The adventure game is not sacred or written in stone and needs to own up to it! There, I said it. Sue me, but you'll be doing so more out of spiteful denial than charges of defamation. The truth is, the adventure game genre, as we all know it, has long been suffering from obscurity, lack of progress, sheer banality, isolation (surprise!), and, simply, from the garden variety of dullness. And everyone - developers, publishers, the media, and yes, we gamers ourselves - is guilty of creating and fueling this suffering. The apparent sources of my grievances, viewed top-down, are obvious, but some are less so. As I delve deeper, I'm finding some intriguing and inherent contradictions, fallacies, and redundancies that add to this muck. As devoted supporters and partakers of the adventure game, don't we all want to see it move ahead and reach a bigger audience and be restored back to its former glory as it was during the days of Lucas Arts and Sierra and -- Stop right there!! You see? That's what I mean! You didn't catch it, did you? Read on.