, so instead of full-cast audio, the games rely on dialogue boxes such as those shown here throughout. The significance of audio is not neglected, however; the musical track builds tension and atmosphere throughout.

Figure 3.7 Opening sequence of Women’s Murder Club: Death in Scarlet.

In the design document, every investigation scene (where the primary hidden object gameplay is encountered) is detailed using a table as shown in figure 3.8.

Figure 3.8 Women’s Murder Club: Death in Scarlet investigation #1 diagram, Jensen design bible.

Jensen details every significant object of the screen, in this case (the first investigation of Death in Scarlet) laying out the elements needed for the first simple puzzle. The player unlocks the puzzle by noticing a crab just visible through holes in the sand, and the crab appears to be holding an object significant to the investigation. Jensen’s design document describes the puzzle in detail:

In the close-up the player sees 5 holes in the sand that have been made by the tide. They look fairly deep. (Even though each hole has a rough shape they should look as natural as possible.) A crab pops its head out of a hole for a few seconds, then disappears and comes up in a different hole. The crab can appear in any hole. The crab has something shiny and glinting in one claw. Lindsey comments that the crab has got a hold of something. She’d better see what it is. (Jensen 2007, 7)

The player must find the four useful objects that match the size of the crab’s potential escape paths in order to corral it and get a hold of a diamond earring belonging to the victim. Jensen’s diagram of the different holes for the crab puzzle is translated to the final art, as shown in Figure 3.9.

Figure 3.9Jensen’s crab puzzle design sketch and the final game art.

Throughout the design document, Jensen refers to the hidden object puzzles as “I SPY” play but distinguishes her additions to that traditional mechanism by noting where the significant objects will be essential either for solving a puzzle or advancing the investigation.

Figure 3.10Jensen’s sketch of the evidence testing and final game screen.

Jensen carefully lays out the puzzles visually so the artists can translate from her sketches into the final art of the game. Her emphasis on visual detail is apparent in the sketch in figure 3.10, which shows the process for identifying a poison found at a crime scene in Death in Scarlet. The level of detail throughout Jensen’s process reveals the extent of her authorship in every aspect of the design. While game development is nearly always collaborative, Jensen’s approach is that of a novelist, envisioning every aspect of the experience and providing detailed framing throughout.

Following the success of Death in Scarlet, Jensen became bolder with her incorporation of puzzles and narrative in the next game in the sequence. She took elements of potentially complex mechanics and simplified them for the new audience. While Jensen’s earlier hidden object games took a hybrid approach, with some of the objects relating to the investigation and other serving as arbitrary components, Darker Shade of Grey uses every object in service of the story. The interrogation system of Gabriel Knight is reimagined as a more casual mechanic through the questioning of suspects and potential witnesses. For instance, after a student at a military school dies on a run under suspicious circumstances, the player as Detective Lindsay is stuck interrogating his classmates while the drill sergeant looks on. As none of the boys will volunteer, the player has to watch the boys for nervous tics or motion to know when one of them has the answer to an important question. Scenes like this use simple visual elements (not unlike the “I Spy” mechanics but applied to character-based, rather than arbitrary, clues) effectively to ask the player to more clearly occupy the role of detective. Likewise, the searches for objects are well integrated into the story; a search of envelopes in the office is intended to turn up a misplaced autopsy report, and investigations of crime scenes are focused on potential evidence. When playing the journalist Cindy, the player engages in text-based research of full articles. Several sequences require exploring microfiche archives of a newspaper with the complete text of articles related to the case available for reading. The interweaving of textual documents (such as the autopsy report) is sophisticated and recalls the novels in its invitation to the player to speculate and theorize about the murderer as the game moves forward. Jensen’s detailed crafting of this paratextual material and the focus on written text as an avenue for exploration and investigation perfectly reflects her own approach as a designer-author.

Exploring the potential of hidden objects for storytelling

The use of objects in the service of puzzles removes the arbitrariness that can become tedious in hidden object games. For instance, a puzzle to deactivate an alarm requires finding pieces of a paper with instructions, and a puzzle to communicate unseen with a student during an interrogation relies on learning and using Morse code. Jensen herself points to the game as an example of her strongest narrative integration in the hidden object genre:

All of my hidden object games had a lot of story in them. I usually sit down first and write out “what really happened” (especially with a mystery). And then I break that up into small nuggets of info and figure out where to put those nuggets in the game so that the player can find them and piece together the story. With hidden object, I always tried to incorporate as many real story clues into the hidden object scenes and mini-games as I could—newspaper articles, birth certificates, what have you. For example, in Women’s Murder Club: Shade of Grey, you found 12 strips of paper from a shredded letter in a hidden object scene—and then had a mini-game to piece them together. The result is that you got to read a letter that was an important clue in the story. (quoted in Squires 2012)

Not all hidden object players were ready for the dynamic gameplay of Jensen’s approach. After A Darker Shade of Grey, the second Women’s Murder Club game, was less successful in sales, she took another look at the formula and balanced some traditional hidden object gameplay in the next title. Twice in a Blue Moon was more of a return to the form but proved a success and was followed by a fourth title in the series, Little Black Lies (2012). Her reputation with adaptations and the potential of the genre continued to grow, and Oberon Media found a new collaboration in the work of Charlaine Harris. Harris is known for The Southern Vampire Mystery franchise (2001–2013) featuring Sookie Stackhouse, a southern waitress caught in a world where vampires and werewolves have recently gone public. The series also reached a new audience through its adaptation as HBO’s True Blood (Ball 2008–2014). Again designing and directing the project, Jensen took a look at Harris’s universe and found another memorable woman on which to center her game: Dahlia, a sardonic vampire. Designing the environment also brought Jensen back to New Orleans, the setting she’d already explored so provocatively in Gabriel Knight. While Jensen was limited by budget on most of her hidden object games, relying mostly on text dialogue, Twice in a Blue Moon is professionally voice-acted. This addition of casting and vocal nuance allowed Jensen to better give life to some of the denizens of the quarter. There are several adventure game-like aspects to the more complex design that take the form of unusual mini-games, including disguising Dahlia for undercover investigation of the Vampire Quarter and helping out characters such as an Elvis-impersonating ghost. The player also feels like an explorer thanks to the integration of the map, which again recalls Gabriel Knight in the use of the city as character, with travel through the city’s rich spaces as one of the primary player options. Players can use the map of New Orleans to visit and return to locations that change as the story advances. The nonlinear structure of environmental emphasis complicates the design, as shown in figure 3.11 (Jensen n.d.). This graphic illustrates the first episode of the four-act game, a section including ten rooms, three hidden object sections, and five puzzles using combinations of inventory objects and character encounters.

Figure 3.11 Pilot episode of Dying for Daylight design, Jensen’s game design bible.

The game’s complexity is clear in the document, with multiple objectives at most locations. The string of pearls narrative design pattern underlying the use of locations is also apparent. Different areas have locked elements that await the player’s progression, and ultimately revisiting locations is an essential part of moving forward. In particular, the “Dead, Hip Things” store is initially inaccessible but is essential for building the costumes that allow Dahlia to progress in other locations (such as the “Blood Bank Alley”).

Authoring casual games

Jensen’s most ambitious hidden object games pushed the boundaries of the category, emphasizing original, well-researched stories and dramatic environments. These games continued to blur the lines between casual games and adventure games, with Jensen’s approach demonstrating how some of the best elements of adventure games could be brought to bear without a focus on complexity. Jensen’s games challenge the assumptions underlying dismissals of casual gamers, which are often gendered attacks: “hardcore gamers position casual gamers as passive, naïve, and mindless consumers of popular culture. To the hardcore discourse community, casual gamers become feminized shoppers lacking agency and intelligence” (Vanderhoef 2013). By making games that were not for “gamers,” Jensen freed herself of some design expectations while accepting other limitations imposed by the casual games market structure. Working on casual games fundamentally influenced Jensen’s design philosophy. As she observes: “Yes, it has changed me as a designer. I’m more conscious about keeping things approachable, not making things difficult or obscure for the glee of it. I’ve spent time watching ‘real people’ try to play games, which is very enlightening. It’s been a good thing” (Allin 2008). For a game designer, this is an invaluable experience and realization, particularly as even expectations of “hardcore” game difficulty have been shifting as gaming as become more and more mainstream.

But despite these advantages, Jensen was restless in a changing casual games market. Only two of her hidden object games featured entirely original narratives: Dr. Lynch: Grave Secrets (2008) and Deadtime Stories (2010). The lavish detail and story in each of these games is apparent right from the game design document: One version of the design document for Dr. Lynch is nearly eighty pages and 25,000 words long. The game features an unusual investigative duo, Mr. Overly and Dr. Lynch, who are reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes and Watson and likewise dedicated to solving mysteries—or in this case, disproving the existence of the paranormal or supernatural. Jensen introduces timers to the game, adding another level of challenge and giving the investigation a sense of urgency.

Figure 3.12 Unlocking a key puzzle in Dr. Lynch: Grave Secrets.

The game includes a number of puzzles, from rearranging the tiles on a box to reveal a family’s coat of arms and getting inside to trimming down a topiary in its proper shape. Key puzzles (shown in figure 3.12) build urgency to the hunt for objects throughout while adding natural gates to the next section of the story. Jensen’s design document details each puzzle along with reminders of the ever-present option to skip a puzzle and move on in the story.

In Deadtime Stories, Jensen looks to items and inventory-based puzzles for a new mechanic and adds a book of different voodoo concoctions that must be completed to move forward in a graveyard populated by restless spirits (see figure 3.13). The game takes the first steps toward Jensen’s vision of an adventure game, bringing in the best qualities of hidden object games:

[T]‌here are valuable things that I learned working in casual games that I’ll carry forward. That sense of dazzle and frequent reward, flow and ease. I hope to keep the things I love about adventure games—great story and characters, exploring a unique world, puzzle-solving—without bringing back some of the less desirable traits like frequent deaths without save games, pixel hunting and wandering aimlessly trying to figure out what to do. (Squires 2012)

Throughout the game, the player is guided by the voice of voodoo queen Jessie, whose New Orleans burial ground is definitely worthy of an adventure game landscape as it reflects detailed, lavish environments with both hidden objects and puzzles. As Carter observes in her review, “Deadtime Stories’ hidden object levels are very well done, but they’re nothing compared to the game’s puzzles, which are wildly imaginative and challenging. Even when they lean towards the more traditional—like unscrambling letters to reveal a message—they’re given a clever twist that makes them feel completely fresh and vibrant” (Carter 2010). Jensen relies on voice-actors to give Jessie’s spirit (and others) life, providing a higher level of production value and offering further insight into what an adventure game/hidden object hybrid might offer players in terms of immersive storytelling, integration of puzzle and exploration, and sliding difficulty levels thanks to skippable puzzles and an integrated hints system (both aspects that quickly become characteristic of all of Jensen’s hidden object game designs).

Figure 3.13 Deadtime Stories inventory puzzle.

However, while Jensen was honing her process of rapid development at Oberon Media, she was also watching the changing landscape of gaming for new opportunities. The first generation of the iPhone was released in 2007, and with it, new markets for casual and hardcore gaming were opening up as now would-be gamers had a ready-to-use touch screen devices in their pockets all of the time. As the smartphone market heated up, the introduction of tablets took displays sizes and possibilities to a new level; the release of the iPad in 2010 created an ideal device for gaming (Baker 2012). The war for the casual game market was moving on to these platforms, and developers were starting to think about game formats suited to the touch screen interfaces’ restricted form of buttonless input (Keating 2015).

Casual game designer as author

Throughout Jensen’s early work, we see the clear development of her approach to storytelling in games. She takes the tools and dedication of a novelist to her craft. After producing her masterworks in the Gabriel Knight series, Jensen brought her expertise to new genres and demanding production environments. While casual games are produced and released rapidly with a production cycle that may not at first seem to support an auteur approach, Jensen’s casual games advanced the genre. Her attention to detail as communicated through prose and diagrams outlines every aspect of the final game, placing the puzzles into the narrative framework of the experience through environmental design. All of Jensen’s casual games live on through ports to iOS and downloadable versions, with artistic styles and story designed for lasting appeal. While the design practices of the casual games industry are undeservedly overlooked in many discussions in game design, Jensen’s work in this area demands our attention, for her success in using adaptation and mystery-building design often transcends our expectations of the genre.

4

Down Pinkerton Road: Jensen and the Adventure Game Renaissance

It’s not that I think adventure games are going to be the next Halo 3, but why can’t they be the next My Dinner with Andre? All the industry has been for so long is action, action, action. I’m happy for us to be a niche thing, but at least we should have a seat at the table. The gaming industry needs to have a lot more types of games for different types of gamers. Not just one note.

Jensen quoted in Fogel 2013.

