ADVENTURE
Adventure games are one of the earliest genres derived from the intersection of games and digital media. Although they may not be a mainstream genre any more, their continual transformation through designs and technologies illustrates the struggle in reconciling narrative and gameplay. The versatility of adventure games is the key to the genre’s longevity and its constant experimentation with interfaces and storytelling explains why we keep making and playing them.
The genre takes its name from the text game Adventure (1976–1977), also known as Colossal Cave Adventure, initially developed by Will Crowther, and later expanded by Don Woods. Since then, adventure games have taken many shapes, evolving through different interfaces to find new approaches to create narrative experiences. Early adventure games were called text adventures, since words were the way to represent their world and to interact with it. Text adventures are also called interactive fiction, a term popularized by the company Infocom in the 1980s, and the preferred denomination used by current developers of this type of game. Soon enough, text adventure games started incorporating illustrations, with Roberta Williams’s Mystery House (On-Line Systems, 1980), being credited as the pioneer of graphical text adventures (Montfort, 2003, p. 169). The illustrations were not interactive, but complemented the textual descriptions of each location. The combination of text interacting with the graphical environment followed: another game by Williams, King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown (Sierra On-Line, 1983), marked a new milestone in the genre by allowing players to move the characters on the graphic representation of the screen directly, while the rest of the commands were still typed, thus paving the way for graphical adventure games. Later on, the use of menus allowed a more streamlined interaction, by listing the possible commands and inventory objects. Players could click on verbs, objects, and characters to compose a sentence, as exemplified by Maniac Mansion (Lucasfilm Games, 1987) or Eric the Unready (Legend Entertainment, 1993). In the evolution of the interface, mouse clicks became the main input, and command lists became icons, which abstracted many of the actions (e.g. a mouth may stand for speaking, eating, or kissing). Inventory lists also became visual, so that players could drag an object from the inventory bar directly to the world, leaving behind the sentence-like interaction. In order to focus on puzzle-solving, rather than finding the correct command, games such as Myst (Cyan, 1993) made the actions contextual, so that the object or character would determine what clicking on it meant: a case could be opened or closed, but not talked to. All throughout, the player interacted with the game through indirect interaction, that is, instead of moving a controller to mark the direction of the character, a command would provide the instructions for the player.
Video game consoles have generated a different strand of adventure games, since their input comes from game controllers rather than the swift movements of the mouse or keyboard input. Thus some console adventure games incorporated multiple-choice menus as their mode of interaction, typical of Japanese visual novels such as Snatcher (Konami, 1988) or the Ace Attorney series (Capcom, since 2001). Another type of console adventure games, more contemporary, bases its mode of interaction on gestures, where physical movements signify the command, thus incorporating challenges based on direct manipulation (Shneiderman, 2003) of the character and the world. For instance, in Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream, 2010), the player moves the controller’s analog stick in a specific direction to open a drawer instead of selecting “open” from a menu.
Being Adventuresome
The adventure game genre is also defined by a specific set of design features and modes of interaction, which were established in early text adventure games. None of these features are exclusive of the genre, but their co-existence allows us to identify them as such (Fernández-Vara, 2009). Adventure games are characterized by:
• their story-driven nature;
• having a player character who carries out the commands of the player;
• their encouragement of exploration;
• gameplay focused on puzzle-solving; and
• interaction based mainly on object manipulation and spatial navigation.
In spite of the specificity of the features, which will be detailed below, the adventure game genre comprises games as varied as The Hobbit (Melbourne House, 1982), The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Infocom, 1984), The Secret of Monkey Island (Lucasfilm Games, 1990), and Machinarium (Amanita Design, 2009), along with the games introduced above. Other games may involve adventuring, but do not belong to the genre, such as The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986), Baldur’s Gate (BioWare, 1998), or Uncharted (Naughty Dog, 2007). Although this second set of games may share these common features, they have added elements that distinguish them as a different genre, namely action-adventure games or role-playing games, since they do not fulfill all the necessary design traits. Let us unpack these features.
In story-driven games, the narrative unfolds as the player advances in the game. The story is more than a reward for successfully overcoming a challenge, as Juul or Klevjer argue (Juul, 2001; Klevjer, 2002); the events of the story take place as the player interacts with the world. Story-driven games provide a narrative framing to the actions of the player, making him or her a participant in the events, or turn the discovery of the events the main aspect of gameplay.
