Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider 9781501346545, 9781501346576, 9781501346552

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ADVENTURE GAMES

Approaches to Digital Game Studies Volume 7 Series Review Board Mia Consalvo, Concordia University in Montreal James Paul Gee, Arizona State University Helen Kennedy, University of Brighton Frans Mayra, University of Tampere Toby Miller, University of California, Riverside Torill Mortensen, IT University Copenhagen Lisa Nakamura, University of Illinois Gareth Schott, University of Waikato Mark J.P. Wolf, Concordia University Series Editors Gerald Voorhees, University of Waterloo Josh Call, Grand View University

ADVENTURE GAMES

PLAYING THE OUTSIDER

Aaron A. Reed, John Murray, and Anastasia Salter

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Copyright © Aaron A. Reed, John Murray, and Anastasia Salter, 2020 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Reed, Aaron (Aaron A.), author. | Murray, John, 1986–author. | Salter, Anastasia, 1984–author. Title: Adventure games : playing the outsider / Aaron Reed, John Murray, and Anastasia Salter. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. | Series: Approaches to digital game studies ; volume 7 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Drawing upon methods from platform studies, software studies, media studies, and literary studies, Adventure Games reveals the genre’s ludic (playful) and narrative origins and patterns, where character (and the player’s embodiment of a character) is essential to the experience of play and the choices within a game”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019035757 (print) | LCCN 2019035758 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501346545 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501346552 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501346569 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Computer adventure games. | Video game characters. Classification: LCC GV1469.22 .R44 2019 (print) | LCC GV1469.22 (ebook) | DDC 793.93–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019035757 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019035758 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4654-5 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4655-2 eBook: 978-1-5013-4656-9 Series: Approaches to Digital Game Studies Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of figures vi List of tables viii Acknowledgmentsix 1

Outsider Characters, Outlier Players

2

Defining Adventure Games from the Ground Up

33

3

Cinematic Choice Games

61

4

Fragments of Adventure

87

5

Gone Home? Walking Simulators and the Importance of Slow Gaming

115

6

Breaking Boundaries in Visual Novels

147

7

Rick and Morty on the Holodeck

175

8

Futures of Adventure: Kentucky Route Zero and Machines for Getting Lost on Purpose

199

1

Ludography213 Index221

LIST OF FIGURES

1.1  Outcast hero Bobbin Threadbare in Loom (1990)

2

1.2  The “loveable loser” protagonists of Day of the Tentacle (1993), typical adventure game underdogs

12

2.1  Limbo (2010), a puzzle-platformer; Space Quest II (1987), a graphical adventure game; and Trinity (1986), a text adventure, all highlighting an identical revelatory moment of the player realizing that part of the environment can be used to ­advance the narrative

34

2.2  An example of overly expressive input in Eric the Unready (1993)

46

2.3  Text and graphics for limited expressive input in Toonstruck

49

3.1  Action sequences in Dragon’s Lair (1983) relied on pre-animated ­outcomes 62 3.2  Screenshot from Telltale’s The Wolf Among Us (2013)

69

3.3  Excerpt from an in-game Detroit: Become Human chapter flowchart

75

3.4  Excerpt from a designer flowchart of a single scene in Episode 4 of Life Is Strange, and the full chart in miniature form at the bottom (Killham 2015)

77

4.1  The Adventure Game Triangle

89

4.2  An example of a puzzle early in The Witness solvable only through noticing environmental cues

93

4.3  Screenshot from Firewatch

99

4.4  Her Story screenshot

104

5.1  Screenshot from Graham Relf ’s early procedural exploration game Explorer (1986)

120

6.1  Hatoful Boyfriend (original 2011) points out odd norms in dating sims by making all its love interests pigeons

156

6.2  Screenshot from The Game: The Game

159

List of figures

6.3  Scene from the Apple IIGS version of Tass Times in Tonetown

168

7.1  Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab (2017) features video of actors converted into 3D objects, a VR analog to full-motion video adventure games 178 7.2  Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017) productively adapts many adventure game ideas to a VR format

186

8.1  Clara plays theremin with found audio supplied by Ezra (and the player) in a scene from Act 4 of Kentucky Route Zero

206

8.2  Many optional stories and text-only vignettes can be found on the backroads of Kentucky Route Zero

207

8.3 In Kentucky Route Zero Act 3, while immersed in a simulation on the Xanadu mainframe, you encounter another simulated Xanadu mainframe, itself running a program

209

vii

LIST OF TABLES

4.1 The tensions, strengths, and weaknesses of the connections between the adventure game pillars

90

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful for the thoughtful feedback of the series editors, Josh Call and Gerald Voorhees, as well as our Bloomsbury editor Katie Gallof and her team. We particularly appreciate the insights of our peer reviewers in developing this work. We have benefited in this work from feedback through our research communities: the Society for Cinema and Media Studies; NarraScope and the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation; the Association of Internet Researchers; the Electronic Literature Organization; the Modern Language Association; and the Foundations of Digital Games Conference. Our friends and colleagues within those spaces who’ve supported this and other work are too numerous to list. Anastasia Salter and John Murray would like to thank their colleagues at the University of Central Florida, including the Texts & Technology faculty and the Games and Interactive Media faculty, Rudy McDaniel, Amy Giroux, Lynn Hepner, Lindsay Neuberger, Jason Burrell, and Jennifer Sandoval. And a special thanks from John and Anastasia to the members of our academia support Twitter group chat–Emily Johnson, Mel Stanfill, and Anne Sullivan. Anastasia would like to thank the collaborators, mentors, and friends from media and game studies who have influenced this work: Stuart Moulthrop, Aaron Reed, Matt Kirschenbaum, Bridget Blodgett, Dene Grigar, Amanda Cockrell, Kathi Inman Berens, Leonardo Flores, Carly Kocurek, Shira Chess, Laine Nooney, Lyle Skains, T.L. Taylor, and Jennifer de Winter. John and Aaron would like to thank Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Michael Mateas for their support and mentorship during their graduate studies, during which some of this work began. Finally, Aaron would like to thank the parser interactive fiction community for twenty years of innovation and friendship.

x

CHAPTER 1 OUTSIDER CHARACTERS, OUTLIER PLAYERS

It wasn’t that [Myst] didn’t take over [that surprised us]. It was that it didn’t create its own kind of big fork in interactive entertainment… [Recently on Reddit] somebody said, “Hey, I just put my grandparents in front of Assassin’s Creed in the gondola and let them sail around ­Venice for a couple hours.” And then there’s a huge discussion after that… where people are saying, “Yeah, why don’t people make these games? Why can’t we just explore? Why do we always have to shoot things?” So, maybe the time is right again to try that. That’s exciting. I still think there’s plenty of room for something really cool in this genre out there. And I don’t think we’ve done it yet. (Myst co-creator Rand Miller, qtd. in Yoshida 2013) I mean, yeah, [Myst] was gorgeous at a time when games weren’t, and it had “new” gameplay. Only. The gameplay, once you get over the “new,” sort of sucks. (Slashdot user “seebs” 2013) A ten-year-old sits in frustration at a desktop PC, trying to figure out how to get the would-be magician on screen, gray-robed and lost at sea, past a towering waterspout blocking the way. The ten-year-old is playing Loom (Figure 1.1), a graphical adventure game. Buying this game has meant saving up allowance (games in the summer of 1990 generally cost $49.95, well over a hundred dollars in today’s money) and a trip to the software store, filled with boxes advertising portals to fantastic new worlds. Adventure games are still front and center at these stores, making great demos for the latest hardware, their lavish boxes promising experiences that will “become your world” or be “so

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider

Figure 1.1  Outcast hero Bobbin Threadbare in Loom (1990).

real, you may forget you’re playing a computer game,” conjuring “vast cinematic landscapes… [that] create a total environment.”1 A new game isn’t just somewhere to visit: it’s a place you’ll live in for a while, thinking about it even when you aren’t playing, swapping strategies and tips with friends at school, keeping labeled floppy disks with save games at impressive moments. Picking the right game is important. At the local software store, still an independent business with a feel more like a comic book shop than the retail outlets that would soon dominate, the teenage clerk recommended Loom after hearing the ten-year-old liked King’s Quest. But the ten-year-old is stuck. In the game, the player controls Bobbin Threadbare, a novice Weaver who can work magic by playing musical notes on an enchanted distaff. Objects in this world thrum with the magical melodies that define their nature, and by listening diligently, the ten-yearold has written down four-note songs to cast spells of opening, dyeing cloth, and seeing in the dark, learned from an owl hooting in the night. The huge waterspout that blocks Bobbin’s boat is itself vibrating with a spell of twisting. But none of these spells seem useful to calm the raging cyclone. The stakes are high. The ten-year-old has explored every screen of the small starting island from top to bottom. If the waterspout can’t be dealt with, the rest of the game will remain inaccessible. Precious allowance money will have gone down the drain.

As contemporary ads for Myst (1993), King’s Quest V (1990), and Loom, respectively, proclaimed. 1

2

Outsider Characters, Outlier Players

And then, in a sudden, thrilling moment of inspiration, the ten-yearold wonders what would happen if you played the notes of a magic spell backward. Tentatively, the experiment is tried: it takes just a moment. And with a glorious shimmer of purple magic, the cyclone collapses. The novice Weaver realizes, just as the ten-year-old does, that they have the power to turn twisting into untwisting. They are thinking together. Suddenly their whole stock of existing magic is thrown into a new light: what can be opened might also be closed, and a caster can not only add color to an object but remove it as well. But what of the owl’s night vision? What could be the opposite of that? The ten-year-old and the Weaver realize with a giddy smile that the owl’s spell is a musical palindrome: the notes are the same backward as forward. And so another rule of magic has been learned through implication: some spells are irreversible, by their very nature. And as the Weaver’s boat lands on a new shore, a new and higher note is unlocked on the distaff: a melody previously heard but unplayable can now be performed, opening up even greater horizons. And yet another ten-year-old might never have had this revelation, remaining stuck at the waterspout forever, unable to progress through a game they paid good allowance money for. They might have told their friends the game sucks, or maybe that the whole genre does, if this isn’t the first time they’ve been burned. These small humiliations add up. Shortly before the release of Loom, designer Ron Gilbert, working on a new game that would eventually be titled The Secret of Monkey Island, saw the danger of taking the dominance of adventure games for granted: The thing we cannot forget is that we are here to entertain, and for most people, entertainment does not consist of nights and weekends filled with frustration. The average American spends most of the day failing at the office, the last thing he wants to do is come home and fail while trying to relax and be entertained. (1989) Gilbert’s words prove prophetic. A decade after Loom, the graphical adventure game has become commercially unviable, giving way to genres with more predictable ways to overcome challenges than waiting for a flash of insight: a moment where player and protagonist think alike. Revelations like Bobbin’s are moved into cut scenes, rewards for clearing an area of enemies or some other demonstration of mastery over a physical challenge rather than a mental one. The increasing visual fidelity of flight simulators 3

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider

or first-person shooters has become better demo material, anyway. As game design wisdom evolves, the quirky, inconsistent experiments tried across a myriad of contradictory adventure game styles give way to a more consistent set of mechanics that are more successful at keeping players engaged and always coming back for more. Telling customers they’re not smart enough to keep playing, as Gilbert predicted, comes to seem like an almost embarrassing misstep for a burgeoning industry. But something about adventure games persists in the collective memory. Despite their frustrations, gamers old enough to remember them recall their successes, too. Those colorful boxes and characters, those pioneering experiments and evolving interfaces, whispered a promise to change forever how stories were told and how people might be playful within them. As the gaming zeitgeist drifted away to other shores, it left behind a body of work, a generation of players (who grew up to be a generation of designers), a thriving band of descendants, and a space of intriguing possibilities that have rarely been comprehensively explored.

Why Adventure Games? Calling yourself a fan of adventure games today, decades removed from the genre’s prime, is likely to get you strange looks. There are several dominant narratives about adventure games circa 2019: that they were once popular but have been dead and irrelevant for decades, that their core design ideas are fundamentally flawed and not worth revisiting, or that the only reason you would play or make one today is for nostalgia. But each of these narratives is deeply problematic. While adventure games as a distinct category are no longer mainstream, an entire generation of designers grew up playing them, and it should be unsurprising that many of their games continue threads of design or aesthetics begun in a style of gameplay now little studied. More directly, a wide swath of modern genres are direct descendants of adventure games, from action-adventure titles to puzzle platformers to visual novels to walking simulators to escape rooms to hidden object games and beyond. And while it is true that adventure games are often remembered as much for their frustrations as their pleasures, their strengths remain a well of untapped potential that successful designers have returned to again and again for inspiration: from the character-driven worldbuilding of Firewatch to the open-ended exploration of No Man’s Sky, from the engaging dialogue trees of Life Is Strange to the poignant emotional 4

Outsider Characters, Outlier Players

landscapes of Night in the Woods. A close read of how the genre operates as a design framework and a study of how contemporary games adapt, reject, remix, and repurpose its elements reveals a fascinating and fraught marriage between pillars of story, exploration, and puzzle-solving, a difficult trifecta of dynamics that designers continually explore new ways of balancing. And while nostalgia is certainly a driving force across gaming generally—nine of the twelve most successful gaming Kickstarters as of publication time were for revivals or sequels to classic titles—people continue to make and play adventure and adventure-like games for all kinds of other reasons. They are taught in college courses to explain the basics of interactive narrative design; they create a space for play that centers story, character, romance, and other neglected domains in mainstream games; they reach audiences uninterested in or unable to participate in coordination or reflex-driven titles; and they allow participation in one of gaming’s oldest conversations, stretching back at least to the day a Kentucky caver uploaded a half-finished game called Adventure to the ARPANET. What we claim in this book is that adventure games are important: not just to history but to understanding games today. Rather than a survey of a dead genre, we consider this work a necessary and overdue look into a mode of game making and playing still vital for designers to understand—especially younger designers who may be less familiar with the genre’s particulars or consider it a mere historical footnote. Through a comprehensive and transdisciplinary dive into the genre’s theory and practice, we will show how many of its threads are still vital to the fabric of modern games and suggest new designs that might be woven. Our approach draws on methods from platform and software studies, media studies, and literary studies, and mingles design analysis, critical commentary, and social context to demand reconsideration of the adventure game: through these many lenses, we hope to reveal a bigger picture and more culturally situated view of adventure games than previous work that has studied these elements in isolation.

Definitions One of these lenses we will return to again and again is a theory that adventure games are, and have always been, a genre of outsiders. Before we can unpack this concept, we first need to clarify what we mean by both terms. We have deliberately chosen the term “adventure game” even though it has several problematic elements. It evokes mostly historical images, 5

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider

perhaps most strongly the 2D graphical adventures of the early 1990s like Loom, when we intend to cast a wider net that includes artifacts of many other times and styles. The term also implies a subject matter focused on juvenile quest narratives, despite the fact that adventure games have often tackled more mature subject matter than other game genres. But a brief survey of other possible labels finds none better suited. “Interactive fiction” has come to mean exclusively text-based games (which we argue in Chapter 2 share the same fundamental design characteristics of their graphical kin), and the term “electronic literature” has become associated with a particular academic flavor of born-digital writing. Terms like “interactive digital narrative” (IDN) or “cyberdrama” have also been used within academia, but generally for more embodied experiences (and rarely by real-world practitioners). We use the term “storygame” throughout this volume to refer to the wider category of games fundamentally intertwined with story; but for our primary subject, this is too broad a label, while many more specific terms, such as “point-and-click games,” “visual novels,” or “text adventures,” are too narrow, focusing on grouping games more by their interface elements or aesthetics than by a shared design. So we’ll stick with “adventure games,” which scholar Clara FernándezVara says “always have a story inextricable from gameplay—advancing in the game means advancing in the story, because each challenge and its solution constitute an event in the story of the game” (2011). These games center the exploration and understanding of a fictional world: gaining a conceptual mastery over it in order to advance a scripted story, rather than the skill-based mastery called for by many other genres. This space includes classic graphical games like Space Quest, Loom, or Myst, from an era when adventure games were consistently the top-selling titles each year; modern games that recreate the conventions of these classics, from Obduction to Broken Age; early and recent text adventures that pioneered and continue to advance the possibilities of interactive narrative, from Zork to Hadean Lands; full-motion video (FMV) games like Phantasmagoria or Under a Killing Moon which attempted uneasy alliances between adventure games and multimedia; modern games that repurpose and remix adventure game aesthetics to center story and exploration, like Firewatch, Dear Esther, or Her Story; and games using new technologies like VR to immerse players in narrative environments that need to be explored and understood for progression, like I Expect You to Die or Asobo Studio’s Fragments. As different as they are, these games all share core elements— contemplative pacing, a focus on story and embodied character, and an 6

Outsider Characters, Outlier Players

appeal to audiences outside today’s gaming mainstream, among others— but have rarely been studied together as a unified body of work or theory of design. We propose in Chapter 2 that these games all center a tense relationship between contradictory pillars of design and suggest that many of their pleasurable aesthetics, frustrating dynamics, and untapped potential can be understood by more closely characterizing this design space. By positioning these varied games as cousins on the same family tree, we hope to reveal insights that are obscured when, for instance, text adventures and puzzle platformers are considered fundamentally different kinds of games and rarely studied together. The historical genre of “adventure game” was born, grew through an awkward adolescence, and suffered an ignoble commercial decline through a period of astonishing technological change. We can roughly bookmark the adventure game’s classic period between Zork (1980) and Riven (1997), arguably the first and last such games (in their original form, at least) to sell a million copies. This pair of titles illustrates the rapid and dramatic upgrades to home computers weathered by the genre. Between the release of these two titles, less than two decades, the file size of a best-selling game increased by a factor of 50,000 (from roughly 100 KB to 4.5 GB); game output went from text to animated 640 × 480 views with 64,000 colors and from no sound at all to CD-quality audio. Despite the success of 1993’s Myst, undoubtedly the genre’s best-selling title, adventure games slowly declined throughout the 1990s: The Software Publisher’s Association’s “CoDie” awards only had a category for them through 1997 (and the following year had to give Riven a special “Best Overall Multimedia Presentation” award instead), while other awards, such as the Golden Joystick, had removed their corresponding category as early as 1989. By the end of the 1990s, the commercial failure of titles like Grim Fandango (1998) and Gabriel Knight 3 (1999) marked the end of the classic adventure game period and its status as a commercially mainstream genre. As the remainder of this book explores, however, the genre has inspired many successors that build on or alter its original formula. While we consider primarily text-driven games to unquestionably be adventure games, and touch on them in Chapter 2 while considering the genre’s foundations, our focus in the remainder of the volume is largely on graphical adventures, for a number of reasons. Graphical games are closer to mainstream gaming culture, and thus more easily connect to our argument that the genre has continuing relevance to that culture. From the 1990s on, graphical games have been played by a wider range of people and have 7

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider

shaped more opinions and perspectives on game design, both historically and today. Finally, while there are many threads of contemporary textdriven games that connect strongly to adventure game traditions, these have received more coverage in existing scholarship than their graphical contemporaries: we ourselves, for instance, have previously discussed games like 80 Days, Fallen London, and Depression Quest (Salter 2016; Reed 2017), as have many others. A few useful entry points into scholarship on text-driven interactive fiction include Nick Montfort’s Twisty Little Passages (2003), Jimmy Maher’s extensive coverage of individual games at The Digital Antiquarian blog (filfre.net), work from the parser interactive fiction community on history and craft (Nelson 1995; Jackson-Mead and Wheeler 2011), and the coverage of Twine games in books like Videogames for Humans: Twine Authors in Conversation (Kopas 2015) and Rise of the Videogame Zinesters (Anthropy 2012). Three companies especially important to the history of adventure games will come up often in this volume. Infocom, active through the 1980s, was the most successful company to market text adventures, starting with Zork and continuing with many titles still held up as masterworks of interactive storytelling today, including Trinity and A Mind Forever Voyaging. Sierra On-Line pioneered the graphical adventure with 1980’s Mystery House and dominated the sales charts for the next two decades with family-friendly series like King’s Quest and Space Quest, and more mature series like Leisure Suit Larry. LucasArts, prominent throughout the 1990s, raised the bar on adventure games by innovating their design, animation, and writing, producing classics like Loom, the Monkey Island series, and Sam & Max Hit the Road. While many other companies were part of the story of adventure games, and we take special care in this volume to include some of these lesser-studied titles, the three companies above are common touchstones when speaking about the classic period of adventure game design. We are deliberately choosing to focus more on how these games have affected the popular imagination than their influence on academic game studies, although that has certainly been substantial. The discipline of digital games studies came into being during the genre’s prime, and many of the field’s foundational works were heavily influenced by the dominance of adventure games. Espen Aarseth’s seminal book Cybertext (1997), for instance, contains the revealing index entry “Adventure games: see Games,” since most of the games it discusses fall under that category. Adventure games and early games scholars alike struggled to reconcile the seeming contradiction between fixed stories and an unpredictable player (Frasca 8

Outsider Characters, Outlier Players

1999; J. Murray 2004). A full treatment of how adventure games have shaped games academia (not to mention games academics) could easily fill a whole volume this size.2 While we will occasionally reference arguments and lines of thought from game studies, this will mostly be in service of understanding how makers and players in the wild responded to adventure games historically and continue to respond to their modern offspring. The history of adventure games has been previously chronicled through a number of other lenses as well, emphasizing fan communities and ongoing interventions (Salter 2014), structural patterns of puzzles and narrative (Fernández-Vara 2009), first-person perspective and changing engines (Larkin 2016), and changing design approaches (Adams 2014). The continued interest in historical creators of adventure games and their creations is further demonstrated by biographical work on subjects such as Roberta Williams, creator of King’s Quest (Nooney 2013), or Jane Jensen and her titular character Gabriel Knight (Salter 2017). Our approach mingles historical and contemporary work, focusing mostly on how different kinds of modern games share a design lineage with their genre predecessors. It is worth mentioning, however, the place where many assumed the genre’s story ended: the end of the classic period of adventure games, often placed around the turn of the century. Why did adventure games fail? Blame has been placed at a number of doorsteps: the rise of 3D graphics, growing competition in the market, changing audiences, even shifting release cycles and corporate practices in a maturing industry (Andreadis 2015). Ron Gilbert’s insight that customers didn’t like to be frustrated was often ignored, with puzzles becoming increasingly uroboric, catering to the insiders who could unfurl their tortured logic, baffling to newcomers. Among the most famous eulogies for adventure games is a brutal deconstruction of the correct solution to a puzzle in Gabriel Knight 3 (1999), which involves a series of improbable actions that add up to a wildly convoluted and unlikely solution. The screed ends with the blunt verdict: “Adventure Games committed suicide” (E. Murray 2000). Another commenter noted in a retrospective on the genre’s worst puzzles that “there’s a delightful subtlety to USE BRICK ON WINDOW that few adventures have ever grasped, preferring instead the kind of contraption and convoluted schemes that would make MacGyver go and have a lie down in his store closet” (Cobbett 2015).

A good entry point to interdisciplinary game studies can be found in Deterding (2017).

2

9

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider

One history of the genre blamed this kind of insularity and failure to innovate for its decline, noting how late-period classic adventure games were often “suffering from an unwillingness to adapt to changing market conditions or to further push the boundaries of interactivity” even while noting they “undeniably influenced all [future] development in the medium”: Some mechanics and concepts, such as the rewind-time mechanic most famously used in Braid and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time or the embedded movies found in all kinds of games, debuted in adventure games. And they remain the best demonstration of how comedy and humor can work in video game form. (Moss 2011) Adventure games today have gone underground. No longer on the front pages of game magazines or distribution platforms, they continue to be produced in a multiplicity of forms and for a variety of audiences: from obvious descendants like the 2010s games of studio Telltale, to retro clones and daughter genres, to award-winning indie games challenging dominant audiences and aesthetics, they are still here, even if no longer a visible part of the mainstream. This returns us to our theory of adventure games as a genre of outsiders, a notion which we will spend the remainder of this chapter exploring and return to as a frequent touchstone throughout the book. The term “outsider” has a rich history and many overlapping shades of meaning, and we will find many of them echoed in our survey of adventure games, sometimes in surprising ways. As a word, outsider simply means one who is excluded, isolated, or otherwise apart from a center or majority and its norms: outsiders are definitionally not “in.” Sociologists have long observed that humans naturally divide themselves into ingroups and outgroups, feeling a closer bond to those on the inside and demonizing everyone else: this may have evolved because groups with stronger bonds and common cause became more effective (Tajfel 1970; Cosmides, Tooby, and Kurzban 2003). “Outsider” is therefore both a relative label (shifting with different perspectives) but also a dangerous one to be given. We see shades of this kind of outsider in the geeky, socially ostracized hackers who created and played the first generation of adventure games, as well as in the othered victims of Gamergate deemed dangerous by gaming’s in-group, finding themselves and their games under attack as unimportant, not valuable, or even “not real.” We will discuss this kind of outsider more below, as well as in Chapters 5 and 6. 10

Outsider Characters, Outlier Players

There are many other shades of outsider we will engage with throughout this book: the “non-gamer” outsider customer, who drives unexpected games to be bestsellers, confounding industry assumptions; the abandoned outsider, who can no longer find adventure games to buy and so starts making some of their own; the rebel outsider, making queer or altgames that use adventure game tropes to explore alternative characters, mechanics, or designs; the outsider auteur, who brings in fresh ideas from art forms outside gaming and shakes up conventional wisdom, such as that game and story are fundamentally incompatible; and the disabled outsider, who is shut out of games based on reflexes and physical movements. Not the least are outsider players, who find solace in different kinds of game from their more mainstream peers. All of these outsiders reveal different ways adventure games, their players, and their makers can be understood as othered, alternative: “outlandish,” in the phrasing of Jonathan Eburne in his book about unconventional ideas that don’t fit into accepted paradigms (2018). Adventure games are outlandish in a myriad of ways: their eyebrow-raising puzzles, their intriguing worlds demanding exploration, their awkward or troubled protagonists, their oftenimprobable origins on the laptops of struggling indies or scrappy studios. In the remainder of this chapter we will dive more deeply into some of these varieties of outsider and how they shape our understanding of adventure games and their communities.

Playing the Loser The early heroes of digital games, once they began to grow defined enough to have personality, fell generally into two archetypes: epic heroes and loveable losers. The second category quickly became the primary domain of adventure games, perhaps because of their focus on intellectual rather than action-based challenges, and many of the most famous heroes of early adventure games stand in marked contrast to the heroes in other genres. Bobbin Threadbare in Loom is not a master sorcerer but a fumbling apprentice; the hero of Sierra’s Space Quest games, rather than a dashing space jockey, is an interstellar janitor. The list goes on: compare perennial loser Larry Laffer in Leisure Suit Larry with Master Chief from Halo, obnoxious Simon the Sorcerer with Lara Croft, or hapless would-be pirate Guybrush Threepwood with Solid Snake. While there were certainly exceptions to this trend (adventure gamers also got to play noble King Graham, bold 11

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider

Tex Murphy, and Indiana Jones), many of the genre’s most memorable characters are undeniably flawed, sarcastic, incompetent, or clueless. For the introverted hackers who were the first generation of gamemakers, outsiders to traditional cultural markers of success, it may simply have been that they couldn’t help but put some of themselves into their creations. Adventure game characters are frequently cited as examples of welldefined avatars, differing from the more nebulous or rules-driven characters common to other styles of game (Tychsen, Hitchens, and Brolund 2008). The three misfit heroes of LucasArts’ Day of the Tentacle (1993; Figure 1.2), as described by one modern reviewer, are classic examples: I particularly enjoyed… the outrageous, cartoon-like characters. ­Bernard is pleasantly nerdy and a touch naïve. He wears Groucho Marx-style glasses and his ears are enormous… Laverne looks like she sticks her finger in electrical sockets. She has wild blonde hair, one eye that’s larger than the other, and blinks constantly. Instead of walking, she lurches from side-to-side. Hoagie is a mellow traveling-band roadie with a gigantic nose… His long hair covers his eyes—the only glimpse I caught of one eye was when Bernard’s foot happened to be in his face. (Waxman 2016)

Figure 1.2  The “loveable loser” protagonists of Day of the Tentacle (1993), typical adventure game underdogs. 12

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Tentacle’s protagonists fit into stock comic underdog roles: the nerd, the weird kid, the stoner. Claire Dormann and Mish Bouetet offer the stars of 1995’s Sam & Max Hit the Road as examples of a “comic duo” (Dormann and Boutet 2013) and present Guybrush (from the Monkey Island franchise) as an exemplar of the “comic avatar,” grouping him among many other adventure game exemplars of the “lovable loser.” As opposed to the powerfantasy heroes of other genres, adventure game avatars were often filled with personality to the point of distraction: Guybrush sometimes comments on the impossibility of an action, but other times his refusal is down to “personal” whim, preference or aversion (“Ugh! Porcelain!”), with no other reason for defying the player. Porcelain items are nonetheless present in the games, and can be clicked on, though Guybrush will usually refuse the player’s further interaction with them. (Giappone 2015) These characters were early examples of playing with, and even breaking, the player’s expectations of a narrative game. Rather than drawing upon the role-playing tradition of stats and skills, they fundamentally reject the seriousness that those games are traditionally associated with, or even, in the case of parody games like Eric the Unready, directly poke fun at them. It may seem odd to start a discussion of outsiders with a set of white, mostly male characters, but these flawed, quirky, memorable protagonists stand in stark contrast to the hypermasculine physicality that would come to dominate images of gamer heroes in future decades (Salter and Blodgett 2017). While the outsider hero trope has shades of the toxic geek masculinity frequently associated with videogames, or with angry outsider literature best known from characters like Holden Caulfield or Ponyboy Curtis (from S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel The Outsiders), especially in hindsight early adventure game heroes have an undeniable charm untouched by bitterness. The introverted protagonist of the novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower writes “tell me how to be different in a way that makes sense” (Chbosky 1999): many players of adventure games have found unlikely heroes or role models in the genre’s quirky, unconventional, optimistic protagonists. As games matured and audiences broadened, other kinds of outsiders began appearing in them, and perhaps because of the genre’s focus on story and character, they often showed up in adventure games first. Among the first female protagonists in a computer game was Princess Rosella in King’s

13

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider

Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella (1988). Designer Roberta Williams fought for a female lead in Sierra’s flagship series, despite internal skepticism that such a choice would be controversial, or at least “semi-experimental,” as she said at the time: “I know it will be just fine with the women and girls who play the game, but how it will go over with some of the men, I don’t know” (1988). It turned out to be just fine with everyone—the game won awards and sold better than any previous title in the series (Holmberg 2001)—but having an avatar of one’s own gender was especially significant for the 40 percent of the King’s Quest player base who were women (Maher 2016). Looking back on the game today, one reviewer recounts the powerful impression this character made on her: “I was sucked in by the assortment of fairy tale tropes, from dwarves and fairies to ogres and haunted houses… Best of all for a tiny, three-year-old girl though, was the courageous, blondehaired princess named Rosella, an adventurer” (Smallwood 2018). Rosella appeared on screens nearly ten years before her more famous counterpart Lara Croft, who would become the poster child for the ongoing debate over hypersexualized representations in games (Kennedy 2002). Sierra would go on to release other games with female leads, including the Colonel’s Bequest games (1989 and 1992); Infocom’s Plundered Hearts (1987) was another early example of a narrative game with a female lead. Representations of people of color and LGBT characters in early games were even rarer, but often the first substantial such appearance was in an adventure game. The action-adventures Urban Chaos (1999) and Beyond Good & Evil (2003) feature female protagonists of color; another actionadventure game, the comic book adaptation Shadow Man (1999), is one of the first narrative games with a black male lead. The exhaustive research of the LGBTQ Video Game Archive3 documents a fleeting suggestion of a lesbian relationship in Infocom’s 1986 text adventure Moonmist; in the textheavy adventure game Circuit’s Edge (1990), a number of gay and transgender characters; and a bisexual protagonist and gay major character in the FMV adventure game Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh (1996). While such characters had occasionally appeared in earlier games of other genres, these were generally the flimsiest of cameos or the laziest stereotypes. Adventure games often gave these characters their first chance within digital games to speak lines, respond to player interactions, and be coherent parts of a fictional universe.

https://lgbtqgamearchive.com/.

3

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To gamers from these radically underserved groups, these few examples of representation in an interactive medium could be memorable despite their heartbreaking rarity. “Bless you, little Amy Briggs,” wrote a contemporary female reviewer about the designer of Plundered Hearts; “for years I’ve been masquerading as a macho male 18-year-old in countless adventures, so the chance to shed ‘him’ and become ‘her’ was long overdue and more than welcome” (DeMunn 1988). Looking back on her early experiences with antiestablishment fan games, game designer Anna Anthropy connects the unique thrill of discovering a rare example of representation with the inherent power of an interactive medium: Look: If you read a book about a pirate queen, you’re not a pirate queen. She’s a third party; you’re just reading her story. But if you’re playing a game, you are the pirate queen, even if all her lines are p ­ re-scripted and she doesn’t ask for your input before she quips them… Games became a safe space for me to begin exploring ideas about sexuality, kink, and queerness. (Anthropy 2014) While on-screen representation was practically nonexistent, gamers with disabilities also had a special relationship with adventure games. While today groups like AbleGamers work with hardware and software developers to help make games more accessible, these resources were scarce or unavailable in the early days of computers. Adventure games, with their focus on mental rather than physical challenges, could be enjoyed by a wide swath of physically impaired players with little need for special hardware or custom tools. Even blind players could enjoy text adventures. Blind interactive fiction fan Austin Seraphin speaks in outtakes from the documentary Get Lamp about their relative accessibility—it’s easy to hook most such games up to a screen reader—but also the novel experience of second-person text placing the reader inside a world with abled senses: “I think for the blind it’s actually really liberating, because you can explore a world with sight.” Whereas for Seraphin, “‘examine object’ would mean feel it, smell it, use my other senses,” in an interactive fiction the result of the action is described as if a sighted “you” had performed it (qtd. in Scott 2006). Disabled fans of adventure games might be transported to new worlds in entirely different ways than other kinds of players. Adventure games continued to star nontraditional heroes throughout their commercial decline. Grim Fandango, set in a fantastic afterworld inspired by Día de Muertos iconography, was perhaps the earliest game 15

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider

with multiple speaking roles for Latinx voice actors, including Tony Plana as skeletal travel agent Manny Calavera; in The Shivah (2006) you play a rabbi. The Longest Journey (1999) tells a typical game story of a journey to a fantastic other world, but its star, April Ryan, is an ordinary college student from our own, something one reviewer looking back at the game found noteworthy: April is just a normal person like you or me. She has no skill with weapons. She’s not a hacker. She’s not particularly strong, tough, or fit. She’s just a struggling artist and nothing more… The way she grows and develops over the course of her journey makes her one of the “­ realest” characters I have ever come across in gaming. (Eisenbeis 2014) Of course, several styles of adventure games leave the nature of the protagonist entirely unspecified, including most early interactive fiction as well as first-person games like Myst. In 1997’s Zork: Grand Inquisitor, a wizard trapped in a lantern dubs the unseen player “Ageless Faceless GenderNeutral Culturally-Ambiguous Adventure Person—AFGNCAAP, for short.” Outsiders and underrepresented players could project themselves into these roles without a white or male, abled or straight avatar onscreen to spoil the illusion. While these blank slates were no substitute for true representation, they were another welcoming hand extended toward audiences that rarely saw themselves in the mainstream’s notion of what a heroic avatar should look like. Indeed, as time went on and the game industry “matured,” the notion of what a hero should or could be began to calcify. The year 1993 saw the releases of two games, Myst and Doom, that were both wildly popular: the first became the best-selling game of all time, largely by appealing to millions of players who didn’t consider themselves gamers, and the second as a runaway shareware success, showcasing the coming real-time 3D revolution. In the following years some fans of Doom began to develop a narrative that Myst could hardly be considered a real game, nor could the people who played it be real gamers: To many insiders, this was the reality of non-gamers, outsiders… the unwashed masses banging on the hallowed gates. Reflecting on the 1997 performance of Myst and its sequel, a nameless staff writer for PC Gamer commented that “the hard-core gamers here at PC Gamer are still trying to figure out how the gruesome twosome of Riven and Myst continue to sell in phenomenal amounts.” (Adkins 2018) 16

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The staff writer’s frustration came from a feat that today seems almost surreal: Myst, released in 1993, was still the top-selling game of the year in 1996, three years later, and was only kicked out of that position by Riven, its own sequel.4 But the game industry was beginning to close ranks about what it thought of as proper games and proper gamers. Another turning point may have been 1989’s release of the Sega Genesis, with its shift from family-friendly titles toward more violent content and traditionally masculine themes like sports (Chess 2017). We might say that shift had been fully realized just over a decade later with the release of Grand Theft Auto III in 2001, which the National Organization for Women asked its members to speak out against, abhorring its hypermasculinized gameplay which sees players “killing police officers and innocent bystanders, stealing cars, and doing drugs. When the player begins to lose his health, he can pick up a prostitute on the street and have sex with her” (2002). The use of male pronouns for the player was certainly deliberate. If the 1980s were a decade filled with hope for a future where computer games might be for anyone, the 1990s saw a transition to a presumed market of young men as gaming’s insiders. In her book Ready Player Two, Shira Chess posits that the rise of a male-dominated games industry with its male “player one” became a way of othering different kinds of gamers and game experiences: “While women and girls indeed played these games, they have often been considered outliers, marginalized, pushing their way into a space not originally intended for them.” As a result, while hypermasculine games came to dominate cultural perceptions of the industry, even while less gendered games like Myst or The Sims continued to see wide commercial success, “games designed for women are often overlooked and dismissed as having no importance or value” (Chess 2017). Today “outsiders” from many of these groups are increasingly making their own games, and we will turn to this thread in the next section. But it’s interesting to note that many of the “loveable losers” in modern storycentered games are less innocent and less naïve than their predecessors. These include Henry, the forest ranger fleeing from responsibility in Firewatch (discussed in Chapter 4); an unknown game designer and his dangerously obsessive fan in 2015’s The Beginner’s Guide; or Mae, the troubled hero of lauded 2017 adventure game Night in the Woods. Using anthropomorphic characters to tell a poignantly human and personal story, Woods connected 4 It’s also worth noting that Myst was created by another set of outsiders: two brothers who had played few other digital games and whose studio operated almost entirely outside the mainstream game industry of the time (Rosenberg 2013).

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with many gamers because of its raw content, including outsider characters who make mistakes and don’t find easy resolutions to their quests: [Parts of the game] could have been ripped straight out of my life. I’ve lived a lot of the moments in Night in the Woods: a friend confessing years of childhood abuse in a religious Pennsylvania town just like Possum Springs; learning of the death of a fellow punk in a brutally offhand way while scuffing around a parking lot with strangers; the times I’ve admitted my own mental health struggles in some sudden inappropriate-but-inevitable moment when I’ve tried not to sniffle I’m making this weird way too much. (MacLeod 2017) Night in the Woods self-identifies as an adventure game and repurposes a number of graphical adventure tropes to tell a more deeply personal kind of story: the screens Mae explores aren’t a fantastical kingdom but a hometown slowly dying in a failing economy, and the player is invited into Mae’s emotional space in the same way an earlier generation of games offered access to a physical one. Anna Anthropy notes how this kind of personal, emotional connection is a crucial way that smaller, more personal games— outsider games—often differ from those offered by the mainstream: [Context] frames those interactions in a way that encourages the player to relate to my personal experience… That’s important in the face of the game culture that brought us BioShock Infinite… a game that forces you to watch images of racialized violence. There’s a part where you’re forced to watch a man of color pecked to death by crows while begging for his life. And then a minute later, you gain a power-up that lets you throw crows at people that peck them to death. BioShock Infinite is an empathy-challenged game. (qtd. in Alexander 2013) The focus on empathy and contemplation in adventure games creates a radically different space for connecting with their central characters, even if these connections are challenging to make. The danger of a more personal story is that not everyone will relate to it. One reviewer writes positively about interacting with the many complex characters in Night in the Woods but struggles to identify with its protagonist: She is often selfish, cruel, self-absorbed and destructive in ways that may be believable and relatable but rarely ever pleasant. Mae is 18

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s­ omewhat redeemed by a childlike joy in simple pleasures, a streak of loyalty to her friends and some late-game realizations about her own failings, but only somewhat. (McElroy 2017) Mae is a different kind of loser from Leisure Suit Larry and solves different kinds of problems than Laverne in Day of the Tentacle. But in many ways, she is nevertheless their descendant. She continues a long thread of outsider protagonists in adventure games and their often complex relationships with outsider players.

Radical Makers Another powerful outsider narrative is that of the outsider as visionary rebel, a framing that dates back centuries. During the Romantic period, outsiders who “preached a dissatisfaction with the mundane everyday world” began to be seen as not just aberrations but potential sources of revelation: artists, prophets, and visionaries (Cubbs 1994). While this notion had faded somewhat by the early twentieth century, Colin Wilson’s 1956 cultural study The Outsider helped usher in the counterculture movement by exploring the critical roles that outsiders from Dostoyevsky to Kafka to Hermann Hesse had played in shaping modern society. As beatniks and hippies came to dominate the cultural conversation in the following few decades, art brut (localized as “outsider art”) became a dominant force in arts conversations, celebrating art by creators outside the mainstream who drew inspiration from “their own resources rather than [from] the stereotypes of artistic tradition or fashion” (Jean Dubuffet, qtd. in Cardinal 1994). It was of course into this cultural environment that those early hackers who birthed adventure games came from, and it’s perhaps no surprise that many of them saw themselves as visionary pioneers: like those renaissance prophets “exiled from common social life by the myth of their unique creative vision” (Cubbs 1994). The aftermath of the counterculture movement left behind profound changes on how we conceptualize heroes and their role in society. At the height of the classic adventure game’s prime, sci-fi editor Veronica Hollinger was studying the resurgence of vampires and aliens as dominant outsider archetypes, noting the modern works remaking these classic monsters “might be said to constitute a new literary canon developed around the figure of the Outsider.” These works of weird fiction suggested “a new representation created by a politicized contemporary literature in its protests 19

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider

against the coercive nature of patriarchal marginalization” (Hollinger 1989). The Other in popular fiction was increasingly no longer an unknowable monster but a necessary self: a way of being that defied norms and fought back against oppression. While most early adventure game characters were hardly subversively politicized, their contrast to the potent heroes of other games suggested a hidden potential to protest and resist entrenched norms. This potential began to be realized by the outsider players of the first generation of adventure games, who grew up and decided to make their own. Anthropy’s book on ZZT, a 1990s’ tool for making adventure games, describes the many weird, subversive, experimental, and exploratory games made in its hybrid ASCII art engine, shared and remixed by creators on bulletin boards or the early web (2014). Meanwhile, fans of text adventures had reverse-engineered the tools that now-defunct companies like Infocom had used to make their games and began a quiet revolution exploring the possibilities of interactive narrative, experimenting with techniques of point-of-view, unreliable narration, and the nature of choice and agency in interactive stories decades before these ideas would be explored in more mainstream games (Short 2016). Free from any commercial entanglements, these abandoned or newly forged spaces allowed individual developers to explore alternate ideas of what games could be. Soha Kareem describes these games as a space to be “transgressive from a status quo” of gaming (2015), while developer Zoë Quinn’s punk manifesto describes the need for altgames that experiment with, and break, traditional conventions: What people don’t realize is that when you start making things outside of the convention of what is normal or good or “best practices”, you’re also shedding some of the baggage that comes with the concept of what a game “should” be. You won’t be at the mercy of design conventions that haven’t been challenged in 20 years just because they “seem game-y”. You’re starting with a truly blank canvas, and that has just as much potential to yield truly experimental work as it does to produce crap. (2015) The proliferation of easy-to-use tools for the creation of text games, in particular, provided an appealing platform for sole creators to explore radical new ideas or tell uniquely personal stories. The rise of the tool Twine in the 2010s, a platform for easily constructing a set of linked story nodes, saw a revolution in games from outsider creators, chronicled in Anthropy’s book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters (2012). Many of these gamemakers 20

Outsider Characters, Outlier Players

were queer, and the Twine revolution saw for the first time a profusion of narrative games centering LGBTQ voices and stories. While Twine games often connect only loosely to adventure game mechanics, many repurpose the expected tropes of environmental exploration and puzzle solving to subvert or remix them: 2014 game Quing’s Quest VII by Dietrich Squinkifer (whose name references a line from Monkey Island) directly invokes adventure game tropes in its title, cover art, and structure, while games like Howling Dogs (2012) play with genre expectations about progress and the goals of exploration. Narratives of indie success are often harder to come by for these kinds of radical makers. Veve Jaffa has noted that while a number of indie game “auteurs” have achieved name recognition and commercial acclaim, these success narratives are often reserved for white and cis men, with outsider creators encountering far greater resistance: The mischaracterization of indie game success as universal privilege ultimately harms marginalized developers the most, betraying the spirit of indie games: their ability to find their niche with an underrepresented audience. Remember, Jonathan Blow can proudly declare he makes games for “people who read Gravity’s Rainbow” and be celebrated for seeking diverse and discerning audiences, but let one trans game developer greenlight their game about mental illness and the comments section explodes with accusations of exclusivity. (2016) Quinn’s game Depression Quest (2013), its title a reference to adventure games and its mechanics reframing expectations of player agency as a way of understanding the protagonist, famously kicked off the firestorm of the Gamergate harassment campaign against outsider gamemakers. We will discuss how certain kinds of games and makers have been targeted more in Chapter 5. But even when not the focus of attacks, while queer games like Coming Out Simulator 2014 and Read Only Memories or games about and designed by people of color like We Are Chicago have seen critical acclaim and awards nominations, these laurels rarely come with financial support. Scholar Bonnie Ruberg identifies “deep-seated resonances between queerness and games,” drawing from queer theory that goes beyond a strict association with LGBTQ identity to focus on a more conceptual meaning: “queerness as a way of being, doing and desiring differently… a term for a way of reimagining, resisting, and remaking the world” (2019). She considers the movement we identify above as part of a “queer games avant-garde” 21

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider

challenging assumptions—around binaries of gender (or insiderness and outsiderness) but also around “the normative logics that traditionally have dictated how games are played and how they communicate meaning.” Many members of this avant-garde grew up with adventure games, and many continue to explore the mechanics, themes, and aesthetics of the genre in direct or conceptual descendants. We will explore these creators more in Chapter 6 as we consider how some creators of visual novels (another direct descendant of adventure games) subvert normative expectations of romance and victory with mainstream game mechanics.

Finding Adventure Today Adventure games have always been a genre of hybrids and awkward transitions. Sierra’s first decade of games combined a text adventure parser with onscreen graphics: a decade after Mystery House, pure text adventures from Infocom were still on store shelves alongside games with VGA graphics. Years after Myst and other titles cemented the CD-ROM revolution, offering orders of magnitude more storage, new games were still also being released on floppy disks. The ill-fated FMV genre tried to thread the difficult needle of marrying static film clips with expectations of agency and interactivity. In the genre’s commercial decline, awkward hybrids like King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity (1998) tried to stitch increasingly popular open-world 3D  environments and combat into the adventure game template. Loom, which we began this chapter with, was no exception to these growing pains: the game originally supported sound cards only via a separate floppy disk you had to request via mail; a 256-color version with voice acting was released only two years after its original 16-color debut; and the game box contained both an audio cassette tape with a thirty-minute backstory and a physical notebook to record magic spells in. These Frankenstein games—exhausted from the technical arms race, running too slow on some computers and too fast on others, spilling into supplemental materials, and existing in multiple versions—required players willing to live with their awkward growth spurts and stuttering performance. They were misfit games, discovered by many a misfit player who, like their games, were coming of age in a time of astonishing technological change. Adventure games today are still found in interstitial places, and this is in no small part caused by a lack of consensus about what the term even means today. It’s no longer a category represented in mainstream awards or covered 22

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by mainstream publications, and it’s used in a confusing and inconsistent way by online storefronts, often as a catch-all category for any kind of game that foregrounds story. This frustrates dedicated fan communities still using the term in its original sense. In 2008, fan site Adventure Gamers had to clarify its editorial policy to justify how they had decided to use the term: The common denominator among genre-blending games we have covered, then, is as much that they aren’t recognizably something ELSE. [Valve’s 2007 game] Portal is a prime example. Is it a conventional adventure? Of course not. Does it focus on puzzle solving in a narrative framework? Certainly does, and in many ways, much more seamlessly than most traditional fare. The only area it falls short on is the exploration element, although that’s something of a misnomer in this case, as you are certainly encouraged to explore every square inch of territory in pursuit of your goals. There just doesn’t happen to be much of it to explore. Does the physical interaction bump the game into action genre territory? I would say no. Some players will disagree, but that will be the case no matter where one draws the line. (Allin 2008) While this boundary-blurring is an undeniable aspect of modern descendants of adventure games, distribution platforms complicate efforts to gather the branches of this family tree together under a single umbrella. The “adventure” tag on Steam, the most popular online distribution platform as of this writing, is used so broadly that most of its entries incorporate action, violence, and other mechanics not traditionally associated with the genre: top sellers in the category as of summer 2018 included role-playing and survival titles, massively multiplayer online games, and pure strategy games with narratively evocative settings, all titles fundamentally different from what the term originally signified. In contrast to Steam’s “official” genres are its unofficial, crowd-sourced tags. The list of popular tags offers a richer window into how adventure-ish games are defined in today’s vast marketplace of digital distribution: “Story Rich.” “Point & Click.” “Visual Novel.” “Interactive Fiction.” “Exploration.” “Choose Your Own Adventure.” “Dating Sim.” “Choices Matter.” These tags demonstrate how genre borders are pliable: one can categorize games by their user interface conventions, their primary actions, their subject matter, and many other criteria. Exploring these tags specifically for adventure-like games, however, can be frustrating. Recommendation algorithms can often 23

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider

fail to recognize what qualities a user is really interested in. Given the sheer scale of options (7,672 games were released on Steam in 2017), the methods of sorting have become more important than ever to gaining entry into a genre (Kuchera 2018). Labels such as those we examine throughout this book fill many roles. They serve a purpose for consumers looking for their next jam, for designers contextualizing their game to funders or consumers, and for scholars looking at the patterns and trends shaping interactive media’s evolution. But these labels rarely serve all (or even any) of these purposes well, particularly within the outsider subgenres examined here. Other avenues for finding games outside of genre rely on human curation. Steam Curators are humans who assemble lists of like-minded games, offering an entry point into a crowded storefront based on reviews and shared assumptions of taste. Awards offer another avenue for discovery, particularly within independent-focused games festivals such as IndieCade and their communities of makers and players. Finally, many of the most popular classic adventure games have been reborn through new remastered versions, including Day of the Tentacle and the Monkey Island series. The remasters point out another facet of adventure game communities: with a history spanning more than four decades, many of these games can be difficult to find or play on modern computers. The distribution platform GOG began as “Good Old Games,” a dedicated site for players looking to relive classic titles, including many adventure games, in a playable form: each release was wrapped in an emulator and configured to run on modern platforms. The site continues to serve as an alternative portal for old classics and modern indie games (Senior 2012), now billing itself as a “curated” platform: its Adventure Games category is more on-topic than Steam’s, revealing a collection of classics, Telltale titles, walking simulators, Night in the Woods, and many others discussed in this work, side by side. Getting these titles to run often involves questionably legal work by preservationists reverse-engineering code to build emulators, sharing disk images long after the original rights-holders have abandoned them, and reimplementing proprietary algorithms to run on modern hardware. Opensource engine ports and emulators, such as the massively comprehensive MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, which emulates dozens of engines running close to ten thousand individual games), are created through extraordinary efforts from unpaid volunteers, often risking legal action to preserve gaming’s playable history. This work, however, means that many classic adventure games can run in one form or another on modern 24

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platforms, providing an invaluable service to students of adventure games (and many other genres) who can today encounter titles from a number of eras without the difficulties this presented in earlier decades. Adventure games in the past were often hybrids, and today they are often homeless: running in emulators, distributed across multiple tags and categories, brushing up against multiple communities of play and practice without fully belonging to any. A genre in diaspora is difficult to follow, to study, and to characterize. We hope by bringing disparate games under the adventure umbrella into conversation with each other, we can go some way towards clarifying where adventure games stand today.