Jensen’s approach as writer-designer was well established through her work at both Sierra and Oberon. However, the realities of the changing industry would continue to push her to take on new roles, as she built on her experience as an Oberon cofounder toward independent entrepreneurship. She set out to create a family-run studio, Pinkerton Road, following a successful Kickstarter campaign. Jensen’s first post-Sierra adventure game Gray Matter (Wizarbox 2010) marked the start of her engagement with the genre’s renaissance. The game demonstrated a number of innovative and unusual aspects, including a memorable strong woman at the forefront and gameplay that draws on magic tricks to solve puzzles. Following this project, she played a small role in Cognition (Phoenix Online Studios 2012), a Kickstarter-funded game that also served as an introduction for Jensen to several future collaborators. She then launched her own Kickstarter campaign to fund Pinkerton Road. The work Jensen designed and produced through Pinkerton Road presents incredible examples of design under constraint; with a budget that would be considered inadequate for a single studio adventure game title, Jensen delivered three projects: an original adventure game, an elaborate remake, and a children’s picture book. I examine these works as Jensen’s contribution to an attempted adventure game renaissance, during which many designers tried to establish independent studios and in many cases faltered with games as yet unreleased. The combination of Jensen’s detail-oriented, writerly approach to design and her experience with user-centered and rapid casual game development allowed her to succeed where many failed, although the story of Pinkerton Road remains financially a cautionary tale for a troubled industry. Jensen’s auteur approach allowed her to update many of the classic assumptions of the adventure game genre for a new market.

Moving back to adventure games

While Jensen was working primarily on other projects at Oberon, adventure games were kept alive primarily within dedicated fan communities. Classic games were still playable but were visually very different from more modern games; the sparse polygons of Gabriel Knight 3 did not age well when set alongside the lush landscapes of the fantastical World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment 2004), and the pace of gameplay was very different. While 2D games such as the first Gabriel Knight have aged better, the number of players who actually go back and play classic PC games is low. Unlike console-based retrogaming, which requires maintaining hardware in decent shape (and the market for retro consoles on eBay and similar sites is thriving), yet playing classic PC games requires emulation and tricking current computers to behaving like older, slower machines in order to function properly. Community hubs such as Good Old Games (GOG.com) host relatively cheap versions of some old games for players to revisit, but the fan base has nowhere near the user numbers of sites like Steam, which focus on new releases. Further, the selection of games is narrow, leaving many titles completely inaccessible. This relative lack of living history in the PC games industry is somewhat countered by the efforts of dedicated fans who create tools for emulating and supporting older games or even produce elaborate remakes to enhance the graphics and production qualities for appeal to a newer audience (Salter 2009). Sierra games particularly needed this type of attention and support since during the change in ownership, those games were viewed as so worthless to the new owners that the archives, development files, and many internal documents simply ended up in a landfill.

A year after Jane Jensen and her cofounders established Oberon, Kevin Bruner and Dan Connors founded Telltale Games. The team included several LucasArts employees as the adventure game arm of the studio had suffered the same fate as Sierra. Unlike Jensen, many of the LucasArts designers hadn’t gotten the chance to see their in-progress sequels released. They expressed their displeasure in the company’s founding press release, citing the cancellation of Sam & Max: Freelance Police without warning and the support of fans as the motivation for establishing a studio to “focus on the under represented adventure game market” (“Telltale Games, a New Game Development Studio” 2004). But like Jensen, they couldn’t rush headfirst into their dream projects and instead explored the casual market with a series of themed puzzle and poker games. While they couldn’t get all their work on the planned Sam & Max sequel out of LucasArt’s legal team, they did secure permission to make new games and brought their dog and rabbit crime-fighting team back in an episodic series starting in 2006.

The Telltale Games approach wasn’t simply a rehashing of LucasArts game mechanics; the team made several changes to try and revitalize the adventure game market. Most notably, they jumped on the trend of episodic narrative, which meant producing shorter games than the genre was once known for. Economically, this was clearly a win as reduced production times and budgets could still result in something saleable more rapidly. Dan Connors noted that Jensen was the only other designer at the time occupying a similar space between casual and hardcore, although from a different direction:

I think we did accomplish something unique, in that the game is being reviewed on hardcore game sites, and at the same time we will be on major casual game sites as well. The only other games that have ever done that were Jane Jensen’s [BeTrapped! and Inspector Parker], and her stuff was definitely—no knock on it—it was great casual gaming stuff, but it was casual first. (Interview by Morganti 2005)

Over time, Telltale moved even further in its attempts to appeal to the hardcore market of reviewers and players, adding increasing numbers of quick time events that demand rapid decision-making while decreasing the number of puzzles and other traditional adventure game mechanics.

In this increasingly competitive landscape, Oberon switched gears and directed its attention from producing games to distributing them. There wasn’t much left for Jensen to do in a company that no longer had need for original game design as the shift toward mobile and away from downloadable casual game storefronts made it impossible for Oberon to continue to succeed as a game developer and distributor. Jensen decided to leave the casual market as the changes to the genre hadn’t gone far enough for her design aesthetic:

I had hoped and thought that casual games, and especially hidden object games, could get more and more adventure like. I put adventure elements into ours (for example, I think Women’s Murder Club was the first to have inventory—though I could be wrong). But it was gratifying to see that it wasn’t just my games that did that, everyone in the industry started doing it. So I guess I have been pleasantly surprised, on the one hand, that I was correct ... and yet it hasn’t gone far enough for me! (Interview by GameBoomers 2012)

Changes in the casual game industry and at Oberon had increasingly made it difficult for her to experiment. Big players were getting more and more involved with competing branded titles from Disney and other vendors releasing at a frantic pace and focusing on the emerging mobile market. Many of these games didn’t need story to sell existing franchises, taking familiar characters and sticking them on top of casual game mechanics to evoke player’s existing attachments to colorful worlds, exemplified by games such as Bejeweled-like Frozen Free Fall (Disney 2013) shown in figure 4.1.

Figure 4.1 Screenshot of Frozen Free Fall.

The shift to mobile also came with more percentages of sales going to Apple and other digital distributors, while the notion of downloading a casual game for play on a PC fell by the wayside. New mechanics also started to dominate, with runaway hits like Roxio’s 2009 Angry Birds making the most of touch-based gameplay while the Nintendo Wii and its successor the Wii U focused on physical activity and motion controllers for simple games and exergaming. Casual games were definitely changing but not into the landscape of story-driven experiences Jensen had once hoped for.

Making Gray Matter

While her work at Oberon Media kept her consistently producing narrative games, Jensen searched for ways to get back to adventure games. It would take over a decade from the release of Gabriel Knight 3 for her to reenter the genre, despite the rumors and announcements that surfaced in 2003 of a forthcoming collaboration with The Adventure Company (Kasavin 2003). That project would become Gray Matter, but for years, it seemed cursed. Jensen explained the delay thusly: “The first publisher ended up dropping the project due to lack of funding. Then with the second publisher we had a development team change which really set the project back” (interview by Mulrooney 2011). It seemed for a while that Gray Matter was destined to be the adventure game equivalent of Duke Nukem Forever (3D Realms 2011), stuck in an endless development cycle and ultimately followed by an unremarkable release. Jensen described the production process as frustrating due to the physical disconnect between her and the team:

The hardest thing with “Gray Matter” was that I was not really involved in production. The game was done in Hamburg and Paris and I was living in the US. It also had budget issues and so many of the things I suggested could not be done. In the end I was really providing a game design document to the team but wasn’t directing production as I did on “GK” and “Moebius.” (interview by Καρκαλέμης 2014)

While Jensen’s game design documents were always detailed and elaborate bibles for a design, she usually followed up those documents with direct interactions throughout the production process. The Gray Matter process was very different from the designer-director role she’d taken on in most of her previous projects, and it left her with less say in the game’s final outcome.

The game was widely praised: “Jensen’s mastery in storytelling truly shines through in the game, seamlessly mixing science, fantasy, mystery, and even history to form a compelling narrative that is ultimately a study of the human condition—love, hate, loneliness, obsession, guilt, and forgiveness” (Jong 2010). Adventure game fans took notice, as one reviewer wrote: “Gray Matter has ‘cult hit’ written all over it. As well it should—it’s the best traditional adventure game in a decade” (Kaiser 2011). The game’s protagonist Samantha (Sam) Everett is a street magician and a skeptic entangled with mysteries surrounding apparent telekinesis in Oxford. Jensen drew on significant research for the game concept, citing the influence of Oliver Sacks’ “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”; V.S. Ramachandran’s “Phantoms in the Brain,” Dean Radin’s “The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena” for guiding a clash of scientific and spiritual approaches (Jensen 2009). This tension of science and magic recalls the themes Jensen had been exploring in her novels. Finally released in 2010, the game marked both a return for Jensen to adventure games (comparisons with the Gabriel Knight franchise were inevitable) and a small step in drawing coverage back to a genre whose few releases at the time were often going unremarked outside a small circle of enthusiasts, particularly in the United States.

Figure 4.2 Exploring Dread Hill manor in Gray Matter.

Sam Everett, shown in figure 4.2, ends up in Dread Hill, home of professor and paranormal researcher David Styles, as a research assistant. Sam pretends to be a student in order to get the job mostly because she is out of money, and she ends up charged with recruiting several students for the professor’s questionable experiments. The story centers on a complex mystery surrounding the apparently supernatural, with David haunted by the memory of his wife Laura, who died in a suspicious car accident. David and Sam alternate as playable characters, allowing the player to get a deeper perspective on the story as well as the professor’s guilt and obsession over the circumstances of his wife’s death. As Sam, the player has access to several useful magic tricks, including palming objects and “vanishing” things as needed. The character-driven aspects of play come through strongly, as well as the extensive research beyond this fictional version of Oxford: “At the end of the game, the player will have learned quite a bit about the history of Oxford, mythology and parapsychology, although it sometimes takes a keen critical eye to distinguish fact from fiction” (Derboo 2011). The game employs a very simplified control system, with an early tutorial guiding the player through the single-click interactions using the example of feeding Sam’s pet rabbit Houdini a carrot. Some of the more challenging aspects of the genre for new players are minimized through providing players with a color-coded map that indicates whether key story tasks are still in a particular location. In a review, Jong noted that “this system is ingenious and greatly reduces backtracking” (Jong 2010). The beginnings of the influence of Jensen’s experience with user-focused, casual game design shines throughout in the form of logical, narratively consistent yet accessible puzzles.

Leaving Oberon

The landscape of gaming in 2010 looked very different from the scattered and growing industry Jensen had entered nearly two decades earlier. Several major companies controlled the console market. Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, and Playstation 3 were all going strong, with announced successors to follow over the next few years. In the PC gaming world, Windows 7 brought new life to desktop PCs and digital distribution through the Steam network dominated the desktop computer industry. The best-selling games of 2010 paint a picture of a diverse industry with few strong narrative games. The list includes two Call of Duty (Rockstar Games) first-person shooter games (Black Ops [2010] and Modern Warfare 2 [2009]), action-adventure Western Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar Games 2010), meditative fitness game Wii Fit Plus (Nintendo 2009), and Ubisoft’s 2010 music-video-esque Just Dance 2 (Reilly 2011). Many of the hit games crossed over multiple platforms, released almost simultaneously on PC, Xbox, and Playstation. Players looking for story-driven gameplay would most often be drawn to smaller titles or to the dominant massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment 2004) which had 12 million players paying for subscriptions as of October 2010 (“World of Warcraft Subscriber Base”).

After leaving Oberon in 2011, Jensen briefly flirted with these new models and looked for an existing studio that would value her expertise as writer and designer. More and more games relied on integration with Facebook for generating a player base and revenue driven by micro-transactions. Jensen briefly worked with Facebook-dominator Zynga on a project to bring the hidden object genre to their social model with Hidden Chronicles (2012): “Cara Ely was Creative Director for that game and we were both game designers/directors at Oberon. She called me in to help with some narrative writing. But the main writer on Hidden Chronicles was Christy Marx, another terrific Sierra designer” (interview by Squires 2012). The game, which centers on the mysterious death of an uncle, attracted an impressive 30.2 million monthly user starting fan base (MacMillan 2012). There were rumors of another Jensen–Zynga project that never came to fruition, perhaps because of the failure of Hidden Chronicles to retain players despite the promising start. Ultimately, this may have been thanks to the game’s frustrating requirements of either social mechanisms or micro-transactions to move forward in exploration and narrative. It also never reached the scale Zynga depended on for its success. It was shut down with approximately 588,000 monthly users, compared to Zynga’s flagship game FarmVille 2’s (2009) 24.6 million monthly users (Shaul 2014). Zynga closed the game in July 2014 due to a combination of shifting market focus from Facebook to mobile along with dwindling in-game sales.

Jensen’s attempts to work within the studio system and bring her expertise in narrative were frustrated by the realities and expectations of studios. As she confessed in an interview, “I worked for a while with a really big company—I guess I shouldn’t say who it was. I was basically hired to do a better story. I faced so much resistance from the team leader and the project manager—literally hours worth of meetings where it would be ‘I don’t get it, why would we want a story?” (Suicu 2014). Jensen’s frustrations grew when she realized how many of these projects would leave her creatively stalled, unable to fulfill her full range as writer-designer: “I didn’t want to contract out my writing abilities on projects out of my control that weren’t really good story projects. I didn’t have any real say in them, and they weren’t adventure games. I just felt like ... I’m finally free of Oberon—I want to do what I really want to do” (quoted by Kollar 2012). This realization would bring Jensen back full circle to an adventure game genre that had very different prospects when compared to the golden age of Sierra and LucasArt’s relatively large budgets and tight-knit collaborative teams. With no traditional routes to funding available and no established studio behind her, she tried to craft a back door into an industry that viewed adventure games as a genre of a bygone age. Ultimately, Jensen would play a large part in the struggle to reinvigorate the genre, working against unfriendly market forces, insufficient budgets, and something perhaps even more challenging—the specter of her past success, the Gabriel Knight series to which all her new independent efforts would inevitably be compared.