The story may seem simple: Zork’s (Infocom, 1980) appears to be a scavenger hunt set in a dungeon. The space, however, points to the history of the Great Underground Empire. In contrast, other games turn the player into the protagonist of complex narratives, such as the intrigues with the ancient Order of the Templars in Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars, aka Circle of Blood (Revolution Software, 1996), or the interweaving stories in the thriller-like Heavy Rain.
The player interacts with the fictional world through a character. Unlike role-playing games, where players may designate their identity and qualities, the character is normally pre-defined. Usually, there are no stats associated with the character, such as life meters or skill sets that allow increasing the character’s capabilities over time. The goal of adventure games is not to improve the skills of the character, but to advance the story. There are some exceptions, of course, e.g. the player character of Loom (Lucasfilm Games, 1990), Bobbin Threadbare, learns new spells as he travels, expanding the repertoire of possible actions. The player character may also be generic and nameless, as is the case of the scavengers in interactive fiction (Adventure or Zork), or games using the first-person point of view, such as the Myst series. Some games may feature multiple player characters; instead of using them as a team, the player still controls one character at a time. The player may switch characters any time during gameplay, as in Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle (LucasArts, 1993). More often, the game dictates who the player controls at specific points of the game. Heavy Rain is divided into chapters, each focusing on the point of view of a specific character.
The predominant type of gameplay is puzzle-solving; puzzles are integrated in the fictional world of the game, so the objects and characters of the story create the challenge. The solution to puzzles may rely on general knowledge, such as locked doors that need keys to be opened, or basic trading conventions. More often, the player must learn the workings of the fictional world in order to tackle its challenges. The rules of the world may derive from traditional storytelling or genre fiction: the fairy-tale kingdoms of the King’s Quest series hark back to traditional fairy tales, whereas Beneath a Steel Sky (Revolution Software, 1994) invokes dystopian science-fiction novels. Adventure games can be particularly good at creating fresh fictional worlds, mixing up cultural and media references. Grim Fandango (Lucasarts, 1998) is set in a bureaucratized afterlife, mixing the colorful iconography of the Mexican Día de los Muertos with 1930s architecture. Botanicula (Amanita Design, 2012) takes place on a tree inhabited by an insect menagerie, sieged by a vampire bug. The rules of both fictional worlds are different from everyday life, so the player must learn them because they create the constraints to the puzzle. For example, in Botanicula the player must learn which insects are friendly or hostile, and who eats who, in order to find the lair of the evil vampire bug.
The main method of interaction with the world is exploration: talking to characters, examining objects, and trying different actions. Exploration is necessary in order to make sense of the fictional world first, and then to solve the puzzles. The delights of exploration and discovery may not be as valued often in mainstream games, which tend to favor constant action and where quick rewards are predominant. In contrast, adventure games thrive on allowing players to explore the world in their own time, or at least give room to gather information, and even learn from trial and error. Exploration is also more clearly encouraged when the goal of the game focuses on piecing together the events that have taken place in the world, what happened before the player started the game. This is the case of games such as Myst, or the interactive fiction Deadline (Infocom, 1982), in which the detective player must solve a case in less than 12 hours. However, games where the story of the player (i.e. what happens as the player participates in the world) is more dominant tend to limit the space that can be explored, usually by fragmenting it in scenes (The Hobbit, Heavy Rain). Most games are somewhere in between, so that the player has a limited amount of space, but may open up new locations as the game advances. In Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (Sierra On-Line, 1993), the player carries out an investigation, and as new information is revealed, new locations open up for the player to explore.
The interaction in adventure games focuses on two core mechanics: object manipulation and spatial navigation. Adventure games are characterized by an uncommonly ample list of specific actions. Take fighting games, for example: the main actions are punch, kick, dodge, jump. Each verb may have different nuances, such as high/low punch, or strong/weak kick, but this gradation does not really change the core actions of the game. Adventure games involve navigating and examining the world, talking to characters (if there are any), and using objects. “Use” is a general way to refer to a large variety of actions, its meaning depends on the context: in interactive fiction, the player needs to find the exact word, which may be as common as “open drawer” or as exotic as “set pants on fire” (Lost Pig, Admiral Jota, 2007). As discussed above, early graphic adventure games list their set of commands in a menu, to avoid word-hunting. In other games, contextual actions do away with specific commands: if the player clicks on an object, it triggers the corresponding action: a switch will be turned on and off, a character will start a conversation.
