If you don't have a clear sense for what the term means, you probably need to play one
I've done a lot of writing about Adventure Games, a genre probably best defined around solving explicit abstract puzzles which are connected by means of a story. Some of what I've written on the subject:
- A piece on Adventure Game Interfaces, talking about the history of how interfaces have changed in the genre and how the choice of interfaces affects the puzzles and game design. The version linked is a much revised version of the one I've maintained on this site here, it was eventually re-written and edited for Strange Horizons
- Reviews of various adventure games (and some interviews) for Adventure Classic Gaming. The process of reviewing games deserves a lot of comment by itself, I get aggregated into GameRankings, although I'm much more comfortable communicating my recommendations in a full textual review than in a one dimensional scoring metric.
- A piece on adventure game puzzles for Adventure Classic Gaming, the spiritual sequel to my piece on interfaces, another breakdown and classification of a fairly complicated topic. My initial impressions on the topic can be found here, along with some tables trying to look at puzzles by game
Interviews I've done:
- An interview with The Brothers Chaps of Homestarrunner.com and Mark Darin of Telltale games about the Strong Bad episodic adventure game
- An interview with the creators of The Path
- An interview with Sean Vanaman of Telltale games about the Tales of Monkey Island series, transcribed from a discussion we had at Comic-Con
- An interview with Craig Derrick of Lucasarts about the Secret of Monkey Island remake
Some links I've received, and discussion on the subject:
- A Slashdot post on my interfaces article. Slashdot does the best job of any community I know of filtering up quality posts and encouraging people to weigh in with something insightful.
- A blog post discussing my piece on interfaces
- A blog post from fidgit, the sci-fi channel's gaming blog, discussing my piece on puzzles.
- A post on kotaku discussing my piece on puzzles. Not a lot of discussion, but it may have done more for my traffic than anything else here.
- A post from the writers at armchairarcade
- A blog post from Dennis Jerz, Professor of New Media Journalism. Prompted me to try to refine my definition of adventure games a little further
- A Slashdot post on my puzzles article. The discussion wasn't as detailed, but it did get encourage some interesting comments on the page for the article itself.
- An assigned reading in a course on Game Narratives and Design
- An assigned reading in a course on Game Design and Gameplay
And if you care more about how all this relates to me as a human being rather than understanding the true abstract nature of puzzles, I've blogged about some of my experiences with these types of games here.