Thinking through Gray Matter and Cognition

Gray Matter (2010) served as a reintroduction for Jensen to a community that might not have noticed her casual game releases. She continued to find roles in the renaissance adventure game scene, starting with an unexpected consulting role on a project started by a group of hardcore fans: Cognition (2012). Cognition was the first original title project from Phoenix Online Studios, a team primarily famous for their work on an unofficial but copyright-holder approved sequel to Sierra’s King’s Quest entitled The Silver Lining (Phoenix Online Studios 2010). Produced entirely by a volunteer team, The Silver Lining’s return to the stories of an aged King Graham and his family became the studio’s calling card for new projects, and they leveraged it by turning to Kickstarter for support from fans who had enjoyed their free game (Phoenix Online Studios 2011). The project’s Kickstarter campaign was launched on October 29, 2011, with a modest goal of $25,000. The campaign announcement included a blurb about Jane Jensen’s involvement:

Jane Jensen is our Story Consultant! A lot of us at Phoenix have been huge fans of Jane’s work since her early days at Sierra, through to her latest release of Gray Matter this past year. To have the creator of Gabriel Knight, one of the first and most influential supernatural investigator adventure games, acting as a guiding hand on our story is a dream come true—we’re honored and, let’s face it, really lucky to have her on board! (Phoenix Online Studios 2011)

Jensen’s influence on the team was already apparent in the concept: Erica Reed is an FBI agent with powers of “post-cognition” that allow her to reconstruct fragments of memory from crime scenes. While the game is set in Boston and not New Orleans, Erica travels through some settings that recall the Gabriel Knight games, including an antique shop where she finds a mentor who helps her control her growing powers. Like Gray Matter’s leading woman Samantha, Erica is a strong and complex heroine with personal stakes in the growing conflicts around her. Both characters are remarkable as depictions of women in the industry. In 2012, the year of Cognitions’s release, only two of the top ten best-selling games included notable women characters—the dancing instructors of Just Dance 4 (Ubisoft 2012) and the more diverse women of Borderlands 2 (2K Games 2012) (Cifaldi 2013). Top-selling franchise Call of Duty would only add playable female options to their multiplayer customization a year later in Call of Duty: Ghosts (Activision 2013) (de Matos 2013).

Cognition includes several memorable elements that Jensen and her family of collaborators contributed. The game’s lead character Erica Reed was voiced by Raleigh Holmes (Jensen’s stepdaughter, daughter of Robert Holmes), an actor/singer-songwriter whose songs are featured in several of Jensen’s games and in Cognition (Mulrooney 2012). She also sings several songs within the game, including “The Taking” by Robert Holmes’s band the Scarlet Furies. The song provides both atmosphere and a plot point; Erica uses it to jog the memory of a character during an interrogation during which she dives into his memories. While Cognition is not a Jane Jensen game, designer Cesar Bittar credits her with assistance and editing:

Jane has been involved in the story since the very beginning, and so far she has taken a pass at the full scripts for Episode 1 and 2, giving very honest and very strong feedback about things she feels work, and what doesn’t. She had so many notes on mine, and that was awesome, because she saw things I didn’t, and helped me center my focus and my energy on the things that mattered. She also edited a lot of my dialog, so there’s a bunch of lines in the game that are Jane’s, which I think is awesome! (Interview by Boke 2012)

And perhaps more importantly, Cognition introduced Jensen personally to the Phoenix Online Studios team, a group of passionate adventure game developer-fans who she could envision collaborating with on future productions guided more by her own vision.

Founding (and funding) Pinkerton Road

Cognition is far from the only indie adventure game to come out of Kickstarter’s funding model. The last few years had seen an incredible resurgence in adventure games produced, and most of them have been funded through similar campaigns. Tim Schafer (designer of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango) propelled the craze into the spotlight with his overfunded campaign in February 2012. He asked for $400,000 and raised over three million dollars to support the making of a classic graphical adventure game (Double Fine and 2 Player Productions 2012). The campaign traded entirely on Schafer’s name recognition and included no details at all about the game itself, referring to it only as Double Fine Adventure (named after the studio). However, adventure game fans came running even for this vague promise, which was eventually released in two parts as Broken Age in 2014—long after its initial unrealistic target for completion of October 2012.

Tim Schafer was the first major name from classic adventure gaming to take to Kickstarter in a big way, bringing several former LucasArts designers to the project as collaborators. His example would help inspire several Sierra designers, such as Al Lowe, who had spent several years frustrated by a lack of success revisiting the traditional studio model, and Jane Jensen, to test the waters. Their campaigns launched almost simultaneously, with Lowe’s starting April 2 and Jensen’s announcing on April 4. However, their visions for what was possible were very different: Al Lowe partnered with Replay Games to work on a remake of the original Leisure Suit Larry game rather than try to create a new game idea, setting an initial funding goal of $500,000 and receiving $655,182 in pledges (Replay Games 2012). The team’s goal was to take a game that was visually incredibly dated and update it for a new generation of potential players. This leveraged nostalgia heavily, with fond memories of Leisure Suit Larry’s pixelated antics enough to draw in old-school fans. However, the team acknowledged that many backers would be more interested in a new Leisure Suit Larry game and addressed the challenges of pursuing that goal in their FAQ: “What we REALLY want to do is to make Leisure Suit Larry 8. To do that, though, it costs a hell of a lot more money than $500,000. To put it in perspective, LSL 7 cost about $2mm back in 1996 which is about $3mm today” (Replay Games 2012). While that’s the amount Tim Schafer raised through Kickstarter for his new game, it’s a lofty goal, particularly given most successful projects on Kickstarter are funded at levels of $10,000 or less (“Stats” 2016). Of the 100,000+ successfully funded Kickstarters as of April 2016, only 2,860 have raised more than $100,000, and only 170 have exceeded the million-dollar mark. Several of these are from well-known game designers, such as Ultima series creator Richard Garriott’s 1.9 million dollar funded campaign for Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues (Makuch 2013).

Jensen approached Kickstarter with a much more ambitious goal than remaking a single game: She set out to fund the new studio Pinkerton Road (Kollar 2012). The idea for Pinkerton Road came from her new family farm, situated in Lancaster, PA—not exactly a hub for the game industry but a place where the idea of community-supported agriculture, or CSAs, was thriving. Jensen credits her husband Robert Holmes with suggesting a possible connection between the model and their dream of a studio to pursue truly independent projects while connecting with a community of fans. The goal was to attract a dedicated base willing to pitch in, adapting the model of supporting memberships akin to CSAs. As the campaign explained:

Part of our vision for the studio is to have a direct relationship with our players—the designer communicating directly with the fans. We call that “CSG” or “Community Supported Gaming.” The idea is that with your pledge you “join” the studio family for one year. You won’t only get the games we produce that year, but you get a virtual seat in the studio. (Pinkerton Road Studios 2012)

This idea drew on the proven dedication of adventure game fans, which both Lowe and Jensen’s Kickstarters were counting on. The two campaigns happening simultaneously attracted the attention of many of these adventure game fans, and Serena Nelson credits that moment as the start of the “Adventure Game Revival Movement,” an informally organized group that began with pledge drives in support of Sierra games (Nelson 2013). For Pinkerton Road, the supporters called themselves “St. George’s Knights” after Gabriel’s bookstore and pledged an extra $6.66 to “pay for your father’s sins” (ibid.). Appropriately for Leisure Suit Larry, the pledge drive campaign focused on any multiple of sixty-nine.

However, relying on a small, dedicated fan base to support so many projects at potentially high costs wouldn’t be enough to sustain the type of budgets full adventure games demanded. Jensen set herself up for a financial challenge with the modest goal of $300,000, far short of the real cost of producing a new graphical adventure game.¹ Pinkerton Road was at this point only two people strong—Jensen and Holmes—in their farm-turned studio. All development would by necessity be handled externally, but Jensen already had one team in mind—Signus Labs, a former collaborator from her days at Oberon. Signus Labs operated from St. Petersburg, Russia, but Jensen’s time at Oberon gave her plenty of experience with using remote conferencing to handle these logistics, and it also sheltered Pinkerton Road from the risks of trying to hire an internal development team without a continual source of revenue (Kollar 2012). Her Kickstarter was initially vague about the logistics, referring only to “two excellent external development teams” from Jensen’s past collaborations (Pinkerton Road Studios 2012). The second team would turn out to be Phoenix Online Studios, the developers behind Cognition. She addressed the funding challenge directly: “A 3rd person adventure game like the one we’re planning would normally cost at least twice that. But we are putting in some funding as well, and the team is taking less up front in exchange for rev share. So this project already has committed believers behind it. The last piece we need is you!” (ibid.). This optimism would prove misplaced, particularly as the campaign’s goals scaled up even as the final funding ended at $435,316.

The financial model surrounding campaigns depended on finding new audiences, the same type of players Jensen had been courting for years through her work at Oberon Media. The dual forces of digital distribution and mobile devices suggested an untapped player base of potential adventure game fans, causing several observers in the industry at the time to look hopefully at the future of the genre. As writer Kate Cox described in 2012, shortly before Jensen’s campaign launched,

The era of digital distribution has opened up new avenues for developers large and small to get almost anything to this wide new pool of players, and we’re still learning the full range these games and their revenue models can take. We have perhaps never been better poised for the up-again, down-again adventure game to find its star on the rise once more. (Cox 2012)

Jensen herself spoke optimistically of the future of the genre in the early stages of development following the Kickstarter’s success:

Adventure games are focused on story, characters, and puzzles and exploring a world in your own time rather than being a trigger fest. That sort of game was eclipsed for a lot of years by action shooters, but now I think the growth of the casual game industry has brought some people into gaming – women and older gamers—who want that more exploratory experience. Also, I think, I hope, that the industry as a whole is interested in more variety again instead of the same type of game over and over. (Interview by Carmichael 2012)

Jensen wasn’t the only one counting on that market. As more and more adventure game designers took to Kickstarter in her wake, everyone was hoping for post-release sales to prove the genre’s appeal to more than the dedicated fan base of pledged supporters.

Of the designers taking to Kickstarter, Jensen was one of the few to already be looking for a crossover audience powered by tablets as a media consumption device, which she saw as tailor-made for adventure gaming:

I’m excited about tablets for adventure games because it’s a good demographic for story-based gaming. A lot of people buy tablets in order to read ebooks, so there’s a good base of “story consumers” there, and casual games have also taken off on tablet. I hope to see a strong market for true adventure games grow and help the “rebirth” of adventure games. (Interview by Munger 2014)

The Pinkerton Road Kickstarter rewards included the studio’s first tablet-targeted interactive children’s book Lola and Lucy’s Big Adventure (Pinkerton Road 2012), which recalled some of Jensen’s early influences from collaborating with the EcoQuest and Pepper’s Adventures in Time teams and which starred two bulldogs traveling across the country. The app was a smaller project, intended as a test run for Pinkerton Road’s model of collaborating virtually with a production team. Jensen even released videos of her remote guidance and consultations with the production team on the app to demonstrate how the same model would work for the larger Kickstarted games (Pinkerton Road Studios 2012).

Perhaps the most ambitious part of Jensen’s approach to Kickstarter was taking seriously her commitment to market a studio rather than a single game by letting the fans decide mid-way through the Kickstarter which game would be the team’s first project. In her early Kickstarter updates, Jensen addressed her goals by giving fans three different concepts to vote on:

[I]‌t’s so great to see that some of you want all 3 (or at least 2!) of the games. That was what we were hoping to do with this game concept idea and voting. We wanted to show you that this campaign isn’t just for “a” game. We are founding Pinkerton Road for the long haul! And we have so many great games we hope to share with you over the next few years. (Jensen 2012b)

The first choice winner, overwhelmingly, was a new concept entitled “Moebius,” beating out both a prospective sequel to Sam and David’s supernatural mysteries in Gray Matter and a Jane Austen-esque “Anglophile Adventure” by a 61 percent majority. On May 4, 2012, Jane Jensen made another big announcement: The Kickstarter would no longer support a single game. However, Jensen didn’t advance one of the two titles from the voting. Instead, she promised a “Mystery Game X,” fueling some last-minute donations and over a year of speculation on the Pinkerton Road backer forums, with many backers hoping for a Gabriel Knight project despite the inclusion in the FAQ of a reminder that the studio did not possess the rights to the series (Pinkerton Road Studios 2012).