Chapter Overview In this introduction we’ve outlined what we mean by adventure games, touched on the many ways they evoke the trope of the outsider, and explained our intentions to use this trope as a lens to emphasize personal, marginalized, and resistant trends in modern adventure games and their descendants. In Chapter 2, we consider the historical evolution of adventure games as a label and set of shared design elements, starting with Adventure and tracing how the genre began to stabilize across its first decade of practice. A key feature of adventure games is their “expressive input,” the ability for players to perform experiments, attempt surprising actions, and express themselves within a narrative simulation—allowing for moments like the discovery of reversible spells in Loom. This foundation supports building a bottom-up definition of adventure game mechanics and dynamics, which work together to establish (and resolve tension between) three core pillars of story, exploration, and puzzle-solving. Through this definition, we will explore how key dynamics in the genre function (like the sudden moment of revelation) and establish a design framework that will inform our discussion of these games in the following chapters. In Chapter 3, we discuss the “cinematic choice game,” one of the most popular heirs to the adventure game legacy and best exemplified in the episodic series from Telltale Games. This studio pioneered an evolution of the genre that fused techniques from cinema and television with interfaces allowing for action and choices. We will discuss how as Telltale’s style evolved, and other studios like Quantic Dream and Dontnod Entertainment began to explore cinematic choice games as well, these games developed a number 25

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider

of distinctive features, including a focus on the aesthetic use of choice and exploration of how and when branching narratives actually add value to gameplay. With familiar licenses and a means of continually reconnecting with their audience via episodic releases, Telltale’s model proved successful for more than a decade, not only advancing the state of the art in interactive story design but in providing a new generation of designers experience in their form of storytelling. In Chapter 4, we consider another way modern designers have continued to evolve the adventure game by attempting to fix it, adopting different strategies to recapture its unique “feel” while updating it for modern sensibilities. Perhaps surprisingly, even contradictory approaches have led to successful games. A close reading of three modern storygames—The Witness (2016), Firewatch (2016), and Her Story (2015)—shows how each attempts a different strategy for resolving the core tensions in the genre’s three pillars (story, puzzles, and exploration, respectively) by attempting to remove one of them entirely. Despite their radically different approaches, all three games were critically and commercially successful, in part through bringing fragments of a forgotten genre forward and connecting them to modern game conventions and design innovations. In Chapter 5, we consider another thread of adventure game descendants that have come to be closely associated with gaming “outsiders”: the exploration-focused games called walking simulators. Many of the labels given to emerging storygame subgenres can be read derisively: “walking simulator” in particular suggests a passive experience of moving through an unchallenging (and thus supposedly uninteresting) environment. And yet the most powerful games in this mode use exploration of space as a surrogate for exploration of character, often center the experiences of traditionally marginalized voices within gaming, and have been the site of many innovations in the last decade. The breakthrough indie hit Gone Home (2013) exemplifies this genre, inviting the player to occupy a specific perspective while literally piecing together a family’s identity from fragments of environmental storytelling. We also consider how Dear Esther (2008) repurposed the engine and aesthetics of the first-person shooter through modding and introduced a radical refocusing of gaming actions that spawned new ways of thinking about, and exploring, spaces in games. In Chapter 6, we turn to the surprisingly direct threads leading from classic adventure games to dating sims and visual novels, another genre on the margins of the industry. These games put characters and relationships at the forefront, focusing almost exclusively on conversation as a prime 26

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mechanic: today’s survivors of the dialogue trees originated by adventure games. These games embrace different modes of play, while remaining grounded in embedding players in a fictional world in which they must think like the central character to successfully advance. We connect players of these games to Shira Chess’s “Player Two”: othered players who approach games from a different perspective than that of the masculine, adrenalinfueled Player One. Many of these creators build on the potential of games grounded in woman-centered spaces and domestic “quests” to subvert the cisgendered, heteronormative expectations of mainstream games, creating a space for queer and feminist play. We also survey the many ways in which outsider creators have used the genre’s strict aesthetics to subvert or counteract traditional assumptions about how love and relationships function in gaming. In Chapter 7, we consider how emerging technologies are changing the future of adventure games. We propose the term “reality media” to encompass virtual, augmented, and mixed reality experiences, considering these all as an emerging platform fundamentally challenging many assumptions about what storygames can do and be. Virtual reality has been framed as the new frontier for interactive stories, but challenges such as the difficulty of characterizing a strong protagonist, or a loss of control over the player’s actions or (in the case of augmented reality) environment, have created nontrivial obstacles to realizing this dream. Radical platforms suggest radical updates to existing design assumptions, and a number of designers have begun to tackle these challenges. We consider the games Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-Ality (2017) and Fragments (2016) for the way in which they turn reality media’s strengths and limitations into a platform for new kinds of adventure games. The ultimate challenges of reality media will be to artfully reintroduce the discontinuities of space and time that characterize storytelling and to build on the experience of being present in a space to reclaim the motivation provided by the identity of the player character. In the final chapter, we consider the game Kentucky Route Zero, a modern adventure game that draws many of the threads of this volume together: an indie game with a cast of outsider protagonists, drawing on the genre’s rich history while continuing to innovate and evolve. We will look at the ways this game suggests different futures for the genre than the technologydriven approaches explored in the previous chapter and consider how our cross-disciplinary approach merging design, cultural, and historical analysis provides new insights into studying narrative games, how they work, and what they mean. 27

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider

We do not intend this book to be a hagiography of adventure games, singing their praises while brushing their failings under the rug. But we do hope to shine a spotlight on the many ways in which they’ve been, perhaps unfairly, overlooked. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard, quoted in Eburne’s book Outsider Theory, notes that the value of systems like alchemy or dream interpretation lies not necessarily in their claims to absolute truth but in “their capacity to challenge the close-minded certainty that stands in the way of truth” (qtd. in Eburne 2018). Conventional wisdom holds that game designers, players, and scholars have nothing further to learn from adventure games. We disagree. Across the volume we will consider adventure games like Eburne does his “outlandish” ideas: worthy of study despite their flaws. We will consider the prospect that adventure games are not dead but alive and well and living in diverse places; that vast swaths of modern gaming continue conversations and threads of design work begun decades ago in classic adventure games; that the genre has always been one that pushed the boundaries of the mainstream from within and without; that it says things games cannot say in any other way. And like Weaver Bobbin Threadbare in Loom, and that ten-year-old adventurer some of us once were, we hope that new insights will keep unlocking new ways to move forward.

Works Cited Aarseth, Espen J. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins University Press. Adams, Ernest. 2014. Fundamentals of Adventure Game Design. Peachpit Press. Adkins, John Gabriel. 2018. “Two Histories of Myst.” Picking Up the Pieces (blog). July 11, 2018. https://medium.com/picking-up-the-pieces/two-histories-ofmyst-8b37e1504f9e. Alexander, Leigh. 2013. “Four Perspectives on Personal Games.” Gamasutra. April 29, 2013. Allin, Jack. 2008. “No Sliding the Slippery Slope.” Adventure Gamers. May 19, 2008. https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/22040. Andreadis, Kosta. 2015. “The Past, Present and Future of Adventure Games.” IGN (blog). March 1, 2015. http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/03/02/the-pastpresent-and-future-of-adventure-games. Anthropy, Anna. 2012. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-Outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. Seven Stories Press. Anthropy, Anna. 2014. ZZT. Boss Fight Books. 28

Outsider Characters, Outlier Players Cardinal, Roger. 1994. “Toward an Outsider Aesthetic.” In The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture, edited by Michael D. Hall and Eugene W. Metcalf Jr. Smithsonian Institution Press. Chbosky, Stephen. 1999. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Pocket Books. Chess, Shira. 2017. Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity. University of Minnesota Press. Cobbett, Richard. 2015. “The 10 Worst and Most WTF Adventure Game Puzzles.” PC Gamer (blog). January 30, 2015. https://www.pcgamer.com/the-10-worstand-most-wtf-puzzles-in-adventure-gaming/. Cosmides, Leda, John Tooby, and Robert Kurzban. 2003. “Perceptions of Race.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7 (4): 173–179. Cubbs, Joanne. 1994. “Rebels, Mystics, and Outcasts: The Romantic Artist Outsider.” In The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture, edited by Michael D. Hall and Eugene W. Metcalf Jr., 76–93. Smithsonian Institution Press. DeMunn, Betty D. 1988. “Review: Plundered Hearts.” ST-Log, June 1988. Deterding, Sebastian. 2017. “The Pyrrhic Victory of Game Studies: Assessing the Past, Present, and Future of Interdisciplinary Game Research.” Games and Culture 12 (6): 521–543. Dormann, Claire, and Mish Boutet. 2013. “Incongruous Avatars and Hilarious Sidekicks: Design Patterns for Comical Game Characters.” In Proceedings of DiGRA 2013: DeFragging Game Studies. Eburne, Jonathan. 2018. Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Questionable Ideas. University of Minnesota Press. Eisenbeis, Richard. 2014. “Why You Should Play the Longest Journey and Dreamfall.” Kotaku. October 21, 2014. https://kotaku.com/why-you-shouldplay-the-longest-journey-and-dreamfall-1648772015. Fernández-Vara, Clara. 2009. The Tribulations of Adventure Games: Integrating Story into Simulation through Performance. Georgia Institute of Technology. Fernández-Vara, Clara. 2011. “From ‘Open Mailbox’ to Context Mechanics: Shifting Levels of Abstraction in Adventure Games.” In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games, 131–138. ACM. Frasca, Gonzalo. 1999. “Ludology Meets Narratology: Similitude and Differences between (Video) Games and Narrative.” Originally Published in Finnish in Parnasso 1999: 3, 365–371. http://www.ludology.org/articles/ludology.htm. Giappone, Krista Bonello Rutter. 2015. “Self-Reflexivity and Humor in Adventure Games.” Game Studies 15 (1). http://gamestudies.org/1501/articles/bonello_k. Gilbert, Ron. 1989. “Why Adventure Games Suck.” Journal of Computer Game Design 3 (4): 4–7. Hinton, S. E. 1967. The Outsiders. Viking Press. Hollinger, Veronica. 1989. “The Vampire and the Alien: Variations on the Outsider (Le Vampire et l’étranger: Variations Sur Le Motif de l’autre).” Science Fiction Studies 16 (2): 145–160. Holmberg, Petter. 2001. “King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella: Development History.” The King’s Quest Chronicles. http://www.oocities.org/petter_holmberg/ kq4dev.html. 29

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider Jackson-Mead, Kevin, and J. Robinson Wheeler, eds. 2011. IF Theory Reader. >TRANSCRIPT ON PRESS. Jaffa, Veve. 2016. “The Myth of the Indie Game Success Story Needs to Stop and Here’s Why.” Model View Culture (blog). April 27, 2016. https:// modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-myth-of-the-indie-game-success-storyneeds-to-stop-and-heres-why. Kareem, Soha. 2015. “The Games That Are Too Underground to Be Indie.” Motherboard. April 23, 2015. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ nzemdx/the-games-that-are-too-underground-to-be-indie. Kennedy, Helen. 2002. “Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo? On the Limits of Textual Analysis.” Game Studies 2 (2). http://www.gamestudies.org/0202/ kennedy/. Kopas, Merritt, ed. 2015. Videogames for Humans: Twine Authors in Conversation. Instar Books. Kuchera, Ben. 2018. “Report: 7,672 Games Were Released on Steam in 2017.” Polygon. January 10, 2018. https://www.polygon.com/2018/1/10/16873446/ steam-release-dates-2017. Larkin, Roy C. 2016. First Person Adventure Games: History, Technology and Future. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. MacLeod, Riley. 2017. “Night in the Woods: The Kotaku Review.” Kotaku. February 24, 2017. https://kotaku.com/night-in-the-woods-the-kotakureview-1792726026. Maher, Jimmy. 2016. “Sierra Gets Creative.” The Digital Antiquarian (blog). August 26, 2016. https://www.filfre.net/2016/08/sierra-gets-creative/. McElroy, Justin. 2017. “Night in the Woods Review.” Polygon. March 3, 2017. https://www.polygon.com/2017/3/3/14807446/night-in-the-woods-review. Montfort, Nick. 2003. Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. The MIT Press. Moss, Richard. 2011. “A Truly Graphic Adventure: The 25-Year Rise and Fall of a Beloved Genre.” Ars Technica. January 27, 2011. https://arstechnica.com/ gaming/reviews/2011/01/history-of-graphic-adventures.ars. Murray, Erik. 2000. “Death of Adventure Games.” Old Man Murray (blog). September 11, 2000. http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html. Murray, Janet. 2004. “From Game-Story to Cyberdrama.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. MIT Press, 2–11. National Organization for Women. 2002. “Action Alert: Speak Out against ‘Grand Theft Auto III.’” January 25, 2002. Nelson, Graham. 1995. “The Craft of Adventure.” http://www.ifarchive.org/ifarchive/info/Craft.Of.Adventure.txt. Nooney, Laine. 2013. “A Pedestal, a Table, a Love Letter: Archaeologies of Gender in Videogame History.” Game Studies 13 (2). http://www.gamestudies.org/1302/ articles/nooney. Quinn, Zoe. 2015. “Punk Games.” Boing Boing (blog). March 16, 2015. https:// boingboing.net/2015/03/16/punk-games.html.

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Outsider Characters, Outlier Players Reed, Aaron A. 2017. “Changeful Tales: Design-Driven Approaches toward More Expressive Storygames.” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz. Rosenberg, Adam. 2013. “Myst’s Co-Creator Looks Back on His Game’s 20 Year Legacy.” Digital Trends (blog). April 12, 2013. https://www.digitaltrends.com/ gaming/myst-co-creator-robyn-miller-looks-back-on-his-games-20-yearlegacy/. Ruberg, Bonnie. 2019. Video Games Have Always Been Queer. New York University Press. Salter, Anastasia. 2014. What Is Your Quest?: From Adventure Games to Interactive Books. University of Iowa Press. Salter, Anastasia. 2016. “Playing at Empathy: Representing and Experiencing Emotional Growth through Twine Games.” In 2016 IEEE International Conference on Serious Games and Applications for Health (SeGAH), 1–8. IEEE. Salter, Anastasia. 2017. Jane Jensen: Gabriel Knight, Adventure Games, Hidden Objects. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. Salter, Anastasia, and Bridget Blodgett. 2017. Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media: Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing. Springer. Scott, Jason. 2006. GET LAMP: Austin Seraphin. https://archive.org/details/ getlamp-austin. Senior, Tom. 2012. “Good Old Games Relaunches as GOG, Will Sell Indie Games and More Current Titles DRM Free.” PCGamer. March 27, 2012. https://www. pcgamer.com/good-old-games-relaunches-as-gog-will-sell-indie-games-andmore-current-titles-drm-free/. Short, Emily. 2016. “Brief Bibliography about IF History.” Emily Short’s Interactive Storytelling (blog). April 2, 2016. https://emshort.blog/2016/04/02/briefbibliography-about-if-history/. Slashdot user “seebs.” 2013. “Comment on Article ‘Myst Was Supposed to Change the Face of Gaming. What Is Its Legacy?’” Slashdot. September 24, 2013. https:// games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4260647&cid=44942577. Smallwood, Nancy. 2018. “King’s Quest IV: A Love Letter from My 3-YearOld Heart.” Rock, Paper, Shotgun (blog). April 25, 2018. https://www. rockpapershotgun.com/2018/04/25/kings-quest-iv-a-love-letter-from-my-3year-old-heart/. Tajfel, Henri. 1970. “Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination.” Scientific American 223 (5): 96–103. Tychsen, Anders, Michael Hitchens, and Thea Brolund. 2008. “Character Play: The Use of Game Characters in Multi-Player Role-Playing Games across Platforms.” Computers in Entertainment 6 (2): 22:1–22:24. Waxman, Becky. 2016. “Day of the Tentacle Remastered Review.” Adventure Gamers. May 6, 2016. https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/30430. Williams, Roberta. 1988. “Roberta Williams on the New King’s Quest.” Sierra Newsletter, Winter 1988. Wilson, Colin. 1956. The Outsider. Gollancz. Yoshida, Emily. 2013. “Lost to the Ages.” Grantland (blog). September 24, 2013. http://grantland.com/features/looking-back-game-myst-20th-anniversary/.

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CHAPTER 2 DEFINING ADVENTURE GAMES FROM THE GROUND UP

Obviously, no small computer program can encompass the entire universe. What it can do, however, is simulate enough of the universe to appear more intelligent than it really is. (Dave Lebling, co-creator of Zork, 1979) In the previous chapter we outlined the kinds of games we think fall under the umbrella of the adventure game label, an eclectic set of titles that includes everything from Adventure to Myst to King’s Quest to Firewatch to Dear Esther to Night in the Woods. But what does this diverse set of games really have in common? Games are often studied through approaches that cluster them in genres defined by shared mechanics or UI conventions (Adams 2009), so that, for instance, the foundational features of text adventures like Trinity are identified as a command-line parser and text input/output (Montfort 2003; Douglass 2007) while puzzle-platformers like Limbo are defined by their side-scrolling viewpoint and a jumping mechanic (Minkkinen 2016). But on a higher level, it seems intuitive that these games operate in a shared (or at least overlapping) design context. Consider Figure 2.1, showing three nearly identical moments in games of three different styles. In each, a player exploring a narratively charged environment must come to realize that a dead, weakened tree can be pushed over to create a pathway to a previously inaccessible area. What these games share is not low-level mechanics but a design aesthetic based around experimentation in an explorable environment and moments of revelation. The remainder of this chapter will consider how a particular set of ideas came to define an adventure game aesthetic that cuts across surface-level genre boundaries to a deeper core. We will consider how these ideas emerged and evolved through the first few decades of the genre’s existence and the ways particular mechanics and designs can

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider

Figure 2.1  Limbo (2010), a puzzle-platformer; Space Quest II (1987), a graphical

adventure game; and Trinity (1986), a text adventure, all highlighting an identical r­ evelatory moment of the player realizing that part of the environment can be used to ­advance the narrative.

enable or frustrate them.1 We will trace the origins of the term “adventure game” and how its meaning changed over time as well as how the games themselves evolved through the 1980s and 1990s to adapt rapidly changing technologies to meet particular aesthetic goals. As we define this broader view of the genre, we will gain a useful lens for the remainder of this book to discuss how adventure games (and their relatives and descendants) work as playable experiences and storytelling systems. We’ll conclude our historical survey of the classic period of adventure games by applying this lens to their commercial downfall, using it to reveal how changing cultural and technical considerations made it increasingly difficult to successfully execute on the genre’s tricky aspirational aesthetics—in, at least, their original form. The First Adventure(s) The story of the adventure game begins most clearly with its namesake, the original Adventure (the 1977 Crowther and Woods version).2 Its Some of this chapter is based on material that first appeared in Reed (2017). This game is sometimes called ADVENT, its filename on early systems that could support only six-letter commands, or Colossal Cave Adventure to distinguish it from the (very different, graphical) Atari Adventure (1979). We’ll simply use Adventure throughout this book, which is what the game calls itself in its opening text. 1 2

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Defining Adventure Games from the Ground Up

gameplay and origins have now been well-documented (Jerz 2007; Maher 2011b), but here is a brief summary: in the game, the player explores an underground cave system filled with treasures and obstacles. The game describes the surroundings to the player in present-tense, second-person prose, and the player indicates what action they would like to take through typing short commands like “go east” or “get lamp.” The game was begun by influential ARPANET coder Willie Crowther, who, along with his then-wife Patricia, were avid cavers.3 After their divorce, Crowther reportedly created Adventure as a way of connecting with their two daughters, eventually posting an incomplete version on the ARPANET with little publicity. Some time later, Stanford grad student Don Woods found, significantly expanded, and ­re-shared the game, and in this version it became wildly popular. It’s hard to overstate how much Adventure’s popularity influenced modern computer games. In early 1977, shared and re-shared across the early internet, it is said to have “set the entire computer industry back two weeks,” so ravenously was it consumed (Anderson 1985). The founding members of many first-generation game companies (Infocom, Sierra, Atari, among many others) were directly inspired by the game’s potential (Jerz 2007), and many modern genres such as MMOs, RPGs, survival horror, walking simulators, and action-adventure games can trace their lineage back to the adventure game genre and through to the original Adventure. And yet it’s important also to remember that Adventure’s legend has grown in the telling, crowding out other early games that were also influential. In her examination of the evolutionary narrative ascribed to adventure games, Laine Nooney points out that Adventure existed in an ecosystem of other early games circulating on the ARPANET that influenced the first generation of game pioneers, with no clear chronology available at the time as to which came first (2017). She notes that in the earliest histories of this period, they tend to appear as a body of work, with Adventure given no more or less significance than its many peers and imitators: King’s Quest creator Roberta Williams mentions Adventure in a 1981 interview about her inspirations, but also Journey and The Count, two 1979 text games almost forgotten today. Adventure did differ from many of these other games in a key way. Most of its peers were created by and for the geeky first generation of 3 In 1972 Patricia had been an instrumental part of an exploration team that connected the Mammoth and Flint Ridge cave systems, making them the biggest cave system in the world (Brucker and Watson 1987).

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computer users: number-heavy simulations like the original Lunar moonlanding simulator (1969; essentially an interactive calculus spreadsheet) or Hunt the Wumpus (1973), which assumes familiarity with the layout of a dodecahedron and describes its maze more with numbers (points and vertices) than words. Adventure’s target audience, by contrast, was Crowther’s children, both under twelve at the time and outsiders to early computer culture for any number of reasons, their gender not the least. Woods’ act of “finishing” Adventure by adding a score, rewards, enemies, and practical affordances for playing on a time-share system can be seen as an act of translation: making an “outlandish” game more palatable to the computing insiders of the time. The result was a unique hybrid: Crowther’s realistic descriptions of cave passages mingled with Woods’ addition of favorite fantasy tropes, prose-laden exploration and timerbased puzzles, and a game written for kids modified to be one addictive to hackers. Years later, these games would be characterized as “a narrative at war with a crossword” (G. Nelson 1995); early game studies were dominated by arguments over whether they could best be understood as stories or systems. This hybridity, this tension, has been in the genre from the very beginning. Whatever the reasons for its success, Adventure undoubtedly helped spawn a “computer game aesthetic” as something distinct from console and arcade games, due in part to its arrival just as home computing was becoming a possibility. Its keyboard-driven input and demands of thensignificant amounts read/write storage to store its kilobytes of story text and save games (Salter 2014) differentiated it from Pong and other games played at the arcade. Though it’s hard to appreciate these paltry improvements as groundbreaking today, they signaled a pivotal moment in the evolution of interactive digital entertainment. While earlier games like Wumpus were sketches toward the notion of transportation into a simulated environment, Adventure was among the first to focus on creating an immersive experience: providing, through its second-person prose, an illusion that you were really there. The illusion was maintained through its natural language input and a consistent simulated story world that could be explored, interrogated, and experimented with. This was revolutionary in no small part for suggesting the immense and untapped potential of computers for changing the way stories could be told. One moment from early in the game exemplifies this promise. After the player solves the cave’s first few challenges, they come to this worrisome sight:

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Defining Adventure Games from the Ground Up

A HUGE GREEN FIERCE DRAGON BARS THE WAY!4 The words mirror another test which players must previously have passed to reach this point: A HUGE GREEN FIERCE SNAKE BARS THE WAY! Getting past the snake is one of the game’s first puzzles. Commands like KILL SNAKE are non-starters: “ATTACKING THE SNAKE BOTH DOESN’T WORK AND IS VERY DANGEROUS.” Nor can you squeeze past the snake into the deeper cave system before dealing with it. The solution involves caging a small bird, bringing it to the snake and then freeing it; the bird somewhat surprisingly drives the snake away in “AN ASTOUNDING FLURRY.” Not long after, the player reaches the dragon, described with almost identical language and a mechanically similar obstacle: it seems to block access to more of the cave and attempts to kill it through conventional means (such as with the axe, useful against aggressive dwarves) are fruitless. And so, eventually, the player tries this: >KILL DRAGON WITH WHAT? YOUR BARE HANDS? >YES CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE JUST VANQUISHED A  DRAGON WITH YOUR BARE HANDS! (UNBELIEVABLE, ISN’T IT?) This delightful moment, apparently added by Woods (Dyer 2017), speaks to the way the adventure game would become a standard-bearer for the potential of digital storytelling. The moment does several things at once. First, it’s a release of tension, making trivial what the player assumes will be a major challenge. Second, in contrast to games driven by reflexes or statistics, slaying the dragon does not rely on your physical or simulated strength, gender, or any other attribute: all it requires is a bit of cheek. It’s an implicit subversion of the notion that these things matter to a heroic identity or a good story. Structurally, the dragon puzzle delights by momentarily offering a more sophisticated kind of back-and-forth interaction than the rest of the The original versions of Adventure were written for computers that did not yet distinguish between lowercase and capital letters, meaning all the game’s original content is uppercase only. 4

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Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider

game supports, one not foreshadowed by earlier interactions (typing YES or NO at other points in the game results, untruthfully, in “I DON’T KNOW THAT WORD”). The borderline-magical feel of a computer transcending its limitations would later be characterized as a double-edged sword for parserdriven interactive fiction (Short 2010), but especially in the early days of computing, people wanted to believe in magic. Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine (1981), one of the first books to discuss Adventure, recounts a moment of astonishment at a similar response during a post-midnight tour of the game by a hacker with a “sneaky smile”: “How did the computer know to do that?” “I don’t know,” said Alsing, coyly. “Sometimes it’s perceptive, other times just dumb.” The dragon moment is also a metatextual joke: by not actually describing how this bare-handed victory is accomplished, by calling it “unbelievable,” the winking implication is that we are meant to read this not as something that literally happened but as the narrator having a bit of fun with us. Breaking the fourth wall would become a common trope in adventure games as another way of signaling the genre’s outsiderness: unlike all those other games (and other gamers), we’re not taking ourselves too seriously. In Adventure’s success, a generation of hackers saw the perfect vehicle for introducing the masses to the enormous potential of home computers, the kind of revolution foreseen in titles like Ted Nelson’s manifesto Computer Lib/ Dream Machines (1974). What better way to show that computers weren’t just for nerds? They could be funny. They could be transporting. Hastily stolen, ported, or repackaged by a number of early software companies (including Microsoft: their version of Adventure was a launch title for the IBM PC), the game was one of the first “killer app” demos for home computing, a role the genre would continue to play throughout the 1980s. Companies like Adventure International and Infocom sprung up to market Adventure clones to the earliest home computer users, distributed at first on cassette tapes in plastic baggies. But slowly, what started as direct or thinly veiled rip-offs began branching out, exploring the strange new territory this curious game had opened up. A Definition Evolves While the genre itself proved immediately and explosively popular, the term “adventure game” took a while to emerge. When it was a more singular 38

Defining Adventure Games from the Ground Up

phenomenon, Adventure itself needed no descriptor more than “game” or “program,” the two words used for it in Kidder’s 1981 book. When similar games began appearing, some of these were perhaps naturally called “Adventures,” the term used, for instance, by Scott Adams of Adventure International to describe and market his products (Maher 2011a). One of the first scholarly works about Adventure is a dissertation entitled “Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame ‘Adventure’” (Buckles 1986), whose introduction admits the title is a scattershot approach to finding an appropriate term. The author, Mary Ann Buckles (another outsider, who stumbled across the game in the midst of a doctorate in German Literature) coined the term “storygame” to refer to this “new form of ‘literature’, in which the reader, for the first time, takes part in writing the story as (s)he reads it.” Buckles placed these games within a long tradition of playful texts, including detective fiction, riddles, word games, and make-believe. The “storygame” term has since been used in a wide variety of contexts and situations (Reed 2018): we’ll use it lightly throughout the book as a broader category for any game that requires understanding of both a system and a story to proceed. So what did contemporary authors call their games? When Zork appeared in 1979, its creators labeled the genre somewhat clumsily as “Computerized Fantasy Simulation,” tying its lineage to tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons as well as their digital imitators, which would become best-known through Rogue (1980). These latter games, with some narrative component but more focus on statistics, skill, and sometimes reflexes, grew their own still-active family tree of “roguelikes” and spawned the entire computer role-playing game (CRPG) genre. But this mitosis took place over some time. The Book of Adventure Games (1985) still identified its subject matter as a parent genre containing both “puzzle adventures”—what we think of as adventure games now—and “fantasy adventures” like roguelikes or CRPGs (Schuette 1985). Zork’s creators did state the defining characteristics of their new genre, however, in one of the first attempts to formally define it: First, the object of the game is usually to collect treasure, and this may be done only by solving problems… Second, a great deal of the enjoyment of such games is derived by probing their responses in a sort of informal Turing test: ‘I wonder what it will say if I do this?’ The players and designers delight in clever (or unexpected) responses to  otherwise useless actions. (Lebling, Blank, and Anderson 1979) 39

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider

Solving problems, often in the form of puzzles, is by far the most common feature identified as core to adventure games. Designer Al Lowe has suggested this dynamic may have sprouted from the often inscrutable puzzle of dealing with early computers in the first place (1999): staring at a command prompt trying to figure out what to do next was perhaps only marginally less frustrating in Zork than Unix. The adventure game puzzle, as opposed to other kinds of gaming challenges, is generally solved through wits, not reflexes: a more recent definition of adventure games says they have “a reduced emphasis on combat or action elements” (Rollings and Adams 2003). This differentiates the genre from other kinds of games centered around coordinated movement. While movement and occasional tests of coordination appear in most adventure games in some form or another, their pacing is generally much slower and their challenges more intellectual, another way they differed from their arcade peers. Adventure game puzzles also tend to be singular rather than repeatable challenges. While in a roguelike, a player might learn a trick that can be reused in later encounters (such as that goblins have a weakness to fire), and in a platforming game, a player gains mastery over particular skills that can be reused again and again to meet future challenges, in an adventure game each problem is generally unique. Sierra’s original King’s Quest (1984), for example, has a witch who lives in an edible house clearly inspired by Hansel and Gretel: to defeat the witch, you must hide in her house, wait until she’s leaning over her oven, walk up behind her, and push her inside, just as in the fairy tale. Pushing is not an action used elsewhere in the game, nor are there other witches to be defeated. Challenges in adventure games thus function more like the obstacles in traditional narratives than the many repetitive hurdles present in most game genres. Here, each is a distinct story beat which the player and protagonist must overcome—or perhaps fail to, a point we will return to later in the chapter. King’s Quest is a good snapshot of where the genre had advanced to by the mid-1980s. Pure text adventures now existed alongside a wide variety of hybrid graphical games that mixed text parsers with images, sounds, and animation.5 In King’s Quest the player still types commands and gets text output, but now the player also uses the arrow keys to direct an avatar

Just as Microsoft’s Adventure was a launch title for the original IBM PC, King’s Quest was a launch title for the family-friendly PCjr (Maher 2013). 5

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through a series of full-screen rooms, alongside animated sprites such as crocodiles, witches, or waterfalls. Unlike in a pure text game, the avatar’s position matters: it must be close enough to objects to interact with them or far enough from enemies to avoid danger. By 1986, with hundreds of examples rather than handfuls, definitions had grown slightly broader: many adventure games had appeared based on ideas other than treasure hunts, for instance. One of the first published guides to creating one’s own adventure games defines them as “in essence, a puzzle or series of puzzles” (Hartnell 1984) but goes on to clarify that these puzzles must be placed in a consistent environment which the player must gain mastery over, such as through producing a map. The notion of a consistent environment that must be explored is a second key component of adventure games, along with the related notion that there must be someone to do the exploring. Another mid-eighties guide to adventure games defined the genre as: one in which the computer provides an alter ego for you, the game player… The challenge usually involves solving many puzzles in pursuit  of the final reward… The search for surprises and a little humor in unexpected places make up another key factor… Some of the pleasure of these games derives from succeeding after repeated failure. (Schuette 1985) Puzzles appear again in this definition (along with the clarification that they should not be trivially easy), but new is the notion of the alter ego, a specific character who is solving the puzzles and pursuing a goal. While some adventure games conflate the notion of player and player character through use of the second-person voice or a first-person camera, the genre is often remembered for games where the avatar was visible on screen as a particular, personified character. A disconnect between the consistency of the environment and the conceit that the player character operates within it can be detected in this longer definition from the 1990 Encyclopedia of Microcomputers, in which one might also hear some hints of frustration: [T]he player is placed into what appears to be a realistic fantasy world. The objectives are rarely stated so the player must not only figure out what to do but what the objective of the game is. The player can move from location to location, pick up and drop objects, and take vari41

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ous kinds of actions. Objects include (1) “treasures,” which increase the players [sic] score, (2) weapons, which the player can use to fight the various opponents of the adventure game, (3) literal or figurative keys, which are important in solving puzzles of the game, (4) objects containing clues, and (5) some objects that are totally useless. (Kent and Williams 1989) This definition (perhaps somewhat passive-aggressively) identifies several frustrations that can arise when puzzles and exploration are poorly integrated. Useless objects and unclear objectives are signs that the player’s exploration is being frustrated. But object manipulation (successful and otherwise) as well as movement show up in adventure game definitions precisely because they enable the exploration and experimentation which is necessary for a player to understand enough about the world to solve its situated puzzles. For experimentation to be effective, the world must be consistent (as Hartnell pointed out), and another word for a consistent world that can be acted upon is a “simulation.” It may seem odd to ascribe this word to adventure games, in which behaviors are generally entirely hand-crafted rather than emergent.6 And yet it is important to the genre’s aesthetics that players act as if they are playing within a simulated world where anything might happen. To complete an adventure game, the player must create a mental model of the world, and likely events that could happen within it, in order to reason about what actions in a large possibility space might be fruitful. Good designers, in turn, will create mental models of various ways players might try to interact with that world, encoding responses to actions to make the world interesting to explore or point the players toward fruitful courses of action. Recall Schutte’s definition from 1985 stating that “the pleasure of these games derives from succeeding after repeated failure.” Interactive fiction designer

6 Some early threads of adventure game design did explore more explicitly simulationist approaches, including in games like The Hobbit (1982), in which characters could move of their own volition through the world, or The Pawn (1985), which promised objects with changeable attributes and qualities, such that one could damage a wooden door by hitting it with a stone statuette, thus offering up a realm of emergent solutions to any given problem. In practice these game systems were rarely as impressive as advertised and tended to increase only confusion, not immersion. Outside of these early experiments, while adventure games sometimes have (hand-encoded) alternate puzzle solutions, generally there is only ever one correct way to solve each problem.

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Andrew Plotkin also identifies this tension between open-ended input and a simulated world as a core characteristic of adventure games: Resolving this tension is in your hands, and what are your tools? The game’s description of its reality, and your understanding of it as reality. If you treat the words (or pixels) as interface elements of a program, you have no handhold. Any button could be the magic button. They are distinguished only by their meaning in the game world. The adventure game interface, in other words, is accessible only via player immersion… Why does an IF game provide a simulated world? Because the player’s understanding of the world must be the primary means of determining what is possible. (Plotkin 2011) The player’s understanding of the world, arrived at through exploration and experimentation, is enabled by mechanics for manipulating that world and its contents. Plotkin observes that when this marriage fails, it’s often because of poor design: in puzzles that don’t make narrative sense and thus give players no means to learn how to solve them, or interfaces that do not accurately carry out and report back on the results. Curiously, story does not appear explicitly in most early definitions of adventure games. By the time of a 1999 roundtable on the genre at the Game Developers Conference, however, it had risen to top billing in the definition they arrived at: “to be considered an adventure game, a game must emphasize story, include a protagonist, puzzles, and inventory objects and have a definite beginning and end” (Lowe 1999). This notion of a story with a beginning and an end is another differentiator between adventure games and other kinds of storygames. Fernández-Vara describes the “ideal walkthrough” for an adventure game: a sequence of actions that will take the player character through their proscribed story, without an abrupt early end along the way (2009). Through exploration and puzzle-solving, the player attempts to discover the ideal walkthrough. While most adventure games feature open worlds such that many puzzles might be solved in different possible orders, generally by the end of a successful playthrough, the player will have seen nearly all the game’s content. Contrast this with hyperfiction or branching narrative games, which often have many valid paths and significantly more content than a player will see in a single traversal. This requirement that players encounter, in some order, nearly all the content in the game puts them in a curious position: “an actor without a script,” as Fernández-Vara puts it (2009), hinting at this tension between 43

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exploratory freedom and proscribed actions. How does the player know what action will advance the story? In a well-designed game, story bridges this gap by unifying the narrative and ludic planes in a way unlike any other game genre. In an adventure game, “advancing in the game means advancing in the story, because each challenge and its solution constitute an event in the story of the game.” Each action the player takes, at least while following the ideal walkthrough, directly enacts and advances the story of the player character. The story is the player’s sequence of actions. Some adventure game strategy guides were even written as short novellas telling the story of the main character moving through a complete traversal (Salter 2014) without ever needing to break character. The ludic instructions to solve the game could be told completely in the form of fictional prose. Considering the many definitions of adventure games, we find three elements recurring again and again: puzzles, story, and exploration. The genre, at its heart, is an exercise in trying to balance these three pillars, which sometimes support and sometimes subvert each other. We will explore the dynamics that emerge from these pillars and the frustrations of trying to balance them more fully in Chapter 4. But first let’s consider what mechanics enable them.

Expressive Input Exploration and puzzle-solving both require giving players a possibility space that does not at first reveal its entire scope. Players must have a way to make discoveries. One mechanic that enables this is expressive input: giving the player a large space of possible actions. Adventure games have long offered this in one way or another: most often through combinatorial input (a verb plus a noun), or through providing a large area to explore with many problems to solve available at once. But this freedom comes at a cost, as we will explore below. The term “expressive input” plays on the corresponding notion of an “expressive process,” an algorithm that reveals, either in its code or its output, a unique authorial voice from its designer (Wardrip-Fruin 2009). Sim City, for instance, is not a neutral simulation of urban growth but a statement by its designer about what factors he considered important or interesting enough to include. Expressive input, by contrast, lets the user express something distinctive back to the system, in a more personalized way than, say, choosing an option from a menu. The potential configurations 44

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and outcomes of a system with expressive input are not easily enumerable: the possibility space feels large enough to a player that they may experience genuine discovery, surprise, or even ownership over their input. To illustrate, imagine two character creation systems for a CRPG. The first, Class Picker, offers players a choice between five character types, including Rogue and Wizard. The second, Skill Creator, lets players assign a pool of stat points among five possible skills, including Sneaking and Magic. We would posit that Class Picker does not offer expressive input, while Skill Creator does. We can say the following things about Creator’s expressive input that do not apply to Picker: 1. The range of outcomes implied by the possible inputs may not be immediately obvious to the player, allowing for “discovery” of options not at first considered: for instance, equally splitting points between Magic and Sneaking to make a mystical assassin. 2. Some possible inputs might even surprise the system’s designer (such as splitting all points equally to make a generalist). 3. While the set of possible inputs is technically finite and enumerable (each possible distribution of points), it would not be practical or useful to present those possible inputs to the player as a comprehensive list of options. We might therefore say that systems like Adventure, Photoshop, or the Spore Creature Creator, about which players might proudly tell stories of their unique interactions, have expressive input. Systems like Pong, a Choose Your Own Adventure book, or your bank’s phone tree, all with easily enumerable inputs and little support for surprising or discovered actions, do not. Expressive input is not the only means of doing so but is one pathway to enabling both the exploration and experimentation required for satisfactory puzzles, as well as the sense of identification with the protagonist crucial to the player’s feeling of transportation into a fictional world. In the genre’s earliest games, when the player’s sole affordance was typing words on a keyboard, input was inherently expressive. But as graphics arrived, and with them new interface paradigms like graphical file explorers and new input devices like the mouse, it became less clear what tools were best suited for interacting with a story world. LucasArts tried on-screen verbs; Sierra replaced them with an even more limited palette of icons; first-person games eliminated icons entirely for a “click to interact” mechanic. One curious hybrid rarely remembered today is 45

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider

Legend Entertainment’s Eric the Unready (1993), designed by former Infocomer Bob Bates, which takes a kitchen-sink approach to its interface (Figure 2.2). Though primarily a text adventure, the interface includes music, animated cut-scenes, and images of each location. Players can type commands to interact with the world, or click objects in the picture window to “do the obvious thing” with them, or use on-screen buttons for common commands like movement or looking, or assemble a command by clicking verb and noun words from scrollable on-screen lists—or even access these lists purely with the keyboard by using the Tab key. Contemporary reviewers seemed ready to believe this might be the future of interactive story UI: Designer Bob Bates and programmer Duane Beck have fashioned one of the slickest system architectures in the genre. Everything needed to communicate, manipulate, and monitor your progress is within easy reach on the high-resolution windowed interface. You can either type full sentences into the story window or use the mouse to assemble commands from the scrolling verb, preposition, and object menus. (May 1993)

Figure 2.2  An example of overly expressive input in Eric the Unready (1993). 46

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There was perhaps a hope among both players and designers that more ways to interact with the world would produce an even more immersive and engaging experience. But playing Eric today, it’s clear that none of these extra buttons or clickable areas make up for an awkward truth about adventure games both with and without them: offering expressive input in no way guarantees a system is capable of responding to it. Recall our Skill Creator example, where the player carefully assigns skill points to create their ideal character. The game that follows might completely ignore this input, perhaps resetting the skills once play begins, or ignoring them entirely in favor of purely random outcomes each time a skill is checked. This might be the result of a bug, or perhaps even deliberate design. While  such outcomes wouldn’t make the system’s input less expressive, they would doubtless disappoint players who figured out what was really going on. To prevent such disappointment, designers had to work hard to craft responses to a wide variety of player inputs. Recall that while it is important that players interact with an adventure game as if it were a simulation— for there is no other way to gain enough information about the fictional world to advance—the underlying system is rarely actually simulating things like the properties of dead trees, witches, or upper-body strength, and thus has no way of knowing that pushing a particular object will have a particular effect unless the designer specifically encodes it. In order that the player might experiment to learn what kinds of verbs and actions exist in the world, a typical adventure game might need thousands of responses to particular actions, which are what make the player’s expressive input feel meaningfully responsive. Eric, for instance, is loaded with these reactions, something appreciated by reviewers at the time: Practically everything that you try results in some wisecrack or joke. Bates says that he sat up nights dreaming up comebacks for the truly creative gamer, and we believe him. Try anything and everything: getting it wrong is often even more fun than getting it right! (Mr. Bill and Lela 1998) Responses to off-beat commands are more than just amusing, of course: they are the primary way the player learns about the world and moves closer to solving each puzzle and advancing the story. This was identified as a foundational element of the genre as early as the 1979 Zork definition:

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I wonder what it will say if I do this? Customized responses flesh out the world and its characters, much like prose in other literary media, but also reward player exploration and enable progression past obstacles. But they are difficult to create. Bates has written about the challenges of hand-coding responses to expressive input: As soon as players see an object, they want to interact with it. So, as a designer, suddenly you have to start creating satisfying responses for objects that aren’t necessarily relevant to gameplay. Players might want to pick them up, or destroy them, or look behind them, or whatever. It’s very unsatisfying to get a default response like “That’s not important” or “You can’t do that.” So suddenly your job as a writer has become much larger, because you want to customize a response that entertains the players, while subtly letting them know that interacting with this object won’t get them anywhere. (Priestman 2017) Responding to expressive input became increasingly difficult as graphics became more sophisticated and studios became larger. It’s easy to add a custom response when you’re the sole programmer and the required content is a sentence of new prose. It’s much more difficult when that content might involve custom animations, complicated scripting, additional voice-over work, or approval from a line manager. Prose is also less literal than imagery, easier to be selective with: it’s much simpler to write a room description mentioning very few nouns than to draw a compelling scene containing very few objects. In 1993, Eric was already an outlier: most games were moving away from expressive input to minimize the number of potential responses to deal with, and worse, most didn’t even adequately respond to the more limited range of inputs they did offer. Adventure games began to develop a nasty reputation for needing a repetitious kind of “grinding” to complete: if you weren’t sure what to do next, try clicking every object on every other object—an antipattern, only necessary when you can no longer rely on experimental responses giving you clues as to what else you should be doing (or at the very least, providing some amusement). Another rarely remembered adventure game that appeared not long after Eric is Toonstruck (1996), a game that combined the growing craze for CDROM-driven full motion video with adventure game aesthetics. In the game, you control a down-on-his-luck cartoonist (a somewhat blurry Christopher Lloyd) who gets sucked inside his own creation, an animated kingdom being

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taken over by a nefarious villain.7 Text has almost entirely vanished from the interface (Figure 2.3): the player clicks objects in the colorful world to interact with them in a single relevant fashion or selects pictures of possible topics in conversations. There are no longer any opportunities for the player to contribute something unexpected. This is in part due to the extreme difficulty of adding additional actions or dialogue to the game after its initial design, which would have required, among other logistics complications, getting Christopher Lloyd to return to the bluescreen stage to record new dialogue and video. The puzzles in Toonstruck are clever in concept (based around finding themed pairs of objects, such as sugar and spice, or a heart and a “sole”), but this cleverness is mostly in the writing and presentation, not the player’s actions: the puzzles tend to be straightforward in execution. For instance, one puzzle involves finding some butter (to help a pair of bakers make a roll, which goes with “rock”). The cows in a nearby barn offer to make the butter for you, but a part fell off their “Churnatron” machine. In the nearby Wacme Outlet store, you can buy a magnet: using this on the stacks of hay in the barn pulls up the missing part, which when reattached can make the butter. All fairly straightforward, for better and worse. While losing some expressivity, Toonstruck also loses some of the friction and frustration a large input space can engender. There are fewer stray verbs

Figure 2.3  Text and graphics for limited expressive input in Toonstruck. His name, in fact, is Count Nefarious.

7

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and nouns to try, meaning fewer actions that might be taken at any given time. A period reviewer spoke highly of the game’s puzzle design: At every point in the first chapter, it’s clear exactly what you need to be doing. Not that Toonstruck is easy: it isn’t. But the challenge comes from figuring out how to do something, and not what you need to be doing, which is an extremely refreshing change from the almost total lack of logic common in most contemporary adventure games. (Dulin 2000) Toonstruck demonstrates one approach to the problem of responding to expressive input: streamline the input so there’s a smaller space of possibilities to respond to. This has been echoed in many modern games, including choice-based games that give players a set of options to choose from. We will explore this branch of adventure game descendants in Chapter 3. In a 1990 CompuServe roundtable on the future of adventure games, Bates was already worrying about the effect the transition to graphics would have on the medium: “It’s hard to design tough puzzles that can be solved just by pointing and clicking at things” (qtd. in Maher 2018). But the real danger to the form wouldn’t be a shrinking of the input space. It would be failing to adapt designs to the new strengths and limitations that change implied. Simulation and Revelation: Adventure Game Dynamics While many descendants of adventure games have rejected puzzles entirely, before we move on from them, it’s worth investigating what they were doing in the genre in the first place: how, for two decades, they existed alongside the pillars of story and exploration and worked to create a unique and memorable dynamic. Puzzles and expressive input go well together, but given the dangers of using either, why include them at all? Expressive input is a means to letting players experience the satisfaction of all three adventure game pillars together: solving a narratively embedded puzzle through the powers of observation and exploration. When wellbalanced, these three pillars can together create an almost magical moment of shared mastery, where player and protagonist are thinking alike. This moment of mastery is in some ways like the satisfaction of solving a pure logic puzzle, but different in several key respects. To tease out these differences, let’s start by considering the before and after states of an adventure game puzzle. When the player first encounters it, 50

Defining Adventure Games from the Ground Up

it’s a roadblock to advancing the story: a locked door, literal or metaphorical. Assuming the game is winnable, there must exist some sequence of ludic actions that will allow the player to get past it. After it’s solved, the player has passed through the obstacle to the next part of the game. In the interim, they must somehow have learned a sequence of actions that allowed them to do this. How has the player done this? Perhaps they experienced a “eureka” moment, a sudden flash of insight in which they apprehended all at once the way to progress past the obstacle. On the other hand, perhaps they progressed slowly through a series of smaller steps, performing experiments that provided them more and more information about the obstacle, until at last they reached a state of mastery over it, understanding it so completely that the steps to overcome it naturally followed. We posit that any adventure game puzzle exists somewhere on a spectrum between these two extremes: either more revelatory (the player must simply come to understand the correct action all at once, without much help) or more simulative (the player has many opportunities to experiment, observe, and gather clues about the problem). Regardless of whether a puzzle is more revelatory or more simulative, designers must carefully craft it in order to produce the desired sequence of events leading to a pleasurable outcome. Specifically, the player must go through all the following stages for an adventure game puzzle to be truly satisfactory: 1) Be unsure what ludic action will advance the narrative. 2) Explore, experiment, and consider possible actions. 3) Have a moment of revelation in which they see what needs to happen next. 4) Prepare and carry out a plan, possibly returning to step 2 afterwards if the plan fails or the puzzle is still not complete. 5) Feel validation and satisfaction when the plan succeeds and the story continues. In a revelatory puzzle, step 2 is minimized, or more internal to the player (they can do few experiments within the game itself to test out their ideas); whereas in a more simulative puzzle, they might spend proportionally more time in step 2, or loop between step 2 and 4 multiple times to gain more and more understanding of the situation. Let’s contrast two puzzles from fairly different classic adventure games to tease out more completely the difference between revelatory and simulative 51

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puzzles. In King’s Quest IV (1988) Princess Rosella must at one point befriend a unicorn to continue her journey. The creature is shy and bolts whenever you try to approach, which leaves many players stuck (1). Elsewhere in the world (2), however, the player can find Cupid bathing in a pool, having left his bow sitting nearby. Approaching him scares him off; he leaves his bow behind. What the designers intend is that the player will suddenly realize (3) that Cupid’s bow is not a weapon but a way to make a creature fall in love. Returning eagerly to the unicorn (4), the player shoots the unicorn with the bow and is satisfied (5) to see this work: the unicorn now dotes on you and the story can continue. This is a fairly revelatory puzzle. First, it assumes familiarity with the Cupid story: there’s no way you can learn what the bow does from within the game. More seriously, it offers few chances for experimentation. Nothing about the unicorn’s appearance or description, or the bow’s, hints at a connection between these elements. You can’t interact with these items in any way other than the correct one. Trying to shoot at anything else in the game—living or otherwise—only produces the message “You shoot an arrow into the air… You miss!” Worse, there are only two arrows, one of which you need for the unicorn and one you need for a later puzzle, so any incorrect experimentation makes your game silently unwinnable. The puzzle only works if you have the right revelatory flash about what the arrows might be good for and save them to use at precisely the right moments. By contrast, let’s look at a more simulative puzzle in Riven (1997), the sequel to Myst. Early in the game the player enters a pentagonal room through an open doorway. There is one other exit, but it’s barred by a gate (1). Through careful exploration of the area (2), the player can notice a button (3) that can be pressed from the hall outside the pentagon, which rotates the whole room a fifth of a revolution clockwise (4). The room only has two doors, but experimenting with this button (2), the player can see there are five passageways leading away from the room (3), two of which are barred by gates. By exploring more of the surrounding environment, the player can find another route leading to one of these other entrances (4). By aligning an open doorway with this point, they can gain access to one of the gatefree exits (2-3-4, etc.). Inside is a lever that opens one of the two gates. By continuing to rotate the room and use its available exits, the player can gain access to the fourth tunnel, with a lever that opens the final gate. Through one last set of movements and rotations, the player can move through the now-open gate and enter a new area of the game (5). 52

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This puzzle is less narrative than the previous one, but it’s also less reliant on cultural cues or interpretations.8 It’s clearly also much more simulative: it hinges less on one logical leap than on a series of smaller realizations, each driven by an exploration of and experimentation within the environment. The states of the rotating room, the different gates, and the player’s position are simulated, observable, and manipulable in the fictional world, allowing the player to build a mental model of the rotating room, its possible exits, and their current position within the system. It’s notable that there is no single angle in the game from which you can see all of the exits at once: that understanding exists only in the player’s mind. It’s also impossible to trap yourself in a state from which you cannot escape: the puzzle never punishes you for experimentation. This is not to say that simulative puzzles are inherently superior to revelatory puzzles, nor that there is even a sharp line dividing them. LucasArts’ Day of the Tentacle, whose outsider protagonists we described in Chapter 1, uses its largely revelatory puzzles as punchlines: the player understands how to proceed when they get the joke. But these moments are aided by worldbuilding that consistently encourages the player to think with the same wacky, cartoon logic as its characters. The plot centers around time travel, with many puzzles involving making a change in the past that affects the future: this was a deliberate choice by the creators to heighten the usual focus on cause and effect in adventure games to a useful extreme (Mackey 2018). In one sequence, you find yourself needing a vacuum cleaner, but all you have is a flyer from a salesman saying there should be a vacuum cleaner in every home. Back in the past, you can meet America’s Founding Fathers, arguing over potential items for inclusion in the Constitution and throwing out a number of silly examples: if you suggest any of your own, they pointedly draw your attention to a “suggestion box.” The solution is to put the advertisement in the box, causing a vacuum cleaner to appear in the future basement, where the Constitution now enshrines that every home should have one. In contrast to the Cupid’s bow puzzle in King’s Quest IV, here the various elements of the puzzle all work to suggest each other, the game provides many hints and experimental responses nudging the player toward the correct solution, and the recurring theme of taking actions in the past to create unexpected changes in the future primes the player to expand their thinking to unconventional solutions.