When all these five features concur in a game, we can affirm that we are playing an adventure game. A set of features is not the only way to discuss the genre, however. The development and reception of these games is also important to understand its richness and influence on video game history.
These defining features help to map the relationships between genres, through similarities and differences. For example, Warren Robinett’s Adventure (Atari, 1979) was conceived as an adaptation of Will Crowther and Don Wood’s Adventure/Colossal Cave Adventure for the Atari VCS (Robinett, 2006). Since the VCS lacked textual input, Robinett created a version where the maze of twisty little passages becomes a series of screens with warping connections, the puzzles are simplified to finding the key to each of the castle gates, and combat becomes prominent, with a bat and dragons that the player has to fend off with a sword. Adventure shares the defining features listed above, thanks to its inspiration from Crowther and Woods’s work. It also presents features that differentiate it from contemporary games: the command prompt is absent, substituted by direct manipulation, by which the player moves the character through the game controller, and drops objects through the press of a button. The emphasis on real-time actions in Robinett’s Adventure marks the beginning of another strand of adventure games, which soon became its own differentiated genre, the action-adventure game. One can see the origins of The Legend of Zelda’s dungeons (Nintendo, 1986) and Metroid’s caves (Nintendo, 1986) in the blocky mazes and grates of Adventure. The differences are also evident, starting with the relative simplicity of the puzzles in comparison with those found in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, for example. Most importantly, the emphasis on direct manipulation makes action-adventure games more reliant on skill and timing, rather than puzzle solving. Although adventure games have occasionally incorporated direct manipulation (in King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown, for instance), the predominant mode of gameplay is still puzzle-solving. More recently, gestural interfaces, as the ones found in Heavy Rain, have incorporated a greater emphasis on action and timing, in turn inspired by action-adventure games. Thus we see how adventure games and action-adventure games relate through common lineage, and yet remain different genres based on their emphasis on specific aspects of gameplay.
Interacting with the Simulation
Because of their strong narrative component, adventure games have been often been considered a borderline case between games and interactive narrative. There is often a pre-determined narrative, which unfolds as the player advances in the game, rather than a series of events that are the result of a dynamic system of rules, as would be the case of games involving a contest such as fighting or racing games. This fixed story is often the cause as to why adventure games have sometimes been dismissed as “linear.” Juul (2005) considers them the extreme case of games of progression, where the player has to complete actions in a specific consecutive order, as opposed to games of emergence, where the events are the outcome operating with the dynamic system of the game. This presumed linearity only applies to certain adventure games, and misconceives the nature of the genre. Although the events may be pre-determined, they do not usually imply a specific order in which they should take place; the emphasis on exploration also subverts the perceived notion that adventure games constrain the player into a specific path.
Adventure games are simulations. The first paper published in an academic journal on text adventure games calls Zork a “fantasy simulation” (Lebling et al., 1979). In defining the different ways to understand an interactive fiction work, Montfort states that it is “a simulation of an environment or world” (Montfort, 2011). Using object-oriented programming, the designer implements rooms, populated by characters and objects. These objects and characters have behaviors attached to them: doors open and close; chairs are for sitting on but cannot be put in your pocket; chocolates can be put in a bag, can be eaten, and, if it gets hot, they melt. There are events that can be programmed to happen constantly, such as day and night cycles, or periodically, like people walking following a specific route, or changes in the weather. The game unfolds as a series of consecutive events, but it does not mean that these games are like a film or a novel. The designers constrain how the player interacts with the world by creating the underlying system that is the core of the simulation. Those constraints come from the number of actions that may be possible in the world, or the spaces that may be accessed any one time, and is no different from other games that may be considered “simulations.” All games limit the possible range of actions, e.g. one cannot go to the bathroom in most role-playing games, or negotiate a truce instead of shooting in first-person shooters. Adventure games are no different in this respect.