Moebius

The new original title voted on by Pinkerton Road’s backers was supposed to be delivered in March 2013. It was actually launched on April 15, 2014, a not-unusual outcome in the fate of Kickstarted games (Schreier 2015). The original description that brought it to the top of the proposed list promised a Gabriel Knight-esque premise: An antiquities dealer loses his store in a fire and gets hired to investigate a series of suspicious deaths that end up being part of something sinister and supernatural. The engine and mechanics promised a return to the 2D graphics that had created the compelling environments of New Orleans and that also seemed to be a more budget-friendly solution for the small team. The concept was one Jensen had been holding on to for some time, waiting for a chance to make it under her direct artistic control:

I was on a flight trying to come up with some concepts to pitch to a game company I was working with at the time. There’s something about being in the air that seems to inspire higher-level thoughts for me—life and death, the nature of reality, stuff I’m normally too busy working or consuming media to think about. The core idea for Moebius came to me on that flight, and I decided to tuck that one away in my pocket and keep it for the day I could publish my own game. (Interview by Gutsche 2013)

By this stage in her career, Jensen was adamant about keeping the rights to her properties rather than seeing another Gabriel Knight end up out of her reach in the hands of another company (interview by Agnello 2012).

However, Jensen would be sharing her intellectual work with someone besides a corporate oversight committee. The very idea of CSA is to create personal connections throughout the process. Often, CSA farms open their doors to members, provide opportunities for volunteering and getting a hands-on experience on the farm, and regularly bring the farmers and members into contact as part of picking up one’s share. Tim Schafer’s Kickstarter included an ambitious plan for doing something similar, with a documentary team onsite to record the process of making the Double Fine Adventure. As a smaller project, Jensen’s community-supported gaming drew on CSA strategies with regular updates and the sharing of design documents and other material to provide fans an entry point into what they had backed. In the usual game production process, players aren’t involved until the game actually launches, and that’s when the feedback and ranting really start. Jensen also noted the pleasure of having fans on staff for a project she truly controlled: “The fact that Moebius was entirely the property of the studio gave a lot of creative freedom, and working with Phoenix Online, the dev team, was also great. They’re super hard-core adventure game fans, so it was wonderful to have a team like that” (interview by Burks 2014). However, the working conditions for Moebius weren’t much like the days of Sierra’s physical studio; the connections to both the production team and fans were mostly sustained virtually (other than one notable open studio day during which backers above a certain level were invited to converge on Pinkerton Road itself for a gathering.)

Figure 4.3 Initial design document of Moebius.

The game itself showed many of the impacts of Jensen’s changing style and design philosophy from years of working outside of the adventure game genre. Jensen’s novels brought her unlikeable characters to the forefront, a humanizing effect that we don’t as often see employed in games. Playing Moebius can be disconcerting because of the protagonist’s outright unlikeable qualities, which aren’t balanced with the Southern charm of Gabriel Knight (or for that matter, delivered in Tim Curry’s smooth voice). Jensen’s design document introduction, released as part of the Kickstarter, clearly set the character apart (figure 4.3). Reviewers noted the challenge, suggesting that “Malachi requires warming toward,” as his arrogant, snobbish personality combined with his wealth and knowledge make him unapproachable until his counterpart steps in: “It’s only through his unexpected pairing with the instantly charming David Walker, an ex-military hero turned interim bodyguard, that Malachi begins to open up and display empathetic human emotions” (Werner 2014). In this he recalls his predecessor Gabriel Knight, bringing a complexity and humanity to the player character that has rarely been seen outside of Jensen’s own games. As one reviewer noted, Jensen excels at creating Gabriel Knight-esque “likeable jerks”: “with the launch of Moebius, he’s got company: Protagonist Malachi Rector is one of the most brilliantly flawed protagonists I’ve had the pleasure of controlling in quite some time” (Davidson 2014b). The game thus centers not only on the metaphysical story but also on the development of the character. As Werner points out, the moment where Malachi becomes likeable was the most compelling of the game:

Unraveling the mystery Malachi has become entangled within is enough of a reward, but it is witnessing his subtle growth into something more than the sum of his haughty parts that is most gratifying. It’s a testament to Jane Jensen’s storytelling that in a game about pseudo-scientific theories centuries in the making, multiple murders, conspiracies, and even raw fistfights, the event that most stands out is Malachi’s intangible transformation; the moment you finally root for him as your hero. (Werner 2014)

Malachi’s central mechanic for interacting with the world is by performing a Sherlock-esque analysis of characters upon meeting, as shown in figure 4.4. The mechanic feels like a combination of Gabriel Knight’s tendency toward interrogation with the psychic abilities of Erica Reed to dive into memories in Cognition. We experience the character’s emotional growth, which one reviewer notes is not something we expect from games: “Over the course of the game, Malachi grows and changes as a result of his interactions and experiences. It’s a nice thing to see in a game ... It doesn’t happen immediately, but seeing Malachi evolve over the course of the game is welcome, refreshing, and well executed” (Shaw 2014). In Jensen’s character-driven approach to design, the growth in Malachi’s character translates to actions in puzzles as well as revelations in the story. The unusual mechanics and particularly the details of investigation mode drew praise. Reviewing for IndieGamer, Benjamin Bracker praised the game both as an indie success and a modernization of the adventure game genre:

Moebius: Empire Rising is an astonishing example of what can be done on a small budget, with a talented team whom can do so much with so little. This is not your typical rub things up against each other and see what sticks type of adventure game, everything that enters your inventory has a purpose, and that purpose actually makes sense. This is an adventure that should absolutely not be missed. (Bracker 2014)

Figure 4.4 Screenshot of Moebius: Empire Rising showing the investigation mode.

Malachi Rector’s initial aloofness is balanced by his compatriot and bodyguard David Walker. Their relationship is similar to Sherlock Holmes and John Watson and is perhaps most reminiscent of BBC’s Sherlock (Gatiss and Moffat 2010–present) in its reliance on the more likeable, humanized, physical Walker to balance Rector’s alienating, sociopathic qualities. In a review Lefebvre calls the pair’s relationship a “bromance:” Walker is both the “comic relief” and the voice of reason and experience throughout the game (2014). Of course, calling it a bromance is perhaps selling it short. The game also held the suggestion of romantic undertones between the two characters, although Jensen noted in an interview that none of this would be canon (at least, not yet): “There will be subtle sensuality between the protagonists of Moebius, who are really hot guys. Nothing is going to be overt, though ... Except maybe in fan fiction” (Teitelbaum 2012). This is particularly unsurprising given that under her penname, Jane Jensen is also known for her remarkable Sherlock “Johnlock” slash fan fiction, most notably “The Great Sex Olympics of 221B” under the name Xistential Angst. The work is a novel of its own, coming in at nearly 60,000 words and receiving many kudos as a frequently read fanfic on Archive of Our Own (XistentialAngst 2012). While Jensen kept these identities separate for a long time, she revealed the connection in an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit following the game’s release (Holmes 2014). As she explained in the interview from chapter five of this book,

I didn’t want to come out before the games were out because I didn’t want them to be viewed through a lens—especially Moebius, because Moebius has quite a significant romance in it that I was always planning to develop into a romance later on in the series, which will now not happen. I didn’t want the reviews to be like, “well, she’s just doing this gay romance shit now, and now she’s putting it in her games”—I just didn’t want to go there. (Jensen forthcoming)

Jensen set the stage to provide a canonical gay relationship between computer game characters, notable for complex characterization that avoids stereotypes. This type of inclusiveness and diversity in protagonists is part of a small but significant trend in the industry. Strategies for including LGBTQ+ characters were even addressed at a GDC panel in 2014 (Staff 2014). Unfortunately, the relative lack of financial pay-offs for the first game makes such a future for the bantering Rector and Walker unlikely outside of fan fiction or follow-up stories from Jensen herself. A search for David Walker and Malachi Rector on Archive of Our Own returns five hits as of May 2016, including one appropriately tagged as “Bromance to Romance” (doorfighter 2016).

Mystery Game X

While work was proceeding on Moebius with regular updates, fans speculated wildly on the possibilities of Mystery Game X. Jensen finally announced the details in October of 2014. Gabriel Knight would indeed be returning, though not in the Gabriel Knight 4 fans had been waiting for. Instead, Jensen was partnering with Phoenix Online Studios on a Gabriel Knight anniversary remake. This wasn’t merely a matter of taking the old assets of Gabriel Knight in for a refresh; the original audio recordings from the game were lost. Jane Jensen’s success in rebooting Gabriel Knight also fits with her hopes for the future: “Ideally, we’d like to bring back the Gabriel Knight franchise. We’ve been talking to Activision and we thought the best way to approach it was to redo the first game, which was basically like a pilot episode; it shows how Gabriel Knight becomes a Schattenjager. And from there, we might be able to proceed with new episodes” (interview by McDonald 2014).

Figure 4.5 St. George’s bookstore in Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition.

Fans of the classic games wanted to hear the original voices and see the familiar faces they expected from Gabriel Knight—but the small studio could not afford to rehire Tim Curry or his compatriots to revisit their roles. This is a common tension in retrogaming, which is often driven in large part by nostalgia and a desire to recapture the essential experience of the original (Heineman 2014). Jensen sought to strike a balance that would make everyone happy by preserving the original feel with some new aesthetic additions: “The story is the same as the original ... There are a few new full-size puzzles added in and a few new exterior locations so that we could really get across the feeling of being in New Orleans” (McDonald 2014). The game offers players new yet familiar gameplay. Iconic series locations (such as Gabriel’s bookshop, shown in figure 4.5) were brought into 3D while artists preserved much of their original color palette and style.

The Gabriel Knight remake’s mechanics demonstrate a number of changes to fit modern play styles and increase the ease of play. While the original game included an impressively detailed dialogue tree, the conversational range of the remake is comparatively limited. The team made several changes that cut back on the text:

[T]‌he script had to be trimmed down to fit the updated game interface, working in a much higher resolution meant new details needed to be planned and added to scenes and characters, and the MIDI required some re-orchestrating as well. Having a mostly complete GDD from the beginning meant we had more time and bandwidth to make these changes and add in a few new puzzles. (Hallahan 2015)

These changes also include user-centered design enhancements that ease gameplay, particularly for those being introduced to the genre for the first time:

[T]‌he game contains a journal that not only gives you clues to what Gabriel is thinking, but also records some of the specific details of what he has learned—knowledge that occasionally helps with puzzle solutions. In addition, this new edition contains a system with graduated hints for specific obstacles, as well as a list of everything that needs to be accomplished within a particular day. (Waxman 2014)

Fidelity to the original design document and the approval of the game’s designer was privileged over precise recreation of scenes, allowing the team to do some things not possible in the original version. The team also took cues from post-publication materials, such as Jensen’s novelization, to add new cut scenes with zombified police officers that acted to increase the sense of the threat to the city and Gabriel himself. According to Waxman, the increased resolution also helped build the atmosphere: “The details are carefully and realistically rendered: the upturned corner of a rug, the glimmer of light in a crystal, the serpentine patterns formed by tree roots, skulls gathered in a makeshift net, a bloodstained machete on a filthy wall” (ibid.). These elements serve primarily to highlight what modern graphics capabilities have to offer Jensen in revisiting and updating the genre.

A Sierra renaissance?

By the time the two games were released, there was no money left for marketing. Jensen managed against incredible financial odds. As she described,

We ended up raising, I think it was around $435,000, after everybody takes their cut, we had about $390,000. It was really not enough money to make a game like the game that we made. So it’s been a difficult few years, we ended up putting a lot of our own money into it as well and the team was on starvation wages. (Interview by de Matos 2014)

By turning around two games (and the Lola and Lucy interactive book) and delivering on their Kickstarter promises, Jensen and Holmes joined the slim ranks of successful crowdfunded video game projects. Kickstarter failure happens across genres: A study in 2014 of Kickstarters from 2009 to 2012 found that only one in three had fully met their promises to backers (UnSub 2014). While only a few projects are formally cancelled, the realities of the cost of video game production outside of established studio structures have impacted a number of Kickstarters and left more designers than Jensen nostalgic for the days of Sierra.

The most successful parts of the Sierra renaissance have been powered by studios, not Kickstarter, with a reborn and rebranded Sierra bringing back the King’s Quest series for an episodic reboot, starting in 2015 and following an approach similar to Jensen’s (Johnson 2015). The game is perhaps the type of Gabriel Knight sequel Jensen might have made with the new Sierra’s backing, using a Hollywood voice cast and combining old and new to frame gameplay: “[T]‌he whole adventure is framed as a tale told by the aging Graham to his rambunctious granddaughter Gwendolyne. and [sic] it’s here where most of King’s Quest’s charms reveal themselves. The older version of Graham is wonderfully voiced by veteran actor Christopher Lloyd, and the range of his voice work here is at once staggering and impressive” (ibid.). Jensen’s crafting of similar projects outside the resources of a large studio is in part a testament to her ability to take on a multitude of roles in the design process.