The Witness, which we will discuss in Chapter 4, takes this approach to puzzles to its extreme.

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This last point is part of why story is just as important to these moments as exploration and the puzzles themselves: in a well-crafted game, it provides a reinforcement, an echo on the narrative plane, of the ludic solution. This can be used for comedic effect but also to more serious purpose. Another puzzle in Riven involves using a children’s toy to learn how to count in an unfamiliar language. One can operate the toy in such a way that it becomes clear that certain symbols are associated with certain numbers. But doing so also makes it clear that this toy is a device not just for teaching numbers but for instilling fear: it recreates a morbid vignette of a stick figure being lowered on a rope toward the jaws of a waiting monster. When the player sees a similar cage nearby suspended above a lake where a ravenous beast swims, they come to understand another way the game’s villain Gehn has kept the people he’s enslaved under his thumb. While rare in adventure games, these moments where the player’s revelatory moment solves both a ludic and a narrative puzzle can be immensely powerful. These moments, however, can also be catastrophic failures. The designer’s carefully planned sequence often does not play out as intended. The most obvious point of failure is the revelatory moment itself: if it never comes, the player remains stuck, unable to continue making progress in the game. Looking up the solution in a hint guide lets play continue, but at the cost of robbing the player of the joys of experimentation, divining the solution for themselves, and feeling satisfaction when it succeeds. There are many other points of failure: the player might have a different revelatory moment than the one the designer expected and become frustrated that the game doesn’t recognize their novel solution; poor UI might prevent them from carrying out a solution they’ve correctly figured out; if the solution is so simple the player immediately sees what to do, they get no satisfaction from enacting it; and so on. We can productively analyze many of the failures of adventure games as breakdowns of the ideal revelatory sequence described above. Rather than being a simple, ineffable flash, successful puzzle-solving is actually a quite complex narrative dynamic that requires careful design work to set up and pay off. A movement away from expressive input and responses rewarding experimentation implies a movement away from simulative puzzles toward revelatory ones: more self-contained puzzles that can easily be added and removed from a design, have fewer moving parts, and are less interdependent. And this is indeed what we see more and more toward the end of the classic period of adventure games: puzzles that increasingly relied on moments of revelation in games that gave players 54

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fewer and fewer tools for provoking them. This, unsurprisingly, would soon have dire consequences for the genre.

End of an Era By the end of the 1990s, it had become rare to find a well-implemented puzzle-based adventure game, and this glut of poor titles dragged the whole genre down with it. Some blamed the popularity of games like Myst, which seemed to dumb down the more complex expressive input of earlier games. At a 1999 Game Developers Conference panel called “Is Adventure Dead?” Leisure Suit Larry creator Al Lowe summarized: “every publisher wanted a Myst-killer, which spawned a huge crop of ‘me-too’ games that mostly sucked.” It’s certainly true that a rash of clones often emulated the surface features of the genre, like complex puzzles, without understanding the reason those features were there in the first place or providing players adequate tools to solve them. Our design framework, however, suggests a more fundamental problem had emerged. Puzzles only bring joy when coupled with explorable environments that allow the user to learn, experiment with, and master them. But the sea changes in graphical fidelity and UI expectations increasingly frustrated designers’ attempts to enable this. The switch from 2D to 3D graphics increased the resources necessary to develop and release a game tremendously; the rise of the CD-ROM and expectations of voice acting made each response from the game an expensive commodity. (Loom’s CD version, debuting two years after its initial floppy disk release, trimmed many of the original game’s responses for this reason.) Even worse, since voice or video actors would only be in the studio for a limited and expensive recording session, it became nearly impossible to iterate in response to tester feedback by adding additional responses. The switch from parsers to clickable on-screen action verbs and then to an expectation of pointand-click interaction each reduced the ways players could get stuck, but also reduced their capacity for expressive input, to perform experiments learning how to gain mastery over their environment. This combination of constrained input and constrained responses meant many adventure games were reduced to tedious exercises in finding the right spot to click. Finally, real-time 3D also opened up a new space of design aesthetics based around motion rather than stillness. Early 3D assets were visually far less sophisticated than the lovingly hand-drawn worlds they replaced: 55

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they were only charming in motion, with swooping cameras exploring them from all angles and textures that looked better endlessly scrolling by than studied close-up. It was unclear to contemporary designers how to combine a more frenetic aesthetic with the fundamentally contemplative, slow pace of classic adventure games, where, in the end, the player must on occasion stop moving and think. King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity (1998), for example, tried unsuccessfully to integrate real-time 3D combat into an adventure game storyline: the result was a critical and commercial misfire. For all these reasons, adventure games as a whole began to be seen as fundamentally flawed, as they increasingly appeared only in a degenerate, hamstrung form. Mainstream games responded by aggressively cutting out narratively situated puzzle-solving from their design vocabulary. The first Tomb Raider (1996) pointed the way toward a form of problem-solving tailored to understanding and executing precision movements through an environment. Role-playing games, both single-player and online, refined a model where progress through an explorable story-filled world wasn’t about sharing the revelations of a protagonist but sharing the actions: a quest is a more reliable form of contract, a promise that moving from point A to a point B marked on the map and defeating any enemies found along the way will constitute success. Games like Grand Theft Auto III (2001) demonstrated the appeal of explorable sandboxes, within which underlying simulations allowed players to create their own stories of high-speed chases or thrilling capers. Pieces of the adventure game pie, in short, were carved up and shipped off to other genres. Another narrative we can tell about the death of adventure games is that they signaled an important cultural transition. For a brief time, the outsider hackers and dreamers who’d pioneered the home computer revolution had become the mainstream. They’d brought their quirky, command-line sensibilities with them: notions that physical challenges were less interesting than mental ones, or that being stumped was natural and fun, or that a handful of people could make a game. The transition away from adventure games coincided with the growing dominance of gaming as a form of mainstream entertainment: though direct comparisons are tricky, annual game industry sales figures first exceeded box office receipts right around the year 2000 (Staff 2018), just as classic adventure games were dying. At the end of this transition, adventure game creators and players were once again outsiders, increasingly ostracized from the industry they’d helped create. Many of them went underground or to other markets and kept making adventure games: classics like The Longest Journey (2000) and Syberia (2002) 56

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were made outside the United States, while amateur interactive fiction enthusiasts created both classic homages like Anchorhead (1998) and radical experiments like Shade (2000). But mainstream games had moved in a different direction. While these communities and others continue creating adventure games in the traditional mold today, these games are rarely represented in bestseller lists or awards shows, nor do they enjoy the same cultural cachet their predecessors once had amongst early gamers. But the seeds of adventure live on in countless other forms, and its influences cast a surprisingly wide net across the contemporary landscape of gaming. The early-adopter outsiders who drove the genre to its initial popularity have kept it alive, as have successors inspired by their initial trajectory. Across the remainder of this book, we’ll consider a number of these threads of gamemaking, the many new garments woven from the scattered threads of adventure. Works Cited Adams, Ernest. 2009. “The Designer’s Notebook: Sorting Out the Genre Muddle.” Gamasutra (blog). July 9, 2009. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/ feature/132463/the_designers_notebook_sorting_.php. Anderson, Tim. 1985. “The History of Zork [Part 1].” New Zork Times [Infocom Newsletter]. Brucker, Roger W., and Richard A. Watson. 1987. The Longest Cave. Southern Illinois University Press. Buckles, Mary Ann. 1986. “Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame ‘Adventure.’” PhD Dissertation, University of California, San Diego. Douglass, Jeremy. 2007. “Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media.” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara. Dulin, Ron. 2000. “Toonstruck Review.” GameSpot. May 2, 2000. https://www. gamespot.com/reviews/toonstruck-review/1900-2533283/ Dyer, Jason. 2017. “Adventure 500: Tilted!” Renga in Blue (blog). April 22, 2017. https://bluerenga.wordpress.com/2017/04/22/adventure-500-tilted/. Fernández-Vara, Clara. 2009. The Tribulations of Adventure Games: Integrating Story into Simulation through Performance. Georgia Institute of Technology. Hartnell, Tim. 1984. Creating Adventure Games on Your Computer. Ballantine. Jerz, Dennis G. 2007. “Somewhere Nearby Is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original ‘Adventure’ in Code and in Kentucky.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 1 (2): 2. Kent, Allen, and James G. Williams. 1989. Encyclopedia of Microcomputers. Vol. 3. CRC Press. Kidder, Tracy. 1981. The Soul of a New Machine. New York: Little, Brown and Company. 57

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider Lebling, P. David, Marc S. Blank, and Timothy A. Anderson. 1979. “Zork: A Computerized Fantasy Simulation Game.” IEEE Computer 12 (4): 51–59. Lowe, Al. 1999. “The Death of Adventure Games.” Al Lowe’s Humor Site (blog). March 19, 1999. http://allowe.com/al/articles/death-of-adventures.html. Mackey, Bob. 2018. “Day of the Tentacle: The Oral History.” USgamer (blog). June 25, 2018. https://www.usgamer.net/articles/day-of-the-tentacle-the-oral-history. Maher, Jimmy. 2011a. “A Busy 1979.” The Digital Antiquarian. http://www.filfre. net/2011/07/a-busy-1979/. Accessed July 12, 2018. Maher, Jimmy. 2011b. “‘Will Crowther’s Adventure’ and ‘The Completed Adventure.’” The Digital Antiquarian (blog). May 18, 2011. https://www.filfre. net/2011/05/will-crowthers-adventure-part-1/. Maher, Jimmy. 2013. “The Unmaking and Remaking of Sierra On-Line.” The Digital Antiquarian (blog). July 18, 2013. https://www.filfre.net/2013/07/the-unmakingand-remaking-of-sierra-on-line/. Maher, Jimmy. 2018. “Adventure-Game Rock Stars Live in Conference.” Blog. The Digital Antiquarian (blog). February 16, 2018. https://www.filfre.net/2018/02/ adventure-game-rock-stars-live-in-conference/. May, Scott. 1993. “Eric the Unready Review.” COMPUTE!, September 1993. Minkkinen, Toni. 2016. “Basics of Platform Games.” Kajaani University of Applied Sciences. Montfort, Nick. 2003. Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. The MIT Press. Mr. Bill, and Lela. 1998. “Eric the Unready Review.” Mr. Bill’s Adventureland Review. http://www.mrbillsadventureland.com/reviews/e-f/ericunreadyR/ ericunreadyR.htm. Nelson, Graham. 1995. “The Craft of Adventure.” http://www.ifarchive.org/ifarchive/info/Craft.Of.Adventure.txt. Nelson, Theodor H. 1974. Computer Lib/Dream Machines. 1st ed. Self-published. Nooney, Laine. 2017. “Let’s Begin Again: Sierra On-Line and the Origins of the Graphical Adventure Game.” American Journal of Play 10 (1): 71–98. Plotkin, Andrew. 2011. “Characterizing, if Not Defining, Interactive Fiction.” In IF Theory Reader, edited by Kevin Jackson-Mead and J. Robinson Wheeler. >TRANSCRIPT ON PRESS. Priestman, Christopher. 2017. “Bob Bates’ Thaumistry Is an Experiment in Reviving Text-Based Games.” Gamasutra (blog). February 14, 2017. https:// www.gamasutra.com/view/news/290667/Bob_Bates_Thaumistry_is_an_ experiment_in_reviving_textbased_games.php. Reed, Aaron A. 2017. “Changeful Tales: Design-Driven Approaches toward More Expressive Storygames.” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz. Reed, Aaron A. 2018. “What I Mean by ‘Storygame.’” Aaron Reed—Medium (blog). April 27, 2018. https://medium.com/@aareed/what-i-mean-by-storygame2f16988f0253. Rollings, Andrew, and Ernest Adams. 2003. Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design. New Riders. Salter, Anastasia. 2014. What Is Your Quest?: From Adventure Games to Interactive Books. University of Iowa Press. 58

Defining Adventure Games from the Ground Up Schuette, Kim. 1985. The Book of Adventure Games. Arrays, Inc. Short, Emily. 2010. “So, Do We Need This Parser Thing Anyway?” Emily Short’s Interactive Storytelling (blog). June 7, 2010. https://emshort.blog/2010/06/07/ so-do-we-need-this-parser-thing-anyway/. Staff. 2018. “The Video Games’ Industry Is Bigger than Hollywood.” LPEsports. Com. October 10, 2018. http://lpesports.com/e-sports-news/the-video-gamesindustry-is-bigger-than-hollywood. Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. 2009. Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. Software Studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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The art of interactive storytelling is not a matter of inserting interactive moments within a standard plot but, rather, a matter of discovering what kind of plots lend themselves to active user participation. (Marie-Laure Ryan 2015) In 1983, around the time the earliest graphical adventure games were gaining traction on home PCs, a dramatically more cinematic kind of interactive story appeared in arcades, driven by laserdisc and with feature-quality animation from an ex-Disney animator. The game was called Dragon’s Lair, and it seemed to herald a glimmering future. Players watched the handanimated story of brave knight Dirk the Daring, who at crucial moments needed them to quickly intervene to save him from monsters and hazards by pressing the right button (Figure 3.1). Failure led inevitably to the loss of both Dirk’s life and the player’s fifty cents, the then-premium price to play. The technological patina—lasers!—and breathtakingly cinematic production values produced massive hype, lending the game initial financial success and a lasting legacy on pop-culture (referenced as a useful 1980s touchstone in everything from Wreck-It Ralph to Stranger Things to Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants). But the game’s success proved difficult to replicate, in part because, as many players can attest, actually playing it is repetitive and frustrating. The prerendered animations are the same from player to player and replay to replay, with only brief moments of agency limited to reacting correctly to advance the story or failing and bringing it to an end. While the sequences appear in a randomized order and are sometimes horizontally flipped, these moves do little to disguise the fact that players are watching the same movie clips over and over again, with little opportunity to identify with Dirk or exert much influence over him. Dragon’s Lair is quite different from an adventure game—with no opportunity to explore and mental puzzle-solving replaced with physical reflex challenges. But its ambitions and its legacy are caught up with adventure games and several branches of their descendants, through its

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Figure 3.1  Action sequences in Dragon’s Lair (1983) relied on pre-animated ­outcomes.

attempts to use more cinematic influences to immerse the player in a story. While Dragon’s Lair’s success proved hard to replicate in the 1980s, by the early 2000s, a number of games and studios had begun to appear that sought to marry the elusive dream of an interactive movie with the fading glory of adventure games, including work from Telltale Games, Quantic Dream, and (more recently) Dontnod Entertainment. Since these games often center the player’s agency on an evolution of the classic adventure game dialogue tree, with a goal of creating a sensation of meaningful choice while immersing the player in a cinematic story, we call these “cinematic choice games.” Cinema has influenced many game genres, of course: the use of cut scenes and fully rendered animation or even film clips had come to be common throughout the games industry by the time these games began to appear. Cinematic choice games are distinct in the way they deploy filmic conventions in the service of games whose primary mechanic is interacting with a story, rather than using narrative as interludes between actions. These games use techniques developed through a century of cinematic storytelling—close-ups, editing, deliberate framing, and cinematography, among others—to immerse the player in the story and establish a connection with its protagonist, much as noninteractive films do. They emphasize the story pillar (the adventure game foundation most compatible with cinematic storytelling) while reducing emphasis on puzzles (which can have the uncinematic effect of bringing the story to a halt) and generally 62

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move toward making exploration less about physical spaces and more about narrative possibilities: focusing more on choices and their (real or suggested) consequences than do traditional adventure games. As these games matured through the 2000s and 2010s, their designers explored foregrounding different aspects of cinematic interactive storytelling, varying in whether they placed more importance on character, causality, or agency, for example. We will look in detail at how the three studios mentioned above each make different trade-offs to keep the space of possible stories manageable while delivering satisfying content that feels driven by player action. Each takes a particular stance on the relationship between agency and story, dancing around a question adventure games long struggled with: What are choices in an interactive story really good for? Are they something that players make, perform, or reflect on? Do characters determine the choices, or do players? What should the player feel about the choices they make: regret, empowerment, control? We will conclude by proposing an aesthetic called the Telltale Effect for the artful way these games have learned to traffic in a pleasurable illusion of choice and how this continues the adventure game tradition of letting players imagine they are starring in an interactive story even when that story is largely prescripted: a ludic suspension of disbelief that has evolved into an expressive game design tool.

Origins Adventure games are the most obvious predecessor of cinematic choice games, which maintain many of their conventions. These include searching an environment to find clues or inventory items, puzzle-solving (though often in simplified form), and a focus on interacting with characters in a richly defined story world. We can also trace a direct design evolution from classic adventure games to modern cinematic choice games, especially in the case of Telltale, whose direct commercial and design lineage is discussed below. These modern games also share with their predecessors what might be called an aspirational aesthetic of offering meaningfully interactive narrative, most clearly marketed through the player’s control over the story: advertising material for these games often focuses on both the number and the value of the different endings or pathways through the game. We call this focus “aspirational” because in practice, these games, like their predecessors, generally offer a smaller number of curated pathways through a prescripted 63

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story than the player generally perceives. The impression of meaningful agency, however, is central to the allure of both styles of game. The dream of games that actually do offer truly immersive stories stretches back for decades. In her 1986 dissertation “Toward the design of a computer-based interactive fantasy system,” Brenda Laurel laid out an aesthetic and technical foundation for what academics would come to call “interactive drama,” defining it as “a first-person experience within a fantasy world, in which the user may create, enact, and observe a character whose choices and actions affect the course of events just as they might in a play” (1986). While Laurel cites the 1981 novel Dreampark (Niven and Barnes) as one fictional inspiration for this idea (and there are of course earlier examples, such as the 1973 movie Westworld), it would gain a widereaching cultural shorthand the very next year with the premiere episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which featured a technology for immersive stories called the holodeck. Ten years later, scholar Janet Murray framed her influential study of interactive storytelling Hamlet on the Holodeck around this cultural touchstone (J. H. Murray 1997), proposing three aesthetics for immersive stories: immersion, agency, and transformation, together providing a unique joy of sampling, through enactment and simulation, the “kaleidoscopic” possibilities present in an interactive story world. While some work has been produced in academia that reaches toward more truly dynamic stories—the interactive drama Façade (Mateas and Stern 2003) is one noteworthy example—these techniques have rarely been employed in mainstream games, in part because of the incredible burden, both technical and artistic, imposed by creating such a responsive system (Grow et al. 2014). Professional developers are also understandably wary of losing control over an emergent system, allowing it to produce undesirable stories (Nay and Zagal 2017). Designer Jesse Schell notes the distinction between the “string of pearls” approach favored in commercial games, where some limited amounts of player agency may be allowed within each “pearl” but the player can do nothing to alter the sequence or overall direction of the string, and what he calls “story machines” in which narrative is represented more systematically, allowing for the possibility of more radical responsiveness (Schell 2014). While games driven by story machines do exist, such as Dwarf Fortress (2006–present) or The Sims,1 their gameplay

A more thorough discussion of released games that use story machines can be found in Reed (2017). 1

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tends to be focused on non-narrative systems: interesting stories might arise through play, but producing them is not the primary concern of the game. At the other extreme, we might also certainly consider the short-lived subgenre of the full-motion video (FMV) adventure game as a predecessor of cinematic choice games. Video became possible to deploy in games with the widespread adoption of CD-ROM drives in the early to mid-1990s, and titles with heavy use of video like Return to Zork and Under a Killing Moon became some of the best-selling adventure games of the period. While excitingly novel for a time, these games chafed under a terrible contradiction: film clips, in addition to being expensive to produce, were by nature entirely static, unable to react to players’ expressive input, and difficult to integrate into the cycle of exploration and experimentation at the core of the genre’s earlier successes. One illustrative example is Sierra’s Phantasmagoria (1995), a horror-themed FMV adventure game that was at the time the most expensive title the studio had produced, with hours of video that required shipping the game on seven CD-ROMs. Chroma-keyed actors were inserted into computer-generated sets not just for full-screen cut scenes but as avatars moving across the traditional static rooms of an explorable environment: actress Victoria Morsell spent three months capturing footage of protagonist Adrienne performing hundreds of different movements and actions, from unlocking doors to climbing stairs. The game used an intensely cinematic design and production process, including using storyboarding and a screenplay format for its design document and hiring Hollywood talent both behind and in front of the camera, but reviewers complained that its puzzles were simple and its progression primarily linear and on-rails: a necessity when each piece of content was achieved at such a high cost. While FMV adventure games were on fire in the mid-1990s, by the early 2000s they had largely faded away as 3D engines advanced to the point that more dynamic and interactive cinematic worlds could be created without relying on video and its many limitations. Games have experimented with cinematic techniques in less literal ways from their earliest days. Designer Ron Gilbert coined the term “cut scene” (Buecheler 1996) to describe the sequences in his adventure game Maniac Mansion (1987) which take control away from the player to advance the story, presumably because they “cut in” to the player’s interactive experience: games had been using this technique for a while, of course, dating back at least to arcade game “attract modes.” Cut scenes give game storytellers precise control over the pacing, viewpoint, and outcome of a scene to better convey a plot point or present a satisfying narrative beat, at the expense of removing the 65

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player’s agency over these story elements. The “cinematic camera” is another technique that had been increasingly used by games as graphic engines allowed for more dynamic visuals, first coming to attention with Alone in the Dark (1992), and used to create tension or control information through framing, add visual interest, and focus the audience’s attention, much as in traditional cinema. Dividing play into discrete scenes with jumps in time and space between them is another cinematic technique, as opposed to the continuous action in many adventure games (the conceit that the player is following the protagonist in real time as they move through the story). All of these predecessors informed the emergence of cinematic choice games. We will next look at how a number of individual studios took these influences and shaped them into successful new kinds of adventure-like storygames. Telltale Games While many of the most memorable graphic adventures of the 1990s were produced by the LucasArts Entertainment Company, including Loom (1990), The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993), Full Throttle (1995), and Grim Fandango (1998), by the end of the decade, the company had stopped producing adventure games to focus on more action-centric games in the Star Wars universe. In 2004, three veterans of LucasArts (Kevin Bruner, Dan Connors, and Troy Molander) formed a new studio, Telltale Games, to find a way to bring the legacy of adventure games forward into a new decade. With their pedigree and their passion for the genre, adventure game fans found the new company promising shepherds of a sputtering torch: here is a group of seasoned developers who sincerely understand what makes adventure games so great, and who are determined to prove that the genre is not a relic of the past. Throughout the conversation, the words “characters,” “acting,” and “dynamic story” kept coming up, and the technology that Telltale has developed was repeatedly described as existing only to serve the storytelling—an encouraging concept for any fan of adventures. (Dickens 2004) From the beginning, Telltale intended to bring several changes to the adventure game formula. Their focus on character over puzzles or player skill, it was 66

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hoped, represented a new path forward to widespread commercial viability. They described their intention to make “television adventure games,” nodding to both an aspiration to film-like conventions but also a plan to release game content episodically, a novel idea at the time (Ibid): with a lower price point and a shorter playing time, episodic adventure games hoped to lower the barrier to entry for new players. More significantly, the team hoped this structure could create the same kind of communal experience as watching an ongoing television show, with coworkers gathering around a watercooler to chat about the ongoing plot (Bruner 2016). Short episodes would also allow designers to reuse engines and art assets much more frequently than had been possible on games with a multiyear cycle. To this end, Telltale devoted much of their early work on creating a reusable engine and authoring tool, both of which continued to evolve with each new game they produced. Telltale’s earliest games—sequels to popular LucasArts titles in some cases, including an episodic Sam & Max sequel (2006) and Tales of Monkey Island (2009)—kept much of the core gameplay of adventure games, such as exploring an open environment, collecting inventory items, speaking with characters, and solving puzzles. A focus on quality writing and voice-acting, along with more cinematic use of camera angles, made up for a low-poly style adopted in part so a small team could reasonably produce the games but also to keep them playable on as wide a range of platforms as possible. As the studio’s style evolved, however, it began to streamline away some of the mechanics and conventions of traditional adventure games, shifting toward a more linear form of storytelling with fewer puzzles, and pacing their stories more like movies (without long lulls in the action while the player wanders a map trying to figure out what to do). The locus of player freedom also began to shift from environmental exploration toward dialogue trees, where the player is given a list of options for what the protagonist might say next during a conversation. Often only a marginal part of classic adventure games, Telltale increasingly relied on dialogue trees both as a place to locate bounded player choice and as a way to shift the focus of gameplay toward characters and conversations. Controlled, delineated options also had the effect of improving pacing by pruning away all possible player actions that wouldn’t cause the story to advance. Co-founder Kevin Bruner has noted his skepticism for emergent narrative systems (“not every possible story is a good story”) and maintained that only through hand-crafting each moment of choice can designers guarantee the quality of all stories players experience (2016). This philosophy shifted the focus of the player’s role from openended agency toward targeted choice. 67

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Telltale’s innovations helped their games become increasingly successful, attracting more and more famous license-holders, until by the mid-2010s they were making interactive story adaptations of some of the most successful franchises in pop culture, including The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Batman, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Minecraft: watercooler relevancy, indeed. It’s interesting to note, though, that the kinds of watercooler discussions Bruner hoped to enable only work if the speakers have a shared set of moments to talk about, eliminating the possibility of significant narrative branches (and not just because audiences might become increasingly skeptical that they’ll be allowed to make choices with lasting consequence for these popular massmedia characters). Telltale cleverly shifted the discussions around these games to center on the choices shared by all players, rather than their outcomes, and the dramatically contextualized and time-limited choice became a standout feature of their games, especially from The Walking Dead on. Often centering on emotional moments, Telltale’s choices position players to respond to characters and situations emotionally, which can evoke a strong sense of ownership over the events that unfold regardless of the player’s actual control over those events. This emotional engagement is enhanced by choices that let the player choose how to perform the protagonist’s identity and values. Telltale designer Molly Maloney has described the “roleplay rails” principle to guide the design of compelling choices, where each option presented is about embodying a particular core aspect of the character’s nature or personality (2017). This allows for different choices that are true to the character and story but give the player control over which aspects of that character win out in moments both significant and incidental. Maloney describes how these core aspects of each character would evolve from both workshops with the writers but also iterative playtesting to discover which facets of a given character players are most interested in exploring, and when. The types of emotional experiences that result from this process are different from the feelings that games with strategic choices work to evoke, such as pride or accomplishment. Instead, Telltale’s games aspire to draw forth feelings of responsibility, empathy, and identification. While the choices in one episode rarely carry over to significant consequences for future episodes, players enter those episodes with a sense of complicity in the unfolding events, because they have chosen to perform the aspects of the protagonist’s personality that would seem to have led to them (whether they actually have or not). In The Wolf Among Us (2013; Figure 3.2), for example, the player controls Bigby Wolf, the sheriff of Fabletown (and the Big Bad Wolf from the Red 68

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Figure 3.2  Screenshot from Telltale’s The Wolf Among Us (2013). Riding Hood stories). Bigby’s core pillars are strongly telegraphed through dialogue and actions in his earliest scenes: a firm sense of justice; a desire for intimacy, perhaps owing to his lone wolf existence; and a strong loyalty to  Fabletown for providing him with a home. Early in the first episode, Bigby is introduced to a character named Faith when he sees her being attacked. This results (without player intervention) in a protective response by Bigby; a similar defense happens automatically shortly thereafter when Faith is insulted. The player must then defeat Faith’s attacker in a lengthy action sequence, exerting significant effort (in the form of button mashing) to take  out her aggressor. These responses from the player character (and required physical actions from the player) define Bigby and shape expectations of him before any choices of how to interact with Faith are presented. After the fight, Faith reveals that she needs some money for a meeting with a shady character, and it’s suggested that showing up without it will lead to a bad outcome for her. The player gets a choice: give her the money or refuse. A third option of silence is also available, but setting up the threat to Faith first makes the player feel responsible even if they ignore the choice (which results in not giving her the money). By establishing Bigby as a protector, both generally in his role as sheriff and specifically in regards to Faith, the game attempts to trigger a guilty reaction that might be assuaged by giving Faith the money, thus creating an emotional connection to the (presumed similar) reaction from Bigby. 69

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No matter’s the player’s decision, however, Faith is brutally murdered later in the episode. It’s interesting to note that if the player refuses to give Faith the money, it remains in Bigby’s inventory for the remainder of the episode, serving no purpose other than to remind the player of their choice.2 Here a structural genre convention—that inventory items will be useful somewhere in the story world—is used to reinforce a feeling of guilt and responsibility, implying that giving Faith the money might have prevented her death. It doesn’t really matter that this is not actually the case: the intent is to cause regret through the imagined alternate possibilities that the framework of an interactive story invokes. Text appears at the beginning of many Telltale games along the lines of “This game series adapts to the choices you make. The story is tailored by how you play.” The text is usually bold against a black background, with all the seriousness and solemnity of “Based on a true story.” In both cases—“true” stories and “adaptive” games—the important thing is that the audience believes in the frame of a story that really happened or a game where their choices really mattered—although finding out they didn’t, of course, might change how they feel about their experience. Not all critics find this approach successful. Critiquing The Wolf Among Us, Josh Bycer decries the game’s lack of any real player agency over the story: “Good player agency is about having the player make choices both large and small so while yes, not every choice should be a matter of life and death, they should still mean something to the character and the plot.” He continues: Popups that say that “Snow White likes your answer” doesn’t [sic] mean anything when she then disappears for the remainder of an episode and these choices never came back to do anything. With The Walking Dead season one, there was all this fuss over who would stay with you for the finale and that your choices matter… but again they really didn’t. No matter what you did or who you helped, the game always ended up the same way… Now I know that some of you will argue that the choices were personal and they meant something to you but that’s really a cop out on the issue. Saying that someone is angry at

2 We would note that while this moment demonstrates an interesting moment of choice mechanics, its narrative beats play out the lazy trope of “fridging,” popularized by Gail Simone’s Women in Refrigerators website (lby3.com/wir/), which catalogues the many occasions in popular media when female characters are brutally murdered—physically or metaphorically found in a fridge—to give momentum to a male character’s story.

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you or doesn’t trust you doesn’t mean anything if that person still acts the same way towards you every time. (Bycer 2014) This perspective comes up in many reactions to Telltale games, with opinions often split on whether actual agency matters (Gerardi 2014). Bycer’s mention of different endings as a metric is a common one: from Choose Your Own Adventure on, the possibility of multiple endings has long been a surrogate measure of perceived interactivity. Lack of endings, rightly or not, implies lack of player agency. Games journalist Adrian Froschauer offers a path to reconciling real and perceived choices: Fast-paced choices and moral quandaries are the most prominent f­ eature of The Walking Dead, but they seem to have no real consequences. Why did this game receive approximately all of the awards in 2012 if its main selling point is used so inconsequentially? I suggest that the most important aspect about this game is not the many difficult choices it offers the player—it’s the illusion of choice the game constructs. (2014) We would follow after Froschauer in arguing that the real distinction is not whether multiple endings are possible or whether choices really determine the major plot of the story: it’s in the story players tell themselves about those things, their “illusion of choice.” Illusion is behind many successful entertainment experiences, from magic tricks to carnival rides to cinema itself. Telltale’s broad critical acclaim and sales success across over a decade of releases speak to the power of the illusion of choice over the diminishing returns of actually implementing fully dynamic and branching interactive narrative. And like all good illusions, Telltale’s are based in part on truth: some choices really do have meaningful consequences, from altered lines of dialogue to different versions of scenes, and altered (if not fully alternate) endings. The careful construction of choices also means even minor decisions can in aggregate be meaningful to individual players, shaping their connection to characters and exploration of the story world’s moral boundaries. When the final episode of Telltale’s Game of Thrones ends, for instance, it shows over thirty choices onscreen from across the season with statistics on how players in aggregate responded to each one. Another critic, defending Telltale from attacks that it doesn’t make “real games,” focuses on the emotional impact these many small choices build up to and which these reports make visible: 71

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My mind stayed engaged, I took responsibility for what happened, and I was absorbed by the idea that I need to pay attention to details if I want the story to play out a certain way. And that’s an incredibly ­personal experience when you get down to it… If the experience is malleable like this, how can it not be a game? (Maltbie 2016) While Telltale shuttered in 2018, its run of nearly fifteen years as a ­storyfirst studio (and thirty-five episodic seasons of storytelling) left a lasting legacy of continuing iteration on the adventure game formula. We next turn to a studio that has been far less prolific, instead focusing on games that take inspiration from both the cinema and the holodeck and reach for even more elaborate extremes.

Quantic Dreams Like Telltale, the studio Quantic Dream began with the vision of a new kind of adventure game, although this time from an outsider rather than industry professionals. Founded by French composer David Cage in 1993, the studio’s first release was The Nomad Soul (1999; known as Omikron: The Nomad Soul in the United States). A quirky cyberpunk hybrid that mixed adventure game tropes with an open 3D world, RPG-like player stats, and fighting and driving sequences, it featured a number of revolutionary ideas (“probably too many,” Cage would later say) and groundbreaking firsts. Among these was the first performance capture for a digital game: by, of all people, David Bowie, who also composed parts of the soundtrack (Edge Staff 2013). Nomad Soul’s unusual design and aesthetic established Cage as an auteur with a singular vision, a rarity then and still today in the world of mainstream games. Its open-world design established a major tenet of the studio: a “dream” of true multiplicity in interactive stories, a “quantum” superposition of narratives that the player would collapse. Each of the studio’s subsequent games has evolved this dream while developing a particular house style: Fahrenheit (2005; called Indigo Prophecy in the United States), Heavy Rain (2010), Beyond: Two Souls (2013), and Detroit: Become Human (2018). Like Telltale, Quantic Dream uses cinematic conventions, but pursues a nearphotorealistic visual style and a more aggressive attempt to involve player enactment and agency, from a heavier focus on embodied player actions in sequences requiring reflexes or coordination to a more serious push for 72

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branching stories with decisions that determine subsequent scenes and the game’s final ending. As opposed to Telltale’s lower-fidelity style, Quantic Dream games lean heavily into immersion, often showcasing the latest console capabilities for rendering realistic faces, motions, and environments. Motion capture, sometimes with well-known Hollywood actors, has been used to create lifelike animations. This focus connects to the studio’s mission of creating a movie—not just a story—for the player to star in. It has also limited their audience to those with the latest consoles (as opposed to Telltale’s games, which were often ported to a wide array of platforms) and affected their design and aesthetic in various other ways. One example is the way Quantic Dream uses the affordances of console controllers in their input schemes. This has both streamlined the UI and conventions around choice (for instance, by presenting a maximum of four choices tied to the four action buttons on the PlayStation controller) and also taken advantage of the more complex kinds of input these controllers support. These include different kinds of motions made with thumbsticks or touchpads, the analog sensitivity of triggers, or the accelerometertracked movement of the controller itself. The studio has leveraged these different control methods to extend the kinds of embodied actions players must perform, connecting these moves more directly to the character being controlled: in Detroit, for instance, the player cleans dishes by scrubbing their finger across the PlayStation 4 controller’s touchpad. As in other cinematic choice games, the studio’s releases make heavy use of cinematic conventions, including dramatic camera angles, the division of action into discrete scenes, plotlines following multiple characters, flash cuts, flashbacks, and even less common cinematic techniques such as split screen. Quantic Dream also relies heavily on timed reactions in which the player must quickly perform a button press or sequence of presses, usually in tense moments where their characters need to make a quick reaction. First styled as “quick time” or “quick timer” events (QTEs) in the late 1990s (Rogers 2011), this mechanic appears in many game genres, generally in the context of a cut scene or otherwise noninteractive sequence, with the goal of making players feel more connected to a character they are otherwise not directly controlling: Finishing off a boss with a complex combo, every action of which you perform yourself, might be more rewarding in the grand scheme of things, but mashing the hell out of a one or two buttons—your 73

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palms slick with sweat and fury—to drive home the final blow is a powerfully physical thing. You’re only doing basic actions, but you’re going all-in on them. No pauses or breaks, no mood-breaking health potion gulps, nothing to pull you away. It’s just you and the moment. (Grayson 2014) However, this mechanic has a mixed reputation among designers, reviewers, and gamers. Grayson also notes that QTEs can be used as a crutch in lieu of more interesting forms of interactivity, such as in Telltale’s Game of Thrones: “[they] got the job done, and that was it. They were samey and unexciting. They felt like they existed to pull players back into the game in case they’d zoned out while people were talking or something—not to be genuinely interesting on their own merits” (Ibid). While Telltale used QTEs in a variety of ways, from basing a game almost entirely around them (2011’s Jurassic Park: The Game) to getting rid of them entirely, Quantic Dream uses them heavily across a wide variety of possible controller actions, including shaking and moving the controller, to enhance a sense of physical embodiment and empathy with the player character. At pivotal moments, the stakes of failing a QTE can be significant, resulting in a continuing story with an outcome the player didn’t want (such as, in the worst case, the death of a major character). Interestingly, Detroit: Become Human offers a “casual” mode that simplifies and makes QTEs less difficult, at the cost of reducing the variability of the story since some plot options are only available when these sequences are failed. QTEs more generally can be seen as a way of restoring a lost sense of direct control over the onscreen avatar. In early adventure games, as in many other game genres, players directly triggered each movement and action of the player character, much like a puppeteer: but most cinematic choice games make this control more abstract. QTEs become a way of reestablishing a lost sense of connection between player and player character. The photorealistic aesthetic, the styles of writing and acting familiar from Hollywood, and the frequent use of high-stakes button presses to advance the action all make Quantic Dream’s titles among the most high-profile modern games carrying forward the dreams of Dragon’s Lair and the holodeck: interactive movies where the player becomes the star. These games have in some ways made major steps beyond their arcade predecessor. Rather than ending abruptly, the story will often continue even if the player misses a timed reaction check or makes a bad choice. Player decisions can lead at times to different scenes, or radically altered consequences or endings. 74

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Detroit: Become Human shows an elaborate flowchart at the end of each scene demonstrating the path your choices took through a graph of possible moments, which effectively demonstrates that the game provides much more content than is seen on any individual playthrough: a small excerpt from one of these graphs is seen in Figure 3.3. While the use of motion capture and other expensive assets means these games are still much more rigid than true “story machines,” they also move closer than Telltale games do toward exploring the effects of agency in an interactive story, not merely the illusion of it. In Telltale’s The Wolf Among Us, for instance, Bigby is a strongly characterized protagonist: the player might influence which aspects of his personality are emphasized, or the particulars of what happens in his story, but his core journey remains the same. In Detroit: Become Human, however, the player controlling android Kara makes decisions that build to a binary outcome of what kind of character she is. Much of her story centers on her relationship with Alice, a young girl for whom she becomes a surrogate parent. The player’s decisions for this character often influence whether Kara will become a positive or negative role model to Alice, with more effective options for action (such as committing crimes or betrayal) framed through how these actions will affect Alice’s opinion

Figure 3.3  Excerpt from an in-game Detroit: Become Human chapter flowchart. 75

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of Kara. Unlike the role-playing rails Telltale’s Maloney describes, here there really are distinct stories about different character arcs—although these stories obviously share many overlapping assets. Cage has described a fail state in a narrative game as a failure of the designer, and not of the player (Rose 2013), and this philosophy can be seen in the structure of his stories, which often allow players to make bad decisions but continue playing stories about those flawed people—a contrast to Telltale’s “one best narrative” approach. This philosophy ties into the subtly different ways that Quantic Dream games use their affordances to manipulate the player’s emotions. For instance, these games frequently invoke anxiety over the possible outcomes of choices by leaning into the player’s knowledge that major characters might die and bad outcomes are possible. Heavy Rain features a sequence where the player character is told he must chop off his own finger to receive a clue to the location of his missing son. The sequence is extended across a five-minute countdown where the player must decide whether (and how) to carry out this task. The sequence only works because the player knows the story will continue no matter their decision: the player’s anxiety about “which branch will be better” mirrors the protagonist’s anxiety about which outcome is most likely to lead to him getting back his child. This is not to say that Telltale’s games cannot invoke fear (as players of The Walking Dead will attest). But the affordances of each game, and its studio’s aesthetics, flavor how players interpret those emotions. We’ll next look at Dontnod Entertainment, whose Life Is Strange gives players a fictional ability to rewind time and try different choices, creating an entirely different relationship to agency, choices, and outcomes.

Dontnod Entertainment Founded by a group of former Ubisoft developers, Dontnod is a French studio whose first title, an action-adventure game, didn’t sell particularly well. Their follow-up, Life Is Strange, was released episodically across 2015 and took a different, more story-centric approach. In the game, the player plays high school senior Max Caulfield, who discovers she has a limited ability to rewind time. On this sci-fi hook hangs a largely character-driven story about friendships, responsibility, and navigating the transition to adulthood, still rare themes in mainstream games. 76

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As with Quantic Dream’s games, the branching stories in Life Is Strange work to present the player with tangible consequences for their actions, in part by making those consequences more playable by allowing the player to rewind and retry them. While many interactive stories can present their major plot nodes in the form of a graph, it’s rare that a game actually allows free navigation of that graph. Games scholar Erica Kleinman has catalogued a growing body of exceptions, however: interactive stories that include navigating a branching possibility space as part of their mechanics (2016), including games such as Save the Date (2013) and The Stanley Parable (2011). These “metagaming mechanics” give players a fundamentally different relationship to an interactive story by making its variants explorable rather than merely stumbled upon. While Life Is Strange does not branch significantly more than other cinematic choice games (see Figure 3.4), the player’s ability to explore this possibility space more freely can lend it a more tangible quality. Life Is Strange evokes emotions through correspondingly different techniques than in the other cinematic games we’ve profiled. The plot includes many themes of responsibility and obligation, and these are engendered in the player with several techniques. First, the game gives us more access to the internal voice of its central character. Rather than

Figure 3.4  Excerpt from a designer flowchart of a single scene in Episode 4 of Life Is Strange, and the full chart in miniature form at the bottom (Killham 2015).

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viewing the protagonist from their outside actions (what they do and say), the player is constantly hearing Max’s internal monologue, reacting to everything the player examines in the game world. This creates a stronger relationship between the player and the player character and offers more chances to get to know her through an exploration of the environment. We also see Max in conversation with a wide range of characters, from family to friends to enemies: by contrast, Kara in Detroit: Become Human has a single relationship and no history, which, while an intentional part of her robotic character, still makes it more difficult for players to connect with her. Many of the choices that are presented to the player in Life Is Strange are longer-term choices whose outcome is too distant to be known, but clearly important. This is distinct from the inciting incident in The Wolf Among Us, where Faith’s death is predetermined, and the player’s feelings about their choice, not the choice itself, are the primary goals of the scene. Choices in Life Is Strange come in several forms; while conversations are a frequent form of interaction, the game also has many sequences of environmental exploration, allowing for optional content and worldbuilding based on how much or little of the surroundings the player wishes to explore. This mechanic of using “hot spots” in a richly detailed but otherwise noninteractable environment is seen in a number of cinematic choice games and can be traced back to early text games with rich paragraphs of room descriptions where only certain items mentioned would actually be interactable. This translated directly to graphical adventures where parts of a scene that looked interesting might yield results if clicked on: given the large number of screens and richly painted detail of these games, however, this mechanic became known as “pixel hunting,” with many players getting stuck simply because they hadn’t figured out the right part of the screen to click on.3 Later games made interactable objects more apparent through large highlights, glimmers, or floating icons: “hot spots” that were much harder to miss. While in Telltale games hot spots are generally used in a distinct exploration mode, where the player can observe or interact with a new environment, Life Is Strange uses them far more frequently as the main driver of observation and actions both casual and consequential. Quantic

The pleasurable side of pixel hunting, however, would evolve into its own strange daughter genre of adventure games: the hidden object game. 3

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Dream often uses hot spots to simulate investigation, sometimes alongside other mechanics. In certain scenes in Detroit, for instance, the player must investigate a crime scene to discover critical hot spots, which transition to a zoomed-in view with more hot spots: identifying all the zoomed-in spots triggers a reconstruction of an event, while uncovering all the events in an area resolves the investigation. Dontnod has continued producing cinematic choice games exploring new mechanics for emotional connection with characters, while also deliberately working to tell stories about underrepresented and outsider protagonists: The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit (2018) concerns the ways an imaginative youngster and his father try desperately to avoid their grief after a death, and Life Is Strange 2 (2018) centers on the story of two Mexican American brothers. The fact that the player has more control over these stories may not be an accident: thoughtful and less consequential replay, rather than adrenaline-fueled and irreversible timed choices, connects to both the aesthetic of classic adventure games and the previously-discussed “othered” players of Shira Chess’s Ready Player Two, a theme we will return to later in the book. Dialogue Choices Games from all of these studios center conversation trees as a primary mechanic, albeit with differing flavors of interaction. While in older games dialogue options tended to be cyclic or repeatable, with the player often able to return to a top-level “what should we talk about next?” node and exhaust all possible options (or repeat those previously seen), modern games generally feature a conversation that’s always moving forward, with each player choice advancing the action, conversations that can’t be returned to once they’ve ended, and alternate options rarely available to revisit without replay. Different games have used different ways of hiding or revealing how previous conversation choices affect future ones. Detroit will reveal choices made available as a result of prior actions with an unlocked icon, directly demonstrating to the player how they’ve shaped the available actions. Many Telltale games have similar conditional options available but don’t reveal this metatextual information about which ones have been made available or locked because of prior decisions, instead notifying the player at the time they make the original choice that their action might “be remembered.” 79

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Another way modern games have iterated on adventure game dialogue trees is to add a countdown timer, with the character remaining silent or choosing some default option if a response is not chosen in time. This enforces a film-like pacing, where the scene continues to move forward even if the player does not interact. Designers often use this option to invoke stress in a high-stakes situation: The Walking Dead is particularly effective at doing this to invoke the split-second high-stakes decisions that characterize its story world. In games with a slower pace, such as Life Is Strange, timed silence failbacks are rarer or not used at all. The relationship between the choice text (the on-screen label which the player selects) and the actual line which the player character performs can also vary significantly, from being precisely the same (as in most LucasArts games and early Telltale games) to being only a single word hinting at the general tone or topic (as in Fahrenheit or Heavy Rain). Shorter choice text is necessary for timed sequences or to prevent slowing down the pacing of a scene but risks creating disconnect for players surprised or upset by how the action they selected plays out. Especially if this happens too often, players may be pushed away from identification with the player character through having their perception of agency repeatedly thwarted.

