I have tried dabbling in this area as well, but there are few game makers out there that are easy to pick up without knowing a decent amount of coding. I had tried playing around with Adventure Game Studio. It is pretty straight forward, it's free, and there is a guy on youtube that has large number of easy to follow tutorials that basically give you the knowledge to build an entire game.

It is pretty easy to use Poser to make 2d sprites and pre-rendered backgrounds, but it is not good for video cut scenes or animated backgrounds. It is also not action oriented out of box either.

What programs do you all use that are kind of at the same user level that could make games in line with things like Myst /Zork and other old style adventure games?