While not a financial triumph, Jane Jensen’s accomplishments with Moebius and the Gabriel Knight anniversary edition are still remarkable in the context of restricted resources and would have never been possible without the experience in developing under continual budget pressure and working with remote teams that Jensen learned at Oberon. Unlike many designers, Jensen’s approach as a director and manager has allowed her to experiment with innovations on the business side of gaming as well as within her works. Playing these many roles has also presented challenges, costing Jensen some of the advantages that come from a structured studio and reliable sources of funding for large-scale projects. Jensen’s contributions to the renaissance era of adventure games demonstrate significant evolution for the genre, particularly in the diversity and characterization of protagonists and the employment of user-centered design features to increase accessibility and diminish frustration on the part of players.

5

Jane Jensen: In Her Own Words

Interview on November 13, 2015

In November 2015, Jane Jensen was in the midst of many projects. Her latest games, Moebius: Empire Rising and Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition were both released following the successful Kickstarter campaign in 2014, and she had several novels underway as both Jane Jensen and Eli Easton. Jensen’s career has pivoted multiple times with her moves from Sierra to Oberon to Pinkerton Road. This latest experience, however, might well be the catalyst that drives her away from gaming and toward primary focus on writing. I spoke virtually on Skype with Jane Jensen and asked her to reflect on the path that brought her to this moment as a writer/designer and discuss how she sees her own work when looking back on over two decades of game design and novel writing.

Anastasia Salter (AS).You started out as a programmer: What influence does programming as a discipline have on your approach to game design?

Jane Jensen (JJ). I often think of game design as basically writing code with fiction because it’s extremely logical and path-oriented and logic diagram-oriented, so having a computer science background (and a degree in computer science) really helped me get started.

AS.Your first big project at Sierra was joining the team for EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus. What was your role on that project?

JJ.I was a big fan of Sierra games, and then I finally got hired on to be part of a new writer’s block. EcoQuest was one of the first games I worked on because at the time, the creative director Bill Davis had an idea for a kids’ game that he wanted to develop. He wasn’t a writer, per se. He invited a couple of people from the writer’s block to work on the design for him. It was my first design project, and I had to sort of follow someone else’s idea. I was working with another designer, and we each had sections of the game, and I was particularly responsible for the city, where I added a lot of puzzles and some puns that would become something that I did a lot in my games. There were a bunch of puzzles in the city that were very logic-oriented and nested, where you had to go to one location to get something and then go back to the place, and that was a signature for me.

AS. You worked on another educational game at that period, Pepper’s Adventures in Time.

JJ.That was a similar situation in which it was originally a Davis concept, and another kid’s game, exploring a series of historical periods. I was only on that for a short time before I ended up getting swept into King’s Quest, so Pepper’s Adventures in Time ended up going to somebody else to finish it. But from what I can remember of the early work that I did on it, it was fun to play around with the idea of Fred [the evil uncle who mixes up time in the game].

AS.Those games—and the concept of the Sierra Discovery Series—still stand out in the history of educational games for their story-driven play. What do you see as some of the opportunities and challenges of educational game design?

JJ.I enjoyed it, and since then, we’ve done a little game Lola’s Big Adventure on the iPad, which uses similar elements for kids. I think it’s important—when I was a kid I loved fiction, and I loved books, and so for me, these games have to be entertaining first. We try to work the subject matter in using as interesting a way as possible.

AS.After these early projects at Sierra, you entered into a major collaboration through working on the King’s Quest series with Roberta Williams. What was it like collaborating on this project?

JJ. It was really, really educational for me because I’d been working on small titles before that, and this was one of their major blockbuster titles. And I’d played a lot of her games before I went to Sierra, so it was interesting to be able to work with her directly. It was great to see how she worked: she wasn’t there during the day; she pretty much worked from home. So we worked together on the design for a few weeks, and I did a lot of the detail-oriented work. She would take the game, and she would playtest it for like a week, and then return thirty or forty pages of notes. They would be very detail-oriented, with notes like “There’s a pink pixel on the white bricks of the castle, and this is misleading because people are going to think that they have to do something.” She was really picky, and as a young up-and-coming designer, it was inspiring for me to see how sure she was of her vision and how much of a perfectionist she was. It gave me a lot of courage to be, not demanding, but very detail-oriented on my future game projects.

AS.What influences did you take forward from these early collaborations forward as you worked on your own games?

JJ.Primarily in terms of the mechanics—for instance, something I ran into a lot on the last project that I did, Moebius, was thinking about her [Roberta Williams’s] specific ideas for what you can and cannot do in adventure games. For instance, you wouldn’t have a south exit, where you would just exit towards the camera because you always have to see a door. It has to always be on the east, west, or north. As I mentioned before, you have to watch for things in the scene, and the art being misleading, suggesting the player can interact with them when they really can’t. I learned a lot of her ideas for what’s good and not good in adventure games, some of which I agree with, others which are like any rules—they’re made to be broken. She [Williams] had a really good handle on how people played adventure games, so that was interesting even though we have very different approaches to story, character, and dialogue.

AS.How do you see the role of research in your approach to story, particularly in the Gabriel Knight series?

JJ.It’s really important. It depends on the subject that you’re dealing with. Probably the most intensive research-driven game that I ever did was GK3 [Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned] just because it required so much complex lore and conspiracy theory and all that behind it. I wanted to incorporate a lot of that into the actual puzzle, so that one was more intensive than something completely fictional or invented. I wanted it to have a basis in real logic, particularly in terms of the whole idea of patterns repeating through history. So we concentrated on historical research on that one, and I actually had a fan who is a retired schoolteacher, who lived in the UK, and who offered to do some research for it. She was really helpful: I could say “okay, we have a situation where we need a woman who is crazy jealous, so find all the people in history who might match this set of characteristics for our puzzles.” For my games it’s been incredibly important, but it depends on what story you are trying to tell and how much it involves something real.

AS.You mentioned collaborating on research. What role does collaboration normally have in your design process on adventure games?

JJ.As a writer, I’m fairly insular. I withdraw and become a turtle and focus in on my own world, and I’ve never really co-wrote in any significant way. It’s great to get feedback, like from testers and players as we had on the Kickstarter. From that, you can try to make some adjustments. All that is important. I’ve been writing more novels lately, and readers will go through and say, “You know, you just lost me on this scene because I just thought he was reacting way too harshly,” or whatever, or “Why didn’t you ever address this issue that you brought up?” and that sort of specific information is really valuable. But that’s probably as far as I go in terms of collaboration. When it comes to actually creating the story, I’m pretty internal.

AS.It seemed like with every Gabriel Knight game, you were working with larger teams and changing technologies. Did that have any impact on your game design process?

JJ.Yes, it’s like the difference between stage and film. When you’re working with live action video in a game versus 3D, you need to adjust more than look, and you have to change everything—especially your puzzles—accordingly. This even sometimes changes your dialogue; if a real person is going to say it, it changes. Things that can be really over the top and funny with a cartoon character may fall flat with a live actor. It also changes what’s possible. For instance, in Gabriel Knight 3 there were a lot of puzzles that involved using the 3D camera—going under a desk or solving a puzzle involving the whole landscape. Those were things that I put in there because it was going to be my first 3D game, and I was really interested to try to play with that format. But at the end of the day, it didn’t particularly affect the core story; it has more impact on puzzle and actual play mechanics.

AS.With each of the Gabriel Knight games, how much control did you have over casting and art decisions that would bring that story to life?

JJ.I was fortunate enough to be involved in every single aspect of the casting in GK2 and even on GK1—we had a voiceover director who sent me tapes of auditions. I’ve always been really that way, and basically, I’ve acted as director on the project, giving me control over those sorts of decisions. Most of the dialogue for GK1 was written before we had gone into recording, but after I had heard Tim Curry as Gabriel Knight, from then on, I always had that voice in my head as I wrote the subsequent games. With the script for GK2, we knew it would be filmed on an actual stage, so I had to be very conscious of what we could and couldn’t do on the green screen. And there were several sequences in there where we really pushed it, like with Grace running through the snow. We had live horses on set, and we really pushed it given how much budget and expertise we actually had. But I was aware that the scenes actually had to be filmed, and the scenes had to be something that live actors could do on a stage that would be reasonable and sound good.

AS.Since Gabriel Knight, we’ve really seen the genre of supernatural horror on the rise in the mainstream thanks to shows like Supernatural, the Twilight phenomenon, and similar franchises. What do you think makes this genre endure?

JJ.I’ve seen Twilight, and I’ve watched True Blood and I’m a fan of all that stuff—with Supernatural, I’ve watched every episode. It’s all dark fantasy. I’m not sure why that’s so compelling, but it’s interesting that it’s not really complete horror anymore. There’s a softer edge to it compared to Stephen King, and there’s a more erotic edge to it too. I think it has something to do with our ultimate fascination with death, or maybe our denial of death as a culture.

AS.What are some of your influences and favorites?

JJ.I like really dark mystery stories, like Patricia Cornwell and P. D. James. I love Fargo, True Detective, those sorts of dark real-life mystery thrillers.

AS. Gabriel Knight 3, of course, marked the end of both the series and Sierra. After Sierra folded, what inspired you to move into casual games?

JJ.Right after Sierra closed, I wrote books for a few years, and published a couple of original thriller novels. I was basically discouraged after my big book Dante’s Equation took me three years to write and didn’t necessarily receive raving reviews from everybody. I was looking at possibly getting back into gaming and met with the guys that I ended up cofounding Oberon Media with. They were looking at getting into casual gaming. This was really early on, around when the first Bejeweled was a big hit, and this was before hidden object games. I hadn’t really been paying attention to the casual gaming industry at that point; I didn’t really know anything about it. But the statistics of the audience for casual gaming were already really interesting. It was almost eighty percent women, and tended to be over 35, and I just looked at those numbers and I thought this was a great market for adventure games. I’d loved doing adventure games with Sierra, but that just went away, and part of the problem was that we had a hard time finding the right audience, which is still the case. I always thought that people who read books would love Gabriel Knight, but how do you really get them to play it? So I sort of had stars in my eyes looking at the casual game demographics, thinking “Wow, this is my market. If I can get in here with adventure games, we can finally have the right shoe for the right foot.”

JJ.I was involved with Oberon Media for around six years, and I did a number of hidden object games because that was what was selling in the industry. That was fun, but the issue that we had was that we weren’t really growing. Big Fish controlled the market, and they had such a low price point. There were so many of these things coming out, like every day, there would be ten brand new games or something. So we had to rely on unit sales, and we could never get enough traction. We made around six of them, and the budgets were always the same. We’d have twenty-five rooms, and there was just only so much that you can do. I was hoping that could grow, and that it would finally become like a real adventure game, but it really didn’t happen.

AS.How does the process of designing these hidden object games differ from working on adventure games?

JJ.It was much less intensive with a much lighter story to them. Since a lot of the gameplay was going to be hidden object, it was fairly easy compared to adventure games. I think that I did introduce quite a number of story elements to those, and also some inventory mechanics and types of puzzles that weren’t in other hidden object games at the time. Those included logic puzzle stuff, and mazes, and different types of gameplay aside from the hidden objects.

AS.Several of the hidden object games you designed at Oberon were adaptations, such as the James Patterson Women’s Murder Club games. How did you approach those designs?

JJ.One of my business partners arranged the James Patterson book series deals because of James Patterson’s name. We were experimenting with licensing and seeing if it might upgrade our sales potential. I was asked to look over his properties and see what I thought would work well, and I really liked the Women’s Murder Club books and thought that they would be able to translate to games. What was really nice about that was I was able to do an original story using his universe and characters, so each one of the games that we did in that series was a story written by me with his characters in a new murder mystery. I got to meet him, which was great. I also really enjoyed working on the Agatha Christie stuff. I love her writing.

AS.As you worked on these games, how did you push the boundaries of casual games?

JJ.I was restless – I always wanted to do more than I really had the ability to do with those games. So the second Women’s Murder Club played much more like an adventure game than it did a hidden object game, but that didn’t sell as well, so we had to go back to the hidden object formula for number three. I’m not that up with what has currently been going on in hidden object games. I’d heard that Big Fish had folded or sold and that hidden object market had kind of dried up.

AS.Do you think you’ll ever go back to casual games?

JJ.At the moment, I’m just doing books. Our experience on Kickstarter was unfortunately not encouraging, we lost a lot of personal money on those two games. We have no plans to do more with Pinkerton Road or with adventure games. Now if someone were willing to fund the project, I’d be happy to write for it, but in terms of funding our own projects, it’s not going to happen. And from what I’ve understood from other people I’ve talked to who’ve done it, they had similar experiences.

AS.What inspired you to try the community-supported gaming model in the first place?

JJ.I was aware of Kickstarter—my husband had done a Kickstarter for a CD project with his band a couple of years before we did ours—and then when Tim Schafer had his big success, I guess it made me think there are a lot of people out there that love these games, and wouldn’t it be awesome if we could just do a game ourselves without having a lot of interference or corporate politics involved. So that was definitely my hope going in: that there was a market for these things, and that we could make enough to learn a living by crowdfunding these games, and it would be wonderful.