The Telltale Effect We’ve seen how many of these games use choice in a more complex way than simply branching paths. In previous work (J. T. Murray 2018), we have described how these games, and those of Telltale in particular, work to create a sensation in players called the Telltale Effect: “the emotional response elicited from players by the integration of value-based choices in a charged cinematic context without the presence of significant agency within the story.” Rather than focus on strategic choices, these games center the player’s attention on dramatic, well-produced scenes that maximize emotional responses to choices and their (perceived and actual) consequences, aspiring to draw forth feelings of responsibility and identification as well as fear of bad outcomes. This effect is not merely an illusion of agency, nor simply an extension of the familiar narrative experiences created by cinema. Rather, it is a unique experience created from the marriage of the affordances of games to render dramatic performances that can seamlessly vary in response to constrained player choices. In this same prior work, we conducted a user study of players of The Wolf Among Us, studying their emotional reactions across multiple traversals 80

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and comparing these to a coded representation of the choice structure of the episode and the details of how scenes were cut together and edited. We observed that the cinematic presentation, design of choice points and individual choices (including their context and sequencing), and the way consequences were implied and presented all worked together to persuade the player to adopt the protagonist’s values as their own for the duration of play. For example, the designers can insert a cut to a character’s disapproving facial expression after a choice to engender a feeling of guilt or extend the length or angle of a shot to highlight or minimize aspects of a scene connecting to implied consequences. Notably, this is more than just extending cinematic techniques of emotional manipulation into a ludic space: it’s also a clever solution to the problem of static content presented by Dragon’s Lair and FMV adventure games. Our close study of many playthroughs of The Wolf Among Us noted that many use the same recorded dialogue regardless of particular choices but contextualize differently via cinematic techniques to produce different responses in the player. Trying to respond to a player’s expressive input with a small handful of prerendered video clips is a losing game: but with tools like a dynamic camera, remappable motions and expressions, and the ability to insert or remove shots, stories can be both cinematic and responsive. In addition, the way choices are presented is a powerful tool for framing the player’s perception of their role in the story and the possibility space it explores. Game scholar Peter Mawhorter has studied the presentation and framing of choices as part of a holistic “choice poetics,” which posits that the aesthetics of choice-based systems extend far beyond the mere presence or absence of agency (2016). Telltale’s designers deployed choice points deliberately and strategically to produce specific effects in players. For instance, options presented but not selected become part of the implicit space of possible stories the player holds in their head, shaping their perception of being at a specific point within a narrative possibility space. If the player is offered a choice to react sympathetically to a character and then rejects it, they may feel guilt simply by realizing that acting more kindly was an option. Conversely, a player who chose to be sympathetic might gain the sensation that they have branched the story into a version with a more sympathetic protagonist, even if the character would actually have immediately brushed off the insult with no real consequences. The distribution of options, especially in the moments before a consequential choice, can be strategically used by designers to influence players or set up more meaningful stakes for a big decision. 81

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That the choice is more important than the consequence can be seen perhaps most clearly in Telltale’s breakout success, The Walking Dead, which sold over 28 million episodes in its first two seasons (Ohannessian 2014). While Season One contains many choices that seem highly significant, such as which of two characters to save, an analysis of the season’s choice structure reveals that most of these branches are collapsed back into the same linear story, generally within less than an episode (Killham 2013). The season’s final decision hinges on asking someone to murder a friend before they turn into a zombie, and the setup and framing of the season make this moment of choice the climax of the season. If the player refuses to kill the friend, the character dies anyway mere moments later. But the Telltale Effect tells us that this consequence does not really matter: the moment is successful simply for putting the player in the position where they were asked to make that choice in the first place. Writing for gaming press juggernaut IGN, reviewer Greg Miller calls The Walking Dead a “juggernaut” of gaming, saying “there’s no denying the impact” it’s had on video games: Will our endings be completely different? No. [The game] is telling us the same story and thus taking us to the same conclusion, but it allows us to experience it in different ways… [It’s] like a coloring book: we each have the same black and white sketch, but it’s up to us to fill it in as we see fit. The relationships I’ve built, the emotions I’ve felt, the choices I’ve made—that’s what makes The Walking Dead: The Game so endearing. (Miller 2012) With The Walking Dead, Telltale at last achieved the watercooler relevancy they had reached toward for so long, with excited fans swapping theories, reaction videos, and their own rationales for the choices they made online and in person. As Bruner had observed, this was only possible because each person’s story stayed more or less the same—rather than radically diverging—but with The Walking Dead the studio had cracked the formula of how to make a story feel meaningfully interactive regardless.

From Outside to Inside In these mainstream games, where can we locate the outsider? While Telltale’s early games centered loveable loser types familiar from traditional adventure games (Fone Bone, Guybrush Threepwood, Wallace and 82

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Grommit), their later heroes shifted toward more traditional masculine archetypes (Batman, Bigby, Rodrik Forrester) as they began to work with more mainstream properties. While focusing on character means these games have often been more diverse than their contemporaries (The Walking Dead and Fahrenheit both featured people of color as playable characters, for instance), this doesn’t change the fact that in many ways cinematic choice games are adventure games returned once again to the mainstream: as close to insiders as any of their descendants have gotten. These games are difficult for outsider creators to make, requiring big budgets and large teams to realize their cinematic ambitions. There are no freely available toolsets to make cinematic choice games out of the box, in the way there are specialized tools for creating other kinds of games like interactive fiction or side-scrolling platformers. This means these creators often must operate in interstitial and precarious spaces with reclaimed tools. YouTube’s ability to create video annotations (text links that could be positioned on the screen during certain portions of a video) made it a home for thousands of interactive video projects—at least until the provider removed the annotation feature in 2017. Two years later, they removed all existing annotations from videos as well, rendering nonfunctional what was probably the largest archive ever assembled of amateur interactive video projects. As we complete this volume, mainstream cinematic choice games seem at a crossroads. The closure of Telltale Games in 2018 was followed just two months later by the debut of the first high-profile interactive video project from streaming video giant Netflix, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. While making little use of design wisdom from the studios profiled in this chapter (and indeed suffering from all the same issues with rigidity as FMV adventure games), the company has demonstrated an interest in cultivating unexpected and marginalized voices among some of its filmmakers. Netflix now has the opportunity to present those filmmakers with an in-house development tool for creating and widely distributing cinematic choice games. One future of the adventure game may well lurk in one of those coming projects. Cinematic choice games bring forward many classic adventure game ideas—a focus on story and character, deemphasized or more abstracted action, and immersion in the emotional life of the player character—into a new kind of immersive filmic experience. In so doing they have interrogated the nature of choice and agency in games and accumulated much useful design wisdom that interactive storytellers of all kinds can make use of. But 83

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they represent just one of many paths the descendants of adventure games have taken. In the next chapter we will take a close look at a handful of modern games that try more intentionally to replicate the feel of classic adventure games, and how each succeeds with a very different strategy. Works Cited Bruner, Kevin. 2016. “Keynote.” Presented at the 9th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS), Los Angeles, November 16. Buecheler, Christopher. 1996. “The Gamespy Hall of Fame: Maniac Mansion.” Gamespy. http://archive.gamespy.com/legacy/halloffame/mm.shtm. Accessed August 1, 2018. Bycer, Josh. 2014. Player Agency: How Game Design Affects Narrative—Game Wisdom. http://game-wisdom.com/critical/player-agency-game-designnarrative. Dickens, Evan. 2004. “A Profile of Telltale Games.” Adventure Gamers. October 4, 2004. https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/17751. Edge Staff. 2013. “The Making of: Omikron: The Nomad Soul.” Edge (blog). September 21, 2013. https://web.archive.org/web/20140228215752/http://www. edge-online.com/features/the-making-of-omikron-the-nomad-soul/. Froschauer, Adrian. 2014. Clementine Will Remember All of That. http:// ontologicalgeek.com/clementine-will-remember-all-of-that/. Gerardi, Matt. 2014. Readers Debate the Importance (or Irrelevance) of Choice in Telltale Games. games.avclub.com. https://games.avclub.com/readers-debatethe-importance-or-irrelevance-of-choic-1798274854. Grayson, Nathan. 2014. “QTEs Don’t Have to Suck.” Kotaku. December 4, 2014. https://kotaku.com/qtes-dont-have-to-suck-1666301726. Grow, April, Swen Gaudl, Paulo Gomes, Michael Mateas, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. 2014. “A Methodology for Requirements Analysis of AI Architecture Authoring Tools.” In Proc. 9th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. Killham, Evan. 2013. “Here’s a Chart of Every Choice in the Walking Dead: Season 1 (Image).” VentureBeat (blog). March 31, 2013. https://venturebeat. com/2013/03/31/the-walking-dead-season-one-plot-graph/. Killham, Evan. 2015. “The Ridiculous Design behind a Key Scene in Life Is Strange.” VentureBeat (blog). August 4, 2015. https://venturebeat. com/2015/08/04/the-ridiculous-design-behind-a-key-scene-in-life-is-strange/. Kleinman, Erica M. 2016. “Understanding Metagaming Mechanics in Interactive Storytelling.” Masters Thesis, Drexel University. Laurel, Brenda Kay. 1986. “Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System.” PhD dissertation, The Ohio State University. Maloney, Molly. 2017. “Out on a Limb: Practical Approaches to Branching Story.” Presented at the Konsoll, Bergen, October 5, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=4-MGT6SZWWo. 84

Cinematic Choice Games Maltbie, Benjamin. 2016. “Stop Saying Telltale Games Aren’t Games.” Cheat Code Central (blog). January 11, 2016. http://dispatches.cheatcc.com/2038. Mateas, Michael, and Andrew Stern. 2003. “Façade: An Experiment in Building a Fully-Realized Interactive Drama.” Game Developers Conference, 24. Mawhorter, Peter. 2016. “Artificial Intelligence as a Tool for Understanding Narrative Choices.” PhD Thesis, UC Santa Cruz. Miller, Greg. 2012. “The Walking Dead: The Game Review.” IGN (blog). December 12, 2012. http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/12/12/the-walking-dead-the-gamereview. Murray, Janet H. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: The Free Press. Murray, John Thomas. 2018. “Telltale Hearts: Encoding Cinematic Choice-Based Adventure Games.” UC Santa Cruz. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1n02n02z. Nay, Jeff, and Jose Zagal. 2017. “Meaning without Consequence: Virtue Ethics and Inconsequential Choices in Games.” In Proc. 9th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. Niven, Larry, and Steven Barnes. 1981. Dream Park. Phantasia Press. Ohannessian, Kevin. 2014. “‘Walking Dead’ Game Episodes Sell 28 Million, Will Have Season 3.” Tech Times. July 28, 2014. https://www.techtimes.com/ articles/11417/20140728/walking-dead-video-game-telltale-games.htm. Reed, Aaron A. 2017. “Changeful Tales: Design-Driven Approaches toward More Expressive Storygames.” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz. Rogers, Tim. 2011. “Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment: Incorporating Quick Time Events into Gameplay.” Gamasutra (blog). February 8, 2011. http://www. gamasutra.com/view/feature/134611/full_reactive_eyes_entertainment_.php. Rose, Mike. 2013. “Gamasutra—In Story-Driven Games, ‘Game Overs’ Are a Failure of Game Design, Says David Cage.” Gamasutra. August 23, 2013. https:// www.gamasutra.com/view/news/198880/In_storydriven_games_Game_overs_ are_a_failure_of_game_design_says_David_Cage.php. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2015. Narrative as Virtual Reality 2. Johns Hopkins University Press. Schell, Jesse. 2014. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. AK Peters/CRC Press.

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Games traditionally have done a really bad job of replicating that part [the conversations] of being in relationships, regardless of what type of relationship it is. The unpredictability of emotional reaction comes up against the predictability of systems. (Firewatch writer Sean Vanaman, qtd. in Hudson and Hampton 2016) While we can see in cinematic choice games a clear trajectory from the adventure game’s classic mechanics, not all the genre’s descendants show such a direct lineage. In many cases their designers were inspired by the adventure games they played as children and, by returning to the well, hoped to reinvent or reimagine the genre as something that could work for modern audiences. One such game is Firewatch, which we’ll discuss later in this chapter, which centers a relationship built up slowly through a series of conversations that take place over a walkie-talkie as you explore a beautiful natural environment. Games like Firewatch often have a hard time fitting into modern genres and classifications, particularly as the adventure game category has faded from both journalism and scholarship. The article in which Vanaman is quoted above calls his game a “talking simulator,” riffing off another kind of adventure game descendant, walking simulators, which we’ll discuss in Chapter 5. The Witness and Her Story, two other games that we’ll study closely in this chapter, have also both struggled to be categorized by contemporary players and reviewers. What these games have in common is the work they do to recapture the lost spark of adventure games—albeit in very different ways and perhaps for different reasons. Each of these three games removes one of the cornerstone elements of adventure games in a bid to refocus the genre on a more limited set of dynamics. The Witness, the long-awaited second game from developer Johnathan Blow (Braid), removes the story pillar to focus on the pleasures of exploration and puzzle-solving. Firewatch, which has sold over a million copies, instead sacrifices puzzles, to focus on story and exploration. Finally,

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Her Story, winner of multiple Game of the Year awards, sacrifices exploration to strengthen the sympathetic dynamics between story and puzzles. Through a close reading of each game’s design, we will see how three very different approaches to modernizing adventure games deepen our understanding of the genre’s strengths and frustrations and suggest future evolutions and reinventions.

The Adventure Triangle We established in Chapter 2 that classic adventure games were built around three essential pillars of story, exploration, and puzzles. Working in tandem, these pillars can enable certain dynamics of play—such as the sensation of starring in an ongoing story, which the cinematic choice games we discussed in the previous chapter work to amplify. But a reasonable question for designers reconsidering the adventure game formula to ask is whether these pillars are really foundational. What might happen if we removed one entirely? How are they really interrelated? To answer this question, we must look more closely at the connections between them. If we consider each as the corner of a triangle, we can talk not only about its three points but about its three edges: each connection between two pillars. We can consider each edge a spectrum, or tension, between two dynamics (Figure 4.1). Consider the edge between story and exploration, for instance: a tension between desires for coherent narrative (the story pillar) and player agency (the exploration pillar). All narrative games struggle with this tension, and we have well-known design terms to refer to it: removing too much exploratory freedom can make a game feel “railroaded,” a trade-off designers often make to allow for a more tightly plotted story, as in games like Life Is Strange (discussed in Chapter 3) or Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (2007). Alternatively, too much player freedom can hamstring narrative momentum, leaving players lost or confused about what to do next or letting the story stall out: a sacrifice made in roguelikes and their descendants like Dwarf Fortress (2006), less concerned with an overall story, or in openworld RPGs like Skyrim (2011), which let the player digress from the main plotline, sometimes so drastically that they never return, in order to capture a sense of boundless, emergent possibility. Classic adventure games generally worked to balance these tensions not by removing either pillar but by striving to find a balance in between: 88

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Figure 4.1  The Adventure Game Triangle.

gameplay that allows for player freedom but still tells a coherent story. When players explore a large open world like the interconnected islands of Riven, occasionally able to discover actions that open up additional areas and reveal new pieces of an ongoing story, the result can be a pleasurable sensation of starring in the ongoing narrative: that the story is advancing because of you and in response to your own ideas. The danger of this approach, however, is that the two extremes do not reconcile and players experience a failure of both pillars: being lost and confused in an overwhelming possibility space, unable to advance the story through not knowing what action will do so. Many players over the years have made little progress in Riven precisely because it opens nearly the whole map up from the beginning, enhancing exploration but leaving players overwhelmed. We can briefly extend this analysis to cover the other two edges of the adventure triangle (Table 4.1). The tension between story and puzzlesolving is one between narrative flow (an ongoing momentum to the story) and mental challenge (where the story must pause while the player works out the solution to a puzzle). It might fail because the challenge is too great and the story stops moving entirely or because the puzzle is so simple the player doesn’t remain challenged and thus motivated to continue. When balanced, however, this tension can create a pleasing alternation between different mental states and enhance the player’s identification with the 89

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Table 4.1  The tensions, strengths, and weaknesses of the connections between the adventure game pillars. Edge

Tension

Strength

Weakness

Story-Exploration

Coherence vs. Agency

Player feels like the star of the story

Story loses coherence or player loses motivation

ExplorationPuzzles

Possibility space vs. one right solution

Player feels clever

Player feels dumb

Puzzles-Story

Challenge vs. flow

Player understands the story through enacting it

The story stalls out

central character by both thinking and playing along with them, in a way fundamentally different from watching a cut scene or carrying out the provided steps of an assigned quest. Finally, the edge between exploration and puzzles is a tension between a wide-open possibility space where anything might happen and the single correct solution: the “right” answer. Too broad a possibility space, and the player can’t zero in on the proper solution through experimentation and observation; too narrow, and the solution is trivially obvious and thus uninteresting. When balanced, the player feels challenged but not to the point of frustration, feeling clever when they find the solution and like they’ve earned the next chapter of gameplay. Removing one of the adventure game pillars, then, should have more complex effects than we might naively assume. It will not only remove that individual element but alter the dynamics of the two associated edges: removing both their failure states, naturally, but also their potential pleasures. Removing puzzles, for instance, should lessen the chance that the player will feel dumb or that the story will stall out because the player can’t solve them. But the player will also miss out on the chance to feel clever for finding the right solution and may have a weaker connection to the story, since they’re no longer sharing as much mental processes with the protagonist. This is the trade-off made by Firewatch, discussed below. Given their many contradictory trade-offs, is it in fact even possible to balance all three pillars—to successfully navigate all of the tensions and weaknesses in the adventure triangle? Many of the genre’s most memorable games are remembered as much for their frustrations as 90

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their successes. One could argue that classic adventure games, evolving in an earlier and more optimistic time for game design and the potential of computer storytelling, simply tried to do too much: embed players in an explorable world where they had significant agency to interact with an ongoing story and contribute through their cleverness to its continuation. It should therefore be no surprise that many of the modern games we consider in this book remove at least one of the classic adventure pillars, sacrificing some of the genre’s original charms in an attempt to more successfully execute on others. The three games discussed below each try to maintain the feel of an adventure game by removing a different pillar, and examining their approaches in detail is a useful move to consider how each pulls the concept of the adventure game in a different direction. At the close of the chapter, we’ll reconsider the triangle as a whole again, considering whether newer design innovation or technical advancements might be opening another path forward toward reconciling adventure gaming’s conflicted pillars.

The Witness In The Witness (2016), the player explores a Myst-like island filled with beautiful scenery and strange devices. The game is “very deliberately an homage to Myst” (Kollar 2015), with designer Jonathan Blow framing it as a deliberate attempt to reinvent adventure games: What I’m trying to do as a designer is take everything about adventure games I don’t like—cause I loved adventure games when I was a kid but, man, as a game designer now who has ideas about design I just look at them and I think they’re all really bad and I just [want to] kind of solve them in a way that uses our modern understanding of game design as best as I can. (qtd. in Amini 2013) Blow has identified one of these flaws as “pixel hunting,” when a player isn’t sure what part of the environment can be interacted with. The Witness, however, differs from Myst and other adventure games in a much more significant way: it has a deliberate and relentless excision of all traces of story. It attempts to reinvent the adventure game by sacrificing story to strengthen the linked pleasures of exploration and puzzle-solving. 91

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The Puzzles Are Everything In service of this mission, puzzles in The Witness have also evolved. While still situated in the environment, they have been streamlined and abstracted down into variations on a single theme. Some 600 puzzles fill the game’s island environment, all of which involve drawing lines on a grid connecting a start point to an end point. As players progress through the game, they encounter more and more complex rules, and combinations of rules, for drawing a valid solution line. Solving these puzzles is close to the only mechanic in the game: the only others are movement, and activating audio logs strewn around the island, which is entirely optional (and discussed further below). It’s easy to overlook how radical a simplification this is. Other adventure games may have dozens of mechanics: even Myst, famous for its minimalist point-and-click interface, has quite a few beyond the above (inventorydriven puzzles involving collecting blue and red pages, activating linking books, manipulating objects in the environment, and so on). In The Witness, the player never manipulates anything other than puzzle lines directly. Successfully solving some puzzles might cause a change to the world (such as a door swinging open, allowing access to a new area), but these results are all triggered via manipulating the puzzles themselves. Puzzles are clustered around the island in themed groups. Each group centers a new rule framework for how start and end points must be legally connected. Some puzzle groups require connecting to or avoiding certain points on the grid; others involve enclosing particular symbols, making specific shapes with the connecting line, and so on. Within each group, puzzles must generally be solved sequentially, proceeding from simple to more complex challenges based on permutations of the group’s rule or combinations with previously learned rules. In this way access to puzzle groups can be gated based on what the player has learned: an area with a guardian puzzle requiring mastery of the concepts in groups A and B cannot be entered until the player has learned the tricks necessary to finish both of those areas. While some early puzzle groups can be solved by logic alone, very soon the player encounters puzzles where logic is not enough: to progress, it must be combined with observation. One of the first observations most players will make about the game’s meticulously crafted island environment is that, like its spiritual predecessor Myst, it is largely static. Other than the occasional opening door or rotating device, and the drawing of lines across 92

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puzzle surfaces, nothing moves: the clouds do not drift and the sun does not rise or set. Myst’s static world was necessitated by technological limitations of the time, which the designers tried to overcome by including occasional small overlays of motion: soaring seagulls or rippling waves. In The Witness, however, this design limitation is elevated to artistic statement. Nothing moves on the island except in response to puzzle solutions: tree branches do not sway in the wind, and there are no characters to converse with or animals to scamper away. The reason for this becomes clear when the player begins to notice that many sets of puzzles can be solved only by noticing the way they are deliberately situated within the static environment. In one area near the game’s starting point, the player seems to have an unobstructed grid with which to connect points, but straightforward solutions are not accepted. It’s not until the player notices that distant objects seen behind the transparent puzzle panel line up with its grid that the correct solutions can be traced (Figure 4.2). Other puzzles involve noticing the shadows cast by tree branches, the puzzle board’s reflection in a body of water, or the way the sunlight refracts off its surface. The player even comes to realize that a puzzle surface is not a required part of a puzzle: from certain perspectives, distant objects line up to look like puzzle paths, which can be traced. By the game’s conclusion, it seems as if rather than being merely a pretty backdrop for the puzzles

Figure 4.2  An example of a puzzle early in The Witness solvable only through ­noticing environmental cues.

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to exist in, the objects on the island and the technical features of the 3D engine—reflection, specularity, transparency, positional sound, colored and filtered light, the sound of footsteps, and so on—exist because they enable solutions to particular puzzles. It’s especially important to note that these environmental cues do not merely hint at an answer, in the way a narrative clue in a traditional adventure game might. They universally and unambiguously reveal the correct solution—once the player understands how this puzzle relates to the environment and has found the right perspective from which to view it. The world of The Witness does not merely contextualize the puzzles: it exists solely, and perfectly, to enable them (momentary weaknesses of your frail human brain aside). This notion is almost a reductio ad absurdum distillation of the connection between the puzzle and exploration pillars of adventure games: that environmental observation supports puzzle-solving. It works, however, by entirely excising the third pillar: story.

No One Will Remember That Much of the frustration with classic adventure games stems from complaints that their puzzles don’t make sense. Situating puzzles within a narrative is hard (as we discussed in Chapter 2). In many cases, designers striving to extend playtime or increase challenge resorted to forcing players into increasingly elaborate sequences of actions. A 2016 Twitter Bot, @hintline by Neil Cicierga, procedurally generates random sequences of commands styled as adventure game walkthroughs: one example is “Pick up the oilcan. Don’t let the inventor catch you. Attach the gunpowder to the tire swing.” The bot is funny because its arbitrary commands evoke the same reaction many players had on seeing solutions to adventure game puzzles: “Why would you ever think to do that?” Even in well-designed puzzles, the inherent ambiguity and nonuniversality of stories can cause players difficulty. Zork II (1981) included a puzzle that assumed players understood the rules of baseball, making it unintentionally difficult for players who weren’t sports fans or lived outside the United States (Nelson 1995). While giving drugged meat to a pair of guard dogs in The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) is certainly one plausible way to get past this obstacle, players might rightly think of any number of other solutions that the game does not allow, such as attacking the dogs, sneaking past them, giving them grog to drink, and so on. Another way of saying this is that 94

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players might use the environmental clues in a typical adventure game, driven in large part by the story and fictional world, to come to any number of seemingly logical conclusions about the right way forward. The designer’s intended solution is, in the best case, only one of these, and in the worst case, something the player would never have thought of. The Witness moves to solve this problem by eliminating the ambiguities of story. To understand this, we must first consider how emphatically— almost surgically—story and all its traces have been removed from the game. First, the nature of the player character is deliberately ambiguous, frustrating attempts to pin down any information about whom—or what— the player is controlling. Interactive fiction author Andrew Plotkin has extensively analyzed this obfuscation, noting among other things how the player casts a deliberately gendered and costumed shadow and yet cannot possibly be a physical entity, since they can “touch” puzzle surfaces from any distance: Touch has nothing to do with it. You never manipulate the physical world (if there is one!) in any way. Indeed, if you look closer, the island is most unwilling to react to your physical presence. You can hear your footsteps, but you leave no footprints, nor even ripple the surface of a puddle you step in. You cannot brush aside a twig or pick up a bit of paper to read. You are a ghost, or a shadow of a ghost. Do you interact by observation? Perhaps you are simply recognizing the paths, and the panels react to that recognition. (Plotkin 2016) “Witnessing” the fictional world is one of the few actions the player and player character are equally capable of performing, which leads us to the credible claim that The Witness has no player character at all: only a player. While narrative adventure games offer a continuation of the story as a reward for finishing puzzles, The Witness offers merely the opportunity to continue witnessing: to access new beautifully rendered environments and the new puzzles they contain. Those environments also go to significant lengths to stay untainted by narrative. Environmental storytelling is so common as to be invisible in most game worlds: exploring a strange place filled with buildings and contraptions, a player naturally wonders, “Who made this? How long ago? And why?” This instinct is so ingrained that it takes some effort to come to the surprising conclusion that The Witness doesn’t do this either. These  questions are simply not answered: or, perhaps, are answered only 95

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self-referentially. Many of the game’s locations exist solely to justify the others. There’s a factory where the ubiquitous puzzle signs are made; there’s a quarry and sawmill to justify the materials used to build the factory. A lake that appears at first purely decorative is actually an elaborate map indicating which puzzles have and have not been solved, with the positioning of flowers, fountains, and leaves all precisely arranged to serve this purpose. Many of the other buildings on the island seem to echo the great pursuits of humanity: temples, tombs, and art studios (where humans have traditionally pondered questions like “Who made this? How long ago? And why?”), as well as fortresses, factories, and tree houses (symbolic of some of the classic distractions from those questions). The audio logs scattered around the island, stylized as digital media players, evoke another common mechanic in games for advancing story. Gamers expect these messages to contain “story dumps” of exposition from game characters, explaining events that happened here in the past that build together into a coherent narrative, a familiar device in other games where much of the story is delivered via this mechanism (such as BioShock, 2007). In The Witness, however, the recordings are explicitly extradiegetic. They are quotations from real-world figures, complete with a spoken attribution: as with the architecture, it’s clear these materials are not meant to be interpreted as creations of characters within the simulated world. The quotes are from philosophers, historians, astronauts, scientists, religious leaders, writers, and artists; they tend to involve contemplation of purpose and the meaning of life. We might read them collectively as echoing back to us the same questions we hoped activating them might answer, namely: “What’s going on? Why am I here? What’s the point of all this?” The game also features video messages that can be uncovered and that are also explicitly extra-diegetic, with film credits or a vintage production company logo to make it clear they were not produced for the game. One of these, a long clip (excerpted in the quote below) of historian James Burke from the 1978 BBC television series Connections, speaks perhaps to the project of so completely removing story from the game: Today, the people who make things change, the people who have that knowledge, are the scientists and the technologists, who are the true driving force of humanity. And before you say, “what about the Beethovens and the Michelangelos?” Let me suggest something with which you may disagree ­violently: that at best, the products of human emotion, art, philosophy, 96

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politics, music, literature, are interpretations of the world, that tell you more about the guy who’s talking, than about the world he’s talking about. Second hand views of the world, made third hand by your interpretation of them… [Art] is easier to take, isn’t it? Understandable. Got people in it… [S]cientific knowledge is hard to take, because it removes the reassuring crutches of opinion, ideology, and leaves only what is demonstrably true about the world. The Witness wants to make the case that story in adventure games is a distraction. An enterprise based on the player synthesizing an understanding of narrative and ludic planes is doomed to failure, because interpretation of narrative—like all art—is inherently subjective. To ethically give players a puzzle with a logical, definitive solution, a designer should therefore only make use of what is logically, definitively—demonstrably, in Burke’s words— true about the world. Story will never be demonstrably true: adventure game puzzle solutions will always be subjective, and thus adventure games will always be frustrating and imperfect. Quod erat demonstrandum. The Witness emphatically abandons the story pillar of adventure games to focus on maximizing the pleasures of exploration and puzzle-solving. Returning to our adventure triangle framework, our theory suggests this should have several positive effects. Since there is no story to disrupt, the player getting stuck on a puzzle won’t cause it to stall out; and likewise the player’s freedom to explore can’t disrupt or frustrate progression of the narrative, since there is none. The tighter connection between exploration and puzzle-solving, meanwhile, should enhance the player’s feeling of cleverness for figuring things out. We can make a claim that these statements accurately describe The Witness. Many game reviewers found the puzzles difficult, but fair: IGN used almost this exact phrase in their review (Rad 2016), describing the game’s sense of flow as “freeing… a freedom granted by a world as welcomingly open to exploration as it is enjoyably challenging to solve.” Another review said, “The more you figure out… the tougher and more satisfying The Witness becomes” (Totilo 2016). GameSpot’s reviewer has perhaps the most eloquent statement of this point: The Witness is one of the most challenging games I’ve ever played… But when you do persist, frustration gives way to gratification. This is what makes The Witness special. Unlike many puzzle games, it doesn’t just make you feel intelligent—it begins on the assumption that you are intelligent. It trusts that you are a perceptive human 97

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­ eing, ­capable of patience and critical thinking, and it rewards you b for using both. (Mahardy 2016) However, our theory predicts removing story should have negative effects as well. The pleasurable sensations of starring in a complete story and feeling like one’s actions are advancing it will be lost, and because of this, the player may feel less invested and motivated to continue solving puzzles. Again, we can make the case that these statements are true of The Witness. Many reviewers negatively commented on the game’s lack of story: The Witness is a sterile, lifeless videogame. It revels in the idea of knowledge, fascinated by how it’s earned and what it signifies. But it seems uninterested in players and their accomplishments, and with that lack of interest comes a lack of the human touch necessary to make sense of the knowledge it offers. The Witness is like the island on which it takes place: a machine, to the core. Anything within it that seems lifelike is superficial. (Muncy 2016) Players are so used to story in games that its absence is so baffling as to be nearly unthinkable, leading many players to assume they just didn’t “get it”: I’m sure The Witness is about something, but it would probably take a college philosophy class a week to sort it all out. I’m sure that’s the goal, that The Witness is vague and abstract enough that it could mean different things to different to people. Honestly, I don’t know if it meant anything to me beyond being a collection of mazes. The ­Witness doesn’t need a narrator or heroic journey plot structure, but I do wish it had a little more cohesion. (Minotti 2016) The Witness trades the immersion and satisfaction of story to enhance the connection between exploration and puzzles. In brief, this makes it a better puzzle game while making it a less satisfying world to visit. But it’s interesting to note the way this carefully crafted experiment distills sometimes-fuzzy adventure game tropes into crystalline purity. The player has expressive input, but solely in their ability to freely trace puzzle paths. The puzzles are satisfyingly centered on the axis between revelatory and simulative: they must be experimented with to slowly approach a state of mastery, setting up a revelatory moment where the player suddenly “sees” 98

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the correct pathway. The game offers several different endings depending on how the player defines their own criteria for “completion,” but one of these involves a swooping ride through all the island’s colorful scenery, echoing the rides that often appeared in the Myst series and suggesting that their visceral thrill was more than just a fun reward. It was a celebration of the glories of observation, an act The Witness elevates to an illustrative extreme.

Firewatch Another acclaimed 2016 game that makes a different trade-off is studio Campo Santo’s debut title, Firewatch. In the game, the player takes the role of Henry, a new park service employee looking to escape his troubles at a fire tower deep in the Wyoming wilderness. Through a fixed story arc spanning Henry’s summer, the player explores the surrounding environment and builds a connection with his supervisor Delilah, who exists only as a voice on the radio. The two build a friendship while investigating a series of mysterious threats and learning the tragic history of the area’s former inhabitants. Firewatch (Figure 4.3) tells a strong story and foregrounds exploration in a richly detailed environment, removing puzzles to keep the player immersed and the story moving forward. Of the three adventure pillars, puzzles are by

Figure 4.3  Screenshot from Firewatch. 99

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far the one most often removed by modern storygames, probably because they seem the most obvious point of potential failure. Some games replace puzzles with other mechanics, generally more action-oriented; others risk the ire of “hardcore” gamers by not replacing them with anything: these “walking simulators” (discussed in Chapter 5) like Dear Esther (2008) and Gone Home (2013) were inspirations to the designers of Firewatch, who nevertheless felt they needed to find a more active middle ground. The game centers on exploration of a single large area, which becomes more open as the story advances. While this is similar to how many classic adventure games are structured, the designers have also cited as inspiration the classic Nintendo game Metroid (1986), in which the player can freely explore a map, slowly unlocking new abilities or keys that allow them to reach more and more areas, wondering what such a framework would be like without the typically expected combat (Sliva 2014). As the story progresses through a series of episodes, narrative events cause new areas to become available, generally one at a time. While the player has a certain amount of freedom to explore—they may wander through previously unlocked areas and select their own route to the next point of interest—the story will not advance until they arrive. The player has slightly more freedom in their interactions with Delilah, through a conversation-tree menu that offers a large amount of variability. The designers have said there is “far more dialogue in the game than you could ever see in a single playthrough” (Remo 2016), and reviewers have noticed different conversations and story points appearing based on conversation choices. While the story does not branch, and there is only one way it can end, the developers have called this variability in the dialogue a way of creating a “shared history” between Henry and Delilah that feels unique for each player (Palumbo 2016). In contrast to the stripped-down simplicity of The Witness, the player’s space of actions and inputs in Firewatch is closer to the large and messy possibility space of traditional adventure games, thanks to a range of mechanics that recall the multiple verbs those engines supported. These include: ●●

●●

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Many varieties of movement: walking, running, jumping over obstacles, climbing up and down ledges, rappelling up and down ropes Picking up portable objects, examining them from different angles, and choosing to keep or discard them

Fragments of Adventure ●●

●●

●●

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Interacting with fixed objects (opening and closing cache boxes and fences, pushing over a tree, etc.) Manipulating various navigation tools (map, compass, tracking device) Conversing with Delilah via timed conversation tree; silence can sometimes be significant “Reporting” an object seen in the environment to Delilah, triggering either a static audio response or a new conversation tree

These many mechanics help the player feel like the star of Firewatch: by embodying the many actions Henry performs (fumbling with a map, jumping over logs, chatting with Delilah, hiking through the wilderness), the connection between story and exploration is strengthened. The wide variety of mechanics and objects/locations to use them on gives the player a sense of ownership and agency, a sensation that they are choosing from moment to moment how to direct Henry’s attention, focusing on plot threads that interest them and ignoring those that don’t. In The Witness, observing the environment is required and crucial, since the puzzles cannot otherwise be solved; but as Firewatch has no puzzles, environmental observation becomes an optional, player-directed way of embodying the player character. We can see this in the more varied and dynamic environment of the latter game, which changes with the time of day, the weather, and the actions of off-screen characters: trees sway in the breeze, fires start and spread, vandals wreck a previously orderly scene. In contrast to the static situation that must be apprehended in The Witness (supporting abstract puzzles with no temporality), Firewatch wants to appear like a dynamic world that’s being lived in (supporting an ongoing story with forward momentum). Exploration exists in each game, but to serve very different dynamics. Unlike The Witness, which demands player effort to advance the action, Firewatch takes pains to prevent the player from getting stuck. The next objective is always shown as a banner along the top of the screen and usually involves either performing an action on a nearby object, exploring a small region looking for a clue (in the form of an interactable object), or navigating to a specific area. Even navigation provides little challenge: the player has a compass and a map with a highlight of their current location. Most significantly, Firewatch has no puzzles in the classic adventure game sense: the player never needs to have a moment of revelation that will

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uncover the next correct course of action. Designer Nels Anderson, asked in a pre-release interview if the game would include puzzles, replied: There aren’t Myst-esque puzzles or anything like that. You’ll certainly have to be engaged with the game’s systems to make your way through the story, but you won’t be needing to rearrange scrambled letters to spell a word or match coloured tiles or anything like that. (qtd. in Palumbo 2016) It’s interesting to note that Anderson’s characterization of puzzles here is explicitly extradiegetic—arbitrary challenges that don’t connect to the world or story. Rather than reduce player frustration by making puzzles connect more strongly to the narrative—or change the context of puzzles so they don’t require a narrative understanding, as in The Witness—the approach taken by Firewatch is to discard them entirely. This strategy makes perfect sense in light of the designers’ project to make a game foregrounding exploration, a story with forward momentum, and the ongoing development of a close relationship between a strongly characterized player character and game characters. The most important thing is Henry’s story, and obstacles to advancing that story have been eliminated. Our adventure game triangle theory predicts that removing puzzles should have the effect of strengthening the pleasurable dynamics associated with story and exploration. The flow of the story is no longer threatened by the tendency of puzzles to stall it out, and the player is less likely to feel dumb for failing to synthesize environmental clues. The central dynamic between story and exploration, of feeling like the star of a story, is enhanced (a theme echoed by many design decisions throughout: the first thing the player sees upon beginning the game, for instance, is the text “You are Henry”). These observations are again borne out by critical reviews. Game Informer’s review describes being “immediately drawn into the game’s world” (Cork 2016) and the sense of connection with its two main characters. Another reviewer observes: “You’re not some disembodied camera floating around the landscape; you are Hank [Henry], constantly seeing your own body, swaying with Hank’s weight and just generally walking a mile (or a hundred) in Hank’s boots” (Plunkett 2016). Again, though, we should expect that removing the puzzles pillar has consequences. The sense of mastery over the story world should be reduced; and the player might feel less challenged, and thus less personally invested,

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because they did not need to overcome obstacles to advance the plot. Detractors say removing challenges also removes engagement: Walking forward is just a matter of pressing down a key or stick. And unless you are my dad playing a game, this doesn’t pose any sort of challenge at all. Your brain is basically unoccupied and the chance of your mind starting to drift is very high. Instead of being immersed in the game’s world you might start thinking of what to cook for dinner or something else that is totally unrelated to the experience the game wants you to have. (Grip 2017) While one might take issue with the notion that one’s “brain is basically unoccupied” without gameplay challenges (citing, for instance, any thought-provoking book or movie), we might still observe that without explicit challenges, our relationship to the characters and the world is subtly different. We might have narrative revelations while exploring the worlds of Dear Esther or Firewatch, but they are disconnected from the ludic plane. They run the risk of feeling like they happened to the star of the story, but not necessarily to (or because of) us. We don’t need to think like Henry in order to proceed, in short, and thus we might feel less responsibility over, and connection to, his story. These trade-offs, of course, are made with deliberate intent. Much as The Witness incorporates lack of compelling narrative and interesting characters into its design and aesthetic, so does Firewatch intentionally integrate frustration of player choice into its interpretation. In a piece entitled “Firewatch took away our ability to be good people, and that’s where it shines,” reviewer Olivia White argues that the player’s lack of agency over the story—their inability to take game actions to affect it—plays into the understanding of both Henry and Delilah (2016). White notes that Henry’s choices in the game’s prologue for dealing with his wife’s declining health are all selfish: the fact that the designers don’t give players the agency to make better choices is an intentional part of defining his backstory. Similarly, while certain dialogue options seem to suggest the player can influence Delilah’s decisions one way or another, her actions, including the pivotal decision she makes at the game’s climax, are always the same. Delilah is not a compliant character able to be manipulated by the player in the way most game characters are. The design limitation of removing the player’s control over the story serves to make Delilah a more static, independent, and perhaps more realistic character. 103

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Her Story The third leg that might be removed from the adventure triangle is exploration, but this has been tried far less frequently and, when attempted, often looks much less like a recognizable descendant of the genre. Indeed, since on-screen avatars and navigation through spaces are such common game tropes, it might be hard to even imagine a story-based game without exploration. Her Story, a 2015 indie game that took home a number of Game of the Year prizes, takes an imaginative leap into an original design space. While on the surface the game does not seem similar to classic adventure games, its designer Sam Barlow comes from a background of parser interactive fiction, and an analysis of its design reveals it can be productively examined as yet another attempt to rehabilitate some of the genre’s lost pleasures by removing one of its core foundations. In the game (Figure 4.4), the player operates a 1990s-era police computer with a database of video clips, taken from a series of interviews with a (fictional) woman1 accused of murdering her husband. The dated aesthetics recall our jaded expectations of profoundly noninteractive full-motion video games:

Figure 4.4  Her Story screenshot. We’ll refer to her as “the woman” throughout, since her name and the nature of her identity are part of the mysteries the game asks you to explore. 1

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The interface of the computer is a convincing Windows 95 analogue, letting you drag windows around and open files. Fluorescent lights are reflected in the glass of the monitor, briefly revealing the head and shoulders of the person sitting in front of it as they flicker. The clips of the woman are recorded on VHS, giving them a rich texture, and actor Viva Seifert plays her brilliantly. Her performance is understated,  realistic, and complex. For a game built around a single screen, it’s absolutely steeped in atmosphere, with fantastic sound design. (Kelly 2015) The clips, each a response to a single question, are indexed by their transcript: a search interface lets the player pull up a list of clips where the woman says (for instance) the word “murder.” This mechanic drives the entire game: the player must work their way through the library of clips and attempt to come to an understanding of the central character and a personal judgment of whether she’s guilty or innocent. Two carefully crafted limitations turn the experience of accessing the clips database into a game. First, since players are given no index to the clips, they must come up with search terms by hearing them used in other clips or thinking of them on their own. And second, the search engine will only return the first five matching results, meaning players must think up more specific words to access later clips. These limitations mean players can only have a successful traversal (solving the mystery) by coming to a greater and greater understanding of the story, gaining enough knowledge to know what search terms will uncover subsequent clues. As one reviewer describes: Everything you could want to know is available from the start, but you won’t know which words are important to focus on until you spend some time with the suspect. From there, the only barrier between you and what you need to know is what you type into the search bar. It’s refreshing to make progress based on what you learn or feel, and not on what you collect. (Albert 2015) This shifts a classic adventure game element, the inventory, on its head: the player’s own memory (as expressed through the database tracker) becomes the essential tracking mechanism for moving forward in play. One of Her Story’s most successful elements is its expressive text input, an all-but-forgotten device in contemporary games. As in a text adventure 105

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parser, the clip database offers the possibility of typing in anything the player can think of, rather than choosing candidates off a list or picking from a prescribed series of actions. The cleverness of the game’s conceit is that the database metaphor makes the translation from input to action completely transparent. Playing a text adventure, a command like ACQUIRE LAMP might fail for all kinds of reasons unclear to the player: perhaps “acquire” isn’t a recognized synonym; perhaps the game doesn’t have a concept of taking and dropping objects; either or both words could be misspelled, by the player or the designer; the lamp might simulated as immobile, or out of reach, either accidentally or intentionally; and so on. By contrast, a search entered into Her Story’s database will always transparently succeed or fail based solely on whether that word appears in any response. This significantly reduces the frustration caused by many free text input mechanics that map to more complex interpretations of language. Her Story manages to make both success and failure fun. Productive topics are in no way highlighted by the game: the player must notice when the character mentions a new person or subject that might be fruitful to investigate, and try typing it in on their own. The player is also free to try words sparked by thematic connections, sudden insights, or purely at random. The character mentioning her sister might prompt the player to try searching for brother or family. My own first playthrough included a delightfully satisfying moment when I noticed the character drinking coffee in some clips and tea in others: searching for these two words revealed a significant clue. Another similar moment came from an internal realization: in a story revolving around questions of self-identity, it occurred to me that the word “mirror” might be interesting to search for. This clever design means failing is also productive. Failure allows you to rule out certain subjects of inquiry: if a search for father produces no results, the player can assume such a character is probably not an important part of the story. Failure also might produce many false positives, such as clips where the word father is incidentally mentioned: the player must watch each clip to discover whether they are significant or not, and in so doing inevitably encounters mentions of other topics, sparking new ideas for searches. The interface means the player can’t help but drive the story forward as they navigate the maze of footage, each spoken word connecting rhizomatically to all the other clips that use it. Game designer Jesper Juul has observed that in a well-designed game, “Failure serves the deeper function of making players readjust their perception… In effect, failure adds content by making the player see new nuances in a game.” But this 106

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kind of productive failure can be rare in storygames, which tend to have more constrained plots and thus many more ways to fail than to succeed (Juul 2008, 2005).

Metaphors of Exploration Given the central mechanic of Her Story is finding one’s way through a maze of connected clips, is it accurate to say it removes the adventure game pillar of exploration? To defend this claim, we must clarify the assumptions “exploration” implies in the context of an adventure game—and it’s fascinating that it’s taken a game with such an original structure to force this. In Her Story the player has no avatar: while a full traversal does reveal a defined player character, there is no on-screen character exploring a physical space. The database of interconnected clips might be read as a metaphorical space, but the player character does not occupy a specific point within it, and this is a crucial distinction. The player can freely jump to any node in the database at any time, provided they know (or can think of) a word that node includes. Furthermore, nothing within the clip database itself can be experimented upon: the player can add tags to a clip to help find it later, but the clips cannot otherwise be manipulated in any way and will reveal no further information upon closer examination (unless that information is simply detail overlooked on a first viewing). The space of Her Story is therefore both static and open: there is no way to alter its state, and there is no way to hide anything in it other than through the structure itself. All “links” (the words in the clip) are immediately transparent upon viewing: even unlinked clips can be accessed provided the player thinks of the right word to try. Nothing is locked except through comprehension of the plot. Her Story thus features no exploration in the sense we mean when discussing adventure games—of a simulated space, by an avatar situated within it—while retaining the genre’s other features of story and puzzle-solving. Conversely, we might need to defend the claim that Her Story has puzzles, given what we’ve just said about its stateless, unmanipulable nature: the term implies an opportunity for interaction and input that is decidedly missing from the game’s interface. Not only can the player not change the state of the clip database, the structure of the game does not seem to allow for traditional puzzles at all, in the sense of specific roadblocks created by the designer and placed at particular positions within the world. Each player will encounter 107

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their own moments of puzzlement based on which plot threads they’ve discovered on their path through the database of clips and which elements of the story are obvious or unclear to them. Again, we must view our definition of “puzzle” in the context of simulative and revelatory registers to see that it does hold up here. Through this lens, a puzzle does not require us to change the state of a virtual object, and nor is it required to be a specific, designed artifact. It merely requires that the player can have a moment of revelation where they realize what action (here, typing a word) might allow forward progress (accessing new clips). The player conducts experiments to test and advance their understanding of the world by typing new words, and their progress is measured not in areas unlocked or objects obtained but in how much of the story they’ve understood and how that shapes what further words to try searching for. It’s most definitely a form of puzzle-solving. Furthermore, it is not quite correct to say Her Story doesn’t have designercreated puzzles. Barlow has spoken about how the scripts for each clip were meticulously edited before the video shoot to avoid prematurely mentioning keywords associated with deeper parts of the mystery (Barlow 2016). An elaborate spreadsheet was used to ensure layers of narrative were gated appropriately, verifying that the links between clips were not so promiscuous as to make the maze of connections trivial to navigate. While the interview clips seem during play to be casually conversational, the language of Her Story has been carefully pruned—designed—to guide the player through its story and to create natural obstacles for players to overcome through experiencing narrative revelations. This is Her Story’s standout dynamic: growing understanding of a narrative unlocking more and more pieces of it. As with The Witness and Firewatch, this dynamic is achieved by sacrificing the elements of the adventure triangle that do not support it: in this case, exploration. By removing exploration, it becomes impossible for the player’s agency to “break” the story world by putting it in an unexpected state. The sensation of feeling like the star of the story is strengthened, by focusing on how the player’s own actions are driving the narrative (or in this case, an understanding of it): each new successful search is a moment of feeling clever and connected to the ongoing process of solving the mystery. The structure of the story and the careful way clips are interconnected means the player has complete freedom over how they navigate. Though players might be stumped for a while if they can’t think of new search terms, the “productive failures” enabled by the design make random guessing or trying words seen in prior clips very likely to 108

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suggest new avenues of investigation. Reviewers have commented on how Her Story makes you feel like a detective: the direct link between “solving the puzzles” and advancing the story enhances this sensation that player is directly driving the narrative forward (Rayner 2015). Again, we should also expect to see some weaknesses from removing exploration. Without directly controlling an avatar moving through a physical world, we risk feeling less connected to the drama (and Her Story indeed does add a device later in play that gives the player a stronger connection to why they’re navigating this database of clips and have investment in this story). Our analytical lenses give us a deeper appreciation for how Her Story manages to feel so innovative and enjoyable when we consider how design decisions mitigate each of these weaknesses. While the player does feel less like the hero of the story, immersed within it— explicitly watching a character, rather than identifying with or controlling her—this ties into that character’s secretive nature, which is revealed to be an elaborate ploy around the nature of her identity. The mystery would not work if we began the game from her point of view, knowing what she knows. Likewise, while we do not get to enjoy the riddle-like satisfaction of solving well-crafted, environmentally situated puzzles, the dynamics arising from navigating the tightly interconnected web of clips create bespoke puzzles for each player’s unique traversal. They also help provide solutions to them by continuously offering new suggestions of other keywords and clips to try. While none of these games, of course, were designed with our framework in mind, we hope we’ve demonstrated how deep understanding of a genre’s underpinnings can help designers to explore the different trade-offs that modifying those assumptions might make. The structure of the adventure triangle, in this case, lets us predict in advance what the effects of these fundamental design shifts might be. By using three successful released games to demonstrate this framework, we can show its usefulness and point the way toward creating further such useful frameworks for other styles of storygame.

Reuniting the Pillars As we’ve seen in this chapter and will return to in future chapters, there are many paths to recapturing some of the pleasures of the classic adventure game. But with several more decades of design wisdom and technological 109

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advancement, can we imagine reinventing the genre in a form which reunites the three pillars of story, exploration, and puzzle-solving? On the computational side, several threads of games research involve applying computer science techniques to the problem of adapting a narrative to respond to player input. Drama management, for instance, is a technical solution using predictive planning and efficient state search that allows a narrative engine to alter the next presented plot point based on the player’s most recent action, enacting authorial goals and rules about ordering and more or less desirable end states (Laurel 1986; Weyhrauch 1997; Roberts and Isbell 2008). Drama managers hope to bolster the sense of starring in a story through enabling both true player freedom and a coherent narrative, rather than needing to remove one of these elements to strengthen the other. Similarly, technical solutions have been proposed that strengthen the connection between exploration and puzzles, such as dynamic or adaptive systems for hints (Mehm, Göbel, and Steinmetz 2013) or difficulty (Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubek 2004); or for strengthening the bond between puzzles and story, such as through adapting puzzles to the narrative content the player has encountered (Fernández-Vara and Thomson 2012). However, these solutions have often been hampered by the difficulty of developing or standardizing such technology and the difficulty for nontechnologists of integrating it into a practice of game production. More detailed simulations of worlds point toward another way of resolving the adventure game tensions, both through enabling exploration and allowing for emergent puzzles and narrative. Rather than encode particular puzzles with single solutions, designers of games with significant procedural content look to encode rules about the story world into a system, with the hopes that narratively sensible situations will spontaneously arrive. For example, the creators of Dwarf Fortress, a popular and influential indie game with extremely complex simulations, often begin by writing short stories set in a fantasy world like the one they wish to portray, and then review these stories looking for elements not yet part of the game’s simulated world: In one of his [hand-authored stories] titled “Battlefield Lunch,” [Dwarf Fortress co-designer] Zach details a range of activities surrounding the carrion left in the wake of a large battle … Based on this short ­episode… the Adams brothers discover several behaviors not yet ­simulated in Dwarf Fortress. … By analyzing the narrative to extract its implicit tropes and conventions, the Adamses attempt to translate the rules of the storyworld 110

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into the algorithmic processes running Dwarf Fortress. The hope is that, by identifying and encoding patterns such as revenge, scavenging, and grappling, narrative events akin to those described in “Battlefield Lunch” will propagate widely across the simulation. (Boluk and LeMieux 2013) Similarly, the team behind historical strategy game Crusader Kings II also studied historical events for the kinds of actions that princes, regents, and assassins took toward each other (Kaiser 2013), while the team behind social simulation indie game Prom Week (which included one of this book’s authors) analyzed classic movies and TV shows set in high school to devise an initial list of important social statuses, actions, and behaviors; the first draft of the simulation schema came from these notes (McCoy et al. 2013). Making more aspects of a narrative truly simulated gives players more parts of the world to conduct experiments on. It also moves puzzles away from the frustrations of purely revelatory moments toward obstacles that can be systematically overcome through observation and experimentation. Design innovations have also changed the way gamemakers approach story in games. In the past decade, an approach to interactive stories called “quality-based narrative” has appeared, giving players not abstract actions but bespoke story beats that alter a number of numeric “qualities” of the player character or some other aspect of the story world. This approach, which has been seen in games like Sunless Skies, Six Ages, 80 Days, and The Ice-Bound Concordance, again gives story more simulative traction: players can observe that they have a certain quality they want to change and and explore the world, looking for narrative opportunities to alter it. (This sounds much like looking for gold in a role-playing game, but a “quality” might be anything from map pieces to resolve to madness to reputation.) In the process they might incidentally alter other qualities, creating new problems or opening new story opportunities: thus continually generating both new “puzzles” and stories as they go. As the rules in a world simulation help relax the hand-crafted brittleness of adventure game puzzles, so do the content selection rules in quality-based narratives relax the constraint of having a single ordered path through a narrative, by allowing the story and its particulars to be contextually assembled. These technical and design innovations are opening up new paths forward for recapturing the pleasures of adventure games, even while many contemporary games keep many individual facets of the classic experience. We will consider more such paths forward in the book’s final chapter, but 111

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first consider many of the other ways designers have adapted fragments of the classic adventure formula to create new kinds of games entirely.

