INNOVATING IN ADVENTURE GAMES THROUGH RESEARCH Clara Fernandez-Vara Postdoctoral Research Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab Adventure games are an overlooked genre in videogame research and the games industry. However, there is much that can be learned from the genre, and a lot of potential to create innovative, story-driven games. This presentation proposes that the combined study of adventure games history and design with game development paves the way for creating novel games. The method of Genre Variation aims at facilitating innovation by first exploring genre conventions (to avoid reinventing the wheel), then finding aspects that may be liable for innovation, and developing games tackling that problem. The games Rosemary (2009) and Symon (2010) are the result of the application of this method, where the idea was to develop specific game mechanics that would model a concrete aspect of human experience: remembering one’s past on the first case, recreating the odd logic of dreams on the other. In either case, making the game is not the end of the project: playtesting during development allows evaluating the success of the novelty. The wholistic approach of the Genre Variation method is meant to foster innovation, providing an environment of continuous iteration and revision of one’s theories and prototypes.