The correct term would probably be
adventure games, but the "
quest" term is much more common nowadays, probably because of
Sierra's (a company which named many of it's games as "quests") popularity. In
Israel, "quest" is a standard term for those.
A type of
computer game, where you have to play a
hero who's into some special mission (catch the evil
purple tentacle in
Day Of The Tentacle, save your
beloved in
Hugo's Quest, or
get laid in
Leisure Suit Larry's series). On the way to your target (and game solution), you'll usually pass through many different scenes (from small rooms to distinct planets), hold up
dialogs (some games just have a ready-made sequence of questions and answers as the dialog, while others allow you to select your questions).
Quests in the
1980s were usually controlled via a "text parser", which understood commands you typed-in (such as "open door", "talk to old man"). Some quests were graphical, while others described the scenes textually.
In the
1990s, most quests were already graphical and controlled via a
mouse-driven point-and-click interface, where you'd choose different tools (
hand to touch,
eye to look) for your mouse to act like.
CD-ROM drives, which got widespread around
1995, brought a new kind of quests which replaced the traditional hand-drawn graphics with filmed sequences. The introduction of
3D accelerator cards into home computing brought another kind of quests, featuring 3D modeled scenes, objects and characters. Nowadays, many gamers long for the original hand-drawn cartoonish quests.