Adventures? Boring to play, boring to write. If you do understand those "basic concepts" nferraz speaks of, you end up spending very little time writing the engine and then endless hours describing the map and the items and allowed actions and whatnot as either a datastructure or in a special format you design. If you don't ... as most people I've seen writing this type of game ... you end up spending hours and hours writing and trying to debug an insance maze of ifs and else ifs and gotos describing what can happen on what place of the map and where can you go from there.
Though this could be a good test. Give someone a description of an adventure game world and see how they go about it. If they encode the world in the code, you don't need to know more and can part with them happily.