Works Cited Albert, Brian. 2015. “Her Story Review—IGN.” IGN. June 29, 2015. http://www.ign. com/articles/2015/06/30/her-story-review. Amini, Tina. 2013. “Jonathan Blow Thinks Adventure Games Are Bad. So He’s Making One.” Kotaku. June 13, 2013. https://kotaku.com/jonathan-blow-thinksadventure-games-are-bad-so-hes-m-513273372. Barlow, Sam. 2016. “Making ‘Her Story’—Telling a Story Using the Player’s Imagination.” Presented at the Game Developers Conference, San Francisco. Boluk, Stephanie, and Patrick LeMieux. 2013. “Dwarven Epitaphs: Procedural Histories in Dwarf Fortress.” In Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era, edited by N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman. University of Minnesota Press. Cork, Jeff. 2016. “Firewatch: Gabbin’ in the Woods.” Game Informer. February. https://www.gameinformer.com/games/firewatch/b/playstation4/ archive/2016/02/08/firewatch-review-gabbin-in-the-woods.aspx. Fernández-Vara, Clara, and Alec Thomson. 2012. “Procedural Generation of Narrative Puzzles in Adventure Games: The Puzzle-Dice System.” In Proceedings of the the Third Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games, 12. ACM. Grip, Thomas. 2017. “Traversal and the Problem with Walking Simulators.” Gamasutra. March 23, 2017. https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ ThomasGrip/20170323/294377/Traversal_and_the_Problem_with_Walking_ Simulators.php. Hudson, Laura, and Rachelle Hampton. 2016. “Playing with Words.” Slate. February 25, 2016. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/gaming/2016/02/the_video_game_ firewatch_and_its_origins_in_1980s_text_adventures.html. Hunicke, Robin, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek. 2004. “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research.” In Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Challenges in Game AI, 4:1. Juul, Jesper. 2005. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Juul, Jesper. 2008. “Fear of Failing? The Many Meanings of Difficulty in Video Games.” In The Video Game Theory Reader 2, edited by Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf, 237–252. Routledge. Kaiser, Rowan. 2013. “The Surprising Design of Crusader Kings II.” Gamasutra. January 6, 2013. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/184356/the_ surprising_design_of_crusader_.php. Accessed July 12, 2018. Kelly, Andy. 2015. “Her Story Review.” PC Gamer (blog). June 22, 2015. https:// www.pcgamer.com/her-story-review/.

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Fragments of Adventure Kollar, Philip. 2015. “The Witness: The Creator of Braid Talks about His Fiendishly Difficult New Game.” Polygon. September 17, 2015. https://www.polygon.com/ features/2015/9/17/9343943/the-witness-hands-on-preview-feature-braidjonathan-blow-interview-ps4-playstation-4-pc. Laurel, Brenda Kay. 1986. “Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System.” PhD dissertation, The Ohio State University. Mahardy, Mike. 2016. “Doors of Perception.” Gamespot. January. https://www. gamespot.com/reviews/the-witness-review/1900-6416336/. McCoy, Josh, Mike Treanor, Ben Samuel, Aaron A. Reed, Michael Mateas, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. 2013. “Prom Week: Designing Past the Game/Story Dilemma.” In Proc. 9th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. Mehm, Florian, Stefan Göbel, and Ralf Steinmetz. 2013. “An Authoring Tool for Educational Adventure Games: Concept, Game Models and Authoring Processes.” International Journal of Game-Based Learning (IJGBL) 3 (1): 63–79. Minotti, Mike. 2016. “The Witness Makes Me Question Why I Play Hard Games.” VentureBeat (blog). January 25, 2016. https://venturebeat.com/2016/01/25/thewitness-makes-me-question-why-i-play-hard-games/. Muncy, Jake. 2016. “Now That I Beat the Witness, I See What’s Wrong with It.” Wired. February 11, 2016. https://www.wired.com/2016/02/the-witness/. Nelson, Graham. 1995. “The Craft of Adventure.” http://www.ifarchive.org/ifarchive/info/Craft.Of.Adventure.txt. Palumbo, Alessio. 2016. “Firewatch Interview—A Walkie-Talkie Mystery.” WCCF Tech. January. http://wccftech.com/firewatch-interview-walkietalkie-mystery/. Plotkin, Andrew. 2016. “Point-of-View in The Witness: Design Ruminations.” The Gameshelf (blog). July 27, 2016. http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2016/07/point-ofview-in-the-witness-design-ruminations/. Plunkett, Luke. 2016. “Firewatch: The Kotaku Review.” Kotaku. February 8, 2016. https://kotaku.com/firewatch-the-kotaku-review-1756997662. Rad, Chloi. 2016. “The Witness Review.” IGN. January. http://www.ign.com/ articles/2016/01/25/the-witness-review. Rayner, Ben. 2015. “Her Story Review.” Trusted Reviews (blog). August 18, 2015. https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/her-story. Remo, Chris. 2016. “Gameplay/Storyline Differences?” Comment. Steam Forum for “Firewatch.” https://steamcommunity.com/app/383870/discussions/0/458605613 407615517/#c458605613409620382. Roberts, David L., and Charles L. Isbell. 2008. “A Survey and Qualitative Analysis of Recent Advances in Drama Management.” International Transactions on Systems Science and Applications, Special Issue on Agent Based Systems for Human Learning 4 (2): 61–75. Sliva, Marty. 2014. “GDC: Why Firewatch Is One of Our Most Anticipated Games of 2015—IGN.” IGN. March 18, 2014. http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/03/18/ gdc-why-firewatch-is-one-of-our-most-anticipated-games-of-2015.

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CHAPTER 5

GONE HOME? WALKING SIMULATORS AND THE IMPORTANCE OF SLOW GAMING

If we lived forever, maybe we’d have time to understand things. But as it is, I think the best we can do is try to open our eyes, and appreciate how strange and brief all of this is. (What Remains of Edith Finch 2017) In classic adventure games, you spend a lot of time walking. The world would usually be divided into stage-sized screens which your avatar must move across, at walking pace, to reach an edge and the next linked area. These animations can seem painfully slow by today’s standards. Some games, including parts of Loom, would zoom out to sprawling vistas to make environments seem especially epic, your character reduced to a cluster of tiny pixels lost in immensity, the journey to the edge of the screen even more drawn out. Even in text games like Adventure or pointand-click games like Myst, where movement is instantaneous, players still spent much of their time navigating complex environments, retracing their steps to return to earlier areas looking for clues, unsure where to go next. Mainstream game design has moved toward minimizing these down times, adding mechanics like fast travel or quest markers to get players straight to the next point of interest, another filing away of the adventure game’s rough corners. While walking, as an act in and of itself rather than a means to a practical end, has long been demonized as an inefficient form of travel or a wasteful pursuit of the privileged, it has also been praised as an overlooked and unique part of the human experience. Thoreau’s famous essay “Walking” (1862) relates a story of the origin of the verb to saunter as a reference to idlers asking for charity “under pretense of going a la Sainte-Terre,” the

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Holy Land:1 an essentially deceitful activity. But he goes on to make the “extreme statement” that walking for pleasure into new and unseen places is not an act of idleness but a necessary part of retaining our humanity in a modern world increasingly cut off from nature, pleading: “Give me a wilderness whose glance no civilization can endure.” Cultural scholars have often been drawn to Walter Benjamin’s portrait of the flâneur, the urban wanderer who walks without purpose other than keen observation through the city streets, and in whom “the joy of watching is triumphant” (1973): the connection between flâneurs and explorers of games has been noted by many games scholars (Kagen 2015; Carbo-Mascarell 2016). In games, walking connects to the adventure pillar of exploration, as well as the sense of immersive transportation and a focus on environmental storytelling: in adventure games specifically, it provides a space for thinking and reflecting, a necessary precursor to successfully overcoming obstacles. Walking “leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts,” writes Rebecca Solnit in her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking: “The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts… one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it” (2001). Every walk is a chance “to assimilate the new into the known,” the fundamental precursor to that new perspective on the world that adventure games strive to induce. The 2010s saw the rise of a new kind of game foregrounding exploration, often to the exclusion of all other mechanics. These games were originally dubbed “walking simulators” as an insult to exclude them and their creators from being considered “real games” or real game makers. But many creators of this othered, outsider genre have reclaimed the term, as have we in this chapter, for its embrace of qualities that would-be insiders despise. These games deemphasize traditional active game verbs to center more passive ones, especially movement, observation, and reflection. Different verbs can tell different kinds of stories, and these games have often told outsider stories about othered identities. They make us question our attitude toward rarely examined pillars of gaming like challenge, “fun,” and agency. Walking simulators distill one particular facet of adventure games to a purer,

1 Thoreau’s story is probably an apocryphal one: modern linguists find no evidence for this origin. Interestingly, the Oxford English Dictionary finds it more likely (but still unproven) that saunter comes from the same root as adventure.

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minimalist form and have become in the process an essential site of tension for games, a space where their very definition has been contested: one that offers a radically different way of understanding and relating to characters and story than the genre’s other descendants. In this chapter we’ll trace the origins of the term “walking simulator” and the lineage of games that led to its modern form; consider their surprisingly diverse parents (adventure games and first-person shooters) and the sometimes unexpected ways they take after each; do a close read of how two foundational games in the genre, Gone Home (2013) and Dear Esther (2008), use its unique affordances, and close by considering where the genre is going and how it relates to other descendants of adventure games.

Origins “Walking simulator” began as a derogatory label, and is still controversial among game creators: while some have reclaimed it as a useful category, to others it seems reductive or laden with too many negative associations. Some creators prefer terms like “first-person game,” “exploration game,” or “interactive narrative experience” (Kill Screen Staff 2016). Some have suggested creating a contrast with “first-person shooters” by coining the term “first-person walkers,” defining these as games in which “a player’s perception of the game world may be refocused to that of an investigator or close observer, via a strict adherence to minimal interactivity and slow, limited pacing” (Muscat 2016). We embrace the term “walking simulator,” however, for its connection to the outsider tradition of reclaiming slurs as proud labels; for its unambiguous association with a particular kind of game (compared to less-specific alternatives); but most importantly for the way it foregrounds what these games make visible: a certain pace of storytelling, driven by navigation through an environment and without the frustrating challenges of other styles of gaming (including their ancestor, the adventure game). But a discussion of these games should rightly begin with the hostile environment that birthed their label, so it is to that recent history we first turn. Outside of exercise games and human-computer interaction research, the term “walking simulator” first appeared applied to games as a derogatory dismissal, given to titles guilty of placing their points of interest too far apart. The open world survival mod DayZ (2012; mod for ARMA 2, 2009) and The

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Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) were both early targets of this phrase, despite being much more mechanically complex than games the label would later be applied to. The implication is generally that walking between enemies or quests is the boring part of these games. Designs that require too much walking are inherently flawed, as this line of thinking goes, let alone games that exclusively focus on it: among the earliest games to be called a walking simulator (in a comment to McWhertor 2009) was Walk It Out (2010), a game literally about walking simulated via the Nintendo Wii balance board. The comment, tellingly, includes all-caps and profanity: “WE’VE FINALLY REACHED IT!!! A FUCKING WALKING SIMULATOR?!?!?! *Jumps out the window*”. Thus a discourse was born. The term didn’t really take off and become weaponized, however, until the growing resentment of “outsiders” and indie games that would culminate in Gamergate, after which it was retroactively applied with vitriol to games released much earlier like Dear Esther (originally 2008) and To the Moon (2011) (Clark 2017). The critical success of Gone Home in 2013 came at a perfect time to inflame heightened tensions over “gamer” identity and game culture, a ready-made counterexample for a community looking to police what games should be and suspicious of critics who disagreed with them. This fight became so intense that Clark’s 2017 survey of walking simulators called them “gaming’s most detested genre.” Walking simulators became the most visible examples of the tensions associated with indie gaming, which often involve limits to interactions and the removal of recognizable mechanisms of challenge and victory (Haggis 2016). To call something a “walking simulator” became not just a complaint about pacing but an existential fight for survival, spiraling to include larger and larger questions of who gets to be a gamer and what should be “counted” as a game (Chess and Shaw 2015). Real games are difficult, goes this argument: you can die in them; you can take “real” actions (i.e., shooting and loot collecting, not walking or investigating). Real game heroes are powerful and effective. An ugly corollary to this argument, advanced by some, was that “real games” shouldn’t be about the disenfranchised. Game stories shouldn’t be about women or queer people—like Dear Esther, like Gone Home, like many of the games the genre would eventually include— nor should such people be included among their creators. For those impacted by Gamergate, the early snobbish reaction to walking simulators looks like foreshadowing of the more aggressive rejections (and subsequent consequences) to come.

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This is despite the obvious reality that walking simulators were not a  sudden invention of SJWs:2 rather, they continue an evolution of many long-running ideas in game design stretching back decades. Adventure games, as mentioned earlier, often featured a lot of walking between locations and a focus on immersion over challenge. Myst is sometimes derided today as a walking simulator in an attempt to other it, despite its historic and ongoing successes.3 The most visible difference between adventure games and walking sims is the removal of puzzles, although this evolution has happened across many genres of game, as radically extending play time through mental frustration fell out of fashion (to be replaced, of course, by grinding, cooldown timers, and other more modern mechanisms of inflating playtimes). An emphasis on immersion is a more immediate touchstone between adventure games and walking sims. Games in both styles tend to share an “empty” UI “with minimal distractions to obstruct the player’s view of the game world, or direct their movement or action” (Muscat 2016, 8). A popular Skyrim mod (with millions of downloads) is “Immersive HUD,” which hides on-screen UI elements when not immediately useful, leaving the window into the game world as unadulterated as possible. This sense of being transported into a beautiful alternate world is clearly a sensation desired by many gamers and a key part of the appeal of both adventure games and walking sims. Another technique for extending exploration-based play time is to procedurally generate some or all of the explorable world. Players complaining about the travel times in Skyrim might want to try the original Elder Scrolls sequel, Daggerfall (1996), with a world map thousands of times larger and mostly procedurally generated, taking multiple real-world days to walk across (Plunkett 2016). Earlier games such as Elite (1984) famously generated entirely procedural galaxies to explore. Graeme Mason traces the lineage of walking simulators back to two early procedural exploration games by indie coder Graham Relf, The Forest (1983) and Explorer (1986; Figure 5.1).

2 SJW or “social justice warrior” became a derogatory term in the aftermath of the Gamergate harassment campaign, seeking to discredit games or gamemakers perceived as bringing “outsider” values or identities (particularly feminine, progressive, or queer ones) into mainstream gaming. 3 Myst remained the top-selling game of all time until being unseated by The Sims in 2002 (Wilde 2018), and a 2018 revival Kickstarter raised millions of dollars for an anniversary re-release.

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Figure 5.1  Screenshot from Graham Relf ’s early procedural exploration game Explorer (1986).

In a decade that saw its fair share of innovation, mixed with rampant cloning and bandwagon-jumping… Relf came up with the idea of a purely explorative game, a procedurally-generated terrain and countless locations to visit and search. Explorer had a suitably apt title but, despite its technological achievement, it was met with indifference in the gaming press of the time. (Mason 2016) These games have often had mixed reactions: a modern example is No Man’s Sky (2016), savaged by some gamers upon release but remaining wildly popular with others—as of this writing, three years after its release, it attracted millions of players in the wake of its fifth major expansion. Where procedural games differ from walking simulators is in their lack of curation: they let you walk wherever you want, including perhaps into uninteresting places, rather than down a well-prepared path that tells a particular story. Another noteworthy antecedent of walking sims are “slow games,” a loose collection of largely indie games that eschew traditional notions of challenge or adrenalin-fueled pacing. Ian Bogost’s 2010 collection A Slow Year contains four “game poems” for the Atari 2600 that radically 120

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challenge traditional expectations of gaming: games about sipping coffee while looking out a window or about taking a nap. Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, the duo behind indie studio Tale of Tales, released nearly a dozen narrative games throughout the 2000s and the early 2010s defying gamer expectations: in The Graveyard (2008) the player controls an elderly woman walking slowly through a graveyard to sit on a bench, and The Path (2009), with its focus on exploring a forest filled with narrative vignettes, was another early game to receive the derogatory “walking simulator” label. Jason Rohrer’s 2007 Passage has the player walking a metaphorical path representing a life; likewise in the 2009 art game Every day the same dream by Paolo Pedercini, the player repeatedly retraces the steps of an office drone’s daily routine, able to break the cycle only by moving in the wrong direction. In many of these games, walking is the only mechanic, the sole way the player can interact with the fictional world. If adventure games gave walking simulators their focus on exploration and immersion, and generated worlds a contrarian design to react against (pushing away from randomness toward curation), slow games created a foundation or context for games to be minimalist and contemplative and connected to a lineage of art that explores these aesthetics. Walking simulators are among the most visible indie successes, with most of the games mentioned above receiving critical acclaim, awards, and attention in the gaming press. The reaction against them by gatekeepers is telling for what it reveals about the things they exclude. These games, for instance, provide no benefit to experienced players over novices. Mastery over the control scheme gives no advantage as it does in many other kinds of games. The subculture of “speedrunning,” demonstrating mastery over controls at its highest levels, is mostly inimical to the walking simulator: while technically possible to speedrun a walking sim, such demonstrations provide no real value for practitioners or viewers and are rarely seen. Simply put, you cannot become better than someone else at a walking simulator, and this lack of a mechanism for dividing elite from noob might be what’s really behind some critiques complaining about the lack of gameplay. To recall our earlier discussion, Shira Chess’s Player Two reminds us there are other kinds of players than those who enjoy mastery through long cycles of repetition, and how players drawn to narrative games in particular often have less time available to devote to any single gameplay experience. The pick-up-andput-down, interval-friendly style of casual and mobile games lends itself to the type of play that fits in a busy schedule (Chess 2017). The many walking simulators designed to be completed in an hour or two, the same length of 121

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time as watching a movie or reading a few chapters of a book, connect to these players in a different way than traditional games connect with Player One. Many of the critiques of walking simulators conflate this lack of challenge with lack of agency: Their stories lack any player agency; they simply make you trudge from destination to destination to pick up nuggets of story… A “Lets Play” of many of these games is superior because at least you get additional commentary for a greater chance of entertainment, and you save the wear and tear on your keyboard and the frustration when the poor level design gets you lost. You can experience whatever narrative that has been put in place without spending a penny. … So here we have it; the walking simulator. A genre no one really likes except their creators, pretentious peers, and a handful of games journalists. Yet this has only produced a tiny number of mildly successful games. But people still bitch and moan when the term gets applied to their work, or work they personally enjoy. (Sweeney 2015) These are familiar refrains, repeated countless times despite various counterfactualities (about lack of fans or success; about narratives not being worth money). In response to the criticism, defenders of the genre have pointed out that the qualities the term “walking simulator” emphasizes call attention to the underlying assumptions that frequently undermine the discourse of games. One critic finds the term: a glib label for story-focused first-person games in which one explores an environment with only limited interactivity. It’s a snooty, disparaging term that makes sense only if you start from the assumption that video games are supposed to contain complex mechanics and test the player’s timing, hand-eye coordination, and ability to master a ­controller’s worth of commands (often with violent ends). Otherwise, it sounds as silly as describing an engrossing novel as a “page-turning simulator.” (Lindbergh 2017) This comparison with novels is also familiar and well-rooted in the discourse of the genre. Rosa Carbo-Mascarell suggests that walking simulators build on “the Romantic tradition of walking as an aesthetic practice” (2016), which in itself is inherently at odds with the expected aesthetics—the “hardcore”

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norms—of ludic experiences. She calls Dear Esther, which involves a devastating roadside accident, a fundamentally Romantic game “in the way it doesn’t try to simulate an accurate representation of the systems of a car crash but rather concentrates on the way the narrator experiences its repercussions.” Walking sims often center interiority in a way that more mainstream genres struggle with, perhaps another reason the mainstream finds them off-putting or threatening.

First-Person Walkers, First-Person Shooters Adventure games produced through the fallow decade of the 2000s struggled to find a place in a shifted landscape, and many reacted by doubling down on a slower pace and more contemplative story. Titles like The Longest Journey (1999) and Syberia (2002) featured extended playtimes and an even greater focus on lush worlds to explore and interesting characters to meet. In Syberia, for instance, you play a woman named Kate (with the telling surname Walker) in a largely character-driven story about a declining family of toymakers, with contemporary reviewers appreciating the game’s unhurried aesthetic: “The story unfolds at a decidedly slow pace. It takes its time and doesn’t rush… There are already plenty of games that require you to constantly run, shoot, fly, drive, or otherwise interact incessantly. It’s nice to be able to stop and smell the virtual roses once in a while” (Gmiterko 2002). But the dominant genre during this period was the much more frenetic first-person shooter. With many shooter engines increasingly providing tools to build your own levels or otherwise modify game content, it’s no surprise that many gamemakers began using these tools for other purposes. Many of the earliest walking simulators (including Dear Esther, The Stanley Parable, and Mary Flanagan’s 2003 [domestic]) were originally mods for first-person shooters, and the first-person perspective has come to define the genre.4 A premade engine means many problems of rendering a journey through a visually complex environment have already been solved, providing a pathway for indie and outsider creators to create games at the higher levels of visual fidelity that had come to be expected. Since these 4 There are certainly exceptions: some games can be productively analyzed as walking simulators while using different aesthetics, most notably the top-down 2D storygame To the Moon (itself, however, made in an engine for RPGs).

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games inevitably inherit some of the technical and visual aesthetics of their more violent predecessors, first-person shooters provide another thread of ancestry useful to understanding the walking simulator. Games journalist Keith Stuart characterizes the way walking sims evolved from shooter games as a shifting of focus from extroversion to introversion: First-person shooters like Doom and Unreal revolutionised our ­understanding  of space, structure and embodiment in games. They put players into the body of a killing machine and set them lose [sic]. First-person walking sims have taken the environmental lessons, the same ideas of architectural structure as a form of storytelling, and diverted the focus from action to introversion. They leave the player alone in a world with their own thoughts. (2016) J. P. LeBreton maintains an archive of shooters that can be glitched or modded to remove the enemies (2017), creating a kind of tourist mode where one can experience, for example, “a Quake that’s retooled to be nice to potter about. Quake as a whole is incoherent and largely brown… but it does have some interesting places and architecture” (O’Connor 2017). The Quake mod also changes the music, replacing the sharp-edged original soundtrack from Trent Reznor with tracks from one of his more “chilled-out” albums. The change in music is another important move to eliminate the game’s tension and replace it with a thoroughly different mind-set. Notably, many of the examples LeBreton catalogues are unauthorized and require modifying, with various levels of difficulty, the original game files. The 2015 game SOMA (among a small handful of others) does offer an official “Safe Mode” as a built-in feature—but notably, this was originally named “Wuss Mode: Monsters Won’t Attack.” These modes are the opposite of their hypermasculine counterparts, the “Nightmare” or “Hardcore” modes that emphasize the hostility of the environment by ramping up the likelihood of death, and the victory reserved for players skilled enough to survive them. Stripping the violence from a first-person shooter, however, often results in a strange interstitial kind of experience, something in-between and unrecognizable. O’Connor’s review of the tourism Quake mod highlights some of the unsuitability of these environments to casual exploration. The architecture of these games in their original form is a means to the end of success in combat: to the extent the player notices it at all, it is while looking for places to hide, physical obstacles, routes for evasion or ambush. Details are designed to be glanced at briefly, not lingered over. Game 124

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scholar Andrew Hutchison compares the technical affordances of the engines behind Doom and Myst, released the same year, in this light (2008). Myst’s images were largely static because it required offline rendering to create worlds beautiful enough to hold up to long scrutiny, while small bits of spot movement were added via Quicktime video to award attentiveness, creating interesting environmental details such as lapping waves or flittering butterflies. Doom’s engine, by contrast, creates lower-fidelity images in constant motion: the player will look at any one thing for only moments, while constantly racing through the environment fighting enemies who are also in constant motion. In Myst, the water moves because the focus of the engine is on detail. In Doom, the water is static because the focus of the engine is on action. If a player is meant to focus on action, and movement into a new area can only signal a coming attack or a new place to hide, the world will inherently have different aesthetics than one designed without these concerns, focused on exploration at a much slower pace. There is nothing slow about Quake when played as intended. This is why most walking sims that descend from first-person shooters have been radical reimaginings taking years to produce, not merely removing enemies but crafting whole new environments, often with custom textures, objects, music, and narration: creating not just a new focus of interaction but an entirely different kind of world to support that focus. What kind of exploration, then, do the worlds of walking simulators support? Contrary to expectations, these games are rarely just about exploration. There are a few exceptions: Proteus (2013) is a joyful exploration of a shifting island purely for its own sake, and experimental games like Césure and Lumiere (both 2013) place the player in explorable abstracted spaces of light, color, and shadow (Reed 2013). But the most famous and successful walking simulators are best understood as explorations not of environment, but of character. Just as the environments in first-person shooters exist to support action-packed combat, the environments in most walking sims are designed to be platforms for understanding and empathizing with characters. In games like Dear Esther, Virginia (2016), What Remains of Edith Finch (2017), and many others, 3D game worlds come to be understood as metaphorical spaces offering windows into the minds and stories of the people within them. Sometimes this is made literal as part of the game’s fiction (as in the 2014 games Mind: Path to Thalamus and Ether One, both about entering an environmental representation of another character’s mind) but more commonly we understand this reification as 125

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working in the same way experimental films signify abstract meanings with concrete visuals, or the reality-bending conventions of magical realism or unreliable narrators creating layers of truth in literature. In Virginia, for example, the player takes the role of an FBI agent assigned by internal affairs to investigate her partner.5 In the early game a number of recurring locations are established, which the player frequently moves through: the top-floor and basement offices of the protagonist’s boss and partner, the stage where she received her FBI badge upon graduation, and a diner in the small town where she investigates a missing person case, among others. As the story progresses, however, these locations become imbued with symbolic meaning for the protagonist’s inner struggles and conflicts. The long walk to her partner’s basement office becomes imbued with the dread of impending betrayal, and the flashbacks to the stage symbolic of her drive for success and what she’s willing to sacrifice to achieve it. In a game without spoken dialogue, these locations become a language for conveying meaning, and the player’s journey one of uncovering, step by literal step, the self of the character whose story is being told. This revelation of an at-first obscured character, not a quantitative ranking, score, or survival time, is what is “won” through play. As in adventure games, players of walking simulators strive to recreate the “ideal walkthrough,” the preexisting story that must be uncovered step by step through the player’s actions. But in these games, the next step is not occluded by puzzles: rather, it’s generally made so obvious it’s impossible to miss. The combination of increased immersion but decreased challenge— players no longer must “think like” the protagonist by deducing themselves how to advance the story—risks hampering games’ particular strengths at engendering identification with the player character. In third-person adventure games, with the avatar a strongly characterized on-screen presence, the ludic experience can feel almost directorial, with the player as puppeteer. Some walking simulators with strongly characterized protagonists ask the players to enact small routine actions, such as shaving (in the 2012 game Unmanned) or putting on lipstick (in Virginia), to restore this sense of direct control and identification. However, another approach is to center stories around a character other than the one controlled by the player, as in Gone

Again, we see a focus on outsider stories: both characters are women of color, and the partner’s story revolves around a same-sex relationship. 5

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Home or Edith Finch. In these stories, the player’s reduced agency meshes with a role closer to voyeur or watcher than active participant. The role of violence in walking simulators is also more complex than is generally appreciated. The immediacy of the first-person perspective is, of course, part of the appeal of shooter games and also the source of much of the critique around them: compare walking simulator with “murder simulator,” a phrase often evoked in the discourse around controversial titles like Active Shooter (Horton 2018). The first-person perspective also evokes the survival horror genre, a set of preexisting expectations around danger that games like Gone Home lean into. However, neither walking simulators nor adventure games are divorced from violence; rather, they shift it into different registers and modes of interaction. Classic adventure games displayed a noteworthy ambivalence about violence, despite their reputation as more passive and bloodless endeavors. In Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992), for instance, a more violenceoriented path was among several optional strategies the player could pursue, an approach echoed by Sierra’s Quest For Glory titles among others. Many classic adventures included reflex-driven minigames, such as a sequence dodging the thrown daggers of an assailant in Manhunter: New York (1988); Telltale games (examined in Chapter 3) sometimes also include reflexbased sequences. Often these emphasize a time-limited choice to engage in violence, even when that choice proves a false one (as is especially common where more violent characters like Batman are concerned). In walking simulators, violence is also often present, but generally at a distance, remembered or stylized: the violence of Gone Home, for instance, is the emotional abuse of a family; in Esther a traumatic car crash is rendered as a surreally beautiful underwater tableau; and in Virginia a queer character’s loss of her job, subsequent illness and death are seen only through dry official reports and the remnants of at-home nursing care, hidden behind half-closed doors. Making a character a direct participant in violence would seem to violate the generally permeable boundaries of the walking simulator label, just as would punishing less competent players with death. Death also has an ambivalent history in adventure games. Classics were divided in their approach to it, with LucasArts generally avoiding it while Sierra became notorious for serving up dramatic deaths around every corner and misstep off a precarious ledge. Reviewer Drummond Doroski, however, has noted that these divisions weren’t as cut-and-dried as we remember them, with games from both studios breaking their own rules: Fate of Atlantis, while largely death-free, still gives you several chances to 127

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die at key moments (Doroski 2009). Death in adventure games may have been at first an unthinking “style transfer” of the frequent deaths in early arcade games: to be considered a game, such thinking goes, clearly the player must be able to die (although even this chronology is complicated: Adventure features frequent death for the unwary and predates all but the earliest arcade games). We’ve discussed previously how the use of difficulty and the division of players into winners and losers is deeply embedded into mainstream gaming spaces and genres, an inviolable part of the definition of games for many. The most common distillation of this notion into purest form is the mechanic of permadeath, where dying is not a temporary setback but a permanent erasure of all progress, requiring the player to start over from the beginning. Here the division of players into winners and losers stretches to exclude almost all who play from the first category, allowing only the truly elite (or those privileged with the most free time) to claim victory; and it is no surprise that this environment can foster toxicity and exclusion. In walking sims we can see this purism taken to the opposite extreme: removing all possibility for any player to be judged superior to another by removing any punishment for differing performance of play. Games scholar Bonnie Ruberg has called this notion “permalife,” for games which not only include but center the notion of making death impossible (2017). She notes that permalife games are often made by queer designers, positing that “permanent living represents a particularly potent trope for expressing both hopes and concerns about contemporary queer life in the face of an uncertain future.” But Ruberg resists the reading of this mechanic as purely utopian: In contrast to the neo-liberal, homonormative narrative of LGBTQ lives and histories “getting better,” permalife suggests alternative models for queer ways of living that persist in time: loops, endless flat lines, a constant entanglement with death (which, in these games, is always intimately entwined with life)… It also challenges us to look for the consequences of living in video games as well as the consequences of dying, to think about existing and not just surviving as difficult, and to identify places where life and not death is what gives video games meaning. The theme of continuing to exist in the face of trauma, pain, and death is common to many walking sims in their explorations of grief, identity, 128

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and meaning. In The Fidelio Incident (2017) the player’s character is slowly revealed to be struggling with long-repressed guilt from his participation in an IRA bombing decades earlier. The hostile spaces he moves through after a plane crash in a remote icy landscape become a gauntlet not just of physical survival but of metaphorical endurance: the struggle of living with a crushing regret. Permalife games are difficult in an entirely different way than games requiring skill or strategy, requiring players to enact the motions of continuing existence, even in the face of survival under (or complicity with) the evils of that existence. “Perhaps the walking sim’s greatest power is how it makes players recognize and consider such decisions and the way they influence gaming outcomes and environments. A number of traditional big-budget titles don’t demand this kind of moral engagement, which makes sense—asking a player to stop and consider the horrible things they’re doing is antithetical to moving forward” (Clark 2017). Slowness is forefronted in a game of permalife: adrenaline is neither the goal nor the appeal. Most walking sims also streamline away the often-misleading promises of agency that other story-heavy games promise: very few feature significant branching pathways or different endings. In 1997, game scholar Espen Aarseth wrote that the limitations of play persist even as the production values of games increase: “It is a paradox that, despite the lavish and quite expensive graphics of these productions, the player’s creative options are still as primitive as they were in 1976.” We would argue that, another twenty years later, this is as true as it was then, but also as false: creative options of play as expressed through narrative games have been continually evolving through imitation and experimentation but ultimately have always exceeded that which can be graphically expressed. While the walking simulator is the least textually reliant of the adventure game descendants chronicled in this volume, it is still ultimately dependent upon the fusion of an expansive graphic space with other narrative approaches to building the player’s sense of investment. This might not always consist of “options” in the sense Aarseth implied but is no less meaningful, and in some cases more instrumental to the telling of unexpected, othered narratives, and characters without the privilege of having choices to make. Gone Home As we’ve discussed, walking simulators are noteworthy not only for their focus on immersive exploration and reaction against competitive models of 129

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gaming but for frequently centering stories and characters about traditionally marginalized voices. The Fulbright Company’s breakthrough indie hit Gone Home (2013) is an early and prominent example of the genre, inviting the player to literally piece together the identity of the central character from fragments of environmental storytelling. Taking the role of an older sister returning home from college, the player uncovers the story of Samantha, a teenager whose romantic relationship with another girl causes further fractures in an already damaged family. Sam’s story is revealed through letters, notes, music, and other minutia of daily living, which the player combs through: not only Sam’s, but other people in her life. The game asks the player to confront prejudice without any ability via in-game mechanics to resolve it. Coming to an understanding of a character or environment as a means of gaining control over it is a central tenet of environmental storytelling generally and walking simulators in particular. This kind of understanding connects more to cinematic than ludic traditions, although designer Thomas Grip has noted that ensuring players reach that understanding is more critical in a game than a film: [P]art of what makes games interesting is the expression of will. To achieve this, the player must know what they are able to do within the game’s universe. In a movie, a character can reach for an object not seen before, or exclaim “I saw that shop on my way over!” despite the viewers never seeing it. This is not possible in a game. In order for a player to know a game’s space, both in spatial terms and in terms of what actions are possible to make, they need to get intimate with it. The player has to go through the boring process of walking about in order to make a mental picture of the surroundings. If they don’t, they cannot possibly know what the realm of their possibilities are. (2017) Designer Steve Gaynor describes the experience of interaction in Gone Home (and the studio’s next game, Tacoma) as ultimately about this kind of intimate perception and the impact of the game back on the player: in a game like Gone Home or Tacoma, the world is inert until you have an effect on it. The fact that you are opening a cabinet and picking up an object and rotating it isn’t important to the game world… What’s important is that through affecting the game world, you’re creating

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your understanding of it. Through changing the game world, you are changing your consciousness of what it contains and what it means. There isn’t a lot of, “Walk through a door, hit a trigger, and watch this thing happen.” Everything that changes your perception of what the game means is through you interacting with what’s there and having an effect on the state of the world that in turn affects you. (qtd. in Suellentrop 2017) In the same interview, Gaynor notes the influence of Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2012) and immersive theater production Sleep No More (first staged in 2009) on his work. Stories is an oversized box of jumbled volumes of comic art (in sizes ranging from tiny pamphlets to full-sized newspapers), telling through various perspectives and styles the stories of a handful of people living in the same four-story building. The influence of this work on Gone Home can be seen in the similar fragmentation of stories into disparate parts that must be pieced together, making similar demands on the reader/player to construct identities and narratives out of competing (and even conflicting) perspectives. In Sleep No More, audience members can choose which characters to follow during a theatrical performance unfolding simultaneously in multiple rooms of an expansive location: while they cannot interact or change the unfolding events, they can choose how to move through the space and where to focus their attention. In both pieces, the readers or viewers are given agency to understand and gain perspective on the story through their interpretive decisions: about which threads are most interesting to follow, and about how to piece together the events they witness into a meaningful whole. Gone Home also plays with player agency by subverting expectations about danger and complicity. The first moments of the game create a sense of mystery more frequently associated with survival horror: the abandoned house is cast as unnatural and threatening, with the player invited to explore it suspiciously, suspecting some external danger behind the apparent disappearance of the family. That danger, of course, turns out to be internal, not external. The player becomes the intruder in what should be a familiar environment by virtue of returning after long absence, seeing the intimate lives of her family with fresh eyes. The player’s initial fear that they might need to act quickly to defend themselves from some lurking supernatural horror becomes transmuted, by the end of the story, into the inevitable realization that their character has already lost her chance to act,

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has arrived too late to intervene in her sister’s story. All she can do now is understand it. Critics have drawn different conclusions about the role of Gone Home as (and alongside other) queer media. Zachary Harvat describes it as part of the tradition of “queer historical play,” which does not deny the challenges and trauma of queer history but also does not place it as the sole narrative emphasis (2018). Pavlounis describes the inherent conflict between the potential of a radical queer archive of personal experiences and memories, and the more normative experience of solving a mystery (or Mystery) that descends from the earlier games it evokes, criticizing the game for how “it ultimately undermines this potential by adhering to design conventions grounded in normative and normalizing logics” (2016): we will explore the notion of inherently queer game mechanics more in the next chapter. Veale describes how Gone Home toys with expectations of nostalgia, emphasizing a near-historical setting for memories while critiquing that same time’s association with, as Veale puts it, “a backdrop that is even less welcoming to difference than today” (2016). Veale also argues that the game draws on the concept of museums and exhibitions, shaping an experience of the setting through elements rarely presented in games: Exploring the house is the same thing as exploring the story, ­because the narrative is architectural, both because the story is distributed throughout its structure, and because different areas have been personalized by different people living there: the house exists as a coresample of one year in the life of your family. It is filled with the same detritus we expect from every-day lives, yet which is barely ever included in game worlds, such as shopping receipts, toilet paper, a kitchen complete with fridge and cupboards, and even bathrooms complete with towels and tampons. Other critics have described the game as “literary realism,” emphasizing the “interestingly ordinary” setting and love story (Suellentrop 2013), or been more critical of its reliance on media references and consumer memory through a hypersimulation of bad taste and extremes, noting how Gone Home and similar games “provide a simulation of cultural memory that blurs historical reality with period modes of representation” (Sloan 2015). Brendan Keogh described Dear Esther and Gone Home’s pleasure as “textual and phenomenological,” noting that user rejection of them is in part due to their rejection of “dominant hacker technicity” alongside explicit critique 132

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of “the masculinist dominance of the commercial videogame industry” (Keogh 2016, 210). The text of Gone Home is explicit in this defiance of an imposed patriarchal value system, which the player explores at a distance through the memories found in the house. One of the first of Sam’s diary entries to acknowledge the challenges of her parents’ views is dated April 5, 1995: Katie, you know how mom and dad are. Not exactly… super openminded. About things. It feels like every minute I don’t spend with Lonnie, I spend worrying about them finding out about us. And what would happen if they did … You know dad’s “joke” about “the nunnery” that he’d tell whenever you brought boys around the old house? I wonder where he’d want to send ME… This type of detail adds to the sense of cultural distance, while also providing a certain timelessness to the experience of growing up queer in a hostile environment. The final lines also evoke the specter of conversion camps, more prevalent in the US of the 1990s than they are today. The final answer to the mystery of Sam’s disappearance lies in an entry dated June 6, 1995 and titled “I Said Yes,” where in a final letter to her sister Sam describes her departure and reunion with her partner. As a resolution to the mystery it is bittersweet, in part because it happens outside the player’s control; because there is no reunion between the player character and her sister; and perhaps because the player might bring a more jaded, suspicious viewpoint to the likely outcomes of running away with a young lover. The game’s final ending affirms the reasons for the departure, and can be interpreted broadly given the context and potential consequences of the decision to run away: Katie … I’m so sorry. That I can’t be there to see you in person. That I can’t tell you all this myself. But I hope, as you read this journal, and you think back, that you’ll understand why I had to do what I did. And that you won’t be sad and you won’t hate me, and you’ll just know … that I am where I need to be. I love you so much, Katie. I’ll see you again. Someday.

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Sam’s words, though addressed to Katie, are also aimed at the player, serving  as an invitation to connect and respect Sam’s choice. The request not to “hate me” is particularly poignant, given that the essential absence goes unfixed. There is no further opportunity for either confrontation or affirmation: the player cannot reach out, or in any way repair or bridge the family’s disconnections. While the game attracts attention for its centering of a queer narrative, the distance of the avatar from that narrative invites critique: there’s a fundamental passivity to the game that contradicts this praise, particularly where the queer-centered narrative is concerned. This conceit becomes particularly painful as it is clear the player inhabits a sibling of a woman whose coming out story caused a family schism: the player is not a participant in the queer romance that has been heralded as one of the central parts of the narrative and is instead an outsider, so distanced that the sister’s romance is a complete surprise. This distanced gaze continually invites the player to observe the queer romance through a lens of judgement, watching the impact of the romance on the family. (Salter, Blodgett, and Sullivan 2018) Unlike the queer games discussed in Chapter 6, which center queer characters and narratives, Gone Home keeps the player at a distance. But the slow pace and fragmented narrative invites a level of self-reflection distinctive to the walking simulator’s approach to character and story. “A Thing to Be in for a While”: Dear Esther Like Gone Home, Dear Esther has reached many players and played a pivotal role in defining the walking sim for both its champions and detractors. Appearing in multiple versions since its original release in 2008, the game introduced radical notions of experimental narrative and story-first design to the mainstream games world, becoming emblematic of a movement to tell outsider stories with insider technology, and inspiring many of the subsequent games discussed elsewhere in this chapter. Dear Esther had its roots in academia, created by a then-recentlyappointed lecturer in games and creative technology at Portsmouth University, Dan Pinchbeck, and funded by a grant from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (Denby 2011). One of several free-toplay mods released by Pinchbeck in 2007 and 2008 built on the Source 134

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game engine, which is best known for driving Valve’s first-person shooter Half-Life 2 (2004), Esther won early acclaim for its dramatic repurposing of the earlier game’s engine and assets to tell a very different kind of story. Contributions from two professional artists lent an air of gravitas and polish to the mod: the weary conviction in the voice-over work of actor Nigel Carrington, and a haunting soundtrack composed by Jessica Curry (Pinchbeck’s wife, who would go on to win a BAFTA and other major awards for her composition work). Like early adventure games, Esther has been released in several versions with different technical specifications. An indie sensation, the original mod was almost completely remade as a native Source engine game for a 2012 release, in a project led by game industry environmental artist Robert Briscoe. Briscoe completely recreated the game’s environment in a much higher-fidelity version, redesigning the world and the paths through it in a more photorealistic style rich with visual detail. Nearly every other aspect of the game was improved as well for this release, with the original sampled soundtrack replaced by a live orchestral recording, additional lines of narration, and many new props and details added or changed in the environment. This version, funded by the Indie Fund and released under the label of Pinchbeck’s studio The Chinese Room, was also a big success, paying off its investment within six hours of release and selling over 16,000 units in its first day (Yin-Poole 2012). The game was released a third time in a Unity port (allowing for releases on a wider variety of platforms) for a 2016 release as Dear Esther: Landmark Edition, though this version had fewer visible changes. The gameplay of Esther in all three versions involves taking a mostly linear journey across a remote, wind-swept island, from a rocky shoreline through beautiful phosphorescent caves to the pinnacle of a blinking aerial at its highest point. Walking is the sole mechanic (other than an ability to slightly zoom in the view). However, the game is not quite as railroaded as it’s often remembered: paths frequently diverge in multiple directions, some of which lead to hidden content or dead ends, and despite the genre’s permalife reputation, you can indeed die in Esther by walking off a cliff or into the cold seawater. As opposed to later walking sims like Virginia, one playthrough might differ significantly from another: the audio clips and some of the items found scattered around the island are randomized each time a game begins, meaning different players might come to very different conclusions about the story based on which pieces of content they encounter. The designers have said this random variation was an attempt to make the 135

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experience feel more gamelike (Pinchbeck, Briscoe, and Curry 2016), an irony given how much sweat and ink would later be spilled to exclude Esther from being called a game. The plot of Esther is deliberately obtuse, not only because of the randomized presentation of narrative fragments but by design. The creators have compared it to a dream: “It didn’t matter the sense it made, it was more about the shapes it created” (Ibid.). But several major threads can be teased out. As you explore the island, the narrator reveals pieces of a story about a drunken car crash which he survived but which killed his companion, a woman he loved named Esther. He also tells the stories of a number of men who have previously walked the path taken by the player across the island: an eighteenth-century goatherd named Jakobson, a twentieth-century historian named Donnelley, who wrote a guidebook to the island, a mad hermit who lived in the island’s caves and covered them in strange markings, and an ill-fated visitor named Paul, frequently compared to the biblical Paul (who found his faith on the road to Damascus). As the player retraces the steps of these predecessors to the top of the island, it becomes less and less clear whether these are in fact different people, and even whether the island is a real rather than metaphorical space (the narrator claims to be “becoming this island,” or that its caves are “my guts”; the player’s path at one point travels through an oval passage resembling a giant eye). At the story’s conclusion the player character leaps from the top of the aerial in apparent suicide, but instead of falling to their death soars away above the waves (casting the shadow of a bird in the 2012 remake: Pinchbeck often described the original mod as “an interactive ghost story,” hinting at one possible interpretation). In a final narration, heard in each playthrough as the player climbs the aerial, the narrator speaks to the interconnectedness of the various stories: Who was Jakobson, who remembers him? Donnelly has written of him, but who was Donnelly, who remembers him? I have painted, carved, hewn, scored into this space all that I could draw from him. There will be another to these shores to remember me. I will rise from the ocean like an island without bottom, come together like a stone, become an aerial, a beacon that they will not forget you [Esther]. We have always been drawn here: one day the gulls will return and nest in our bones and our history. The player, through retracing the steps of these past journeys, becomes the latest to “return” and “remember,” following in the footsteps of predecessors 136

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in the hopes of finding meaning. Throughout the piece, the male characters are obsessed with meaning: the narrator frets over the recurrence of the number 21 in the minutiae of Esther’s death, saying that it “cannot, will not, be a coincidence”; the island is covered in thousands of drawings of electric circuitry, logic diagrams, and neuronal connections. The randomized fragments of letters, books, and detritus scattered around hint at meaning but, like the protagonist, the player is frustrated in extracting it: unlike in Gone Home, these items cannot be examined more closely or otherwise interrogated, and the fragments (by design) fail to come together into a consistent interpretation. As the player approaches the top of the island, the drawings shift from scientific representations to religious ones, biblical verses suggesting a search for spiritual rather than literal meaning (“Dear Esther: Critical Analysis” 2012). Esther, the sole female character, is spoken to—much of the narration is framed as letters to her, beginning with the words “Dear Esther”—but she never speaks. The player is not given access to her perspective and learns nothing about her life or personality; the story fragments she appears in are solely about how her death affected the narrator and his attempts to find meaning in it. Nevertheless, like Gone Home, Esther evokes the practice of the epistolary novel, and more significantly the way women’s experience and writing have been communicated through that form, even in translation to other media: The opportunity to write a character’s subjectivity into a novel that is presented in epistolary form, as well as the fact that this opportunity has historically given depiction to female subjectivity across media—from the novel to such classic films as Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948) and A Letter to Three Wives (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949) to video games—does seem to reflect a sociocultural desire to think through the subjectivity of female characters, tempered repeatedly by historical anxieties about the position of such experiences in narrative. (Reynolds 2014, 49) Esther also, more obviously, connects to the shooter, both in its technological lineage and in the distinct aesthetic it inherits (or reacts against). The original mod’s assets, as previously mentioned, came from Half-Life 2: Pinchbeck notes dryly how those assets limited possible settings for his project to a European city, a spaceship, or a “blasted desolate landscape,” and how the choice to center on the third possibility shaped the story and mood 137

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(Pinchbeck, Briscoe, and Curry 2016). On a deeper level, Esther and other walking sims like Gone Home often play with the inherent tension gamers expect from a first-person experience: those who mentally associate such things with more action-driven games may find themselves constantly on edge waiting for a violent assault that will never come. Both games seem to appreciate the expectation of attack, and layer on subtle invocations of menace and mystery—the solitude that both so neatly represent is rendered slightly threatening through subverted expectation and the explicit engineering of the environment. (Denby 2011) Esther strips away all actions supported by its original engine except movement. Even there, it hampers traditional gamer expectations of speed: It’s a definite design decision to not only skip the inclusion of a “run” button, but to make your regular walking speed nice and slow. You’re supposed to do this properly, walk each step as you would in real life, actually explore every inch of the island. It’s also because walking triggers randomised narration fragments, and skipping or running would spoil this. But a lot of the island is boring. And if you end up at a dead-end and are forced to backtrack, it can feel like water torture, drip by drip, step by step. (Plunkett 2012) The deliberate pacing and particularly the mention of boredom are a reminder of the constant stimulation at the heart of many games. Jesper Juul has noted that casual games emphasize what he calls “juiciness,” or continual reinforcement through sound, visuals, and even mechanics designed to reinforce and respond to player behavior (2012). Esther’s enforced slowness creates a different kind of aesthetic. Composer Jessica Curry notes that sections of the game were deliberately kept without music or narration to give players a chance to escape a constant barrage of information and to reflect on the story (Pinchbeck, Briscoe, and Curry 2016): while Esther has no puzzles, this is not unlike the way those obstacles forced moments of reflection and rethinking in classic adventure games. Modern gamers are unused to having this kind of space, however, which can produce hostility in some (and curiosity in others). Games like Esther have been characterized as “avant-garde” games, and researchers have noted different responses to games of this kind when compared to expectations of more mainstream 138

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titles (Cole, Cairns, and Gillies 2015). Studies of players engaging with similar works have noted that there is some appreciation among players for the experience of being uncomfortable, even if there isn’t always necessarily pleasure (Bopp, Opwis, and Mekler 2018). While some find the game inaccessible or alienating, or its fractured story pretentious, others connect to the feelings invoked by the narrative, art, and music. Reviewer Alec Meer describes Esther as an emotional experience worth revisiting: [It is] the essence of loneliness and regret, and pins by turns evocative and startling sights onto those universal emotions, augmenting them and also validating them with a vision of pretty purgatory. When I feel low, I long to retreat to rural solitude, rather than a poky suburban bedroom. Dear Esther makes misery noble rather than wretched, weaving music and environments into far more affecting an experience than any description could capture. (Meer 2014) Pinchbeck describes walking sims as capable of providing a kind of satisfaction different than traditional games, based less on traditional rewards and more on emotional experience: I think on a general level you always want to feel that whatever time and effort and investment they’ve put into it is met coming back in the other direction. You want it to be something they can walk away from and be glad they’ve spent 90 minutes doing that… It doesn’t matter if you understand it or it doesn’t matter if you “get” it. It’s not a problem to be solved, it’s just a thing to be in for a while. (qtd. in Pickard 2016)

Walking Forward Walking simulators are a loosely defined subgenre with endlessly permeable boundaries: new games referencing this young tradition frequently veer away from the examples highlighted here in subtle or significant ways. Some designers are hesitant to commit to the radical aesthetic at the genre’s heart, perhaps fearing backlash. Alice O’Conner describes the problem of games that ill-advisedly add additional mechanics to a walking sim and risk missing the point of the genre:

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I still think the problem with many games is that they really want to be walking simulators at heart but the devs didn’t quite realise and made Thing ‘Em Ups instead. You can see them screaming to be walking simulators, furious that someone has bound them with Thinging. Pointless dialogue, bad puzzles, uninteresting combat, dull resource management etc. smothering somewhere that’d be quite a nice place for a potter. (RPS Hivemind 2016) Hartmut Koenitz suggests that the expectations of games relying on traditional mechanics cannot easily be resolved by walking simulators not because they are limited or flawed but because “they signify the next step in the evolution of narrative-focused video games” (2017). Like the artistic avant-garde he compares them to, they are more concerned with breaking boundaries than adapting them. While games are of course always evolving in many different directions simultaneously, the works described here do speak to an evolution, defying the norms not only of conventional games but of their ancestors, the adventure games that were once the most prominent examples of visits to other worlds, things to just “be in for a while.” Many designers have reclaimed the derogatory “walking sim” label and eagerly joined in its associated rebellion. Connor Sherlock, in an interview on his procedurally generated, non-narrative walking simulators, explains: I started making games while Dear Esther and Proteus were coming out, and the term walking simulator was being reclaimed as a genre title, much to the chagrin of the aforementioned creators. I always thought the term was fun and playful, and so when I starting [sic] up my game-a-month Patreon I thought it was a neat-sounding elevator pitch. The term is also pretty value-laden, so it does a good job of screening out people who’d have buyers’ remorse paying for games with nothing interactive in them. (qtd. in Allen 2018) Of all the subgenres examined herein, the “value-laden” category of the walking simulator provides the clearest promise of exploration and contemplation, determinedly defying the values of a difficulty-driven, death-centered modality by making space for permalife. Game writer Levi Rubeck offers a provocative response to the continued value of the label: “Walking simulator” is a reclamation of the positive, active aspects of walking. Especially in a Robert Frost sense, active participation in 140

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an outside world through the senses rather than creation/destruction/ colonization. A habitation of space where so many other games have to “incentivize” the player into interacting with the high-resolution worlds they’ve molded because they are otherwise zipping through so fast that details minor and major leave no lasting impact. Walking is all about taking a place in a world, not taking over that world, and since videogames establish so many fantastic worlds, there should be no shame in embracing one’s small but sensitive position in them. (qtd. in Kill Screen Staff 2016) The 1980s publisher of Graham Relf ’s pioneering game Explorer reflected: “We were always experimental, trying to push boundaries, and be different, because we felt that was our charter in being a games company. Not derivatives or more of the same. Sometimes it resonated, sometimes it didn’t, but we tried different things” (qtd. in Mason 2016). Early adventure games were likewise created by designers who felt they were forging a new future for storytelling: Sierra’s early designers rarely played games from other studios (Maher 2016), and Infocom and Telltale both drew from fields of creative professionals outside the games industry, in the hopes that these storytellers would bring new voices and ideas to the world of games. Today’s walking simulators continue this tradition of bringing new ideas to interactive stories and forging their own pathways to adventure. Finally, walking sims also provide an entry point to consider the queering of narrative play and design, which we turn to in our next chapter. They suggest other ways of interacting with and existing in a simulated world— ways that, conversely, were there from the very beginning of games and that designers are only now rediscovering. Like the shifting landscapes of Proteus or the multiple rereleases of Dear Esther, the earliest narrative games were spaces you returned to and moved through again and again, mulling through their possibilities, patiently waiting for screens to load or terminal printers to respond to your command. Watching your tiny avatar inch its way across the epic landscape of one of Loom’s long shots, one can’t help but reflect on one’s place in this curious world and what it all means. The only alternative is getting bored. Works Cited Aarseth, Espen J. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins University Press. 141

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider Allen, Jay. 2018. “The Walking Simulator a Month Club Pushes the Boundaries of a Sometimes Narrow Genre.” PC Gamer (blog). February 20, 2018. https://www. pcgamer.com/the-walking-simulator-a-month-club-pushes-the-boundaries-ofa-sometimes-narrow-genre/. Benjamin, Walter. 1973. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Translated by Harry Zohn. NLB. Bopp, Julia Ayumi, Klaus Opwis, and Elisa D. Mekler. 2018. “‘An Odd Kind of Pleasure’: Differentiating Emotional Challenge in Digital Games.” In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 41:1– 41: 12.CHI ’18. New York, NY, USA: ACM. Carbo-Mascarell, Rosa. 2016. “Walking Simulators: The Digitisation of an Aesthetic Practice.” In Proceedings of the 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG. Vol. 1. Ireland. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9254/ f8173c5040beda587a3c6a1e6c67a1187f98.pdf. Chess, Shira. 2017. Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity. University of Minnesota Press. Chess, Shira, and Adrienne Shaw. 2015. “A Conspiracy of Fishes, or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying about #GamerGate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 59 (1): 208–220. Clark, Nicole. 2017. “A Brief History of the ‘Walking Simulator,’ Gaming’s Most Detested Genre | Salon.Com.” Salon. November 11, 2017. https://www.salon. com/2017/11/11/a-brief-history-of-the-walking-simulator-gamings-mostdetested-genre/. Cole, Tom, Paul Cairns, and Marco Gillies. 2015. “Emotional and Functional Challenge in Core and Avant-Garde Games.” In Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, 121–126. CHI PLAY ’15. New York, NY, USA: ACM. “Dear Esther: Critical Analysis.” 2012. Digital Raconteurs (blog). March 14, 2012. https://digitalraconteurs.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/dear-esther-criticalanalysis/. Denby, Lewis. 2011. “The Story of Dear Esther.” PC Gamer (blog). March 7, 2011. https://www.pcgamer.com/the-story-of-dear-esther/. Doroski, Drummond. 2009. “Death in Adventure Games.” Adventure Classic Gaming (blog). January 1, 2009. http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index. php/site/features/411/. Gmiterko, Christina. 2002. “Syberia Review.” Adventure Gamers (blog). August 11, 2002. https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/17541. Grip, Thomas. 2017. “Traversal and the Problem with Walking Simulators.” Gamasutra. March 23, 2017. https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ ThomasGrip/20170323/294377/Traversal_and_the_Problem_with_Walking_ Simulators.php. Haggis, Mata. 2016. “Creator’s Discussion of the Growing Focus on, and Potential of, Storytelling in Video Game Design.” Persona Studies 2 (1): 20–25. Harvat, Zachary. 2018. “S(t)Imulating History: Queer Historical Play in Gone Home and the Tearoom.” Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture 3 (1): 9–26.