Unfortunately, it just didn’t turn out that way. The unit sales have been abysmal, and a lot of it may be down to the fact that we didn’t have any money left for marketing. It’s too much, I think—we’re not really business-people, and we didn’t want to get to the point where we hired a CEO and things like that when we didn’t know how the business was even going to fare. Computer games are not a small and cheap endeavor. I can write a book. It’s me, and I can get it done in six months and put it up on the market. I have to invest maybe a couple thousand to get a cover or get a publisher to publish it. For games, we need a large, complicated team, and there should be a lot of marketing of it, so it’s difficult to do unless you are an established company.

AS.Do you think the adventure game genre might pick up thanks to these reboots? Is there any hope for the future of adventure games?

JJ.Well, not from where I’m standing there isn’t. Telltale has had some luck, and I hope that they can continue to do well. It’s interesting to me because Telltale games are to me on the more masculine side, and maybe that’s what it takes. I was hoping that with Moebius and the Gabriel Knight remake, we could reach more of a teen market, but you’d probably have to put $20 million into marketing to really find and convince people to play the game. All I can tell you that I know all of the Sierra-based Kickstarters have been money-losing operations. They’re struggling: Lori and Corey (Lori and Corey Cole, Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption) had to go back and ask for more money.

AS.You also collaborated with Phoenix Online Studios on Kickstarter-based projects. How did that compare?

JJ.They worked on Moebius and Gabriel Knight with us, and if we hadn’t had them, we probably wouldn’t have been able to do those projects. We raised about $437,000 from our Kickstarter. By the time Amazon and Kickstarter took their share of that we got about four. And that had to pay for two games that were probably million-dollar projects each, plus anything that would be resembling my salary for the couple years that I was working on them. We ended up putting in a lot of our own money, but even with that, we wouldn’t have been able to do it. Phoenix gave us an incredible price to do those. They put in a ton of work for the money that they got. It’s tough because people didn’t like the Moebius art, which I thought was really pretty damned good for the time and the budget that we had, but it gets compared to AAA projects; expectations are just so high. It was a good collaboration.

AS.You mentioned that part of your motivation was the ability to make games yourself, without a corporation or studio involved. Do you feel like that happened with these two games?

JJ.Yes, but probably more in a negative way. I really had a lot of creative control at Sierra, and at Oberon as well. At Sierra I was director, and I had final creative say. What was inhibiting me was the budget, and that’s going to be the case no matter what. It’s a lot more responsibility doing it ourselves. I’m not just doing the writing and the creative directing; we’re also in charge of everything.

AS.Do you think the Kickstarter model for adventure game funding will die out?

JJ.I think so. I haven’t followed everything that’s gone up for funding over the last year, but it’s been my impression that it was getting harder and harder to get funding. The audience is becoming a little jaded about what they want to fund, and I think the people that have done them like me probably wouldn’t do them again. For adventure games, it takes a known name or a really great concept. It’s much more useful for getting additional funding if you already have the foundation. It’s tough to do things from scratch entirely with Kickstarter.

AS.You mentioned you are transitioning more to novels. What do you see as some of the similarities between working on games and novels?

JJ.Usually when I write a game like Moebius, the first thing I do is I sit down, and I really think about the storyline. I create an outline of the story (the one for Moebius was about 100 pages). I’m conscious when I’m writing it that it’s going to be a game and that I have to be thinking about what’s happening, not doing crazy special effects or having too many characters. Sometimes when I’m writing the story, I’ll note that there’s going to be a puzzle here if it occurs to me, but mostly it’s about the story. From there, it goes into a game design doc, where then I take each of those chapters and I think: “Okay, how am I going to explore this interactively? What are the actual scenes? What’s in the scenes? What are the puzzles? What puzzles get me here?” For a book, that first step is very similar in working out what the story is, who the characters are, what are the major plot points, twists and turns. It’s easier in a way because I have control over the timing and the pacing, and I don’t have to worry about things like puzzles and all the logic stuff. I have that Jane Jensen novel coming out in January, but I’ve also been mostly writing gay romance under Eli Easton. I just had a book released today. I’ve got about eight or so; that’s more where I’ve been focusing my time. I started writing them after the Kickstarter. I’ve always read romance on and off, but I started reading in a serious way as an escape hatch. A publisher that I liked a lot of their stuff had a submissions page, so that was how I started out writing short stories for them. It grew from there. For a couple years, I was not out as Eli Easton. I kept that very separate from what I was doing on the Jane Jensen side.

AS.Why did you decide to out your penname and associate the two identities publicly?

JJ.I continue to have Eli Easton as a penname, but I decided to reveal it after we shipped Moebius. I didn’t want to come out before the games were out because I didn’t want them to be viewed through a lens, especially Moebius, because Moebius has quite a significant relationship in it that I was always planning to develop into a romance later on in the series, which will now not happen. I didn’t want the reviews to be like, “Well, she’s just doing this gay romance shit now, and now she’s putting it in her games”—I just didn’t want to go there. I wanted people to approach that game from a Gabriel Knight–Jane Jensen perspective rather than coming in with assumptions based on this other identity.

AS.So we won’t get to see a Moebius sequel?

JJ.I thought about doing it as a book series, which I still may do.

AS.What do you see as your next projects?

JJ.Currently, my plans are just to write books: I’ll continue to write as Eli Easton, and I have a number of thrillers I would like to do under Jane Jensen. Actually, Kingdom Come, which is my Amish murder mystery, began as a game plot. It was originally going to be a live action game set here. We live in Amish country, so the idea was that we would be able to film it here as a modern take on the style of The Beast Within, but something more current and design for tablets. However, I couldn’t find any publisher for the project as they were reluctant to take a risk on that genre. So I decided to write this book. I won’t say I’m totally out of gaming, but for right now, I’m on a different path.

6

Legacy of a Writer-Designer

From the very beginning of her career, Jensen’s work has been inherently transmedia: from the accompanying story manual of King’s Quest VI to the comic accompanying Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, to the adapted narratives of her hidden object games, all the way through to her interactive picture book and short stories at Pinkerton Road, Jensen sees her games as part of a narrative ecosystem. Her work broadens our understanding of what a writer-designer-auteur can create, and how important an understanding of narrative across platforms is to successful game design. Her ability to translate her emphasis on character-driven, highly researched, modular narratives to new genres and media makes her works in any platform important to study when imagining the future of transmedia. Today, larger franchise narratives such as Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe are increasingly popular, with story teams moving concepts and characters rapidly from comics to books to games to movies and back again.

Her flexibility across media has recently been necessary because games aren’t always the easiest medium for constructing progressive narratives or pushing for change. As of 2016, the games industry is a space in conflict. Adrienne Shaw’s book Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture captures the contested state of gamer identity and particularly the difficulty of participating as a woman in the community. The number of women game designers remains dismayingly low. An industry self-survey conducted by Gamasutra in 2014 found that women represent only 13 percent of game designers, with a nearly $5,000 lower average salary than men in the same category (“Salary Survey 2014”). Looking more broadly across all roles in the industry, women only made up 11.5 percent of the game industry workforce in 2009, while that number would double to a still-marginalized 22 percent by 2014 (Makuch 2014). As a trail-brazing designer, Jensen worked across genres and roles, taking on challenges in the design world and in entrepreneurship. Thanks in part to the twentieth anniversary edition of Gabriel Knight and the release of Jensen’s renaissance titles, the continued accessibility and impact of Jensen’s work for a new generation of game designers is assured for now. While many of the games she designed are outside of the mainstream AAA market, they are decidedly in conversation with that world and suggest possibilities the future of gaming will explore.

Writer, designer, novelist

As a writer-designer with a novelist’s approach, it is unsurprising that Jensen’s portfolio already includes writing across many more media than games. Jensen’s novel-writing began alongside her work as a designer, particularly through the Gabriel Knight novelizations. Jensen followed those novelizations with her first two original novels Millennium Rising (1999) and Dante’s Equation (2003). Millennium Rising explores religious texts and prophecies with an end-of-times thriller, which was later rereleased as Judgment Day. Dante’s Equation achieved further critical acclaim, including a special honorable mention citation from the Philip K. Dick Award for original science fiction published in 2003. The novel combines a character-driven thriller with science fiction, again combining religious symbolism with an investigation of unexplained disappearances from a number of angles and viewpoints.

Millennium Rising, Jensen’s first original novel, follows a Vatican-appointed investigator of miracles who finds himself looking into apparent apocalyptic prophecy. Together with a reporter, the priest ends up seeking out apparent visitations from deities ranging across faiths and countries. As Schulz-Elsing notes, the novel fit with a turn-of-millennium interest in religious and historical intrigues: “Jensen’s hybrid of global conspiracy, Vatican intrigue and holy revelation makes her entry stand out in the ever-more-crowded subgenre” (1999). The book’s use of historically grounded speculation recalls the Gabriel Knight series, demonstrating how Jensen took her skills and approach from one medium to another. Millennium Rising’s success prompted Jensen to begin work on another thriller. Her next book Dante’s Equation was published in 2003. Like Millennium Rising, Dante’s Equation focuses on a number of religious themes, starting with a mysterious name found encoded in the bible, which compels a scientist to research the laws of good and evil. This next project included a significant number of women characters, and critics noted its sophistication. Jensen describes it as the results of several years of research and writing: “I spent three years on it full-time and about a year prior to that on it part-time while I was finishing GK3. It was the hardest project I’ve ever done. It required a great deal of research in both the sciences and in kabbalah, which is heavily used in the book” (Michaud and Jong 2003). In a review of Dante’s Equation, Strauss noted: “Not so many thrillers, either, are as character-driven as this one. Several of the viewpoint characters less than fully likeable, but all are vivid individuals, whose deftly-drawn failings and strengths believably drive their choices and shape the novel’s action” (2003). This emphasis on realistic, yet not necessarily “likeable,” characters clearly transferred from Jensen’s game design to her novel-writing. Jensen’s emphasis in games on producing characters where the player is at first reluctant to identity, but eventually grows in empathy, shows in the crafting of characters revealed through gradual detail not unlike Jensen’s strings of pearls in game narration. Jensen also described the novel as very personal in an interview at release: “[I]‌t deals very directly with my own beliefs and philosophies—that good stuff and bad stuff go hand in hand in life and are deeply a part of the very fabric of life. Nothing’s perfect but, you know, nothing’s ever complete shit either” (Michaud and Jong 2003). There are also many clear thematic similarities, and Dante’s Equation’s use of religious-driven intrigue invites inevitable comparisons to Dan Brown’s novels.

While Jane Jensen took a brief hiatus from publishing under her own name, she continued to tell stories under her romance penname Eli Easton. As Eli Easton, Jensen has written many novels, including several series featuring both supernatural elements and classic contemporary fiction. Stories under the name Eli Easton have also been included in several anthologies, including Wilde Stories 2014: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press 2014). As Eli Easton, Jensen explained her writing process in an interview:

I generally start with a concept for a book and (hopefully) a burning interest in writing it. I tend to plot out a ways, but then I get bored with plotting and I start writing. I’ll switch back and forth between plotting and writing. Then I usually have a big editing process because sometimes if I get a scene in my head, I’ll skip ahead and write it and not have the transition or “in between” stuff written. It takes a lot of work to get to a final draft I’m happy with. I do try to read the book outloud towards the end, but that takes a long time and I don’t always make it all the way through. Total time depends on the length of the book, but between 2–4 months. (Interview by Lisa n.d.)

The process sounds not unlike Jensen’s descriptions of working on the modular narratives of game design documents, emphasizing the similar strategies she takes across media to telling a story. One of the Easton novels, Puzzle Me This (Dreamspinner Press 2013), even features a computer game designer unraveling secret messages in crossword puzzles. The game designer character Luke works from home, as Jensen has on many projects, and approaches the coded correspondence with the zeal of a driven gamer.

Plan D

In a recent interview as Easton, Jensen joked that if she were writing an autobiography she would call it “Plan D” in reference to the range of paths she’s taken along several different careers (interview by Lisa n.d.). It’s this same range of experiences that comes through in her games and novels, informing her writer-designer approach. Jensen’s experience with Kickstarter and the travails that came with it have led her down a different road, and she is concentrating her energy and attention primarily on fiction. As she explained in the interview in Chapter 5 of this book, her decision is driven by a lack of publishers interested in her experimental concepts for games. Her novel Kingdom Come (2016) started as a full motion video game concept. Kingdom Come demonstrates how Jensen’s focus on research-driven exploration of society is unchanged:

I read a number of auto-biographies written by people who had left the Amish and of course there’s lots of tourist-level information available where I live. And I do have Amish neighbors that we buy produce from on a regular basis. My detective, Elizabeth Harris, is an “outsider” to the culture, so I felt I knew enough to represent her point of view. (interview by Teitelbaum 2016)

Reading the book, it’s easy to imagine how these characters might have come to life in one of Jensen’s games, with Elizabeth’s voice coming through in the dialogue as she begins her investigation:

“I think Ronks Road is over there beyond those woods. Grady sounded hopeful as he pointed across the field. “Can it be that easy?”

“Don’t!”

Grady cocked an eyebrow at me.