The Hobbit exemplifies the linearity of adventure games because, according to Juul (2005), this early graphical text adventure takes the player from scene to scene, limiting the possible actions at one time. The game starts in Bilbo’s house; the first thing the player must do is follow Gandalf. The player can also open a wooden chest or try to talk to Thorin the dwarf, but otherwise there is not much to do there—Thorin does not respond, and the chest is empty. Rather than being linear, the actual issue is that the simulation lacks detail. This lack of nuance could be due partly to technical limitations (it had to run on a Spectrum home computer, with only 48k of RAM), as well as the result from the early exploration of the affordances of digital media. Similarly, in another early game, Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter (Sierra On-Line, 1986), the player is thrown into a scene involving one or two puzzles, and cannot move on until they are solved. In both cases, the narrative constraints in the simulation are what makes these games appear linear.
Another aspect that may obscure how adventure games simulate fictional worlds is the pre-design of all possible actions in the game. Computers can simulate well Newtonian physics, city economies, or military planning. Other things are more difficult, such as human-like behavior, or a complex world with multitudinous objects with distinctive functions. The designer must anticipate what players may try and create intelligible responses to these actions—that is the basic strategy to create simulation. The designer needs to select the level of abstraction (Juul, 2007), that is, how much detail the simulation will present. It is a matter of efficiency—there are so many actions that the player can try, but only so many can be programmed; the effort therefore goes into preventing actions that are not feasible. The easiest solution is to lose nuance, instead of creating a system whose complexity increases exponentially by trying to address every single action players may think of. By not allowing actions that may not be possible or useful to solve a puzzle, designers disguise the simulatory characteristics of the world. Contextual actions are a way to prevent these superfluous actions, as exemplified by Botanicula, where players figure out what to do through trial and error. Early in the game, the player must retrieve a feather from a hole. The player must choose a character out of five to try to grab it, each one will try something different, and eventually only one is able to get the feather: while the other characters bother the other insects living in the hole, the chestnut-like insect grabs a shell in which the feather was lodged. In contrast, the notorious Babelfish puzzle in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy requires a contrived set of actions to make a fish land in the player character’s ear. Also based on trial and error, this text adventure game requires a larger set of actions afforded by the simulation, increasing the difficulty of the puzzle.
The simulation may be more obvious when the player is dropped into a world to figure out how it works, without time pressure or without the possibility of ending the game prematurely, so the player can explore the world. This is the case of games such as Loom or Myst. The player has to experiment and test the limits of the system of the game, exploring the world spatially and functionally: How do things work? What happens if I do this? Who is this character? What problem must be solved? By exploring the simulation, the player obtains the information to solve the puzzles and therefore advance in the game narrative. The fact that the puzzles only have one predetermined solution (if they have more than one solution, it is also pre-designed) does not mean that the game is not a simulation.
The Living Dead
“Adventure games are dead” seems a recurring phrase in the discussion of the current state of the genre. The release of Grim Fandango is often identified as the dirge for adventure games (Kalata, 2011), while Eric Wolpaw (2000) explains how over-complex and nonsensical puzzle design demonstrates that adventure games committed suicide.
The advent of CD-ROMs may have been partly the cause of the degeneration of adventure games as a commercial genre. Myst heralded a new age for adventure games, with high-resolution graphics and sound, and other developers followed suit. In pursuing photorealism, the production costs of these games skyrocketed as they attempted to become more like movies, with rotoscoped animations and long video cut-scenes. The predominance of full-motion video in the second half of the 1990s may have alienated players, who were not impressed by mediocre writing and stilted acting. Adventure games soon became an expensive genre to produce, while the results were cheap movies. By wanting to be like film, developers forgot that these games simulate worlds to be inhabited and explored. Adventure games betrayed their own nature and many players gave up on them.
Adventure games were top sellers in the 1980s and early 1990s, with Myst getting to claim the title of best-selling game of all time until The Sims (Maxis Software, 2000) surpassed it in sales. Sales charts are now topped by other story-driven genres, such as role-playing games or action-adventure games. Adventure games are not currently considered a successful commercial genre, since they thrive in home computers and mobile devices and there is the biased perception that gaming is console-driven. Justifying the relevance of a genre based on sales numbers or technological platforms demonstrates a misunderstanding of the nature of video game production and consumption, characterizing both as monolithic, homogeneous processes. This misconception is more common in North America, since adventure games have continued to be commercially produced in Europe and Japan.