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Gone Home? Heron, Michael James, and Pauline Helen Belford. 2015. “All of Your Co-Workers Are Gone: Story, Substance, and the Empathic Puzzler.” Journal of Games Criticism 2 (1). January. http://gamescriticism.org/articles/heronbelford-2-1/. Horton, Alex. 2018. “The ‘Active Shooter’ Video Game Horrified Parkland Parents. It Was Pulled before Release.” Washington Post. May 29, 2018, sec. Education. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2018/05/29/whatparkland-parents-think-of-a-new-video-game-that-lets-people-shoot-up-aschool/. Hutchison, Andrew. 2008. “Making the Water Move: Techno-Historic Limits in the Game Aesthetics of Myst and Doom.” Game Studies 8 (1). http://gamestudies. org/0801/articles/hutch. Juul, Jesper. 2012. A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players. MIT Press. Kagen, Melissa. 2015. “Wandering in Video Games.” MLA Convention, Vancouver, January. Keogh, Brendan. 2016. “Hackers and Cyborgs: Binary Domain and Two Formative Videogame Technicities.” Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association 2 (3): 195–220. Kill Screen Staff. 2016. “Is It Time to Stop Using the Term ‘Walking Simulator’?” Kill Screen. September 30, 2016. https://killscreen.com/articles/time-stopusing-term-walking-simulator/. Koenitz, Hartmut. 2017. “Beyond ‘Walking Simulators’—Games as the Narrative Avant-Grade.” In Proceedings of DiGRA 2017. Melbourne, Australia. LeBreton, J. P. 2017. “Game Tourism.” Vector Poem. May 27, 2017. http:// vectorpoem.com/tourism/. Lindbergh, Ben. 2017. “The Immersive, Evocative World of ‘Edith Finch.’” The Ringer. April 28, 2017. https://www.theringer.com/2017/4/28/16036454/whatremains-of-edith-finch-walking-simulation-video-games-e228fe93e476. Maher, Jimmy. 2016. “Sierra Gets Creative.” The Digital Antiquarian (blog). August 26, 2016. https://www.filfre.net/2016/08/sierra-gets-creative/. Mason, Graeme. 2016. “The Origins of the Walking Simulator.” Eurogamer (blog). November 13, 2016. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-11-13-theorigins-of-the-walking-simulator. McWhertor, Michael. 2009. “Konami Says Let’s Walk It Out.” Kotaku. July 9, 2009. https://kotaku.com/5311387/konami-says-lets-walk-it-out/. Meer, Alec. 2014. “Have You Played … Dear Esther?” Rock, Paper, Shotgun (blog). November 1, 2014. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/11/01/have-youplayed-dear-esther/#more-245799. Muscat, Alexander. 2016. “First-Person Walkers: Understanding the Walker Experience through Four Design Themes.” In Proceedings of the 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG. Vol. 1. Ireland. http://alexandermuscat.io/ wp-content/uploads/2016/06/DiGRA-FDG-WALKERS-2016-Camera-Ready.pdf. O’Connor, Alice. 2017. “New Quake Tourism Mod Mixes in NIN’s Ghosts I-IV.” Rock, Paper, Shotgun (blog). December 18, 2017. https://www. rockpapershotgun.com/2017/12/18/quake-tourism-mod-ghosts-i-iv/.

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Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider Pavlounis, Dimitrios. 2016. “Straightening Up the Archive: Queer Historiography, Queer Play, and the Archival Politics of Gone Home.” Television & New Media 17 (7): 579–594. Pickard, James. 2016. “Talking ‘Walking Sims’: The Chinese Room’s Dan Pinchbeck on the Pointlessness of the Debate.” PCGamesN. September 27, 2016. https://www. pcgamesn.com/dear-esther/dan-pinchbeck-interview-are-walking-sims-games. Pinchbeck, Dan, Robert Briscoe, and Jessica Curry. 2016. Developer Commentary (Dear Esther: Landmark Edition). The Chinese Room. Plunkett, Luke. 2012. “Dear Esther: The Kotaku Review.” Kotaku. February 13, 2012. https://kotaku.com/5884520/dear-esther-the-kotaku-review. Plunkett, Luke. 2016. “Old Elder Scrolls Game Takes over 60 Hours to Walk Across.” Kotaku. November 13, 2016. https://kotaku.com/old-elder-scrollsgame-takes-over-60-hours-to-walk-acro-1788931074. Reed, Aaron A. 2013. “Césure, Lumiere, and Other Hits of Pure Exploration.” May 12, 2013. http://lacunagame.blogspot.com/2013/05/cesure-lumiere-andother-hits-of-pure.html. Reynolds, Daniel. 2014. “Letters and The Unseen Woman: Epistolary Architecture in Three Recent Video Games.” FILM QUART 68 (1): 48–60. RPS Hivemind. 2016. “Alice and Pip: What Is (and Isn’t) a Walking Simulator?” Rock, Paper, Shotgun (blog). September 30, 2016. https://www. rockpapershotgun.com/2016/09/30/walking-simulators/#more-402151. Ruberg, Bonnie. 2017. “Permalife: Video Games and the Queerness of Living.” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 9 (2): 159–173. Salter, Anastasia, Bridget Blodgett, and Anne Sullivan. 2018. “‘Just Because It’s Gay?’: Transgressive Design in Queer Coming of Age Visual Novels.” In Proceedings of the Foundations of Digital Games 2018. Malmo, Sweden: ACM. Sloan, Robin J. S. 2015. “Videogames as Remediated Memories: Commodified Nostalgia and Hyperreality in Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon and Gone Home.” Games and Culture 10 (6): 525–550. Solnit, Rebecca. 2001. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Penguin. Stuart, Keith. 2016. “How Walking Sims Became as Important as the FirstPerson Shooter.” The Guardian. September 20, 2016, sec. Games. http://www. theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/20/how-walking-sim-first-personshooter-dear-esther. Suellentrop, Chris. 2013. “In Gone Home, a Family Mystery Unfolds.” The New York Times. August 18, 2013, sec. Video Games. https://www.nytimes. com/2013/08/19/arts/video-games/in-gone-home-a-family-mystery-unfolds. html. Suellentrop, Chris. 2017. “Steve Gaynor on ‘Sleep No More,’ Walking Simulators and ‘Tacoma.’” Rolling Stone. August 30, 2017. https://www.rollingstone.com/ glixel/features/sleep-no-more-walking-simulators-and-tacoma-w498642. Sweeney, John. 2015. “Indie Implosion: Walking Simulators.” SuperNerdLand. October 22, 2015. https://supernerdland.com/indie-implosion-walkingsimulators/. Accessed July 2, 2018.

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Gone Home? Thoreau, Henry. 1862. “Walking.” The Atlantic Monthly, June 1862. Veale, Kevin. 2016. “Gone Home, and the Power of Affective Nostalgia.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 23 (7): 654–666. Ware, Chris. 2012. Building Stories. Random House. Wilde, Thomas. 2018. “‘Myst’ Turns 25: Cyan Worlds Celebrates Seminal Game with an Anniversary Kickstarter.” GeekWire. April 13, 2018. https://www. geekwire.com/2018/myst-turns-25-cyan-worlds-celebrates-seminal-gameanniversary-kickstarter/. Yin-Poole, Wesley. 2012. “Indie Game Dear Esther Profitable in Less than Six Hours.” Eurogamer (blog). February 15, 2012. https://www.eurogamer.net/ articles/2012-02-15-indie-game-dear-esther-profitable-in-less-than-six-hours.

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I frequently see people say they’ve replayed [Butterfly Soup] multiple times even though it’s only been out for a few months, and it’s both flattering and sad. I’m happy that they like it enough to replay it immediately, but I wish there were other games they could play that would scratch the same itch. It makes me feel like I’ve got to hurry up and make more games like it to fill the void in its genre. Also, every once in a while I do see some backlash from losers calling it an SJW game, and it fills me with joy. I enjoy making people I dislike miserable. (Gamemaker Brianna Lei, qtd. in Hayes 2018) It is no coincidence that the first successful queer game (labeled, appropriately, a “gayme” on its title screen) was an adventure game. Caper in the Castro, released in 1989 and built in Hypercard, was at first marketed as “A Gay and Lesbian Based Adventure Mystery Game” by its designer C. M. Ralph. Spreading through early bulletin boards, the game became wildly popular among LGBT people delighted at seeing themselves represented in a new format; It went all the way across the United States, and then it hopped to Europe. Somebody took it over there and it got on their bulletin board systems, and then people over there were slopping it up. I would get phone calls, very strange phone calls, at odd hours from people, you know, are you CM Ralph? A lot of people just wanted to thank me for it, thank you for doing this and thank you for entertaining us… at one point we guessed that about 250,000 copies had been downloaded over a period of, I think, five years. (Ralph, qtd. in Shaw 2015)

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Ralph, a self-described “lesbian artist/computer hacker,” gave the game away as “CharityWare,” asking players to donate to AIDS charities in lieu of payment (Yockey 1989). But the game’s success inspired the designer to work with a publisher to take it mainstream—which meant removing all the gay references: I went through it card by card by card and made it straight… I took out all the references to the Castro, all the inside jokes, everything, and I renamed it Murder on Main Street. I sold it to Heizer Software, and I made, I mean, not a lot of money, but I made a steady income for many years from that program. It always cracked me up that these people were loving this game and buying it and had no  idea it was actually an LGBT game [laughter]. (Ralph, qtd. in Shaw 2015) Ralph’s unsentimental narrative belies the chilling reality that any queer game, for at least the next two decades, would need to “straighten” its content to become commercially palatable: excise it, disguise it, or couch it exclusively in the form of jokes or put-downs, a literal erasure of the outsider. The rise of a presumed male and heterosexual insider would exacerbate this problem even further: the perpetual damsel-and-rescuer relationship of Mario and Peach and the lecherous gaze of characters like Duke Nukem would for a long while be the only acceptable roles for game characters to embody. Alternate ways of being, including queer ones, could find little traction. Nearly three decades after the release of Castro, mainstream and commercially successful narrative games that center queer protagonists are still rare and often provoke backlash by their mere inclusion. The Last of Us (2013) introduced the character Ellie as a nonplayable sidekick; the following year, downloadable prequel Left Behind made her playable and gave her a same-sex kiss. The excited (and sometimes contentious) press coverage of The Last of Us Part II (expected 2019), a full game that makes Ellie the lead and features another same-sex kiss in its trailer, is a reminder of how rare canonically queer protagonists still are in the mainstream (Johnson 2018). While a number of major game studios had moved by the 2010s to include same-sex romance options (in series such as Fable, Fallout, The Sims, and Dragon’s Age), these representations, generally welcomed by LGBTQ gamers, are also

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problematic: treating all romanceable characters as potentially interested in either gender, for instance, erases the differences in the stories and lived experiences between queer people and straight people. Castro aside, most early appearances of queer characters in games treated them either as “interchangeable with heterosexual relationships” or as one-note stereotypes, often appearing solely as jokes (Shaw and Friesem 2016). In addition, these mainstream appearances focusing on queer identity rarely engage with the deeper sense of the word as used by queer studies and queer games scholars: as a way of representing alternatives to normative models of life, community, and play, “a methodological framework for disrupting the logics that underlie much existing game scholarship” (Ruberg and Shaw 2017). It is then perhaps no surprise that queerness in both these senses has most often been found outside the mainstream, perhaps most commonly in games centered around relationships and romance. Through the 2010s, queer romance games, especially within the subgenre of the visual novel, have become increasingly visible, defying conventions both in their portrayals of alternate identities but also in their willingness to embrace othered modes of design and their attractiveness to outsider creators. We find resonance in Edmond Chang’s notion of queergaming, discussed further below: a rejection of mainstream norms with the goal of “imagining different, even radical game narratives, interfaces, avatars, mechanics, soundscapes, programming, platforms, playerships, and communities… gaming’s changing present and necessary future” (2017). We identify in queer romance games another important descendant of the legacy of adventure games. Visual novels are direct historical descendants (first created by Japanese developers trying to emulate the look of the earliest American adventure games) and continue design ideas originating with the genre such as conversation trees and nonviolent, slower-paced storytelling. But more importantly, just as walking simulators foreground the adventure game pillar of exploration to center moving through physical spaces as a means of understanding a story, these games center exploration of mental and emotional spaces: of characters and relationships. While romance games can encode the same oppressive cultural norms and heteronormative ideals as any other genre, queer romance games subvert these assumptions in many different ways, whether through presenting protagonists of alternate sexualities, challenging genre assumptions, or upending established mechanics. Like adventure games,

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they transport players to worlds that offer different ways of thinking and being, and like the strange, hybrid, outlandish, “queer” evolution of adventure games through rapid iterations of technology and design, they challenge convention and work to define new ways of understanding from within a rapidly shifting landscape. C. M. Ralph was forced to “straighten” her game to make it more commercially appealing, but it seems significant to note the ways even this “first” gay game presaged the modern queer games scene. The incredible demand for its original, queer version—a quarter of a million downloads in a time when only the best-selling games broke a million—spoke to the massive demand by queer players for content that represented them, a demand still largely unmet by mainstream studios today (McDonald 2015). It’s also significant that Ralph created the game in Hypercard, Apple’s democratizing framework that opened up software creation to new kinds of people, foreshadowing modern tools like Twine and Ren’Py that continue to give sole creators, including queer creators, the tools to tell stories in a medium still dominated by technical and cultural gatekeeping. And just as the rise of bulletin-board systems enabled Castro’s wide dissemination, the web and social media has enabled like-minded communities of gamemakers and players to share their games today. Modern platforms for indies like Patreon and itch.io have even opened pathways for financial success to outsider makers, who have alternatives now—even if they remain difficult—to “straightening” their stories to survive. We will begin the chapter by defining the space of overlap between visual novels and romance-based games or “dating simulators,” tracing how they emerged historically from adventure games and developed a unique set of often-rigid tropes and norms. We will then consider how modern games have queered this genre by subverting these assumptions, rejecting or re-envisioning its tropes to say new and surprising things, and consider how many queer makers have challenged and evolved the genre’s gameplay rather than merely adding LGBTQ protagonists to games with fundamentally “straight” mechanics. We will conclude by considering the role queer romance games play in the larger gaming culture by looking at the challenges these games face (as do other modern adventure game descendants) when dealing with mainstream distribution platforms like Steam, and what this says about the possible futures for outsider games more generally, as we once again move toward a time of rapid technological iteration.

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Defining Visual Novels and Dating Simulators As mentioned earlier, the visual novel can trace its lineage directly back to adventure games, originating with Japanese1 game developers in the 1980s attempting to replicate early American titles like Mystery House (Crimmins 2016). While originally focused around the same tropes as American adventure games (exploring environments, collecting inventory items, solving puzzles, and so on) Japan’s mid-1980s gaming culture was dominated to a much larger extent by game consoles like the Famicon (in America, the Nintendo Entertainment System), which had more limited storage than PCs. This meant successful games could only feature a limited number of screens, as opposed to the dozens or hundreds in American titles (Szczepaniak 2011). As the genre evolved, a focus emerged on longer scenes with fewer locations. Combined with the inevitable influence of manga and anime, this meant Japanese games moved earlier than their American counterparts toward cinematic close-ups of characters and other uses of visual language to convey emotion (Cavallaro 2009). Visual novels eventually became a genre focusing almost entirely on characters and conversation, with interactivity limited to specific decision points that generally arrive at a slower pace than in games of other genres. Cavallaro succinctly describes their aesthetics: “the visual novel typically articulates its narrative by means of extensive text conversations complemented by lovingly depicted (and mainly stationary) generic backgrounds and dialogue boxes with character sprites determining the speaker superimposed upon them.” The term has a complicated intersection with the Japanese dating sim (or ren’ai geemu) with some creators seeing them as distinct traditions that sometimes share similar aesthetics and others focusing on their commonalities. Visual novels tend to be less gamelike in their mechanics and more broad in their subject matter, but the overlap is quite messy: there are dating sims with different aesthetics and visual novels about topics other than dating. (And there are of course other While visual novels have many creators working outside of Japan, the genre has deep roots and popularity within that culture, with many successful or influential titles never translated to English (Picard 2013). Research on the visual novel’s significance to players within Japan has noted their potential to produce “a feeling of belonging,” particularly thanks to the use of mechanics—such as auditory environmental queues, static graphics, and first-person point of view—that encourage “robust identification” and “narrative collective-assimilation” (Lu 2014). In this chapter, however, we focus primarily on titles written in English and the way they collide with other adventure game subgenres in the English-speaking world. 1

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styles of game intersecting with these in complex ways, from otome targeted at women, to eroge that may be explicitly pornographic, to dating game traditions originating in cultures other than Japan.) Visual novels are not exclusively dating sims, and not all dating sims are visual novels, but the two have significant overlap. The dating sim as a genre has been characterized by a set of similar but not identical qualities to visual novels: [1] A focus on foregrounding ordinary, relatable settings and events over fantastic scenarios; [2] The idea of managing a collection of romantic relationships through daily activity; [3] Gameplay that ­ ­consists of explicit choices, such as where to go or what to say from a set of given options; [4] Those choices determining which girl your character becomes linked with romantically, and thus which narrative thread the player follows. (Crimmins 2016; numbering ours) The use of “girl” here makes clear the historical and cultural norm that dating sims tend to focus on male protagonists “whose goal is to date, and converse with, various female characters in order to form a romantic relationship” (Cavallaro 2009). Stats are often tracked in these games: “the player’s success in conversation with a girl may be measured according to his or her choice of apposite lines of dialogue, and the overall score improves or worsens accordingly.” The word “score” often gains a double meaning. Even games from this tradition with female protagonists often demand performing a heteronormative and culturally restrictive type of femininity, such as the Japanese-language dating sim Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side (2002): The game’s content and mechanics replicate intimacy in the “real” world of Japanese society. If the player is not agreeable and submissive to male characters, they will be considered undesirable and will “end up” alone. The game will end with the player achieving no success in dating. She is depicted as alone and lonely, with only her younger brother Tsukushi to console her. In these ways, the game actually does replicate the (harsh) realities of still strong traditional attitudes to establishing heterosexual relationships, and the centrality of men in Japanese cultural life. (Richards 2015) While gay dating sims existed in Japan, drawing on traditions of underground romance manga targeting women or gay men, these were 152

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almost never commercially published, hard to find, and rarely translated into other languages. Starting in the 2000s, queer manga began to see more commercial acceptance with the rise of companies such as Tokyopop (Wood 2006); some of the creators we look at later in the chapter have been inspired by these sources. English same-sex dating sims had fewer established media traditions to connect to and were even rarer: as late as 2014, a game could bill itself as the gay dating sim (Coming Out on Top). In fact, throughout the decade (and before) queer dating sims had been emerging as new alternatives. But the vast majority of the dating sims that defined the genre, including all its most influential titles until very recently, catered to straight male fantasies of relationships and dating. However categorized, these kinds of games have often been dismissed by the gaming mainstream because of their apparent simplicity and focus on conversational (rather than physical) prowess, sometimes lumped in with “casual games” or given other dismissive labels. Whether dismissed for their association with erotic content, written off for targeting “softer” experiences than “hardcore” games, or derided for their seemingly simplistic mechanics, dating sims have often gotten little respect among gamers more broadly. The American game McKenzie & Co. (1995), a FMV dating sim dubbed a “social adventure game” (Game Zero Magazine 1995) by its creators, struggled and eventually failed to find a publisher, and despite finding modest success as a self-published title (Ray 2008) earned the ire of both male gamers upset by its existence and of feminists and progressives angered by its focus on activities like putting on make-up and finding a prom date. Contemporary fans now feel guilty admitting they ever liked it: “It’s super embarrassing to admit I actually played this game and enjoyed it at the time” (Grant 2012). The video clips you can find of the game today are almost exclusively male YouTubers making fun of it. Centering romantic or feminine tropes in a game remains an uncomfortable and dangerous position. Dating sims are often derided for their simplistic mechanics, with many offering neither the physical challenges of reflex-games nor the intellectual challenges of puzzle games. While some games in the genre do demand little other than reading from players, many require paying close attention to cues from multiple characters and synthesizing details across multiple scenes and conversations in order to reach particular endings (Cavallaro 2009). The traditional adventure game puzzle focuses on synthesizing details of an external, object-driven world to advance the plot: many visual novels require a more internal, character-driven understanding. This understanding may not even be required to reach the game’s ending, in contrast with the 153

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revelatory moments that must be achieved to advance an adventure game. But that understanding might be necessary to unlock a better ending or to make sense of the one you got: to come to a personal moment of revelation about why the characters behaved the way they did. The notion that romance is a simpler or easier aspect of human experience to model in a game is also rather suspect. Annika Waern has noted that games can invoke real romantic feelings toward fictional characters (citing the existing term “pixel crush” to describe this effect) although it requires care from the designer to allow the player’s emotions to “bleed in” to the protagonist’s and a player willing to participate (2015). This suggests that creating effective “fictional love” in an interactive medium is indeed a challenging design task, which may be why most mainstream games that include romance use it as part of a fixed storyline or optional sidequest, rather than as a centered and playable system that can be meaningfully engaged with. While these genres have historically been defined almost exclusively through the way they uphold and perpetuate traditional notions of gender and sexuality, outsider creators have explored many ways in which visual novels and dating sims as a platform can tell different kinds of stories. It is to those works we turn our attention in the remainder of the chapter.

Subverting the Dating Sim Games work on their players on many levels: as narratives that tell stories, but also as imagery and sounds that evoke emotion, as play experiences that reward or punish certain behaviors, and as systems that encode rules. Subverting a game therefore does not necessarily mean simply changing its content: truly honoring such a change might demand an equally fundamental adjustment to its inner workings. Edmond Chang describes this deeper kind of change in his coining of the term queergaming for design driven by ideological and mechanical resistance, not simply including queer content on the surface: Queergaming is about creating new spaces but also breaking apart, repurposing, even destroying old ones. It is recognizing that more often than not the rules, goals, ideals, and meanings of a game have been determined, programmed, and naturalized long before a player picks up a game controller or presses the start button. (2015) 154

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As Chang observes, one cannot simply add queer narratives to a game to make it a queergame: if the structure of the game itself encodes a heteronormative framework, “the queer possibilities of the game are overwhelmingly outperformed and overshadowed by traditional and stereotypical ideals, representations, and mechanics.” Chang, for instance, has critiqued the game FrontierVille (2010) for its half-hearted attempt to add queer characters without changing fundamental reward structures, claiming “the game, like most mainstream games, is encoded—both algorithmically and ideologically— with heteronormative values of gender, sex, race, and family” (2015). Queering dating sims within the loaded context of their history and expectations risk reinforcing normative ideas around relationships. One of the greatest challenges facing subversive dating sims, for instance, is the metaphor of victory. In a traditional dating sim, the culmination of the player’s chosen romance replaces the expected “winning” sequence at the end of a game: the structure itself encodes a notion of romantic partners as rewards to be won. Like the treasures to be collected or puzzles to be solved in adventure games, romantic partners in dating sims can easily be seen as trophies to be collected. The choice of partners can also encode normative values by emphasizing traditionally attractive, gender-conforming, white or light-skinned love interests. In this manner, “mainstream reproductive heterosexuality comes to be [re]produced through popular cultural narratives as natural, self-evident, desirable, privileged, and obligatory, at the same time that it discursively disqualifies sexual and other minorities as strangers” (Vasvári 2006). Dating sims would also seem to be inherently against asexual or aromantic narratives and play, as one guide explains: “since dramatic romances are often the main focus of these games and are necessary to lead the stories along their branching paths, you are expected to fulfill your obligation as a good sport and at least attempt to fall in love. Or else the game really won’t know what to do with you, and thus you will be punished” (Cosmos 2015). Despite these challenges, many creators have used the genre to subvert expected norms and assumptions, with many of the more extreme examples garnering widespread attention. In 2014 a dating sim released years earlier become an overnight sensation in US indie game circles: Hatoful Boyfriend, where the potential romantic partners are all pigeons. Quite literally, as one reviewer notes: The game does not let you forget this; it is not simply some dating sim where the devs have changed all the human boys to pigeon boys, say. 155

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Their limitations are well-known and often referenced. For instance, your homeroom teacher Mr Kazumaki is a quail, and he is worried that he will fly directly upwards into the ceiling when he is scared because that is what quails do. (Howitt 2014) While the game is heterosexual in its romantic narrative options, it skews typical heteronormative play and through its absurdity draws attention to the greater absurdity of the entire genre (Figure 6.1). Novelty dating sims in this tradition can easily push into ridiculous or offensive extremes. One reviewer describes the experience of romantic horse sim My Horse Prince (2016): “Both the conversations and the activities escalate in surreality pretty quickly. You start off by feeding Yuuma carrots, and before you know it he’s living with you and making your breakfast” (Jackson 2017). Frequently, games in this genre rely upon crude humor, as a review of Meat Log Mountain (2010) emphasizes: If you move to a place called Meat Log Mountain, you ought to be mentally prepared for a certain kind of atmosphere. That is to say, if you’re not a burly dude with an appreciation for bears—not referring to the woodland creature—then you might have trouble fitting in with the lumberjack locals. Luckily for our hero Thaddeus Cub, the town’s new doctor, his hulking physique and willingness to closely inspect

Figure 6.1  Hatoful Boyfriend (original 2011) points out odd norms in dating sims by making all its love interests pigeons.

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the crotches of man, demon, and orc alike make him the perfect fit for the Meat Log community. (Sullivan and McGee 2016) Games that parody dating sims or traditional romance tropes can be potentially problematic if they position queer love stories entirely as onenote jokes or for comedic effect. However, even some of the most apparently absurd examples can be meaningfully subversive. In Benthic Love (2013), the player becomes a male anglerfish exploring the pitch-black depths of the ocean floor seeking a mate, even though he knows (due to the particulars of anglerfish sexual biology) that this will mean his death as he slowly dissolves into his partner. Suffused with a genuine sense of ennui and inevitability, filled with philosophical musings about the meaning of love, sex, and death, the game manages to evoke real emotion through its art, music, and writing, as well as playing with outcomes other than the seemingly inevitable conclusion (as is hinted at in the game’s bullet-point feature “the ONLY LGBT-friendly fish dating sim!”). Critic Mattie Brice finds the game a powerful expression of queerness and subversive play: The apparent inevitability of nature, and why it is this way, reverberates throughout the entire piece… what is more interesting is how queerness still, in some way, follows the flow of nature, but co-opts it at the same time. As [designer Mike Joffe] mentions in his note about creating this, there is something to conceiving the opportunity to subvert the story and then the surprise when you can actually do it. Subversion isn’t the complete disowning of nature, or in sociological terms, nurture, rather reshaping culture to fit your own needs. (Brice 2014) But even more lighthearted parody games occupy a space somewhere between the meaningful queergaming described by Chang and the genre’s more problematic traditions. Some games subvert genre traditions in more novel, systematic, or disturbing ways. Doki Doki Literature Club (2017) begins as a typical dating sim but soon descends into metatextual horror when one of the love interests, Sayori, commits suicide. When this happens, the game acts as if it has crashed, showing a Ren’Py “exception has occurred” error—as if such a death is so far outside the genre’s boundaries, the engine itself cannot cope with it—and seemingly resets itself, allowing the player to restart, presumably in the hopes of getting a better ending. But contravening genre expectations, the player cannot retry their romance with Sayori: the story restarts in an alternate reality where she never existed, 157

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with the game appearing increasingly glitched as play continues. Before the disturbing climax, the fourth wall and traditional boundaries between player and protagonist are violated, with the characters becoming self-aware of their roles as love interests programmed to fall in love with the player, and all the disturbing implications that follow. To reach the final ending, the player must permanently destroy parts of the game’s real data files on their hard drive. One reviewer describes what makes Doki Doki’s horror so effective in terms of the way it subverts the genre’s baked-in assumptions of agency: It kills a character, then explicitly prevents you from doing anything about it… When the game restarts, it constantly mocked my decisions and regrets. I wasn’t given any idea of how fix the universe, short of a hard reset on the game altogether—which would only bring me back to square one. In sum, this is what’s horrifying about Doki Doki Literature Club: You, as a player and a character within the game’s world, are helpless. (Rose 2017) Another reviewer comments on the game’s realistic depiction of mental illness when contrasted with the more typical portrayal of depression in dating sims: as an obstacle to be overcome with love. “In a lot of romance visual novels the object of your affection will have an emotional problem you have to help them solve. Sometimes this problem is depression… The realism of Sayori’s mental health problems is unsettling, especially because [early on] the game still feels like a cliché light dating sim about cute anime girls” (Jackson 2017). Doki Doki is effective in part because it leans so heavily in its first act into genre expectations and then so thoroughly subverts them, denying the player the control they expect (Barnabé 2018). This deliberate design choice to subvert the dating sim’s traditional focus on controlling relationships meaningfully queers the genre, challenging and overthrowing its fundamental and rarely questioned core assumptions. Other games have made similar points on more explicit levels. Angela Washko’s critique of pickup artist culture The Game: The Game (2018; Figure 6.2) offers a playable simulation of the strategies made infamous in Neil Strauss’s 2005 book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. Out at a bar, the player is confronted by a series of men using social manipulation strategies to try to talk them into going on a date or having sex. With a high degree of variability in its responses, some taken from real 158

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Figure 6.2  Screenshot from The Game: The Game. hidden camera footage of pick-up artists, turning down these continual advances can feel exhausting, as one reviewer wrote: “like paddling a canoe up a tidal wave” (D’Anastasio 2018). Again, the player’s agency is thwarted, but here it mimics the very real way social engineering is used against women by men who won’t take no for an answer. Washko has noted how placing this experience within the frame of a visual novel dating sim encourages the player to turn the tables, exploring how they can game “the game” by seeing each harasser as a distinct character with their own strategies to be understood and combated: I think that most people have both a really over simplified idea of what a pick-up artist is (either it’s always a totally evil, amoral person looking to manipulate women by insulting them, or a socially disadvantaged person who is just leveling the dating playing field by learning game)… and hopefully my independent arty game will introduce more nuance with regards to the differences in intention and levels of aggression within each of these pick-up artists’ unique practices. (qtd. in Pangburn 2016) The kinds of approaches to a potential romantic partner highlighted in The Game: The Game are often reproduced, consciously or not, in dating sims, perpetuating a type of toxic masculinity common in online discourse, and particularly in Men’s Right Activist groups, where a game-like approach 159

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to courtship dominates: if “players” do and say all the right things, they earn sex as a reward (Banet-Weiser and Miltner 2016). These strategies encode a transactional model of social interaction in which the correct choices result in desired outcomes. In dating sims, this encoding becomes literalized by the rules of the game: the revelatory moment of uncovering the right solution to an adventure game puzzle and thus unlocking a new area turned into a struggle to figure out just what to say to a romantic interest to get them to love you. Often the correct choices are those that are meant to best perform the identity that your love interest identifies as desirable, and the format actively disincentives projecting a self which might limit positive romance outcomes. These games and others demonstrate how Chang’s queergaming goes beyond portraying alternate sexual identities to more fundamental challenges to a genre’s core assumptions. We’ll next take a look at how games with LGBTQ characters work to incorporate these deeper subversions and rethinkings into their storylines and mechanics.

Playing at Queer Romance Adrienne Shaw maintains the current leading archive of queer games, the LGBTQ Video Game Archive, which has painstakingly assembled documented appearances of queer characters in games. In 2017 the site worked with archivists to recover both the gay original and “straightened” commercial versions of Caper in the Castro and make them playable online, side by side (Shaw 2015). Through her work across the site, Shaw notes how for a long time queer content in mainstream games was mainly used by straight designers in an attempt to be offensive or edgy, from Grand Theft Auto to Leisure Suit Larry. The latter series, for instance, includes perhaps the earliest representation of a trans woman in a video game—“very transphobic, but she’s there” (qtd. in Ruberg 2017)—as well as several queer women of color. Whether centered or not, Shaw notes how these representations rarely deal with the real challenges, conflicts, or contexts of queer people, often set “in the distant past or in the far future,” speaking to the reluctance of mainstream designers to engage with these issues, or perhaps a hope that they wouldn’t have to: “Maybe it’s that people designing games don’t want to have to deal with issues like AIDS. Maybe this could be the one space where you don’t have to deal with that.” And yet, as the unstraightened version of Caper’s rampant BBS success illustrated, there has always been an audience yearning for more substantive 160

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queer representation. We noted at the beginning of this chapter the rise of the “same-sex romance option” in mainstream games, but these portrayals rarely portray queerness as anything but an inconsequential alternative to heterosexuality, and more significantly, they almost never alter the underlying mechanics of the game to become meaningful queergames in Chang’s sense: “the articulation of and investment in alternative modes of play and ways of being” (2017). A game with queer characters that uncritically perpetuates heteronormative ideas of romance as conquest or partners as objects to be unlocked arguably engages with queerness on a shallower level than some of the “straight” games mentioned above. Todd Harper has proposed three metrics for meaningfully representing queer experiences in games: [1] Sexual/queer identity is procedurally relevant: the gameplay should include some aspect of sexual identity within the gameplay, so that playing the game involves engaging with queer conceptual material/ [2] Appeals to a broad audience: the game should be engaging to players of all kinds, not just LGBTQ individuals/ [3] Uses of sexual identity in the game are purposeful: rather than being “tacked on,” when queer content is included in the game, it should be integrated with the narrative and ludic dimensions of the game. (Harper 2011) In other words, queer main characters are important, but so is placing them in a simulated world where queerness matters. In the same way adventure games are not just games with story but games in which the story and gameplay are essentially intertwined, queer games ought to include not just queer content but queer mechanics. The second half of the 2010s saw a proliferation of queer romance games doing exactly that: offering playable and nonplayable characters with a range of non-straight, non-cis identities, but also thinking critically about genre expectations to challenge and question their normative mechanics and storylines from within the games themselves. Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator (2017) is a visual novel with fairly typical dating sim aesthetics, focused on a single father moving to a new neighborhood filled with a variety of other dads looking for same-sex love. The game found an immediate audience upon its release, including among gamers not used to playing dating sims or queer games. Dream Daddy works in part because of its charming writing and art but also because of the more subtle ways it subverts expectations of both queer games and dating sims. 161

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The game invites the player to occupy and explore a range of alternative masculinities and “ways of being” in the context of queer relationships: first of all through casting all the love interests as dads, but also through presenting a range of body and personality types and challenging many of the more subtle assumptions of the genre. For instance, designer Leighton Gray describes Dream Daddy as an intentional rejection of the normative mechanics of the genre, and particularly the typical emphasis on emotional manipulation: “A lot of times with dating sims it’s a matter of getting a read on the character’s personality and telling them exactly what they want to hear… That’s a really frustrating way to play a game” (Hudson 2017). This transformative emphasis reflects an alignment with the goals of queergaming, as Gray describes: “There is also a growing interest in games that think about and explore relationships, rather than just using humans as action ciphers. A broadening, diversifying audience and a growing community of creators who see games as a mode of self-expression means that we’re seeing more titles that revolve around personal interactions, character customisation, romance and choice” (2017). In Dream Daddy, this is expressed in part through the presence of characters with existing relationships and ties who can be “courted” but not “won.” The lack of a happy ending on some paths defies the completionist expectations of most dating sims, where the player can replay multiple times to find love with every available paramour. Two of the “dream dads” stand out in particular for breaking the player’s normative expectations: Joseph and the “bad dad” Robert. In both cases, the player is able to sleep with the character but not to resolve the relationship in a positive way. The player ends these romance arcs with various positive emotions but not the transactional control over the relationship that genre convention implies. These breaks with expectation provoked fan outrage but were of course an intentional move by the designers (Kane 2017). While the player character is written to use the same kinds of pick-up lines seen in other dating sims and toxic real-world communities, these characters simply refuse to respond to this approach. For players who accept these characters’ terms for continuing a friendship or relationship—or choosing not to—these endings prove to be bittersweet but more honest stories of the complexities of queer romance. The presence of happy endings for queer characters is already radical: early queer romance novels, for instance, frequently ended in tragedy (Lynch, Sternglantz, and Barot 2012), and the “bury your gays” trope in mainstream media points out how often queer characters have been killed off in the 162

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service of straight stories. Dream Daddy’s limitations, conversely, subvert these notions by emphasizing that a happy ending can be understood in many ways other than victory over a conquest: a positive relationship with one’s daughter, or the attempted reconciliation of a troubled marriage. Other queer dating sims have similarly emphasized positivity and playfulness, such as coming-of-age dating sim Coming Out on Top (2014): rather than emphasizing fraught drama and negative emotions, the designer intended the game to focus on “tapping into the frenetic, zany energy of being a college student, coming out, and experimenting” (Starkey 2017a). Other queer romance games take on the manipulation at the heart of the genre through giving the player an intentional space for aggressive behavior. Ladykiller in a Bind (2016) features explicit queer scenes and BDSM content, as well as characters who aggressively pursue their desires: “Social manipulation is the name of the game, choosing the rights [sic] words and phrases in the midst of conversation [while] trying to get with every woman on the cruise. This mix of social manipulation and playing an asshole (who is, in herself, pretending to be even more of an asshole) is executed brilliantly” (Dwan 2017). The game, while heavily centering on discussions of consent, has been criticized for its inclusion of nonconsensual sex scenes, which has in turn drawn attention to how the discourse of representation is wielded in the case of queer creators: Too often it seems like larger studios are lauded for baby steps in matters of representation while women, queers and other independent authors are set upon for imperfect stories that actually hew closer to the realities of their audiences’ lives. If we want more of the latter, and as more and more women and queer creators are in the spotlight for their work, then we need to think about how we relate to the authors creating the works we love. Who do we praise, and who do we castigate? (Rochefort 2017) Other games take a reverse approach, emphasizing the autonomy and freedom of the characters. Tusks: The Orc Dating Sim (2015) challenges the ways orcs in fantasy media are often unthinkingly rooted in any kind of real-world bigotry you care to name, from racism—specifically anti-blackness—to misogyny, to ableism, to cissexism, to colonialism. These things are apparently justified because orcs are inherently evil, immoral, depraved, violent, 163

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or predatory, which is exactly the same tactic that’s used to justify prejudice and violence against members of marginalized groups in real life. (creator Mitch Alexander, qtd. in Carmichael 2015) To give these othered love interests more autonomy, the game includes a system that randomizes their responses: “characters will respond to your advances in unpredictable ways, with no gaming the system. No one set of answers will guarantee you romantic or sexual success—y’know, almost as if you were dating one of them troublesome humans” (Starkey 2017b). This echoes an approach taken by some creators of more complex social simulation games, such as Redshirt (2013), whose designer explicitly introduced randomness into its complex dating simulation because “love and relationships are not deterministic” (Khandaker 2015). This emphasis on resistance to play and victory (a recurring theme in the unsuccessful paths of Dream Daddy, the resistant, autonomous orcs of Tusks, and the subversive, file-destroying mechanics of Doki Doki) recall Bonnie Ruberg’s work on games being “no-fun” as a deliberate and necessary part of queer game aesthetics: By nature video-game interactivity seems to offer players agency, while simultaneously dictating and strictly limiting the extent of player choice. Embracing the no-fun enacts a different type of agency; it means choosing destruction, frustration, alarm. These are not generic experiences, not default choices. They are felt, in the body, as the struggle of the self wrestling with the messy intimacy of a queer partner: the game. (2015) While the space of visual novels and dating simulators may seem to lack meaningful agency both for players and characters at first glance, the ability of this genre to embody this “struggle of the self ” is embedded in the personal, intimate scale.

Steaming up Steam The relationship of queer games with mainstream platforms has been and continues to be a complex and often disappointing one. Among the most popular platforms for PC game distribution as of 2019, Steam has been a difficult partner for queer and outsider creators, in part because it aims to 164

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be a platform both for smaller, outsider creators as well as self-identified mainstream, hardcore gamers (Shaw 2014). The release and subsequent success of outsider games on Steam by women, most notoriously Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest (2014), played a role in inciting the harassment campaigns of Gamergate (Chess and Shaw 2015). Harassers employed user-created Steam tags to literally “tag” outsider games with insults, labeling Gone Home “bad” and “overrated,” and Redshirt “hipster garbage” (Sarkar 2014), with tags even used to suggest targeted developers should kill themselves. Steam eventually silently disabled searches for usercreated tags, but this created other issues, such as a search for “LGBT” on the platform producing zero results. In a market where visibility is a huge problem for indie creators, this is a massive stumbling block to financial success. While Steam has gradually opened up its platform to more and more kinds of games, for years the service barred games with explicit sexual content. The policing of this ban, however, has been highly subjective and often weighted against queer creators. Game designer Robert Yang, whose works explore portrayals of male bodies in games, gay sexuality, and consent, has had numerous issues with his games being rejected, banned, disinvited, or threatened with removal on both Steam as well as popular streaming service Twitch. Yang notes the irony that games with much less mature portrayals of female sexuality, or games by major publishers, often seem exempt from this rule: But what really pisses me off is that my games actually earn their nudity, and cannot function as artistic works without it. Then here comes Twitch, which argues that some blue alien chick boobs in Mass Effect are OK to broadcast because they’re obviously there for some bullshit titillation?… Gamers want so desperately for games to function as art, to witness games about the depth of human experience—and here is Twitch, a crucial platform in games culture that had 44% livestreaming market share in 2014, insisting “NO”—games should only ever snicker about sex and nudity, like some stoned tweens clutching smuggled Hot Pockets in the back of a movie theater. (Yang 2015) Queer dating sims have often been removed from Steam or had content standards inconsistently enforced. In May 2018, developers of a number of dating sims and visual novels with explicit content received notifications that their games would shortly be removed; in some cases, developers 165

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responding with alarm had these threats reversed with little explanation. Then in June, Steam’s parent company Valve announced a new policy: that all games “except for things we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling” would be allowed on the service: The challenge is that this problem [of what to allow] is not simply about whether or not the Steam Store should contain games with adult or violent content. Instead, it’s about whether the Store contains games within an entire range of controversial topics—politics, sexuality, racism, gender, violence, identity, and so on… we’re going to push developers to further disclose any potentially problematic content in their games during the submission process, and cease doing business with any of them that refuse to do so honestly. (Valve 2018) While seemingly a move toward more inclusivity, some queer gamemakers and journalists have expressed alarm at the way this policy continues to vaguely conflate controversy with sexuality: Wait, so, are those controversial topics listed earlier considered “potentially problematic”? Are people going to need to disclose the presence of “sexuality” and “identity” in their games when they are submitted to the Steam store, or risk Valve ceasing to do business with them because they have “refused [to disclose] honestly”? Do developers need to disclose when their characters are heterosexual or is it just us sneaky non-heteros who are controversial and potentially problematic? (Cole 2018) These concerns echo the problems LGBTQ media of all kinds faced with distribution platforms, such as on YouTube, where queer content has been categorized as adults-only and rendered invisible in restricted mode (Watson 2017). Game writer and cultural critic Katherine Cross has drawn attention to a group called NCOSE that took credit for Steam’s new policy after a concerted activism campaign, noting their origins as a Christian antiobscenity group: While all creativity is stifled by a blanket ban on games with sexual content (one which will, inevitably, be applied inconsistently and harm smaller creators)… we know from history that NCOSE’s brand

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of “decency” crusading harms women and queer people the most, with our art often being used as the Ur example of the “indecent” or “degenerate.” No one should be surprised that a relatively tame game about lesbians (Kindred Spirits on the Roof) got swept up in a moral panic about “sexually explicit content.” (Cross 2018) Some might ask why it’s important or necessary for queer creators to release their works on Steam or other mainstream platforms at all, especially with an increasing number of more outsider-friendly platforms available. There are many reasons, not the least of which is the crucial reach major platforms provide to help small creators become self-sustaining. As Harper noted in his criteria for meaningfully queer games, it’s also important that these works remain visible to the larger culture, both to expand and sustain acceptance of queer rights and identities and to provide representation for young queer people struggling to understand themselves (recall our discussion in Chapter 1 of the important role these games can have in helping outsider players find themselves). These games participate in a culture of “queer worldmaking,” “minor voices in global imaginaries of video games” with powerful potential to influence the conversation (Sens 2015). More broadly, queer games have garnered increasing attention for challenging all kinds of “hegemonic constructions in the medium, both in  content and format” (Braganca, Mota, and Fantini 2016): they are often the sites where calcified gaming norms have been most pointedly challenged. Not all platforms adopt the same strategies. Community distribution platform itch.io has long championed policies friendly to creators, and its founder has emphatically rejected Steam’s strategy: “A platform that allows ‘everything, unless it’s illegal or straight up trolling’ is ridiculous. Please keep your malicious, derogatory, discriminatory, bullying, harassing, demeaning content off @itchio. Our ban buttons are ready” (@moonscript 2018). As of the time of this writing, Itch hosts over 2,900 visual novels (almost three times as many as are available on Steam), with 261 explicitly tagged (and searchable) as “LGBT.” While access to dominant platforms is vital to mainstream success, portals like Itch offer essential alternatives, spaces where queer makers and players can gather with less pressure to fit their work into mainstream molds. Itch is also a favored distribution platform for modern interactive fiction and adventure games, providing a community for creators of all kinds abandoned by the mainstream.