“You’ll jinx it. Never say the word ‘easy.’ That’s inviting Murphy, his six ex-wives, and their lawyers.” (Jensen 2016, 9)

The choices of language and use of exaggerated, expressive comments would translate particularly well to voice-acting, and recalls the type of sardonic statements that made Gabriel Knight so memorable as a character.

Elizabeth also stands out as a potential embodiment of some of Jensen’s years of experience as a woman in a male-dominated profession. As a woman cop, Elizabeth encounters skepticism right away: “Amos Miller shot me a confused look, like he hadn’t expected me to be giving orders. I arched an eyebrow at him—Well?—and he nodded once. I was used to dealing with men who didn’t take a female cop very seriously” (Jensen 2016). One can almost imagine some of Jensen’s experiences and frustrations with the games industry embodied through her heroine, who is also one of the most self-sufficient and aggressive women leads to emerge from Jensen’s writing. Jensen’s obsessive detailing of investigation (which came through more casually in Women’s Murder Club) is also present in this new series, suggesting that her skill at shifting between interactive and more traditional media has grown with her years of experience.

Jensen’s success in novels and her recent decision to pursue writing primarily reflects the very different realities of the games industry versus the publishing industry. It is very difficult to sustain a powerful original voice and auteur approach to design in the face of game studio models and their increasingly high demands for profitability to justify the costs of design. Founding family-owned, community-supported gaming like Jensen’s novel approach in Pinkerton Road might seem like the ideal solution to make game design more like writing; however, it puts incredible demands on the resources of the designer-author as entrepreneur. Jensen’s decision to leave this model behind does not reflect poorly on the games she produced (which both stand as intriguing and memorable graphic adventures that enjoyed critical acclaim, particularly among communities of players welcoming this genre). Instead, this shift in her focus is a reflection of the incredible difficulty of sustaining a modern game studio production without resources for marketing and distribution.

As Jensen herself moves on in Plan D, the industry continues to struggle with some of the challenges she faced head-on throughout her game design career. While digital distribution has theoretically enabled a number of new voices to enter the game design scene, particularly through indie platforms and movements, the corresponding challenge of financial viability for these projects is still a factor. Indie designers who use systems such as Patreon (a model for backer-based financing of artists with rewards for ongoing contributions) have similarly struggled with inadequate support. Designers looking to learn from Jensen’s legacy might note both the challenges and opportunities raised by adding “entrepreneur” to a string of additional roles, such as writer, director, and designer. But going forward, the industry will need more voices like Jensen’s to bring maturity, complex characterization, and challenging narratives to games as an art form.

Gameography

Jane Jensen has worked in game design since the early 1990s, with titles ranging across genres from several developers. This gameography includes all of the games on which she plays a credited creative role, as well as game-related transmedia works relevant to assessing her games. Games are listed chronologically. It does not include all of her authored novels and short stories, only those immediately connected to games. On several of her early works, Jensen was one of several listed writers or designers: Sierra normally distinguished between these two roles, although they are often filled by an overlapping team on the project. Where Jensen is listed as director, she additionally took on the leading responsibilities of the game. Unfortunately, given the companies involved and the lack of concrete sales figures for early titles, sales figures are not available. Many of these games have been released for multiple platforms: this list only includes the first version of the game. The Oberon titles in particular have often been ported to mobile and may be available in several editions listing different publishers, but only the initial publisher is noted in this listing.

EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus

1991

Platform: PC

Role: Codesigner/Cowriter

Publisher: Sierra

Developer: Sierra

Part of Sierra’s Discovery Series, an initiative for educational gaming aimed at home buyers rather than school, EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus features Adam Greene, a boy on a quest to help a rescued dolphin. The series was the brainchild of Bill Davis, a Sierra producer interested in the potential of adventure game approaches to reaching the emerging edutainment market. The design team, which included Jensen in collaboration with Gano Haine, used a research-driven process to integrate environmental themes throughout the game. Gano Haine continued the series with a sequel in 1993, while Jensen was moved on to other projects at Sierra.

Police Quest III: The Kindred

1991

Platform: PC

Role: Cowriter

Publisher: Sierra

Developer: Sierra

The Police Quest series is primarily the work of Jim Walls, a retired police officer who brought his experience in the force to game design. The series was marketed for its realism, thanks in large part to Walls’s involvement; however, he left during the production process of the third game. Jane Jensen was brought onto the team to finish the remaining writing for the game following his departure. The game follows the struggles of police officer Sonny Bonds, the protagonist of the first two games who seems like an idealized version of Walls himself, in catching a serial killer apparently associated with a satanic cult.

King’s Quest VI

1992

Platform: PC

Role: Codirector/Codesigner/Cowriter

Publisher: Sierra

Developer: Sierra

Jensen’s breakthrough title and her first playing the lead role as a designer, King’s Quest VI is the most critically acclaimed installment of the King’s Quest series created by Roberta Williams. The project brought Jensen’s complex and structured narrative approach to the series, resulting in an apparently nonlinear plot using the string of pearls model with multiple possible endings depending on the player’s engagement with Prince Alexander’s quest to find Princess Cassima. The game also served as Jensen’s directorial apprenticeship at Sierra, opening the doorway for her to direct and create her own projects.

Pepper’s Adventures in Time

1993

Platform: PC

Role: Codesigner

Publisher: Sierra

Developer: Sierra

Based on a concept by Bill Davis and continuing in the vein of EcoQuest, Pepper’s Adventures in Time featured the adventures of a girl and her dog trying to stop her uncle from undoing the American revolution with his time machine. The game was codesigned by Gano Haines, Josh Mandel, Lorelei Shannon, and Jane Jensen. Lorelei Shannon, a writer who would later work on Sierra’s King’s Quest VII (1995) and full motion video horror game Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh (1996), was responsible for the game’s text and dialogue.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

1993

Platform: PC

Role: Director/Designer/Writer

Publisher: Sierra

Developer: Sierra

The first game to feature the adventures of Gabriel Knight, Sins of the Fathers is a 2D adventure game. It was bundled with a graphic novel, telling the parallel story of Knight’s ancestor and served as an introduction to Knight’s destiny as a hunter of the supernatural. The game was marketed as a mature horror game and remains notable for its well-researched and detailed depiction of the city of New Orleans as well as its supernatural mystery.

Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within

1995

Platform: PC

Role: Director/Designer/Writer

Publisher: Sierra

Developer: Sierra

A full motion videogame recorded with live actors enacting the many possibilities for the player’s choices, The Beast Within brought Gabriel Knight to his family’s castle in Germany to be with a pack of werewolves. The game features a simplified version of the point-and-click interface.

Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned

1999

Platform: PC

Role: Designer

Publisher: Sierra

Developer: Sierra

A 3D adventure game using Sierra’s new engine, Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned brings Gabriel Knight to France to investigate a mystery involving the bloodline of Jesus Christ. It was also Sierra’s last adventure game release. It was bundled with a graphic novel that included events taking place immediately before the game.

Inspector Parker

2003

Platform: PC

Role: Director/Designer

Publisher: Oberon

Developer: Oberon

The first of Jensen’s casual games, Inspector Parker is reminiscent of the board game Clue (Parker Brothers 1949) and relies on logic puzzles through which the player gradually narrows down the possible location of items throughout the house. In the game’s story mode, the player progresses through increasingly difficult puzzles to narrow down the location of items while solving a murder mystery in Misanthrope Manor. The game was built in Flash and released in browser and as a download.

BeTrapped!

2004

Platform: PC

Role: Designer

Publisher: Oberon

Developer: Oberon

A follow-up to Inspector Parker, BeTrapped! continued in the Clue theme, with gameplay centering on finding and disarming traps throughout the house in order to solve the murder. The focus is primarily on the logic puzzle mechanics.

Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile

2007

Platform: PC

Role: Director/Designer

Publisher: I-Play/Floodlight (Oberon)

Developer: Oberon

The first of Jensen’s hidden object games, Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile places the player in the role of Hercule Poirot. The game’s storyline draws heavily on Agatha Christie’s novels and uses detailed 2D graphics to create settings for the S. S. Karnak that the player explores for a mix of clues and arbitrary objects.

Agatha Christie: Peril at End House

2007

Platform: PC

Role: Director/Designer

Publisher: I-Play/Floodlight

Developer: Oberon

An adaptation of Agatha Christie’s novel of the same name, Agatha Christie: Peril at End House takes several steps forward in Jensen’s integration of plot and interaction with the hidden object mechanics. The player explores several locations in the estate setting, using classic find-the-pixel hunting, and also advances the mystery through getting clue cards and learning about the many suspects.

Women’s Murder Club: Death in Scarlet

2007

Platform: PC

Role: Director/Designer

Publisher: I-Play/Floodlight

Developer: I-Play/Floodlight

The first game produced as part of a deal with James Patterson was negotiated by one of Jensen’s Oberon Media cofounders. The terms of the deal allowed Jensen to write new stories for the characters central to Patterson’s popular Women’s Murder Club series, and the game switches between viewpoint characters who play different roles in the investigation. It uses themed hidden object puzzles for each character’s analysis of crime scenes and evidence.

Dr. Lynch: Grave Secrets

2008

Platform: PC

Role: Director/Designer

Publisher: I-Play

Developer: I-Play

The first of Jensen’s hidden object games that featured an original story and characters, Dr. Lynch: Grave Secrets relies on supernatural elements reminiscent of Gabriel Knight. The player moves through carefully detailed hidden object exploration of an apparently haunted site and gradually receives clue cards to unravel the ghost’s mystery. The game’s character, Dr. Ignatius Lynch, has a skeptical approach similar to the lead of Jensen’s novel Millennium Rising.

Women’s Murder Club: A Darker Shade of Grey

2008

Platform: PC

Role: Creative Director/Designer

Publisher: I-Play/Floodlight

Developer: Floodlight

With this second game of the Women’s Murder Club series, Jensen pushed the boundaries of the hidden object genre by including elaborate mini-games. As the player investigates the death of a military school student, she must solve additional puzzles including sequences of interrogation and forensic analysis. Unfortunately, due perhaps in part to its limited marketing to hidden object series fans, these new mechanics did not find a sufficient player base.

Agatha Christie: Dead Man’s Folly

2009

Platform: PC

Role: Creative Director

Publisher: I-Play/Floodlight

Developer: I-Play

A continuation of the Agatha Christie-themed hidden object game series that Jane Jensen started, but was completed without much of her direct design input. The game continues the mechanics of introducing clues through mini-games found from hidden object gameplay sequences.

Women’s Murder Club: Twice in a Blue Moon

2009

Platform: PC

Role: Creative Director/Designer

Publisher: I-Play/Floodlight

Developer: Floodlight

After the mixed reception of the second Women’s Murder Club game by casual and hidden object fans, Jensen returned more to the standards of the genre for the third game in the series. While playing as the four women investigating a message left at a crime scene by an apparent copycat killer, the player encounters some mini-games but primarily explores through hidden object gameplay.

Deadtime Stories

2009

Platform: PC

Role: Creative Director/Designer

Publisher: Big Fish Games

Developer: I-Play

The second of Jensen’s original casual hidden object games, Deadtime Stories is narrated by a ghost who guides the player through learning voodoo spells to make it through a cemetery. The New Orleans setting directly recalls the Gabriel Knight franchise. The game includes a number of puzzle mini-games to balance out the hidden object gameplay at its center.

Gray Matter

2010

Platform: PC

Role: Designer/Writer

Publisher: dtp entertainment

Developer: Wizarbox

Jensen’s first return to the adventure game genre also includes her first woman lead character, Samantha Everett, a performer and street magician who gets caught up in experimental research involving magicians conducted by a professor at Oxford. The project suffered from huge delays—it was announced in 2003 and changed hands several times, with Jensen ultimately playing no directorial role in the final game.

Dying for Daylight

2011

Platform: PC

Role: Creative Director/Designer

Publisher: Oberon

Developer: I-Play

A licensed game using characters from the Southern Vampire novels of Charlaine Harris, Dying for Daylight allows the player to explore New Orleans as a vampire named Dahlia. The game uses hidden object searches in every location but also incorporates a variety of mini-games. These include puzzles to find disguises or to appease nonplayer characters and is reminiscent of classic adventure game mechanics.

Hidden Chronicles

2012

Platform: Facebook

Role: Cowriter

Publisher: Zynga

Developer: Zynga

Zynga’s first experiment with a competitive, social approach to the hidden object genre, Hidden Chronicles is a Facebook game that was live from 2012–2014. Jane Jensen was brought on by former Oberon designer and creative director Cara Ely and played a small role in the writing and narrative of the experiment.

Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller

2012–13

Platform: PC/iOS

Role: Story Consultant

Publisher: Phoenix Online Studios

Developer: Phoenix Online Studios

A Kickstarter-funded return to classic adventure game mechanics, Cognition follows the story of psychic FBI agent Erica Reed on the investigation of several murders that seem all too personal. Codesigned by Cesar Bitar and Katie Hallahan, the game was primarily written by others with Jensen contributing feedback as a story consultant. The game was released in four episodes and ported for tablets.

