Toward a Visualization of Video Game Cultural History: Grasping the French Touch

Abstract

This article introduces a novel methodology to analyze the historical evolution of the adventure game genre. This method involved the development of an analytical system, online database, and data visualization tool designed to help us understand the evolution of gameplay. Following an overview of these methodological considerations, we present the most common gameplay configurations adopted by adventure games over the years with the help of the data visualization interface. This forms the foundation of a comparative study that seeks to highlight the specificity of French production at the turn of the 1990s. The results shed light on gameplay configurations in a way that effectively articulates a synoptic, macrohistorical perspective with deep inspections of specific games.