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Conclusion Caper in the Castro, released in 1989, has often been credited as the first queer game. But there are other narratives we can tell. The 1986 adventure game Tass Times in Tonetown, co-created by trans designer Rebecca Heineman (along with Infocom’s Mike Berlyn and his wife Muffy), has the player pass through a portal to a bizarre world filled with colorful people wearing unique fashions and hairstyles (Figure 6.3). Your faithful dog Spot transforms as he enters this place: not only does he “look radical,” he also gains the ability to speak and a new name: “say bye to Spot ‘n ‘Lo to Ennio! I have arrived!” Heineman, still over a decade away from her own transition, was also “saying bye” to her old name at the time as part of a growing discomfort with her gender assigned at birth: “I wanted everyone to call me Burger because I didn’t want them to call me that other name” (qtd. in Barton 2010). Many of the game’s early puzzles involve trying to “pass” as a resident of Tonetown: if you don’t adopt the proper dress and accoutrements to fit in fast enough, the villain will appear and ruthlessly kill you. While it’s unclear how many of these ideas were from Heineman versus other team members, it’s hard not to read them today as a statement against normative forces (especially in the moments the game goes out of its way to make this connection: at one point the hero passes by “the Ennui Estates” filled with “millions of identical picket fences surrounding identical white clapboard houses”).

Figure 6.3  Scene from the Apple IIGS version of Tass Times in Tonetown. 168

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Tonetown also has an interface that was radically experimental and ahead of its time: years before Sierra or LucasArts would do it, it featured on-screen verb icons as part of its hybrid parser/graphical interface; it was also one of the earliest games to fully utilize new technology like the multi-voiced sound cards of new home computers like the Apple IIGS, or the mouse for input (which was still so new that Heineman had to write her own routines to parse the raw serial data). Heineman at the time had recently helped co-found influential game studio Interplay, and years later spoke wistfully of this time of experimentation: “Interplay’s greatest contribution to the gaming world was that we took risks. We came up with a lot of games that no one would touch because they were so off the wall—like Tass Times in Tonetown, I mean, who in the hell would come up with that and actually ship it? We did!” (qtd. in Barton 2010) While Tonetown has no explicit queer content, it’s a queer game in many of the ways we’ve discussed throughout this chapter. Pivoting around interactions with colorful characters, exploring possible futures for how game interactions might work, and offering alternative ways of being within a safely fictional world, this rarely remembered adventure game demonstrates how the genre has a long tradition of challenging norms and subverting expectations that dates back much earlier than more visible examples of representation. That games like Tonetown were rarely commercially successful—too weird for the masses or too experimental for their ideas to catch on—speaks to another facet of queerness explored in the book The Queer Art of Failure (Halberstam and Halberstam 2011). Queerness suggests a willingness to find success defined in terms other than those proscribed by insider norms, and the bravery to try experiments that might turn out in unexpected ways. The queer art of failure proposes considering outlandish ideas like “art without markets, drama without a script, narrative without progress.” It “turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable,” challenging expectations and exploring new alternatives. The designer of Tusks has spoken explicitly about the vast terrain of nontraditional games “by, for and about people and events so diverse as to defy a single label,” and their potential for disruption: [These games] disrupt normative game taste by demonstrating that games can be used for a vast array of different experiences, many of which the conventional wisdom of normative taste would prevent

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us  from reaching. What happens when we include game verbs like “nurturing”, “caring” and “resting” over “collecting”, “killing” and “running”? What does it mean when the rules that govern someone’s life are translated into a game system that is almost impossible to play? (Alexander 2015) Queer romance games have continued the adventure game tradition of offering contemplative, explorable story spaces, and alongside other descendants are continuing the work of exploring the meaning of agency in interactive stories. With an aesthetic that makes visual storytelling accessible to solo creators, these games offer a platform for outsiders to innovate. Queer games like the ones mentioned in this chapter have become increasingly visible in mainstream spaces, influencing games culture in subtle to obvious ways, not the least of which is better representation. With Ellie’s “big gay kiss” in the trailer for The Last of Us Part II, “we’re finally seeing some queer representation with a protagonist in the mainline story of a triple-A game, something that hasn’t occurred outside of the indie sphere or in supplementary media, not in the actual game” (Johnson 2018). Characters who are trans, ace, nonbinary, and other nontraditional gender and sexual identities are appearing in major games with increasing frequency. Thirty years after Caper in the Castro, creators are at last finding success in the mainstream without needing to “straighten” their games—though it took a lot of effort from outsider creators to get us there. This effort, of course, is ongoing. While the profusion of accessible game creation tools has undoubtedly contributed to the recent spread of queer games, technology continues to change. Castro was created with Hypercard, which Apple stopped updating in the late 1990s and discontinued shortly thereafter: today they offer no similar tool, and releasing apps for Apple devices is a complex process, requiring significant technical expertise and financial commitment. Throughout the 2010s the open web, a favored platform of outsider makers, has increasingly given way to closed ecosystems favoring insiders with the business resources to navigate them. The emergence of virtual and augmented reality as a major new platform has brought with it even more intimidating barriers to entry. In the next chapter we will turn our attention to these emerging platforms, considering how their affordances breathe new life into many of the oldest dreams of adventure games, while threatening to shut out the very innovators who might help realize their potential.

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Works Cited Alexander, Mitch. 2015. “The Craft of Game Design Serves One.” March 17, 2015. http://mitchalexander.wikidot.com/the-craft-of-game-design-serves-one. Banet-Weiser, Sarah, and Kate M. Miltner. 2016. “#MasculinitySoFragile: Culture, Structure, and Networked Misogyny.” Feminist Media Studies 16 (1): 171–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1120490. Barnabé, Fanny. 2018. “The Playful Function of Paratext in Visual Novels: The Case of Doki Doki Literature Club!” In Manga Nexus: Movement, Stillness, Media. Kyoto, Japan. https://orbi.uliege.be/handle/2268/223821. Barton, Matt. 2010. “The Burger Speaks: An Interview with an Archmage.” Gamasutra (blog). December 27, 2010. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/ feature/134614/the_burger_speaks_an_interview_.php. Braganca, Luiza, Rosilane Mota, and Eduardo Fantini. 2016. “Twine Game Narrative and Discussion about LGBTQ Representation.” In Proceedings of SBGames 2016, 937–946. Sao Paulo, Brazil. Brice, Mattie. 2014. “Benthic Love.” Alternate Ending (blog). August 15, 2014. http://www.mattiebrice.com/benthic-love/. Carmichael, Stephanie. 2015. “Shadow of Mordor Has Nothing on the Orcs in This Dating Sim.” VentureBeat (blog). April 13, 2015. https://venturebeat. com/2015/04/13/shadow-of-mordor-has-nothing-on-the-orcs-in-this-dating-sim/. Cavallaro, Dani. 2009. Anime and the Visual Novel: Narrative Structure, Design and Play at the Crossroads of Animation and Computer Games. McFarland. Chang, Edmond. 2017. “Queergaming.” In Queer Game Studies, edited by Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw, 15–24. University of Minnesota Press. Chang, Edmond Y. 2015. “Love Is in the Air: Queer (Im)Possibility and Straightwashing in FrontierVille and World of Warcraft.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 2 (2): 6–31. Chess, Shira, and Adrienne Shaw. 2015. “A Conspiracy of Fishes, or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying about #GamerGate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 59 (1): 208–220. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2014.999917. Cole, Alayna. 2018. “Valve Has Declared They Will Allow ‘Everything’ on Steam … but at What Cost to Indie Developers?” PC PowerPlay Magazine. June 12, 2018. https://www.pcpowerplay.com.au/news/valve-has-declared-theywill-allow-8216everything8217-on-steam8230-but-at-what-cost-to-indiedevelopers,493501. Cosmos, A. M. 2015. “How to Understand and Play Dating Sims.” Polygon. July 15, 2015. https://www.polygon.com/2015/7/15/8970567/how-to-understand-andplay-dating-sims. Crimmins, Brian. 2016. “A Brief History of Visual Novels.” ZEAL (blog). January 7, 2016. https://medium.com/mammon-machine-zeal/a-brief-history-of-visualnovels-641a2e6b1acb. Cross, Katherine. 2018. “Opinion: Illuminating the Shadowy Group Celebrating Valve’s Latest Censorship Drive.” Gamasutra. May 22, 2018. /view/news/318579/

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Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider Opinion_Illuminating_the_shadowy_group_celebrating_Valves_latest_ censorship_drive.php. D’Anastasio, Cecilia. 2018. “In The Game: The Game, It’s You Vs. Pick-Up Artists.” Kotaku. February 5, 2018. https://kotaku.com/in-the-game-the-game-its-youvs-pick-up-artists-1822727691. Dwan, Hannah. 2017. “The Best Visual Novels on PC.” PCGamer. December 27, 2017. https://www.pcgamer.com/the-best-visual-novels-on-pc/. Game Zero Magazine. 1995. “Complete Coverage of the E3 Tradeshow.” http:// www.gamezero.com/team-0/articles/industry/e3_1995/e3final0.html. Grant, Pauline. 2012. “Girl Games in the 1990s: McKenzie & Co.: More Friends.” Blog. Pauline Grant (blog). September 10, 2012. http://www.paulinegrant. com/2012/09/girl-games-in-the-1990s-mckenzie-co-more-friends.html. Gray, Kate. 2017. “Dream Daddy: How the Gay Dad Dating Sim Became a Hit Game of the Summer.” The Guardian. July 26, 2017, sec. Games. http://www. theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/26/dream-daddy-gay-dating-sim-hitsummer-steam. Halberstam, Judith, and Jack Halberstam. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press. Harper, Todd. 2011. “Gay-for-Play: Addressing the Challenge of Relevant Gay Game Content.” GAMBIT. October 2011. http://gambit.mit.edu/readme/ lectures/gay-for-play-addressing-the-ch.php#004952. Hayes, Spencer. 2018. “‘Make a Game Someone Would Kill a Man to Play’ an Interview with Brianna Lei of Butterfly Soup.” Itch.Io. April 10, 2018. https:// itch.io/blog/30145/make-a-game-someone-would-kill-a-man-to-play-aninterview-with-brianna-lei-of-butterfly-soup. Howitt, Grant. 2014. “Hatoful Boyfriend Review.” The Guardian. September 12, 2014, sec. Games. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/12/ hatoful-boyfriend-review-love-pigeons-japanese-dating-sim. Hudson, Laura. 2017. “Gay Dating Simulator ‘Dream Daddy’ Might Just Be the Gaming Miracle of the Year.” Wired. August 3, 2017. https://www.wired.com/ story/dream-daddy-game-review/. Jackson, Gita. 2017. “Doki Doki Literature Club’s Darkest Moment.” Kotaku. December 11, 2017. https://kotaku.com/doki-doki-literature-clubs-darkestmoment-1821196559. Johnson, Astrid. 2018. “The Last of Us 2 Ellie Is First Openly LGBT Triple-A Protagonist.” GameRevolution. June 12, 2018. http://www.gamerevolution.com/ news/396855-the-last-of-us-2-ellie-first-openly-lgbt-triple-a-protagonist. Kane, Vivian. 2017. “Dream Daddy Creators Know You’re Bummed You Can’t End Up with All the Dads, but They Have a Really Good Reason for That.” The Mary Sue (blog). August 1, 2017. https://www.themarysue.com/dream-daddy-ethics/. Khandaker-Kokoris, Mitu. 2015. “NPCs Need Love Too: Simulating Love and Romance, from a Game Design Perspective.” In Game Love: Essays on Play and Affection, edited by Jessica Enevold and Esther MacCallum-Stewart, 82–96. McFarland. Lu, Brian. 2014. “Hikikomori: The Need to Belong and the Activation of Narrative Collective-Assimilation through Visual Novels.” Journal of Interpersonal Relations, Intergroup Relations and Identity 7 (Winter): 50–61. 172

Breaking Boundaries in Visual Novels Lynch, Katherine, Ruth Sternglantz, and Len Barot. 2012. “Queering the Romantic Heroine: Where Her Power Lies.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 3 (1). http://jprstudies.org/. McDonald, Heidi. 2015. “Romance in Games: What It Is, How It Is, and How Developers Can Improve It.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 2 (2): 32–63. @moonscript. 2018. “A Platform That Allows ‘Everything,’ … ” Tweet. June 6, 2018. https://twitter.com/moonscript/status/1004448157776793600. Pangburn, D. J. 2016. “It’s You vs. Pickup Artists in a Dating Simulator Inspired by ‘The Game.’” VICE: Creators (blog). September 22, 2016. https://creators.vice. com/en_us/article/d74b5z/reject-pickup-artists-the-game-dating-simulator. Picard, Martin. 2013. “The Foundation of Geemu: A Brief History of Early Japanese Video Games.” Game Studies 13 (2). http://www.gamestudies.org/1302/articles/ picard. Ray, Sheri Graner. 2008. “Alternatives: Games for Girls and Women.” In Game Design Workshop, edited by Tracy Fullerton, 2nd ed, 418–419. Elsevier. https:// www.gamedesignworkshop.com/games-for-girls-and-women. Richards, Tina. 2015. “Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side: Enacting Femininity to Avoid Dying Alone.” Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association 2 (1). http://todigra.org/index.php/todigra/article/view/43. Rochefort, Simone de. 2017. “Ladykiller in a Bind Shows That We’re Not Ready to Handle Messy Queer Stories.” Polygon. January 24, 2017. https://www.polygon. com/2017/1/24/14365716/ladykiller-in-a-bind-problematic-consent-sex-scene. Rose, Victoria. 2017. “Doki Doki Literature Club Is an Uncontrollably Horrific Visual Novel.” Polygon. October 22, 2017. https://www.polygon. com/2017/10/22/16512204/doki-doki-literature-club-pc-explained. Ruberg, Bonnie. 2015. “No Fun: The Queer Potential of Video Games That Annoy, Anger, Disappoint, Sadden, and Hurt.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 2 (2): 108–124. Ruberg, Bonnie. 2017. “Creating an Archive of LGBTQ Video Game Content: An Interview with Adrienne Shaw.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 32 (2 (95)): 165–173. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-3925176. Ruberg, Bonnie, and Adrienne Shaw. 2017. Queer Game Studies. University of Minnesota Press. Sarkar, Samit. 2014. “One Day in, Steam Tags Are Often More Abusive than Useful (Update).” Polygon. February 13, 2014. https://www.polygon. com/2014/2/13/5408518/steam-tags-valve-trolling-abuse-developerharassment. Sens, Jeffrey. 2015. “Queer Worldmaking Games: A Portland Indie Experiment.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 2 (2): 98–107. Shaw, Adrienne. 2014. Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture. University of Minnesota Press. Shaw, Adrienne. 2015. “Caper in the Castro.” LGBTQ Video Game Archive (blog). August 23, 2015. https://lgbtqgamearchive.com/2015/08/23/caper-in-thecastro/. Shaw, Adrienne, and Elizaveta Friesem. 2016. “Where Is the Queerness in Games? Types of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Content in Digital Games.” International Journal of Communication 10: 3877–3899. 173

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider Starkey, Dan. 2017a. “In One of the Last Steam Greenlight Games, You Can Date Men or a Goldfish.” Kotaku. June 9, 2017. https://kotaku.com/in-one-of-thelast-steam-greenlight-games-you-can-date-1795974819. Starkey, Dan. 2017b. “There’s a Gay Orc Dating Sim, and It’s Surprisingly Smart.” Kotaku. June 30, 2017. https://kotaku.com/theres-a-gay-orc-dating-sim-and-itssurprisingly-smart-1796522693. Sullivan, Lucas, and Maxwell McGee. 2016. “You Think You Know Dating Sims, but You Haven’t Seen These.” GamesRadar. February 12, 2016. https://www. gamesradar.com/14-dating-sims-break-all-romantic-barriers/. Szczepaniak, John. 2011. “Import Only: Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken.” Retro Gamer. 2011. Valve. 2018. “Steam Blog: Who Gets to Be on the Steam Store?” Steam Blog. June 6, 2018. https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/ detail/1666776116200553082. Vasvári, Louise. 2006. “Queer Theory and Discourses of Desire.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 8 (1). https://doi.org/10.7771/14814374.1290. Waern, Annika. 2015. “‘I’m in Love with Someone That Doesn’t Exist!’ Bleed in the Context of a Computer Game.” In Game Love: Essays on Play and Affection, 25–45. McFarland. Watson, Libby. 2017. “YouTube’s Restricted Mode Is Hiding Some LGBT Content [Update].” Gizmodo. March 17, 2017. https://gizmodo.com/youtubes-restrictedmode-is-hiding-some-lgbt-content-1793382337. Wood, Andrea. 2006. “‘Straight’ Women, Queer Texts: Boy-Love Manga and the Rise of a Global Counterpublic.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 34 (1/2): 394–414. Yang, Robert. 2015. “On My Games Being Twice Banned by Twitch.” Radiator Blog (blog). September 24, 2015. https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2015/09/onmy-games-being-twice-banned-by-twitch.html. Yockey, Cynthia. 1989. “Tracker McDyke Matches Wits with Dullagan Straightman.” The Washington Blade. November 3, 1989, sec. The Point.

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I think the future, the most interesting feature in the next-gen platforms will be meaningful content. Yeah, technology is great and it’s going to get better and better until you reach the stage where you won’t be able to tell the difference between reality and games… But what is interesting is what are you going to use this technology for? What do you have to say? And for me meaningful content is the most important thing. (David Cage, qtd. in Bradley 2012) We began this book looking to the past of adventure games, defining how they worked in their original form and the unique design space they occupied. For the bulk of this book we have been looking at their various presents, considering a number of different daughter genres that have each focused on bringing different elements of that design space forward into contemporary games. For the last two chapters, we will turn to the genre’s future: first its technological future in this chapter, and finally its cultural future in the next and final chapter. In a 2012 talk at the San Francisco Game Developers Conference, Quantic Dream founder David Cage (whose work we considered in Chapter  3) laid out his belief in both the increasingly immersive and realistic story worlds gaming will offer as well as the importance of using those worlds to tell strong stories. “Technology is the pen to write the book,” he said, “but it doesn’t write the book for you.” Only a few months later, a massively successful Kickstarter for a product called the Oculus Rift would reignite dreams of a long-chased paragon of immersive story worlds, virtual reality, just as the increasing pervasiveness of mobile devices with large screens and position sensors opened the door for augmented reality to become a commercial reality. But as Cage noted, the real challenge is figuring out how to tell meaningful stories with this new technology. In this chapter we will look to the future of interactive stories by considering how immersive technology challenges the assumptions of interactive narratives and how

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pioneering gamemakers are tackling bringing the traditions of adventure games forward into these new design spaces. As first experimental, then industrial, and now commercial platforms for virtual and augmented reality have come and gone, designers have reinvented and reapplied wisdom for changing capabilities, interfaces, and constraints. Gesture tracking, speech recognition, space mapping, object recognition, spatialized audio, eye tracking, and many other features each suggest their own game mechanics and dynamics, both in isolation and in myriad combinations. While game designers have always faced this evolution, the rise of gaming consoles with lifecycles of a half-decade or longer has provided some amount of stability in the past, with at least a few years for creators to learn what worked with a particular controller or graphics chipset. Today’s landscape for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) is still unstable, presenting additional challenges for both developing games in and talking meaningfully about this space. As with any emerging technology, there has also been a war of terms and standards to contend with. Some have proposed the term “mixed reality” to cover both VR and AR; others have championed XR, where the “X” can represent either a wildcard or invoke the term “cross reality.” Big player Magic Leap at one point named its experiences “cinematic reality” to distance itself from the failed hype and associations of previous terms. We prefer the term “reality media,” to emphasize that these technologies replace or change the user’s perceptions of the world and mediate that perception through a computational platform. It also helps us remember to position these technologies in the context of previous forms of media, rather than as the fundamental departure that overhyped marketing copy might suggest. What does reality media have to do with adventure games? For one, it’s the latest attempt to achieve their original dreams of transporting players into other worlds, particularly worlds that offer chances for more reflective and slow-paced interactions. Reality media moves even more aggressively than cinematic choice games toward the dream of Star Trek’s holodeck (discussed in Chapter 3), which has been remarkably influential on a generation of futurists, philosophers, and game designers. Scholar Marie-Laure Ryan calls the holodeck the ultimate “castle in the air,” a techie pipe dream that hand-waves away problems from simulating fully human intelligence to materializing tangible objects and dynamically adapting stories to player actions. While interaction design for real-world platforms is, sadly, more labored and prosaic, Ryan still finds the holodeck a worthwhile metaphor for designers to be inspired by: even if realization 176

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of many of its more advanced capabilities remains a technological pipe dream, “this does not take anything away from the validity of its individual features as goals to pursue” (Ryan 2009). Many designers working on reality media technology and content have been inspired by the holodeck and other related dreams in contemporary pop culture (the book and film Ready Player One; the anything-goes theme park of HBO’s Westworld). As we shall see in this chapter, these designers have systematically tackled many of both the technical and artistic challenges behind the holodeck’s immersive story environments, experimenting with how immersing players in a world changes their relation to story and character. If adventure games are defined by the marriage of story, puzzles, and exploration, designers in mixed reality platforms must consider how each of these dynamics is affected by interfaces that move beyond screens and controllers. These changes are sometimes so profound as to risk derailing an entire movement. VR’s well-documented problems with motion sickness, for instance, drastically limit the amount of movement designers can incorporate into games hoping to reach a wide audience (Mason 2017). Reinventing exploration without movement presents a serious challenge but conversely has pushed the action-focused game industry back toward the slower-paced and contemplative experiences of earlier decades again. These emerging platforms have caused designers to question many other long-established conventions. Platforms relying on physical gesture map avatar verbs much more literally to actions their players can actually perform: in rock-climbing VR game The Climb (2016), the real-world reach of the player affects the difficulty of the game. Traditional interfaces for conversation, like selecting options from menus, become awkward and risk breaking an otherwise-convincing illusion of immersion, leading many early designers to eschew interactive characters entirely or make them completely nonreactive. VR concept pieces like Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab (2017; Figure 7.1) and unreleased demo Westworld: A Delos Experience (2016), for instance, use video footage of actors turned into 3D objects via depthsensing cameras, with completely pre-rendered actions and movements: the VR equivalent of the full-motion video adventure game. But as we’ve seen throughout this book, the evolution of adventure games has been continually redefined through experimentation and exploration of new and old design spaces. Often successful innovations result from using a more mature media in new ways, enhanced by (rather than fully relying on) new technical capabilities. New platforms are built on and informed by what came before: an obvious point, but one too easy to overlook in the midst of 177

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Figure 7.1 Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab (2017) features video of actors converted into 3D objects, a VR analog to full-motion video adventure games.

an exciting revolution. Many of the radical moves made in reality media design are actually circling back toward long-abandoned terrain. We will treat reality media in this chapter as an emerging platform, taking after the work in platform studies championed by Bogost and Montfort (2009), and use the language of platform studies to interrogate its possibilities. This is despite the fact that it is still far more ephemeral a platform than, say, the Atari VCS: as of 2019, at best a loosely connected set of evolving technologies, paradigms, and standards. Much as early adventure game designers navigated a frustrating, contradictory, and constantly changing world of competing platforms, display and storage standards, and even input devices (from mice to keyboards to trackballs to joysticks), reality media designers today face a challenging landscape in carrying on the tradition of transporting players into immersive fictional worlds—a tradition that, for all its technical churn, we can clearly trace back to 1970s’ students staying up way too late exploring Adventure’s captivating underground mazes on a college mainframe. In the remainder of the chapter, we begin by looking at some of the core technologies of this emerging platform, including immersive modes of input and then consider virtual and augmented reality as separate spaces within the reality media platform. We will look at two games, Asobo 178

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Studio’s Fragments (2016), an adventure game designed specifically for the affordances of the Microsoft HoloLens, and Rick and Morty: Virtual Rickality (2017) by Owlchemy Labs, each of which takes unique advantages of its technical capabilities and limitations to suggest how interactive stories might work as reality media experiences. We will conclude with some considerations of how the steep technical and systemic barriers to entry for these emerging platforms threaten outsider creators, and also consider how the future and how the future of adventure games rests on their continuing efforts to push back at mainstream conversations and conventions, pointing toward a future where the spirit of adventure extends beyond the screen to become a powerful force for shaping our stories and ourselves. Immersive Input In the cinematic choice games we looked at in Chapter 3, we discussed the quicktime events that ask players to make specific physical movements with controllers that connect them in some way to their characters: frantically button-mashing to represent expenditure of effort or carefully moving an analog stick up and down to emulate a careful action like shaving. Reality media incorporates a number of technological advances that connect the player even more strongly to the game world. Scholar Torben Grodal has argued that virtual reality’s focus on immersion, for instance, makes it a natural evolution of games as “the supreme media for the full simulation of our basic first-person ‘story’ experience because they allow ‘the full experiential flow’ by linking perceptions, cognitions, and emotions with firstperson actions” (2013). Players really feel transported to a different place, and this has implications for all facets of design, but especially how they interact with that real-seeming world. Early VR interfaces were often either custom-built for particular experiences or repurposed game controllers. As additional sensor capabilities matured, however, designers saw the potential to incorporate more natural, mimetic interfaces that would allow players to literally enact the movements of their avatars. The Nintendo Wii Remote, for instance, appearing along with its console in 2006, supported both traditional button-based interaction and motion sensors that let the user control actions in the game world with physical gestures. Players could now mimic actions such as bowling, golfing, or tennis serves. This control paradigm was less successful when designers forced players to use it for actions better handled with traditional 179

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controllers, such as steering in a racing game like Mario Kart Wii (2008). But when used appropriately, the subjective perception of embodied action was a fundamental revelation over previous controller styles, credited in part for the console’s success across a broader demographic than traditional game consoles. Fantastical representations of virtual reality, including the holodeck, imagine an even more holistic union of body and avatar. Microsoft’s Kinect, first demoed in 2009 (and officially removed from manufacturing in 2017), invoked this fantasy in its marketing tagline “You Are the Controller” (Weinberger 2018). Rather than putting motion sensors in a controller, Kinect used advanced cameras, a depth-sensor, and an infrared projector to track in precise detail the position of the player’s body. This hardware opened up new kinds of actions not previously possible in game input, such as matching poses during a fitness or dance game, smashing virtual cities as a giant monster by stamping feet and flailing arms, or deflecting incoming bullets or volleyballs with your hands. Again, trying to force traditional kinds of interaction into this new paradigm was less successful: games that forced users to wave their arms to control navigation or select options, interactions better handled by joysticks or buttons, could produce frustration. While the Kinect’s hardware was a marvel and the device reached 35 million homes (Reisinger 2017), ironically its array of privacythreatening sensors became a factor in its downfall during a period where consumers started increasingly fighting back against invasive technology (Russell 2013). A more serious component of the Kinect’s decline was the difficulty of designing games that truly embraced its radical new interface paradigm, along with the corresponding risk of creating content that could only be experienced on a single platform with declining sales. Both of these technologies were attempts to reintroduce expressive input to mainstream game design. Like the long-abandoned text parsers of early adventure games, they gave players a larger possibility space to experiment within. The most successful of these games were often the ones that could genuinely respond to those inputs in a nonreductive way. Flower (2009), for instance, used the motion-sensing controllers of the PlayStation 3 to give the player a more satisfying and embodied connection to the swooping movements onscreen. But in the same way that many adventure games failed to adequately respond to the wide possibility space their UI offered, many games with motion controllers treated them as little more than overly elaborate digital selectors, a factor which might have also contributed to their lack of mainstream acceptance. 180

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The awkwardness of the Kinect’s body-as-controller metaphor parallels other early failures of reality media, such as the cultural backlash against Google Glass in the mid-2010s. Reality media implies a radical rethinking of our relationship to technology and content, perhaps more radical than any previous technical sea change since the dawn of home computing. Much of the potential of this new platform still lies nascent, and many of its thorniest problems are still only beginning to be solved. VR researcher Jeremy Bailenson, for instance, notes that full body motion tracking is still only a small step toward realizing the dreams of virtual presence taken for granted in sci-fi virtual worlds like Ready Player One’s OASIS: If virtual travel and telepresence is going to replace physical travel, it will have to devise a system that allows virtual people to be as nonverbally rich as their hosts. “The OASIS” will need to replicate in virtual bodies the complex choreography of body language, eye movement, facial expressions, hand gestures, and physical touch that occur—often unconsciously—in real life social interactions. In my opinion, the roadblock of tracking and rendering gestures is higher than any other problem related to computing power. (qtd. in Kolitz 2018) The direct measurement and use of a player’s gaze as part of the medium is another key way reality media diverges from previous forms. If important events can happen at any point surrounding the player, designers must devise a vocabulary of strategies (audio, visual, or tactile) for directing the player’s attention to areas that may be outside their peripheral vision or even all the way behind them. Game designer Noah Falstein has spoken about this shift as being as equally fundamental as the invention of editing in cinema (qtd. in Vanian 2016). In an immersive world, encouraging players to consider environments and objects from a multitude of perspectives is also crucial, and designing for an unexpected amount of player freedom presents a challenge: players might crouch down to look underneath something or move their head through a virtual wall. Designing to reward eager exploration is another familiar refrain to students of adventure game design. As of this writing, the next generation of reality media platforms plan to incorporate eye tracking (Bright 2019; Conditt 2019). This technology opens up not only the potential for improvements in graphical fidelity via a process called foveated rendering (rendering only the precise area the player is looking in high resolution) but also a whole new realm of possible input 181

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styles, from selecting options by glancing at them to characters that take eye contact into account in their interactions with you. This tech also, of course, raises a number of issues around privacy and intrusiveness: advertisers will doubtless be very keen to know exactly where players are looking, both from moment to moment and in aggregate. In no storytelling platform before has the player been able to learn so much about the fictional world— nor the world so adept at tracking incredible amounts of information about the player.

Virtual Reality The holodeck’s allure comes in part from its lack of borders and its lack of visible hardware. The simulated world is not limited to a screen nor accessed through a headset: it simply surrounds the visitor, turning a modest room into an infinite stage. Virtual reality, which has existed outside of science fiction for as long as adventure games themselves, replicates this sensation through a head-mounted display that completely fills the wearer’s vision with tiny screens, often expanded via lenses to fill more of their field of view. These optics replace a user’s view of the real world with a fictional one, updated in real time as the player moves their head. In many cases, the user’s position within a walkable play space, and the position of their hands or controllers, is also tracked. In its earliest incarnations, this technology was prohibitively expensive and limited in its reach. Virtual reality can be traced back to at least the 1960s, when DARPA1-funded researchers assembled the first integrated head-mounted display (Sutherland 1968). The device was so heavy that it had to be suspended ominously above the head of the strapped-in user below, leading to the prototype’s name: The Sword of Damocles. The decades that followed would result in a number of other experimental prototypes, but these were rarely reproducible and often bogged down under extreme technical challenges, including the expense of hardware and the difficulty of rendering believably immersive content. As miniature screens and computing power became more easily accessible, moves began toward a platform for virtual reality, though with

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (part of the United States military), has been involved in cutting-edge technology research since its creation in the late 1950s. 1

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many false starts. A would-be VR gaming boom in the 1990s stalled out without achieving much cultural penetration. Perhaps its most infamous victim was the 1995 Nintendo Virtual Boy, a tripod-mounted set of screens that showed red monochrome graphics in pseudo-3D. Describing the headset’s failure, Steven Boyer notes how the console’s lack of connection to the user’s body or head movements frustrated consumers’ perceptions of VR as a gateway to an embodied virtual self: Virtual reality technology’s effectiveness is predicated on the firstperson perspective to generate this new idea of the self along with an emphasis on the use of the body, either through tactile sensations or motion sensing technology, to navigate this virtual world. All of this technology builds an experience in which the user feels a transcendence of the body and the inhabitation of a new one, coming to comprehend the virtual world from a completely separate point of view. The Virtual Boy aspires to this revelatory experience but ultimately struggles to merge the two distinct media forms of home consoles and virtual reality devices. (Boyer 2009, 31) Despite its mass-market failure, researchers continued to explore VR’s potential through the 1990s with experiments often funded by groups with deep pockets. The Aladdin project at Disney Imagineering, for example, developed a VR experience based on the 1992 animated movie, testing it at the EPCOT center and collecting data from over 45,000 guests. An immersive narrative with an explorable environment, story, and characters, the experience was wildly popular among guests across all demographics. But the developers observed that “content matters,” suggesting that a narrative context, clear goal, and straightforward story were important for the technology to be effective (Pausch et al. 1996). This research suggested a number of other since-confirmed baseline assumptions about VR experience design, such as the importance for immersion of having characters that react to player interactions, even if that reaction is just to look toward the player as they approach. Over two decades later, Disney is still experimenting with VR at theme parks. Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire made its debut in Disney parks in 2017, putting guests in an on-rails mission moving through a contained space combining physical motion with VR effects and headsets. One initially skeptical reviewer described the experience breathlessly:

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Of course, pictures and words cannot come close to conveying how immersive the whole show is, you’ll have to try it for yourself. Or you can take my word for it that, thanks to the sensations and smells and  blasters and rumble packs, there was a sense of panic as I battled giant lava monsters and, in particular, something approaching genuine peril as a certain servant of the Dark Side appears towards the end. I confess I was sincerely relieved when that chapter was done. (White 2017) A feeling of immersion is one of VR’s most identifiable strengths, and while this seems an intangible, experiential quality, it has very real effects on game design and player affordances. Jesse Schell, a veteran of the Aladdin project who has worked with many iterations of VR since, notes how immersion changes the way players think of objects in the game world. “In a traditional adventure game, objects are often uni-taskers: screwdrivers are for unscrewing and nothing else. Knives are for cutting and nothing else. It is a sort of ‘key and lock’ mentality. But when the phenomenon of immersion takes over, and your body thinks the virtual world is real, a great deal more detail is expected” (2015). In Schell’s VR game I Expect You to Die (2016), players naturally tried to use a knife blade to unscrew a panel, since this seemed like such an obvious thing to try: as in adventure games, designers can significantly increase player pleasure by providing for a wide range of actions immersed players might think to try in the environment, supporting simulative play and multiple solutions to obstacles. Schell’s game appeared on the Oculus Rift a year before the platform officially launched in 2016, and four years after its Kickstarter inspired another VR boom. In those four years the Oculus went from a fan-made garage project to a Facebook company valued at over two billion dollars and saw the announcement of competitor VR headsets from major players like Sony and HTC. The launch of this first wave of 2010s-era VR hardware has not been as earth-shattering as investors had hoped, but has still found far more success than previous waves: more than two million PlayStation VR headsets shipped in its first half-year of release (Gilyadov 2017), which by connecting with existing hardware managed to reduce the total cost of adoption for many gamers. Another move to fight against the high cost of early adoption is the rise of cheap headsets that work with players’ mobile phones, such as the Google Cardboard: while these platforms do not

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feature the full range of body tracking and graphics capabilities of dedicated headsets, they still suffice to demonstrate the appeal of immersive spaces. Bringing storygames to VR, however, has proven a challenge. The Oculus Story Studio was founded in 2014 to bring top talent together to explore VR as a medium for storytelling. One of their early releases, the Emmy-winning short film Henry (2015), puts the player in the house of a balloon-loving hedgehog for a twelve-minute 3D film. While the experience is completely noninteractive except for the ability to look around, creative director Saschka Unseld brought his experience from Pixar to the challenge of evaluating how emotional stories work in immersive spaces, learning for instance that too much action had the potential to overwhelm the user and that moderation was crucial to avoiding this (Watercutter 2015). The studio began exploring more expressive uses of the medium in the short Dear Angelica (2017), which surrounds the player in a surrealist world of brush strokes, recreating vignettes of a narrator reminiscing about her dying mother. Animated from within virtual reality using a custom tool, the short moves beyond static framing to surround the player with its imagery and effectively engage proprioceptive sensations of size, space, and proximity. In one sequence the mother’s hospital bed appears as a tiny object floating in a vast empty space, providing a visceral sense of transition from her allencompassing, near-overwhelming imagination to the lonely truth of her small and fading reality. When Oculus closed the studio in 2017, its cofounder started a new company, Fable Studio, which looks to expand into mixed reality and investigate more persistent, interactive characters. Their first announced project, Wolves in the Walls, focuses heavily on interaction with a girl named Lucy, who “can hand you objects and be handed objects, collaborate to move through the story, remember what you’ve done and fallback to it, [and] be believably interrupted.” This represents a fundamental shift forward from earlier, more static VR experiences, as cofounder Edward Saatchi describes: “The work of storytellers, when you actually have these holographic characters, no longer becomes these 19 minute bite-sized chunks of movies, but becomes one character” (Fable Studio 2018). This move toward character is a sign of stability, as designers have begun to come to terms with the new capabilities of the platform and can begin exploring how they mesh with existing wisdom on storytelling and interactive drama. Much as story and character did not come to be centered in adventure games until they’d had a chance to mature, the same seems to be holding true for reality media.

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Virtual Rick-ality Game studio Owlchemy Labs first made waves with their game Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives (2016), one of the first VR games to throw out traditional notions of how games should work and embrace reality media aesthetics. With a lighthearted sense of humor and a focus on ridiculous sequences of object-manipulation challenges, the game was widely praised for its “cartoon logic” and embracing the joy of experimentation and trying weird things in a new virtual space: “As a store clerk, you might shoot fireworks at a customer’s face, embiggen a slushie, or be robbed and have to empty out the safe’s literal ‘cheddar.’ As an auto mechanic, perhaps you’ll lovingly place a banana in a tailpipe or chug gasoline. (Definitely do this.)” (Devore 2016). Their follow-up game, Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017), is based on the popular Adult Swim cartoon show and demonstrates a similar understanding of how games and narrative function in reality media. In the game, the player takes on the role of a mute clone frequently insulted by the game characters for being useless: as in Job Simulator, the awkwardness of still-imperfect interfaces into virtual worlds is embraced as part of the fiction. The player is given a series of tasks within the limited space of Rick and Morty’s garage, most of which involve manipulating objects (Figure 7.2). Rules for how some objects may be manipulated add a layer of puzzlesolving to the game: for example, some items are explosive and cannot be

Figure 7.2  Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017) productively adapts many adventure game ideas to a VR format. 186

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teleported, while others must be carried to their destination one at a time in a certain order. The player sometimes must use a device to combine two objects, and at other times employ a proxy character who directly imitates the player’s movements to take an action in another area. The puzzles build toward an elaborate plot in keeping with the genre-parodying shenanigans of the game’s parent show. Two sequences in particular demonstrate how Owlchemy adapts the conventions of adventure games into a native reality media experience. In the first, the game introduces a small squid-like creature whom the player must care for. Bouncing around and emitting happy noises, the creature directs the player through a sequence of tasks and requests, including feeding it, playing catch, and otherwise caring for it. As the player directly interacts with the creature through these tasks, they inevitably build up a sense of companionship reinforced by physical motions and a sense of presence. This connection is underscored when the creature leads you to a meta-VR game where emotional moments from a typical life span are enacted, including getting a job, having a baby, and the end of one’s life. The choice of these events is significant as their evocation reflects back on the birth, growth, and caretaking of the creature. The emotional bond proves to be a double-edged sword, however, when the sequence ends with Rick callously murdering the creature, an event which triggers progressively larger creatures to attack, which the player must in turn destroy. Another scene demonstrates how VR enables manipulation of space in a way that can be incredibly compelling. The player gains the ability to open portals to various locations, and when a portal is first opened to a satellite (which is presented as a routine maintenance task), the effects of a lowgravity environment and the view of Earth floating hugely in the distance point out the fantastic nature of experiencing these events in an immersive media. Another game mechanic involves changing the size of objects, and during the climax, the player radically increases their size to fight a creature threatening the entire planet: the perspective shift of scale is experienced in a very visceral manner. Though presented as gags, these experiences, like the uses of scale and space in Dear Angelica, speak to the power of reality media for connecting players more strongly to a physicalized narrative context and suggest their continuing use to create visceral emotional experiences as storygames for these platforms mature. Rick-ality focuses heavily on exploring affordances within a limited space and without time constraints. There’s one skill-based challenge (where a series of controls must be manipulated according to a random sequence of 187

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lights) but generally nothing like timed quicktime events or other sources of stress. Failure typically results in additional insults hurled at the clone player character, a technique which lets the player shift frustration at the interface to frustration with their talentless avatar. The puzzles are often simple but sometimes do require some thinking and moments of inspiration. The lack of meaningful failure, the room to observe and experiment, a strong ongoing narrative, and a focus on immersion and exploration of an interesting environment, all tie Rick-ality to adventure game traditions. While still uncommon, a number of other VR games have experimented with replicating classical adventure mechanics. The Gallery (2016) is an episodic fantasy adventure game that focuses on physics-based puzzles along with a story delivered through in-game media. Cyan, makers of Myst, ported their PC adventure game Obduction (2016) to VR and in 2019 announced development of a VR-native title, Firmament. These games, especially those that began life on traditional platforms, sometimes find mixed success at translating notions like exploration or an abstracted inventory into an embodied virtual space, but their aggressive experimentation brings to mind the awkward early days of adventure games. In The Gallery, for instance, the player has a backpack for inventory, which can be opened and looked inside via gesture; objects can be returned to the backpack by lifting them over your shoulder and letting go of them, an action that comes to feel natural as the game progresses and has since been emulated by other titles. Another interesting connection of narrative to mechanics can be seen in Pyschonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin (2017), a short puzzle experience in the world of popular platformer adventure game Psychonauts, which invokes many traditional adventure game mechanics while using puzzles redesigned for virtual reality. It uses the same node-based movement scheme as many other VR games, but rather than treating this as a limited form of movement, the game makes it an integral part of the story: This works really well within the fiction of Psychonauts, because over the course of the three-hour adventure Raz uses his Clairvoyance ability to mentally project himself inside the bodies of other characters/ animals in the world. This gave me a slew of unique perspectives from which to view and solve puzzles without leaving me disoriented or nauseous, even in the slightest. (Sliva 2017) Virtual Virtual Reality (2017), by small indie studio Tender Claws, is a “narrative-driven comedy-adventure game” released initially for Google 188

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Daydream and later on other VR platforms. Like Job Simulator and Rickality, the premise pokes fun at the awkwardness of virtual avatars, revolving around a future where AIs employ humans to do menial tasks, rather than the reverse. Rather than moving through physical spaces, players do most scene transitions by putting on or taking off layers of virtual head-mounted displays. Designer Samantha Gorman explains the concept: We wanted to do something with the play of layers of reality, drawing attention to the medium itself as a funny way of navigating it… It goes back to the cultural desire to go deeper and keep putting on devices, to keep putting on things that will augment our vision to get more ­immersed. (qtd. in D’Anastasio 2017) Virtual Virtual Reality’s metatextual commentary on the affordances of its medium explores the hype around immersion and agency, “both a love letter and a way to get more critical with the medium.” It challenges designers and players to interrogate their own desire to visit the holodeck, and asks what we’re willing to sacrifice (or put up with) to get there. Contextualizing Augmented Reality The other major branch of reality media to date is augmented reality, which has achieved more ubiquity through its availability on modern smartphones. AR is the alignment (or registration) of computer-generated graphics with the real world in real time, rather than completely replacing the real world as in VR. This can be accomplished either by rendering the graphics on top of a video feed of a camera or by rendering the images onto a see-through display in such a way that they appear to be positioned within the user’s real environment. The former approach achieved its first mass-market success with the mobile game Pokémon Go (2016), which became a cultural phenomenon and catapulted augmented reality into the popular vernacular: it had been downloaded more than 500 million times by the end of its first year of release. Marrying an existing pop culture brand with a model for gameplay that had existed at least as early as SpecTrek (2009), which positioned ghosts to be hunted down in the user’s real-world surroundings, the game lets players hunt down creatures in their nearby environment and shows them on a live camera feed. Despite its massive popularity, Pokémon Go’s gameplay was at first derided by many reviewers as repetitive and not 189

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especially interesting: “The primary mechanic, called ‘walking,’ is admittedly solid, but past that, none of the actual gameplay provides all that much fun” (Wildman 2016). But the huge success of the game was the strongest indicator yet that reality media could be compelling, enabled in no small part by the repurposing of sensors and devices already owned by the vast majority of the population. Augmented reality works by tracking details of the user’s environment closely enough that new imagery can be overlaid convincingly on top of it. For mobile AR circa Pokémon Go, this typically involves using the phone’s accelerometer and magnetometer. This approach has a number of obvious limitations: objects are not lit as they would be by real-world lighting sources, nor can they be occluded by real-world objects closer than their simulated distance. Newer generations of sensors and equipment are now appearing to support these capabilities and add other more subtle cues to make an object seem really present in an environment. Google’s Tango was a mid-2010s development platform that used wide-angle cameras and more advanced timing capabilities to perform “visual odometry,” discerning the location of a device in space based on tracking its view of the environment. Newer devices also employ partially transparent head-mounted displays to more seamless integrate virtual objects into a user’s real environment. The Microsoft HoloLens uses a miniaturized version of the depth-sensing camera originally appearing in the Kinect to locate its position within an environment. The Magic Leap also uses advanced sensors and “spatial computing” to accurately map the user’s environment and render objects convincingly within it. As of this writing, both platforms are still in a first-generation and developerfocused mode, expensive and with few released games; but similar to the move to provide cheap VR with Google Cardboard, several companies have released see-through head-mounted displays that incorporate mobile phones. Mattel’s Hero Vision, for example, is an Iron Man mask that combines with a mobile phone to enable a superhero AR experience (Lee 2018). Augmented reality libraries—software platforms—have been rapidly evolving over the last several years along with the hardware. Both Google and Apple have released their own AR libraries that track the environment using the latest handset hardware. The reliance on recent hardware has forced some developers to choose between a wider potential release and a more reliably high-quality experience, another hazard of working with cutting-edge platforms. While some consolidation is beginning to appear— with Unity as of 2018 supporting an abstraction layer handling some of the differences between the major libraries, for instance—the instability forces 190

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smaller developers to treat newer technologies with trepidation, a point we will return to in the conclusion of the chapter. Fragments Augmented reality experiences necessarily take place in the real world. The environment and the objects can be supplanted by anything the designers can dream up, but they include as a baseline the player’s cramped living space and the mess within it. This would seem to present a major challenge for encouraging exploration, let alone finding a proper stage to present a narrative. These challenges are addressed in a creative way by one of the first AR games developed for the HoloLens: Fragments by Asobo Studio (2016). While offering an impressive set of capabilities for mapping the player’s environment and overlying objects within it, the HoloLens also has some first-generation concerns, such as a limited field of view and limitations in object mapping, which the designers had to consider during the creation of their game. Their solution was to create a murder mystery where the player’s home becomes a holographic recreation of a crime scene, which they must move through to discover new clues. Using a recognizable core mechanic from other investigation games like Heavy Rain or The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (2014), the player interacts principally through observation of “memories” present at a crime scene location which is mapped onto the player’s real-world environment. The player has different tools to explore these clues and piece them together to solve each crime and connect it to a larger narrative. While the story suggests a sense of urgency, the game avoids any explicit quicktime events or timers, letting the player explore at their own pace. Gameplay involves using clues and observations to piece together timelines and facts, such as uncovering the location of a building based on discovering various markings and numbers scattered around the space that each narrow down possible addresses. In the first scene, for instance, the player might use an audio filter to hear muffled sounds of construction equipment through the door; they can then pinpoint locations with ongoing roadwork on a map of the city to narrow down possible locations for this crime scene. One of the most compelling elements of the experience is the way the game incorporates the player’s physical space to distribute clues and recontextualize a familiar area with an immersive narrative. The story begins with an image of a man holding a gun to a whimpering child’s head, an image especially shocking for appearing life-size in the player’s personal environment. Clues can be 191

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hidden in nooks or corners of the player’s familiar space, which they must move around and explore thoroughly to discover. In one scene, the villain appears in the room and looks around, commenting apparently on the player’s actual home: “This is a nice place. You must have a very nice life.” (A subtle commentary, perhaps, on those with the means to afford a HoloLens developer kit?) The overlaid crime scene effectively makes the familiar space of the player’s home new again, able to be explored afresh. Fragments’ gameplay is advanced entirely through this exploration, as the player collects different kinds of clues revealed through a set of overlay filters: audio amplification, heat sensors, and so on. Voice commands or an “air tap” (making an exaggerating clicking motion with a finger) can be used to select clues or change modes. By combining observations from various modes, the player can input clues into a search terminal that narrows down possible suspects or locations. Despite these virtual overlays, the game’s design takes care to keep the player grounded in their own physical space, placing maps and interfaces against actual walls and sometimes almost casually encouraging the player to incorporate real-world affordances into their play. “I suggest you equip yourself with a notepad and pen,” your holographic assistant encourages you, so that you can better take notes of the clues you find. He means a real notepad and a real pen: while the game does feature a digital clue-tracker, the player’s unimpeded vision would let them just as easily, and even more immersively, use a real-world equivalent. As in Virtual Rick-ality and nearly all reality media games, the player character is only lightly specified, a blank slate the player may project themselves into as in most first-person adventure games. Puzzle-solving in these immersive spaces becomes more immediate, but a strongly characterized protagonist more problematic. While the HoloLens can recognize player speech, for instance, Fragments uses this only as an alternate click mechanic for selecting options, not as a means of expressive input. Rather than using voice to communicate with any of the characters in the game, players will find themselves mechanically repeating the limited voice commands, in the monotone most likely to be recognized by the system: “Examine. Close. Examine. Crime Lab. Memory. Examine.” This is one of several examples of how still-developing tech can prioritize the mere possibility of certain kinds of performance over the actual expressive particulars: a reminder that Janet Murray’s vision of the holodeck’s potential as a stage where players can express themselves in a variety of ways, explore relationships with other characters, and be part of adaptive and ongoing narratives is still a long way off. 192

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This tension between reality media and traditional narrative focus may be deeply rooted in the technology itself. Marie-Laure Ryan suggests that imposing literary values on VR is difficult because of the latter’s emphasis on impressing and overwhelming the viewer: “the profound difference of spirit between VR and literature is one of ‘more is more’ versus ‘less is more’” (Ryan 2001). On the other hand, it may be that designers have simply not yet figured out how to effectively leverage the medium’s affordances to put the focus back on characters. The emphasis of VR on interacting with an environment places the player in a central role, which may have the effect of de-emphasizing plot: in this medium, “a character-centered approach seems preferable to an Aristotelian plot-centered one” (Aylett and Louchart 2003). First-person adventure games, of course, have long faced the challenge of telling strong stories without a visible protagonist, through techniques discussed in earlier chapters like the walking simulator’s focus on environmental and object-centric storytelling. Cinematic choice game Life Is Strange makes heavy use of protagonist Max’s voice-over narration as she considers each object the player examines and connects them to her memories and perspectives. While we will doubtless see these techniques repurposed for reality media, they can only go so far. Detroit: Become Human and The Secret of Monkey Island can force players to role-play their protagonists by having them refuse, for cultural or personal reasons, to take certain actions. This becomes less possible when player and avatar have a one-to-one correspondence: the game cannot stop a player from moving closer to a virtual object they’re curious in or reaching out their hand to touch it. Limiting character actions to player ones can also make it difficult to give players the option for more complex participation, whether that be creating and carrying out a plan, insulting a character, or blocking or dodging attacks. An ongoing challenge for reality media is to rediscover how to leverage the power of immersion to turn the focus back on stories about characters, building on the experience of feeling present in a space to reclaim the motivation of identity. New technologies also offer the potential for understanding and reacting to a player’s expressive input, leading to more dynamic and reactive stories the player can feel truly a part of.