The genre is very much alive and kicking. Adventure games have been continuously released since the late 1990s, as commercial products and as fan works. There is a plethora of tools available for development, most of them freely available thanks to the dedication and talent of developers who create and foster the communities using them. The current community of interactive fiction exemplifies this continuity: as commercial releases of interactive fiction dwindled, fans created different tools and programming languages to create their own games. The productions of non-commercial developers are notable enough that Montfort’s book on interactive fiction (2003) devotes practically half of its pages to them.
The real problem is that commercial adventure games are stuck in a series of aesthetic choices that often shy away from experimentation and innovation. The traits that set them apart from other games have become so predominant they have brought adventure games to a creative stall. Innovation strategies seem to focus more on narrative than actual mechanics, often reveling in nostalgia rather than trying to push the boundaries of the medium. There are also bad design habits that some adventure games designers seem happy to perpetuate, such as illogical puzzles or convoluted plots. In contrast, Heavy Rain and Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective (Capcom, 2010) represent some of the limited brave attempts to reinvigorate the genre commercially by exploring new interfaces on consoles. The most notable attempts at innovation and experimentation, however, come from non-commercial games. Deidra Kiai’s Life Flashes By (2010) is a reflection on life decisions from the standpoint of a woman who just had a serious accident, presented as a series of vignettes. Other works feature innovative complex dialogue systems, such as Emily Short’s Galatea (2000), or Jens Andersson’s Rorschach (2007); some others give voices to characters that may be disposable in other contexts, such as the orc Grunk in Lost Pig.
Time for a Renaissance
As new technologies such as the CD-ROM may have brought the genre to a lull, new technologies may in the same way be able to revitalize it. Adventure games have been a predominantly computer-based genre throughout, with less frequent ventures in consoles. They now thrive in portable platforms, not only portable consoles, where they are already an established genre, but also touch-screen devices such as smartphones or tablet PCs. Their story-driven nature lends itself to being played for a long time, while the portability allows dividing gameplay into smaller chunks of time, so one can play during a commute or short breaks.
While games featuring a lot of text may discourage some players, particularly in the case of interactive fiction, they may also be attractive to people who prefer reading to playing digital games. Tablet computers and ebook readers seem more accessible to non-gamers, since they already use the devices for other purposes, such as work or convenience. Touch-screens are easier to operate than game controllers, since pointing and sweeping allows operating with the world directly, instead of using complex button presses.
New interfaces also open up the way for new ways of interacting with adventure games. Gestural interfaces have brought about new opportunities for exploring the interactions with the world that characterize the genre: Heavy Rain bases many of its interactions on moving the analog stick to imitate a gesture. So far the results have been gimmicky, however, since the design simply substituted hand movements for commands or clicks. The way is open to make gestures expressively meaningful in the games’ worlds.
Conclusion
As an essential genre for the understanding of narrative in digital games, adventure games are a referent through video game history. They should not be judged by their faults and weaknesses, but by their achievements. Random puzzles, weak writing, and arbitrary constraints are indeed often found in their design, but there are also brilliant examples of world-building, character development, and witty problem-solving. Adventure games deal more often with topics that are not the typical genre fiction fare common in video games, including court drama (Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Capcom, 2005) and historical intrigue (The Last Express, Smoking Car Productions, 1997). They are also more successful at incorporating comedy than other digital games, from bawdy comedy (the Leisure Suit Larry series, Sierra On-Line/High Voltage/Team 17, 1987–2009) to the battle of wits in The Secret of Monkey Island.
The richness of the genre provides insight into the struggle to bring narrative and gameplay together. The changes that the genre has gone through over the years are prime examples of the tension between letting the player explore and experiment in the world, and creating a satisfying narrative experience. Interactive fiction has a wide range of actions, which allow players to experiment at large, but players unfamiliar with the conventions of text interaction may get stuck trying to find the exact way to express what they want to do. Facilitating interaction by providing command menus or limiting the actions loses the nuances of the simulation, which encourages free interaction. This basic tension also happens at the level of the narrative: a more complex story usually involves limiting player actions and possible outcomes while experimenting in the simulation. A more open-ended world may not have a strong player story or structure, but it allows the player to explore the world in more depth. Adventure games cover all the ranges within these limits, demonstrating the tensions and difficulties of reconciling both. The history of the genre is long, and continues on by exploring these issues through new design challenges and novel technologies.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Aaron Reed and Nick Montfort for their input during the writing of this essay.
References
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