Moebius: Empire Rising

2014

Platform: PC

Role: Director/Designer/Writer

Publisher: Pinkerton Road

Developer: Pinkerton Road/Phoenix Online Studios

The only original game title developed by Jensen’s Kickstarter-funded studio Pinkerton Road, Moebius: Empire Rising was conceived as the start of a trilogy and features a pair of oddly matched Holmes and Watson-esque detectives. The game includes some traditional Sierra adventure mechanics (including death) but mitigates them with easier puzzles and auto-restore in an attempt to appeal to a crossover audience of adventure game fans and casual gamers.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition

2014

Platform: PC/Mac/iOS/Android

Role: Designer

Publisher: Pinkerton Road/Phoenix Online Studios

Developer: Pinkerton Road/Phoenix Online Studios

A complete remake in 3D, the anniversary edition does not feature the original voice cast but does include reinterpretations of all the original environments. Some conversations were modified to fit modern expectations of play, and a simplified interface was put into place for adaptation to tablets.

Game-associated transmedia projects

Sins of the Fathers: A Gabriel Knight Novel (novel)

1996

Publisher: Roc

Role: Author

Pages: 416

Format: Paperback

A fairly straightforward novelization of the events from the first game, intended to remediate Gabriel Knight’s journey for readers. Particularly notable for how it translates the elements of the mystery genre from game to text. Some of the details added in this novelization would be integrated into the game itself during the twentieth-anniversary remake.

Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within (novel)

1998

Publisher: Roc

Role: Author

Pages: 352

Format: Paperback

With this novelization, Jane Jensen was able to explore some of the additional historical material and complexity left out of the game. The story builds on a werewolf curse with parallels to the reign of King Ludwig II and German history.

Gabriel Knight: The Temptation (comic book)

2014–15

Publisher: Phoenix Online Publishing

Role: Author

Pages: 28

Format: eBook

A multipart comic book, The Temptation follows Gabriel Knight six months after the conclusion of Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. It includes an encounter with a witch and explores Gabriel’s self-doubt in the face of the ghosts of past enemies. The comic was first published as a short story only on the developer’s website as part of the launch of the anniversary edition.

Notes

1Introduction: Long Ago at Sierra

1Without Jim Walls the series passed to designer Daryl Gates. Gates changed the narrative to focus on a new character. New mechanics were also integrated in Police Quest: SWAT (1995) and its action and strategy-driven sequels.

2Being Gabriel Knight: Character and Research-Driven Interactive Narrative

1Relying on amateurs was still common throughout the 1990s but would change by the end of the decade (see Gnatek 2004).

2This dual-platform floppy / CD-ROM release model was very common at the time as CD-ROM was only beginning to be adopted as a standard, and many gamers were still on older systems with floppy drives.

3Hidden Objects: Crafting Mystery through Dazzle and Reward

1See discussion of hypermasculinity in hardcore gaming culture in Salter and Blodgett 2012.

4Down Pinkerton Road: Jensen and the Adventure Game Renaissance

1This is a common Kickstarter problem. Many studios far underestimate their Kickstarter costs or cannot provide enough salary for the actual working time projects require. Since there’s no built-in mechanism for recurring funding, some projects are simply abandoned.

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Index

actions here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Activision here

Adam Greene (EcoQuest) here, here, here

adaptation here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

adventure game genre here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (see also graphic adventure games)

crash here, here, here, here

renaissance here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Adventure Game Studio here

aesthetic here, here, here, here

Agatha Christie series here, here, here, here, here

Agatha Christie’s Dead Man’s Folly here, here, here

Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile here, here, here, here, here, here

Agatha Christie’s Peril at End House here, here, here, here, here

agency here, here, here, here

Alexander (King’s Quest) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

animation here, here, here, here, here

antihero here, here, here, here

apprenticeship here, here, here

art/artists here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Assassin’s Creed series here, here

authorship viii, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (see also writing/writer)

avatar here, here, here, here

awards here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Bejeweled here, here, here, here, here

Berry, Laney here

Bethesda here

BeTrapped!(see Inspector Parker series: BeTrapped!)

Big Fish Games here, here, here, here

Bilas, Scott here, here

Bioshock series here, here

Bittar, Cesar here

Blizzad here, here

Bormann, Adam here

Bruner, Kevin here

Buffy the Vampire Slayer here

Call of Duty franchise here, here

Cassima (King’s Quest) here, here, here, here

casual games/gaming here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

market here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Casual Games Association here

CD-ROM here, here, here

choices/decisions here, here, here, here, here, here

Cindy Thomas (Women’s Murder Club) here, here

cinema/cinematic here, here, here, here, here, here

Claire Washburn (Women’s Murder Club) here, here, here

Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Cole, Lori here, here

comic books here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Community Supported Gaming here, here, here, here

computer gaming here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

graphics (see graphics)

industry here, here, here

market here

computer science/programming here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Connors, Dan here, here

console systems here, here, here, here

market here

cross-media here, here

Crowe, Mark here

Curry, Tim here, here, here, here

cut scenes here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Dahlia (Women’s Murder Club) here, here, here, here

Dante’s Equation here, here, here

Daventry here, here, here

David Styles (Grey Matter) here, here

David Walker (Moebius) here, here, here

Davis, Bill here, here, here, here

Deadtime Stories here, here, here, here, here, here

Delphineus (EcoQuest) here, here

design here, here

audience-driven/user-centered here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

character here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

detail-oriented approach here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

environment here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (see also New Orleans)

mechanics-driven here

ordered approach here, here, here

philosophy here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

process here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

research here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

dialogue and text here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

difficulty here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

digital distribution here, here, here, here

Discovery series (see Sierra Discovery series)

Doom here

Double Fine Adventure here, here

downloadable games here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Dr. Ignatius Lynch (Dr. Lynch) here, here

Dr. Lynch: Grave Secrets here, here

Dying for Daylight here, here (see also Harris, Charlaine)

Easton, Eli here, here, here, here

EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

educational games here, here, here, here, here (see also edutainment)

edutainment here, here, here, here

Ely, Cara here, here

endings here, here, here, here, here

Erica Reed (Cognition) here, here, here, here

exergaming here

fan fiction here, here, here

fantasy/fairy tale here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (see also interactive: fairy tale)

feelies here, here

Frozen Free Fall here

full motion video (FMV) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

G-engine here, here

Gabriel Knight (Gabriel Knight) here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Gabriel Knight franchise here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within (GK2) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within (novel) here

Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned (GK3) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Gabriel Knight: The Temptation (comic book) here, here, here

Sins of the Fathers: A Gabriel Knight Novel (novel) here

game design documents (GDD) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

video game industry here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

demographics here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

market here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Games for Change movement here

Gates, Daryl here

gaze here, here, here, here, here, here

gender and women here, here

in the game industry here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

in games here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Germany here, here, here

Grace Nakimura (Gabriel Knight) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

graphic novels here, here, here, here, here

graphical adventure game genre here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

graphics here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

2D here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

3D here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Gray Matter here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Grim Fandango here, here, here

guidebooks here, here, here, here

Guidebook to the Land of the Green Isles here, here

Haine, Gano here, here, here, here, here, here, here

hardcore gaming here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Harris, Charlaine here, here, here

Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie) here, here

Hewlett Packard here

Hidden Chronicles here, here (see also Zynga)

hidden object game genre here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

history here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (see also educational games)

Holmes, Robert here, here, here, here, here, here, here

horror genre here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

hypermasculinity here, here (see also masculinity; hardcore gaming)

I Spy here, here

immersion here, here, here, here (see also world-building)

Inspector Parker series

BeTrapped! here, here, here, here, here, here

Inspector Parker here, here, here, here, here, here

InterAction Magazine here, here, here, here

interactive/interactivity here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (see also story/storytelling)

fairy tale here

narrative (see narrative: interactive)

interface here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

intertexuality here, here, here

Jessie (Deadtime Stories) here

Karlavaegen, Derek here

Kickstarter/crowd-funding here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Kingdom Come here, here

King’s Quest series here, here, here, here, here, here, here

King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella here, here, here, here

King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

The Silver Lining here, here

Laura Bow Mysteries series here

Leisure Suit Larry series here, here, here, here

Le Serpent Rouge here, here, here

Lindsay Boxer (Women’s Murder Club) here, here, here, here, here

literacy and mega-literacy here

literary here, here, here, here (see also story/storytelling)

Lockjaw (Pepper’s Adventure in Time) here

logic here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (see also puzzles)

Lola and Lucy’s Big Adventure here, here, here (see also interactive/interactivity)

Lowe, Al here, here, here

LucasArts here, here, here, here, here, here

Malachi Rector (Moebius) here, here–here, here

Malia Gedde (Gabriel Knight) here, here

Manhunter 2: San Francisco here, here

manuals here, here, here, here

Marine Mammal Center here, here

Marx, Christie here, here

masculinity here, here, here (see also hypermasculinity)

McCrea, Steve (see The Young Gabriel King Chronicles)

mechanics here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (see also design: mechanic-driven)

mentorship here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Microsoft Windows here, here, here

microtransactions here

Millennium Rising here, here

minigames here, here, here, here

mobile games here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Moebius here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Monkey Island series here, here

Murphy, Scott here

music/audio here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Mystery Case Files series

Mystery Case Files: Huntsville here, here, here

Mystery Case Files: Return to Ravenhearst here

Mystery Game X here, here

mysticism here, here, here

narrative here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

interactive here, here, here

linearity here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

procedural here, here

“string of pearls” approach here, here, here, here, here, here, here

New Orleans here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Oberon Media here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

packaging here, here–here, here (see also feelies)

paratext here, here, here, here, here

Patterson, James here, here, here, here, here (see also Women’s Murder Club)

Pepper’s Adventures in Time here, here, here, here, here, here

personal computer (PC) here, here, here, here, here (see also computer gaming)

Phantasmagoria here, here, here

Phoenix Online Studios here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Pinkerton Road here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

pixel hunting (see puzzles: pixel hunting)

platforms here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

play here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

play testing here, here, here

player experience here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

point-and-click here, here, here, here

Police Quest series here, here

Police Quest III: The Kindred here, here

Police Quest: SWAT here

popular culture here, here

programming (see computer science/programming)

puzzles here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

pixel hunting here, here, here, here, here, here

Quest for Glory here

quests here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

religion here–here, here, here, here

Replay Games here

romance and sexuality here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (see also gender and women)

Samantha Everett (Grey Matter) here, here, here, here, here, here

Schafer, Tim here, here, here, here, here

Sea Turtle (EcoQuest) here

serious games (see educational games)

sexualization (see romance and sexuality)

Shannon, Lorelei here, here, here, here

Sherlock Holmes franchise here, here, here, here, here, here

shooter games here, here, here, here, here, here, here

SIDNEY map here, here, here

Sierra Discovery series here, here, here (see also EcoQuest series)

Sierra On-Line here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

InterAction Magazine (see InterAction Magazine)

Signus Labs here

simulation here, here, here

social media gaming here, here, here (see also Zynga)

Space Quest series here, here

Spear, Peter (see The King’s Quest Companion)

Steam (see digital distribution)

story/storytelling here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

environmental here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

interactive here, here, here (see also interactive/interactivity)

String of Pearls (see narrative: “string of pearls” approach)

Supernatural series here, here

supernatural/paranormal here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

symbolism here, here, here

Telltale Games here, here, here

The Dagger of Amon Ra here

The King’s Quest Companion here

The Southern Vampire Mystery franchise here, here

The Young Gabriel King Chronicles here

Tomer, Ben-Kiki here

transmedia here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (see also story/storytelling)

Walls, Jim here, here, here, here

Warcraft franchise here, here, here, here

Williams, Ken here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Williams, Roberta here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Women’s Murder Club series here, here, here, here, here, here (see also Patterson, James)

Women’s Murder Club: A Darker Shade of Grey here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Women’s Murder Club: Death in Scarlet here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Women’s Murder Club: Little Black Lies here

Women’s Murder Club: Twice in a Blue Moon here, here, here

world-building here, here, here, here, here, here (see also design: environment)

location/landscape here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

writing/writer here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

XistentialAngst here

Zynga here, here

Bloomsbury Academic

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BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published 2017

© Anastasia Salter, 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Salter, Anastasia, 1984– author.
Title: Jane Jensen: Gabriel Knight, adventure games,
hidden objects / Anastasia Marie Salter.
Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, An imprint of Bloomsbury
Publishing Inc, 2017. | Series: Influential Video Game Designers |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016043964 (print) | LCCN 2016047892 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781501327452 (Hardback: alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781501327469 (Paperback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501327438 (ePub) |
ISBN 9781501327421 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501327438 (ePUB)
Subjects: LCSH: Jensen, Jane. | Video
games–Design–History. | Video games–Authorship. | Computer programmers–United States–Biography. |
Novelists, American–20th century–Biography.
Classification: LCC GV1469.3 .S214 2017 (print) |
LCC GV1469.3 (ebook) | DDC 794.8–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016043964

ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2745-2

         PB: 978-1-5013-2746-9

      ePub: 978-1-5013-2743-8

     ePDF: 978-1-5013-2742-1

Series: Influential Video Game Designers

Cover design: Alice Marwick