Outsider Reality Makers Across this book, we have traced the role of outsiders in the lineage of adventure games. Reality media challenges many foundations designers 193

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long used to tell meaningful and engaging interactive narratives and is perhaps especially problematic for outsider creators. Even more so than in first-person screen-based games, virtual and augmented reality conflate the player with the player-character, so exploring characters different from oneself becomes a challenge. It’s hard to imagine the player of a VR game becoming a Guybrush Threepwood or even a Dream Daddy. More seriously, VR’s grounding in photorealistic immersion suggests the production of high-quality assets and requires the technical skills to make them render flawlessly to avoid simulation sickness, as well as significant financial assets for development machines and hardware: as of this writing, developer versions of hardware like the HoloLens or Magic Leap cost thousands of dollars. Increasingly inaccessible platforms for creators to sell and distribute their work are also a big problem: the days of shareware or putting up games for free on your website are rapidly giving way to closed storefronts, like the Oculus Store, and error messages about unidentified developers. Game designer Anna Anthropy notes: “If you try to run a program [on Mac OS X] from an unlicensed creator, a program called Gatekeeper intervenes, telling you the program is damaged and can’t be run. ‘You should move it to the Trash,’ it commands” (2014). Both the means of production and the means of distribution are increasingly being challenged for creators outside the assumed mainstream of commercial game studios. In our own work with nascent reality media, we’ve faced challenges and shared concerns about the future for outsider stories on these emerging platforms; we have had work rendered nonfunctional with forced upgrades or taken down because of lack of resources to meet the shifting requirements of platforms designed for large commercial entities. The thought of turning over these platforms entirely to well-funded mainstream interests is disheartening. Revisiting words on an early AR piece one of us created in 2011, we believe these concerns have only become more relevant since: we considered the disturbing possibility of subscribing to “channels” of reality, imagining AR apps that would only let you see what the entities behind each channel wanted you to see. With each passing month this seems less like science fiction. Big interests will continue exploiting the steep technological barrier to creating sophisticated AR, providing access to only the content (and eventually, realities) that serve their purposes… While digital technology offers the temptation to completely eradicate the past (or undesirable presents), we 194

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hope putting access to AR into the hands of a broader audience will help keep more stories, viewpoints, and realities visible. (Reed and Toews 2013) Outsider creators nevertheless are pushing forward to be included in these spaces. Pieces like Queerskins: A Love Story (2018) or Virtual Drag (2016) explore queer stories in reality media, though it’s noteworthy that both these pieces began as gallery installations rather than downloadable apps, perhaps in part due to distribution barriers. Robert Yang, whose transgressive games about gay male bodies we touched on in the previous chapter, has written of the urgency for independent creators to stake a claim in reality media: “Artists and queers and weirdos need to hit VR now, and hit hard, before VR culture ends up as conservative as the worst of gamer culture” (2016). And DIY guides helping marginalized creators make reality media content have begun to appear, like A. E. Osworth’s “How the Average Queer Can Start Making Virtual Reality Experiences.” Osworth echoes Yang’s call for urgency: VR is a new frontier in the same way the internet was. The difference now is that we have the capability to insert ourselves into the early design and development of this new world. We have to do it, as queers, people of color, women, all or some combination of the above. We have to because people can still get harassed off the internet. The internet was never made for us. That’s what happens when only a small subsection of end users are part of the development process. I argued that we have to make this next reality for us right from the get-go, or we’ll wind up with yet another space in which we are subjugated. (Osworth 2016) For reality media to effectively tell the stories of outsiders, it is equally urgent that technologies that respond to player expressivity advance as well. Characters in games have become vastly more photorealistic but are still far less “playable” than other game systems like physics engines or combat mechanics. Reality media suggests more naturalistic ways of interacting with characters than with a set of fixed options. New advances in artificial intelligence, speech recognition, generative text, and gestural input suggest radically more human interfaces to virtual stories and characters. A growing body of games centered on social simulation (Reed 2017, 178–257) suggest the possibilities of making character interactions a part of gameplay that can 195

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be experimented with, “played,” in a way rarely before possible. Together, these technologies point toward a future where digital characters can become a primary interface to vibrant and dynamic narrative worlds, and they offer new models for understanding and experimenting with identity and character. But these radical new designs, as we’ve demonstrated, might just as often be informed by the future as the past—not the least in the existential necessity that they remain accessible to outsider makers. We will conclude with a look at a modern adventure game that speaks as much to the deep traditions of adventure games as it does to how games about exploration, outsiders, and contemplation can survive in the 2020s and beyond.

Works Cited Anthropy, Anna. 2014. ZZT. Boss Fight Books. Aylett, R., and S. Louchart. 2003. “Towards a Narrative Theory of Virtual Reality.” Virtual Reality 7 (1): 2–9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-003-0114-9. Bogost, Ian, and Nick Montfort. 2009. “Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers.” Digital Arts and Culture, UC Urvine. Boyer, Steven. 2009. “A Virtual Failure: Evaluating the Success of Nintendo’s Virtual Boy.” The Velvet Light Trap Fall (64): 23–33. https://doi.org/10.1353/vlt.0.0039. Bradley, Lee. 2012. “Games Will Be Indistinguishable from Reality within Ten Years, Says David Cage.” Playstation Trophies (blog). March 20, 2012. http:// www.ps3trophies.org/news/news-6199-Games-Will-Be-IndistinguishableFrom-Reality-Within-Ten-Years–Says-David-Cage.html. Bright, Peter. 2019. “Microsoft Unveils HoloLens 2: Twice the Field of View, Eye Tracking | Ars Technica.” Ars Technica. February 24, 2019. https://arstechnica. com/gadgets/2019/02/microsoft-unveils-hololens-2-twice-the-field-of-vieweye-tracking/. Conditt, Jessica. 2019. “HTC Vive Pro Eye Hands-on: Everything Is Prettier with Gaze-Tracking.” January 18, 2019. https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/08/htcvive-pro-eye-hands-on-gaze-tracking-ces-2019/. D’Anastasio, Cecilia. 2017. “A VR Game That Laughs in the Face of VR.” Kotaku. March 9, 2017. https://kotaku.com/a-vr-game-that-laughs-in-the-face-ofvr-1793128757. Devore, Jordan. 2016. “Review: Job Simulator.” Destructoid (blog). October 18, 2016. https://www.destructoid.com/review-job-simulator-393852.phtml. Fable Studio. 2018. “Launch Video.” FABLE. 2018. https://fable-studio.com/launchvideo/. Gilyadov, Alex. 2017. “PS4 Hits 70 Million Sales, PSVR Hits 2 Million—IGN.” IGN. December 7, 2017. http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/12/07/ps4-hits-70million-sales-psvr-hits-2-million. 196

Rick and Morty on the Holodeck Grodal, Torben. 2013. “Stories for Eye, Ear, and Muscles: Video Games, Media, and Embodied Experiences.” In The Video Game Theory Reader, edited by Mark J. P. Wolfand Bernard Perron. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/978020370045713. Kolitz, Daniel. 2018. “Is the VR Universe in Ready Player One Possible?” Gizmodo. April 16, 2018. https://gizmodo.com/is-the-vr-universe-in-ready-player-onepossible-1825101429. Lee, Tyler. 2018. “Hasbro’s Iron Man Helmet Lets Kids Experience Augmented Reality.” Ubergizmo. February 12, 2018. http://www.ubergizmo.com/2018/02/ hasbro-iron-man-helmet-augmented-reality/. Mason, Betsy. 2017. “Virtual Reality Has a Motion Sickness Problem.” Science News. March 8, 2017. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/virtual-reality-has-motionsickness-problem. Osworth, A. E. 2016. “How the Average Queer Can Start Making Virtual Reality Experiences.” Autostraddle (blog). October 8, 2016. https://www. autostraddle.com/how-the-average-queer-can-start-making-virtual-realityexperiences-354122/. Pausch, Randy, Jon Snoddy, Robert Taylor, Scott Watson, and Eric Haseltine. 1996. “Disney’s Aladdin: First Steps toward Storytelling in Virtual Reality.” In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, 193–203. SIGGRAPH ’96. New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi. org/10.1145/237170.237257. Reed, Aaron A. 2017. “Changeful Tales: Design-Driven Approaches toward More Expressive Storygames.” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz. Reed, Aaron A., and Phoenix Toews. 2013. “Re-Visualizing Afghanistan in ‘What if Im the Bad Guy’: Using Palimpsest to Create an AR Documentary.” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 19 (1): 158–169. Reisinger, Don. 2017. “Microsoft Has Finally Killed the Kinect Xbox Sensor.” Fortune. October 25, 2017. http://fortune.com/2017/10/25/microsoft-kinectxbox-sensor/. Russell, Kyle. 2013. “People Are Worried Microsoft’s New Xbox Will Be Able to Spy on You.” Business Insider. May 28, 2013. https://www.businessinsider.com/xboxone-kinect-privacy-issues-2013-5. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2001. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Johns Hopkins University Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2009. “From Narrative Games to Playable Stories: Toward a Poetics of Interactive Narrative.” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 1: 43–59. Schell, Jesse. 2015. “Making Great VR: Six Lessons Learned from I Expect You to Die.” Gamasutra. June 26, 2015. https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ JesseSchell/20150626/247113/Making_Great_VR_Six_Lessons_Learned_ From_I_Expect_You_To_Die.php. Sliva, Marty. 2017. “Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin Review.” IGN (blog). March 8, 2017. http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/03/09/psychonauts-in-therhombus-of-ruin-review. 197

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider Sutherland, Ivan E. 1968. “A Head-Mounted Three Dimensional Display.” In Proceedings of the December 9-11, 1968, Fall Joint Computer Conference, Part I, 757–764. ACM. Vanian, Jonathan. 2016. “Virtual Reality Filmmaking Tricks Revealed.” Fortune (blog). November 5, 2016. http://fortune.com/2016/11/04/google-games-chiefvirtual-reality-development/. Watercutter, Angela. 2015. “Oculus Reinvents Cinema for a Virtual Reality World.” Wired. April 21, 2015. https://www.wired.com/2015/04/saschka-unseld/. Weinberger, Matt. 2018. “The Rise and Fall of Kinect: Why Microsoft Gave Up on Its Most Promising Product.” Business Insider. January 3, 2018. https://www. businessinsider.com/why-microsoft-xbox-kinect-didnt-take-off-2015-9. White, Jeremy. 2017. “I Was a Stormtrooper for 15 Minutes and It Was Awesome.” Wired UK. December 16, 2017. http://www.wired.co.uk/article/star-wars-vrlondon-secrets-of-empire-void-experience. Wildman, Sam. 2016. “Our First Impressions of Pokemon Go!” Nerdophiles (blog). July 16, 2016. http://www.nerdophiles.com/2016/07/16/our-first-impressionsof-pokemon-go/. Yang, Robert. 2016. “A Progressive Future for VR: Why VR Is Already Getting Worse, and How to Make It Better.” Radiator Blog (blog). December 5, 2016. https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2016/12/a-progressive-future-for-vr-whyvr-is.html.

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FUTURES OF ADVENTURE: KENTUCKY ROUTE ZERO AND MACHINES FOR GETTING LOST ON PURPOSE

[T]he works on display here also trace the extremes of our capabilities and the frontiers of our patience as both viewers and exhibitors. Are we capable of viewing these works as they were meant to be viewed? Do we even want to be? (Kentucky Route Zero: “Limits & Demonstrations”) Emily: You can’t leave a ghost behind until you die, right? Elmo: Well, that’s one way to do it. (Kentucky Route Zero: “Un Pueblo de Nada”) Kentucky Route Zero (KRZ) is a game that, like this book, is deeply concerned with both the past and the future of adventure games. Described on its website as “a magical realist adventure game… focused on characterization, atmosphere and storytelling rather than clever puzzles or challenges of skill,” the game tells a mysterious, wistful, and entrancing story about hard times, friendships and families, and living with the past. A close read of this critically acclaimed modern adventure game reveals connections to many of the threads we’ve developed across this book and serves as a good final stop to reconsider what we’ve learned and where we (and the designers of Kentucky Route Zero) think the genre might go in the future. The story of KRZ unfolds mostly across the course of a single long night, juggling dozens of characters, locations, and ideas: but two main through lines emerge. The first is the present-day struggle of an alcoholic driver named Conway, whom the player most often controls, to make one last delivery for a closing antique store, with the help of a ragtag band of fellow travelers he meets along the road who are all similarly struggling with past traumas and uncertain futures. Conway’s search for his delivery address leads

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him underground to the titular highway and the subterranean Echo River, which both meander through a dreamlike underworld Appalachia, whose residents face the same struggles as folks on the surface. The second story, seen mostly through distancing reminiscences, recreations, or retellings, centers around the artist Lula Chamberlain, part of a fictional band of computer pioneers who retreated to underground caverns in the 1970s to complete a revolutionary computer simulation system called Xanadu. The project failed, leaving its survivors in eternal limbo, always wondering how things might had been had they succeeded. As with everything in the game, these threads are closely twined together, sometimes in space- and timebending ways: the address of Conway’s delivery, for instance, is the apartment where Lula was living when the dream of Xanadu was born, suggesting the game’s journey is a quest, possibly fruitless, to return to a long-vanished place of inspiration. Given the strong parallels KRZ makes between Xanadu and Adventure (discussed further below), it’s not unreasonable to interpret the game’s project as a study in how, whether, and why one might try to recapture the seemingly long-dead spark of the adventure game. Like many of its adventure game ancestors, KRZ is a Frankenstein game that shows its seams, made up of strange pieces and hybrid technologies. Released episodically in five acts between 2013 and 2019, the game’s story also spills into interstitial releases put out in the gaps between episodes: shorts like “Limits & Demonstrations,” a playable museum exhibit of Lula Chamberlain’s work; secret phone numbers one can discover and dial in real life to navigate surreal phone trees like the “Here and There along the Echo” tourist hotline; the one-act play “The Entertainment,” which can be bought as a printed book, experienced in virtual reality as an on-stage but silent cast member or reenacted with friends via a series of detailed instructions; a half-hour episode of “The Evening Broadcast” on fictional public-access television station WEVP-TV, available in both video form with human actors as well as a Unity-powered interactive version; and even special oneoff performance pieces, like a live televised auction for a modified rotary telephone. Like Loom’s cassette tape fleshing out its magical world, like the automated hint lines adventure game studios used to run for players stuck on their puzzles, the experience of playing KRZ spills out of its notional boundaries as a single piece of software bound within a box, a screen, or a fixed duration of play. One extension on the “Echo” phone tree invites you to share a memory after the beep: in the game’s next episode, a character can check his answering machine messages to listen to a seemingly endless stream of these recordings. 200

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The game’s design echoes many other chapters of adventure game history. Its visuals elevate the stage-like perspective of classic third-person graphic adventures to an elegant choreographed artistry, treating backdrops like breakaway scenery that glides smoothly on and off stage, the camera tightly controlled to shift the framing of each scene’s beats as a single unbroken moment. The designers have spoken of being inspired by theatrical traditions around space, blocking, and set design (Kemenczy 2014) in contrast to techniques from cinema that most games emulate like the cut, the close-up, or the tracking shot. When the game does include video, it suggests more the fuzzy earnestness of mid-1990s FMV games than the action blockbuster cinema that mainstream game design works to emulate. KRZ also includes long sequences that play out entirely with text, sometimes fading the visuals away entirely, connecting it to traditions of the text adventure. The player controls these interactions through conversation trees, as in choice-based narratives: though the meaning of choice and agency in the game is complex, with your options drifting between different character’s perspectives and switching from moment to moment from controlling possible futures to possible pasts, interpretations, or flavors of inevitable outcome. As mentioned, the game makes no secret of its deeply rooted connection to Will Crowther and Don Woods’ original Adventure and the real Mammoth Cave that inspired it. From its setting in a cave under Kentucky, to its opening scene where you’re given a lamp as you head underground, to dozens of references to locations like the Hall of the Mountain King or people like Stephen Bishop1, to “mammoths” and “twisty little passages” and even characters named Donald and Will, the game is steeped in the lore of the first adventure game. Before they were Cardboard Computer, the game’s creators went by the moniker “The Guardians of the Tradition,” under which name they created an exhibition piece housed in an Infocom-styled box remixing text from Adventure with biographical stories about Will Crowther: ideas which they continued exploring as they began to develop Kentucky Route Zero (Grayson 2013). But like the game itself, many of these references leave themselves open to interpretation. Xanadu’s screens mingle Adventure’s text with Mystery House-like line graphics. Magnus Hildebrandt has catalogued dozens of possible inspirations for the characters in the game (2013), many far from 1 Stephen Bishop was the slave who originally mapped vast portions of the real Mammoth Cave in the early 1800s. Despite being largely responsible for the discoveries that led the cave to become a major tourist attraction, he was not freed until a year before his death.

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obvious. Is the game’s Donald, leader of the unfinished Xanadu project, a reference to Don Woods? To software architect Donald Knuth (whose fifty-year mission to define “the art of computer programming” remains unfinished) or AI pioneer Donald Michie, who created one of the first selflearning computer programs? Ignoring the name, the character might seem an even closer match for early computing visionary Ted Nelson, whose real-world 1970s Xanadu hypertext project envisioned a radically new, never-realized way of interacting with interconnected text: KRZ’s Donald says at one point: “Do you have any idea what it’s like to spend your life building something, and then sit powerlessly as your work declines into ruin?” Some connections are more obvious: the first character you meet in the game is a blind gas station owner named Joseph Wheattree, who vaguely alludes to having once written “poetry on the computer.” On his office desktop you can encounter a thinly veiled clone of 1960s chatbot ELIZA, created in our world by Joseph Weizenbaum—whose last name is German for “wheat tree.”2 But meaning in the game is generally more elusive; the struggle to find it is a recurring theme. In one scene, Conway’s crew visits a diner with a table covered in shellac, perfectly preserving a half-finished meal. The husband and wife owners each have a different story about why the table is preserved: what it means to each of them. The game’s choices more often concern how you feel about what’s happening than what the characters should do about it. “We’re not directors or writers, the game tells us at every step,” noted one reviewer. “We’re more like an audience being taken along for a ride” (Smith 2014). Another noted the way choice functions differently than in most narrative games: Ranging from despondent, bitter to hopeful, each choice holds a mirror to the player, asking them a basic question that games rarely if ever bother asking: “How do you feel?” By doing so, Kentucky Route Zero is able to achieve something important: It includes the player in its narrative process even though the 2 Hildebrandt catalogues many other fascinating possible references in the game’s character names. Lula Chamberlain shares a last name with William Chamberlain, who in 1984 published the book The Policeman’s Beard Is Half-Constructed, attributing authorship to his program RACTER and calling it the first book written by a computer. Conway’s earliest companion, Shannon Márquez, may reference the author of one of the most famous works of magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez). Conway himself shares a last name with the creator of Conway’s Game of Life, the first digital cellular automaton.

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narrative is linear. Every choice you make in the game affects your experience of it and how you contextualize the characters within it more than the actual plot itself. (Patel 2014) Like many of the games that inspired it and that we’ve discussed throughout this work, KRZ moves at a slow and contemplative pace. Its designers mention taking inspiration from filmmakers like Tarkovsky and Kurosawa, who are “bold in their use of slowness and stillness” (Elliott 2013). Conway injures his leg early in the game and moves with a limp through its cavernous spaces, which often must be moved across, like the screens of classic adventure games, to reach the next destination. As in walking simulators, where designers use slow movement through environments to give players space to think and reflect, here again players are denied the “juicy” gratification of immediate results and concrete rewards. KRZ, like these games, strips away challenge to focus on character. It minimizes agency and control to better tell a story about people with little of their own. The characters we meet are all struggling to find ways to survive in the face of foreclosures, recessions, floods, and hard luck. Co-creator Jake Elliott says: “It’s not a game about people who are in power. It’s definitely a game about people who have been disempowered by circumstances” (qtd. in Grayson 2013). Conway, on his last delivery for a closing shop and helplessly slipping into debt, ends up traveling with a kid whose parents abandoned him at a bus station, a repairwoman who only fixes analog TVs and who is two hundred dollars away from eviction, and two musicians who aren’t sure where their next meal is coming from. “Although your motley crew has the look of adventurers,” wrote one reviewer, “when you listen to their stories… you realize there’s another word for what they are: homeless” (Hudson 2016). KRZ’s characters are unquestionably and fundamentally outsiders. Overlooked people and marginalized identities fill up the game’s extended cast, where you can meet folks who are queer, Hispanic, blind, disabled, orphaned, jobless, broke, or neuroatypical, each with their own stories to tell. As has often been the case, the genre’s slower-paced, more contemplative, less violent conventions provide a stage for telling different kinds of stories and centering other kinds of characters. As the genre has matured, loveable losers like Leisure Suit Larry and Guybrush Threepwood have given way to more human stories about misfit heroes, including Conway, Mave from Night of the Woods, Henry from Firewatch, Sam from Gone Home, and many others. At a floating gas station along KRZ’s Echo River, you can meet an elderly divorcee nervously rehearsing his first online personals ad: “Seeking 203

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a companion to map the river with me. I have two grown children but they live far away. No goofballs.” Few game genres have such people in them. KRZ’s outsider characters are haunted by ghosts, sometimes literal but often figurative, filled with powerful yearnings for something they once had that’s since slipped away. Deep underground, you can meet the last telephone operator at an almost-forgotten switchboard, training the machines that will finally replace her: “Think of me when you dial zero,” she says. At the failing community-access television station, the producer muses: “We’re hanging on long past our expiration date,” shortly before the game reveals she and her colleagues died before the game’s opening scene. Bats in the cave are sick, and nobody knows why. Conway stumbles across an archive of reel-toreel tapes in an old mine, forgotten recordings made by academics capturing the working songs of long-dead miners: since the wires in the mine power only one system at a time, the tapes can only be played in the dark. In one of the game’s most powerfully human moments, itinerant musicians Junebug and Johnny sing a song to a near-empty dive bar called “It’s Too Late to Love You Now.” While the game connects to many real-world tragedies, including economic recessions and increasing corporate monopolization, we also find a poignant connection here to the dream of adventure games, a fondly remembered spark by many which has long seemed extinguished, unable to be recaptured, “too late” to save. This interpretation is most easily seen in Donald and Lula’s Xanadu computer, running a game that begins with the exact text of Adventure but quickly grows into something near-magical. “There was so much more to it,” Donald wistfully rhapsodizes, huddled around a perpetually burning bonfire of old computers: “ornate labyrinths of memory, exhaustively-simulated parallel cave ecosystems. Real artificial intelligence built on sophistical neural network algorithms! The birds in the forest could flock in three dimensions. The bats could learn to sing!” He tells you the secret of Xanadu’s potential: the digital circuitry had fused together with cave mold, making it unpredictable, chaotic, perhaps even once alive… but no longer. “You’ve seen it for yourself, what’s left of it. The chalky bones of a beautiful dream. But you can see what it once was, can’t you? Can’t you?” Adventure games also made big promises and drew many to their beautiful dreams of nearly limitless potential. Many of their fans can rightly be accused of being almost as starry-eyed as Donald. But it’s also significant that KRZ’s Xanadu didn’t fail on principle: it was sabotaged. You learn the computer was continually tampered with by “the strangers,” who appear elsewhere in the game as skeletons of crackling 204

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electricity, representatives of soulless corporate giant Consolidated Power. Countless once-local and independent outfits in the game, we learn at various points, have been bought up and taken over, shut down, or crippled by Consolidated. One of these is Hard Times Whiskey, now used as a tool of addiction and control, and this turns out to be the source of the strangers’ interest in Xanadu. When whiskey ages, some of it evaporates—the “angel’s share”—and Consolidated’s owners decided Xanadu’s organic mold was feeding off that whiskey in the air—their whiskey—and intended to get it back. We might read Consolidated Power as the business forces that took over gaming from its outsider creators, turning their dreams of revolution and unpredictable chaos into a system of controlled, reproducible successes, inventing addictive mechanics to keep players hooked, smoothing away the “rough corners” of experiences like getting stuck on a puzzle, playing a game with expressive input, or moving slowly. But there are no easy villains in KRZ: at one point you find a “degausser” that momentarily makes the skeletons less faded, giving each one a few moments to tell you their life story. It turns out they’re all just regular folks who got in too deep with the company and were offered a job to pay off their debt. They don’t want to be what they are any more than the heroes do.3 The degausser, the 1970s-styled Xanadu computer, and dozens of other outdated devices in the game point to its obsession with the technology dominant when adventure games were born. Reel machines and tape recorders, videocassette archives, CRT screens, chattering printers: all of these straddle the uneasy transition from analog to digital, and—crucially— from tech that can be easily understood, hacked, repurposed, and subverted to closed devices and platforms that cannot. Our increasingly Consolidated real-world techmakers are often hostile to outsider creators, preventing unlicensed software from being installed on their devices or content from being distributed except on their platforms. They want their angel’s share. Apple no longer makes anything like the Hypercard platform that enabled outsiders to create Caper in the Castro and Myst. Music purchased from Google Play can no longer be even downloaded, let alone played at different speeds, copied, reversed, or remixed (at least not legally). In a surprisingly moving sequence in KRZ while playing as orphaned kid Ezra, you’re given an old tape recorder by a performance artist and asked to find interesting 3 There are also, of course, obvious and explicit parallels to modern predatory loan systems and wage slavery, and the way miners in Appalachia were once paid in company scrip, only able to buy from the company town and thus remaining essentially trapped there for life.

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sounds to record. Later, while a riverboat audience gathers to hear her play the theremin (another quintessential straddling of the analog/digital divide), she asks you to accompany her by choosing tapes to play, and how and whether to modify them by tweaking the volume, speed, or direction (Figure 8.1): an example of expressive input, letting Ezra, and the player, build a performance that they can feel a part of. There’s something in this old tech and our ability to own, modify, and control it, the game seems to say at every turn, that’s worth keeping around. This theme of reclamation and reinvention is another strong thread throughout KRZ, countering the gloom. Conway and Lula’s journeys both lead them to the Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces, tracking things displaced and places renamed, housed itself in a former cathedral. A phone exchange is built in an abandoned subway tunnel. While its characters are sometimes sad and often struggling, they are at time surprisingly hopeful, resilient, and fearless in their quests to thrive outside the mainstream, remaking themselves in answer to the normative systems that cast them out. Many of the characters you meet have forged new identities out of the broken pieces they’ve been given, making art from noise, homes from ruins, feasts from whatever’s dredged up from an underground river. Wandering musicians Junebug and Johnny, one dialogue path reveals, are mechanical people, built by a mining company for menial labor: they too found the old recordings of

Figure 8.1  Clara plays theremin with found audio supplied by Ezra (and the player) in a scene from Act 4 of Kentucky Route Zero.

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dead miners’ songs, and in them a spark of humanity that led them to escape their masters and rebuild themselves in a self-made image. Many of these stories are found in the nooks and crannies of the game, which often rewards replay or exploring off the beaten path with surprisingly substantial pieces of optional content (Figure 8.2). Driving the game’s backroads, one can find many beautiful vignettes, easily missed by those rushing through but profoundly important in aggregate to the game’s overall meaning. In one of these scenes, Conway finds an abandoned office building, the home of a rural electric cooperative swallowed up by Consolidated Power. The place seems spooky and lifeless, and the player is given several chances to back away from exploring it, to turn around instead of walking on down an ominous dark hallway with a strange red glow at its end, mirroring the warnings some games give you that a pathway will lead to a tragic ending. But if you persist, what you find is not death but a curious, outlandish, queer new beginning: The handle is loose, and the door swings open easily. The hallway fills with warmth, light, and the smells of smoke and coffee. About a dozen men and women sit around a campfire in the middle of a large room. Cubicle walls have been cut into pieces: some leaning up against the walls, and some arranged into stacks of firewood.

Figure 8.2  Many optional stories and text-only vignettes can be found on the backroads of Kentucky Route Zero.

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One of the women waves to Conway, and offers him an empty chair. It’s missing wheels, but it’s comfortable and easily adjustable to his height. Someone takes a pot hung above the fire and pours coffee into a Styrofoam cup. Conway accepts it, and they all return to watching the fire. Queer makers, in the broad sense outlined throughout the book, have been an integral part of keeping adventure games alive, building communities from abandoned wreckage, and reclaiming old pieces to make something new: whether reclaiming first-person shooters through modding to create vastly different experiences like walking simulators, turning the normative machinery of dating sims against itself in games like Doki Doki Literature Club, or centering characters rarely in the mainstream like the teenage girls of Life Is Strange or gay dads of Dream Daddy. Mainstream gaming has paid attention: representation of marginalized identities in AAA games has massively improved in the past decade, and much credit for that can be laid at the feet of indies who’ve used whatever tools they could find to make something new. Of equal importance is queerness as a form of experimentation, rejecting norms, and inventing new futures. KRZ is writhing with experimentation, filled with ideas about different ways stories might be fluid: moving a tape head between strips of magnetic tape hanging in a gallery,4 procedurally generating menu items at a late-night diner, controlling multiple conversations simultaneously, narrators reminiscing from the future or framing your choices as hypotheticals, games within games (from a menudriven interface to an arcade claw machine, to navigation minigames, to playable recreations of early text games) and even games within games within games, as in the several instances where characters in an internal vignette find themselves, in turn, playing another interactive story (Figure 8.3). Like classic adventure games with open areas to explore but a largely linear plot, KRZ rewards exploration with its dozens of hidden moments and optional scenes, often nestled in far corners of maps that can be larger than they first appear. While cinematic choice games worked to extend the illusion of starring in an interactive narrative by creating consequential choice trees, KRZ hews closer to the experimental work seen 4 In a fictional Lula Chamberlain piece in “Limits and Demonstrations,” an homage to both pioneering video artist Nam June Paik, credited with inventing the “superhighway” analogy for the internet, and Choose Your Own Adventure’s Edward Packard.

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Figure 8.3  In Kentucky Route Zero Act 3, while immersed in a simulation on the Xanadu mainframe, you encounter another simulated Xanadu mainframe, itself running a program.

in pure-text games: exploring the meaning of offering choices in the first place, centering interiority over agency and interpretation of the story over how much it branches. Another way the game challenges conventional design wisdom is in its approach to puzzles. It’s not quite true to say the game has none—at certain moments the player still needs a moment of inspiration to determine the action needed to advance the plot, such as in the opening scene, where the way to find a lost glow-in-the-dark die is by turning off your lamp. But these moments are gentle and rare. The designers have talked about wanting to design “mysteries, not puzzles,” a distinction borrowed from political analyst Gregory Treverton, writing in the era of George W. Bush: Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information… The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much. (paraphrased in Gladwell 2007) 209

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Another way of saying this is that a puzzle is something you can “solve” if you find all the right information, while a mystery “cannot be answered, it can only be framed.” The designers of KRZ found this an appropriate framing for their story with its focus on the struggles of real people with no easy solutions: “Puzzles are clearly more satisfying, but the world increasingly offers us mysteries” (Elliott 2013). This approach is thematically appropriate for KRZ but also suggests a new way forward for puzzle design in adventure games: focusing choice on internal rather than external consequences. Perhaps revelatory moments, those pleasurable bursts of inspiration so central to the joy of adventure games, can be produced just as effectively via other means. Like Her Story, in which one player’s moments of revelation about the plot might be very different from another’s, or AR games like Fragments, in which the unique details of your environment can’t help but color your relationship to an otherwise fixed story, creators of twenty-first-century adventure games might be well-advised to consider challenging the player not necessarily with how to move forward but what it means that they moved forward in the way they did. There’s an important distinction, however, between a move to replace puzzles with mystery and a move that rejects them entirely. Another thematic touchstone of early adventure games that recurs in KRZ is the maze. “A maze is a machine for getting lost on purpose,” the creators say in one talk about the game, a place where “we can just focus on the feeling of lostness, the reason we’re there in the first place” (Elliott and Kemenczy 2019). The feelings of disorientation, frustration, and uncertainty of finding oneself in a maze, like the frustrations of being stuck on a puzzle, have often been designed out of modern games, rejected for not being “fun,” “juicy,” or addictively rewarding. But it’s important to have spaces to get lost in and games that ask us to work to engage with them. Here we identify another cultural future for adventure games: continuing to be weird, challenging, disorientating spaces, sites where players can explore material and mechanics outside their comfort zones. In their talk, KRZ’s creators offer instructions for how to get lost in a cave that might also be useful for designers: “First, establish a basecamp… And now, here’s the hard part: start walking away from the basecamp. That’s what it’s for. It’s the thing that you walk away from.” At the end of three decades of commercial stagnation, adventure games occupy a strange place in gaming’s cultural landscape: at once both a distant memory of a long-forgotten form and a vibrant, influential source of threads still active in modern design. Sam Barlow, designer of Her Story, 210

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has observed that the continuing narrative of these games’ demise hides a deeper truth about their role in gaming culture: I think part of it comes from a certain self-consciousness and a certain desire for the medium to hurry up and grow up. Adventure games often feel like an awkward middle ground between the proper narrative games we aspire to and our cruder earlier attempts. (qtd. in Kelly 2017) Adventure games are indeed, and always have been, awkward. And maybe that’s the point. They provide a stage to try out being heroes more awkward than those in the mainstream, but maybe, also, more true. They get us lost and ask us to find our own way out again, coming to a new understanding of the world, the way we think about it, or ourselves. Rather than a focus on mastery of skill and separating winners from losers, they center the uncertain but tantalizing sensation of encountering the unfamiliar. We have made a case throughout this book that adventure games are a genre powered by outsiders, telling stories that more mainstream genres rarely touch. From a divorced caver making a game to reconnect with his daughters, to the hobbyist interactive fiction authors who mined the veins of potential left behind by Infocom’s first literary adventure games, to the indies repurposing first-person shooter engines as tools to wander and contemplate, to the writers queering the ingrained assumptions of dating sims to challenge preconceptions about relationships and romance: adventure games, their makers, and their descendants have always been outliers, “outlandish,” queer, and contested. If it is perhaps in this tendency to go against the grain we can find the most compelling reasons for their decline, it is also the quality that offers the best explanation for their extended second life and the most promise for their continuing influence on the future. Only by walking away from the basecamp can we hope to reach someplace truly new. We began this book with an image from Loom, of Weaver Bobbin Threadbare adrift at sea, stuck on a puzzle. Near Kentucky Route Zero’s conclusion, another Weaver (this one the enigmatic character Weaver Márquez) offers not a puzzle but a mystery, in the close-captioning of a distorted pirate television signal: Go underground, as deep as you can go. The air is cool and the earth is damp, and when you close your eyes you are surrounded by the dead. 211

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider

Remember where that is? You’ll find your way from there. I think this place is what you’re looking for. Kentucky Route Zero begins with a sunset, and most of the game takes place across one long, underground night. Adventure games, too, have lived through a sunset and appeared to slip underground for a long time. But they’re still a place worth looking for, and it’s our fond hope that new generations of quirky and visionary designers will keep exploring their storied legacy—dragging the mainstream, as always, behind them.

Works Cited Elliott, J. 2013. Designing for Mystery in Kentucky Route Zero. Presented at the Game Developers Conference, San Francisco. Elliott, J., and Kemenczy, T. 2019. Game Talk #1: How to Get Lost in a Cave, February 2019. Presented at the University of Milan, University of Milan. Gladwell, M. 2007. “Enron, Intelligence, and the Perils of Too Much Information.” The New Yorker 82 (44): 44. Grayson, N. 2013. “Interview: Kentucky Route Zero’s Mountain of Meanings.” January 22, 2013. Retrieved May 12, 2019, from Rock, Paper, Shotgun website: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/01/22/interview-kentucky-routezeros-mountain-of-meanings/. Hildebrandt, M. 2013. “Kentucky Fried Zero—English Edition.” April 21, 2013. Retrieved May 12, 2019, from Superlevel website: https://superlevel.de/spiele/ kentucky-fried-zero-english-edition/. Hudson, L. 2016. “A Melancholy Journey through the Lost American Dream.” Slate. August 16, 2016. Retrieved from https://slate.com/technology/2016/08/ kentucky-route-zero-reviewed-a-perfect-depiction-of-quiet-economicdesperation.html. Kelly, A. 2017. “The Future of Adventure Games.” November 23, 2017. Retrieved July 29, 2018, from PC Gamer website: https://www.pcgamer.com/the-future-ofadventure-games/. Kemenczy, T. 2014. The Scenography of Kentucky Route Zero. Talk presented at the Game Developers Conference, San Francisco. Patel, A. 2014. “Kentucky Route Zero’s Musical Centerpiece and the Power of Choice.” July 14, 2014. Retrieved May 13, 2019, from Paste Magazine website: https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2014/07/kentucky-route-zerosmusical-centerpiece.html. Smith, A. 2014. “Wot I Think: Kentucky Route Zero—Act III.” May 7, 2014. Retrieved May 13, 2019, from Rock, Paper, Shotgun website: https://www. rockpapershotgun.com/2014/05/07/wot-i-think-kentucky-route-zero-act-iii/.

212

LUDOGRAPHY

Full details about games mentioned in the text can be found below, including the game’s original title, credited designers or director, studio and publisher, launch platforms, and release year. 2064: Read Only Memories. See Read Only Memories. 80 Days. Joseph Humfrey, Jon Ingold, and Meg Jayanth. Inkle. iOS. 2014. Active Shooter. Anton Makarevskiy. Revived Games/Acid Publishing Group. Windows. 2018. Adventure. Will Crowther and Don Woods. DEC PDP-10. 1977. Alone in the Dark. Frédérick Raynal. Infogrames/I*Motion. MS-DOS. 1992. A Mind Forever Voyaging. Steve Meretzky. Infocom. ZIL. 1985. Anchorhead. Michael Gentry. Inform/z-code. 1998. A Slow Year. Ian Bogost. Atari 2600. 2010. The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit. Kevin Poupard. Dontnod Entertainment/Square Enix. Windows/PlayStation 4/Xbox One. 2018. Batman: The Telltale Series. Chris Hockabout, Michael Kirkbride, Emily Garrison, and Mark Darin. Telltale Games. Various platforms. 2016. The Beginner’s Guide. Davey Wreden, Matthew Breit, and Richard Flanagan. Everything Unlimited. Windows/OS X/Linux. 2015. Benthic Love. Mike Joffe. Windows/Mac OS X/Linux (Ren’Py). 2013. Beyond Good & Evil. Michel Ancel and Sébastien Morin. Ubisoft Pictures/Ubisoft. PlayStation 2/Xbox/Windows/GameCube. 2003. Beyond: Two Souls. David Cage. Quantic Dream/Sony Computer Entertainment. PlayStation 3. 2013. BioShock. Paul Hellquist and Bill Gardner. 2K Boston/2K Games. Windows/Xbox 360. 2007. BioShock Infinite. Ken Levine. Irrational Games/2K Games. Windows/PlayStation 3/Xbox 360/OS X. 2013. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. David Slade. Netflix. Interactive streaming video. 2018. Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab. Alcon Interactive Group. Oculus Rift. 2017. Braid. Jonathan Blow. Microsoft Game Studios. Xbox 360. 2008. Broken Age. Tim Schafer. Double Fine Productions. Windows/Mac OS X/Linux/ iOS/Android. 2015. Butterfly Soup. Brianna Lei. Windows/Linux/Mac OS X (Ren’Py). 2017. Caper in the Castro. C. M. Ralph. Macintosh. 1989. (See also Murder on Main Street.) Césure. Orihaus. Windows/Mac OS X. 2013. Circuit’s Edge. Michael Legg and Michael E. Moore. Westwood Associates/Infocom. MS-DOS. 1990.

Ludography The Climb. Rok Erjavec. Crytek. Oculus Rift. 2016. The Colonel’s Bequest. Jacqueline Austin. Sierra On-Line. MS-DOS/Amiga/Atari ST. 1989. Colossal Cave Adventure. See Adventure. Coming Out on Top. Obscura. Obscurasoft. Windows/Linux/Mac OS X (Ren’Py). 2015. Coming Out Simulator 2014. Nicky Case. Web. 2014. The Count. Scott Adams. Adventure International. Apple II/Atari 400/Commodore 64/Macintosh. 1979. Crusader Kings II. Henrik Fåhraeus and Christopher King. Paradox Development Studio/Paradox Interactive. Windows. 2012. Daggerfall. See Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. Day of the Tentacle. Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman. LucasArts. Original: PC/ Macintosh CD-ROM, 1993; Remastered: PlayStation 4/PS Vita/Windows/OS X, 2016. DayZ. Dean Hall. Mod for ARMA 2. 2012. Dear Esther. Original: Dan Pinchbeck. Half-Life 2 mod. 2008. Remake: Dan Pinchbeck and Robert Briscoe. The Chinese Room. Windows/OS X. 2012. Landmark Edition: Windows/OS X/PlayStation 4/Xbox One. 2016. Depression Quest. Zoë Quinn. Twine/Web. 2013. Detroit: Become Human. David Cage and Simon Wasselin. Quantic Dream/Sony Interactive Entertainment. PlayStation 4. 2018. Doki Doki Literature Club. Team Salvato. Windows/macOS/Linux (Ren’Py). 2017. [domestic]. Mary Flanagan. Mod for Unreal Tournament 2003. 2003. Doom. John Romero, Sandy Petersen, American McGee, Shawn Green, and David Shanbell. id Software. MS-DOS. 1993. Dragon’s Lair. Rick Dyer. Advanced Microcomputer Systems/Cinematronics. Laserdisc arcade cabinet. 1983. Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator. Tyler J. Hutchison, Jory Griffis, Greg Batha et al. Game Grumps. Windows/macOS. 2017. Dungeons & Dragons. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. TSR. Printed rulebook (D&D Basic Set, 1st edition, 1977). Dwarf Fortress. See Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress. The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. Julian Lefay, Bruce Nesmith, and Ted Peterson. Bethesda Softworks. MS-DOS. 1996. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Bruce Nesmith, Kurt Kuhlmann, and Emil Pagliarulo. Bethesda Game Studios/Bethesda Softworks. Windows/PlayStation 3/Xbox 360. 2011. Elite. David Braben and Ian Bell. Acornsoft. BBC Micro/Acorn Electron. 1984. Eric the Unready. Bob Bates. Legend Entertainment. MS-DOS. 1993. Ether One. Nathaniel-Jorden Apostol, Pete Bottomley, James Henry Burton et al. White Paper Games. Windows. 2014. Every Day the Same Dream. Paolo Pedercini. Molleindustria. Flash. 2009. Explorer. Graham Relf. The RamJam Corporation/Electric Dreams Software. ZX Spectrum/Commodore 64/Amstrad CPC. 1986.

214

Ludography Façade. Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern. Procedural Arts. Windows/Mac OS X. 2005. Fahrenheit. David Cage. Quantic Dream/Atari. PlayStation 2/Xbox. 2005. Fallen London. Alexis Kennedy and Paul Arendt. Failbetter Games. HTML/ Javascript (server). 2009 (originally as Echo Bazaar). The Fidelio Incident. Ken Feldman, Brandon Popovich, and Christopher Davis. Act 3 Games. Windows. 2017. Firewatch. Chris Remo, Jake Rodkin, James Benson, and Nels Anderson. Campo Santo/Limited Run Games. Windows/OS X/PlayStation 4. 2016. Flower. Jenova Chen and Nicholas Clark. Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment. PlayStation 3. 2009. The Forest. Graham Relf. Phipps Associates. ZX Spectrum. 1983. Fragments. Asobo Studio/Microsoft. HoloLens. 2016. FrontierVille. Zynga East/Zynga. Facebook game. 2010. Full Throttle. Tim Schafer. LucasArts. MS-DOS/Windows/Mac OS. 1995. Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. Jane Jensen. Sierra Studios. Windows. 1999. The Gallery (formerly The Gallery: Six Elements). Episode 1: Call of the Starseed. Cloudhead Games. HTC Vive. 2016. Game of Thrones: A Telltale Game Series. Ryan Kaufman and Matt Allmer. Telltale Games. Various platforms. 2014. The Game: The Game. Angela Washko. Windows/macOS/Linux. 2018. Gone Home. Steve Gaynor. The Fullbright Company. Windows/OS X. 2013. Grand Theft Auto III. Craig Filshie, William Mills, Chris Rothwell, and James Worrall. DMA Design/Rockstar Games. PlayStation 2. 2001. The Graveyard. Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn. Tale of Tales/Valve Corporation. Windows/Mac OS. 2008. Grim Fandango. Tim Schafer. LucasArts. Windows. 1998. Guardians of the Galaxy. See Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series. Hadean Lands. Andrew Plotkin. Zarfhome Software. Inform 7/Glulx. 2014. Halo: Combat Evolved. Jason Jones. Bungie/Microsoft Game Studios. Xbox. 2001. Hatoful Boyfriend: A School of Hope and White Wings. Hato Moa. Windows/Mac OS X. Original: 2011 (Japanese), 2012 (English). HD remake: Devolver Digital, 2014 (Japanese), 2015 (English). Heavy Rain. David Cage. Quantic Dream/Sony Computer Entertainment. PlayStation 3. 2010. Hero’s Quest. See Quest for Glory. Her Story. Sam Barlow. Windows/OS X/iOS. 2015. The Hobbit. Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler. Beam Software/Melbourne House. ZX Spectrum. 1982. Howling Dogs. Porpentine Charity Heartscape. Twine/Web. 2012. Hunt the Wumpus. Gregory Yob. People’s Computer Company. BASIC. 1973. The Ice-Bound Concordance. Jacob Garbe and Aaron A. Reed. Down to the Wire. iPad/Windows. 2016.

215

Ludography I Expect You to Die. Connor Fallon. Schell Games. Oculus Rift/HTC Vive/ Playstation VR. 2016. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Hal Barwood and Noah Falstein. LucasArts. Amiga/MS-DOS/Macintosh. 1992. Indigo Prophecy. See Fahrenheit. Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives. Alex Schwartz, Devin Reimer, Carrie Witt et al. Owlchemy Labs. Oculus Rift/HTC Vive. 2016. Journey. Steve Baker. Softape. Apple II. 1979. Jurassic Park: The Game. Joe Pinney, Mark Darin, John Drake, and Jonathan Straw. Telltale Games. PlayStation 3/Mac OS X/Windows/Xbox 360. 2011. Kentucky Route Zero. Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy. Cardboard Computer. Windows/Linux/OS X. Act I (2013), Limits & Demonstrations (2013), Act II (2013), The Entertainment (2013; also for Oculus Rift), Act III (2014), Here and There Along the Echo (2014), Act IV (2016), Un Pueblo De Nada (2018), Act V (forthcoming). Kindred Spirits on the Roof. Liar-soft. Windows. 2012 (Japanese); 2016 (English). King’s Quest. Roberta Williams. Sierra On-Line/IBM. IBM PCjr/Amiga/Atari ST. 1984. King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella. Roberta Williams. Sierra On-Line. MS- DOS/ Amiga/Apple II. 1988. King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! Roberta Williams. Sierra OnLine. MS-DOS. 1990. King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity. Mark Seibert and Roberta Williams. Sierra Studios. Windows. 1998. Ladykiller in a Bind. Christine Love. Love Conquers All Games. Windows/macOS/ Linux. 2016. The Last of Us. Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann. Naughty Dog/Sony Computer Entertainment. PlayStation 3. 2013. The Last of Us: Left Behind. Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann. Naughty Dog/Sony Computer Entertainment. PlayStation 3. 2014. The Last of Us Part II. Neil Druckmann, Anthony Newman, and Kurt Margenau. Naughty Dog/Sony Interactive Entertainment. PlayStation 4. Forthcoming. Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. Al Lowe and Mark Crowe. Sierra On-Line. MS-DOS/Amiga/Apple II/Apple IIGS/Atari ST. 1987. Life Is Strange. Baptiste Moisan, Sebastien Judit, and Sebastien Gaillard. Dontnod Entertainment/Square Enix. Windows/PlayStation 3/PlayStation 4/Xbox 360/ Xbox One. 2015. Life Is Strange 2. Michel Koch and Raoul Barbet. Dontnod Entertainment/Square Enix. Windows/PlayStation 4/Xbox One. 2018–2019. Limbo. Jeppe Carlsen. Playdead/Microsoft Game Studios. Xbox Live Arcade. 2010. The Longest Journey. Didrik Tollefsen and Ragnar Tørnquist. Funcom Oslo. Windows. 2000. Loom. Brian Moriarty. Lucasfilm Games 1990. Lucasfilm Games (LucasArts). MSDOS. 1990. Lumiere. Orihaus. Windows/Mac OS X. 2013.

216

Ludography Lunar. Jim Storer. (Original: DEC PDP-8, 1969; BASIC version by David H. Ahl, 1973). Manhunter: New York. Barry Murry and Dave Murry. Evryware/Sierra On-Line. Amiga/Apple II/Apple IIgs/Atari ST/MS-DOS. 1988. Maniac Mansion. Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick. Lucasfilm Games (LucasArts). Commodore 64/Apple II. 1987. Mario Kart Wii. Yasuyuki Oyagi. Nintendo EAD/Nintendo. Nintendo Wii. 2008. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series. Molly Maloney, Mark Darin, and Brian Freyermuth. Telltale Games. Various platforms. 2017. Mass Effect. Preston Watamaniuk. BioWare/Microsoft Game Studios. Xbox 360. 2007. McKenzie & Co. Her Interactive/American Laser Games. Windows/Macintosh. 1995. Meat Log Mountain. Team Gachi Muchi Kun. Windows. 2010. Metroid. Satoru Okada. Nintendo. Famicom. 1986. Mind: Path to Thalamus. Carlos Coronado, Dani Navarro, and Luka Nieto. Carlos Coronado/Talking About Media. Windows/macOS/Linux/PlayStation 4. 2014. Minecraft: Story Mode (Season 1). Stephen McManus, Michael Kirkbride, Brian Freyermuth et al. Telltale Games. Various platforms. 2015–2016. Moonmist. Stu Galley and Jim Lawrence. Infocom. ZIL. 1986. Murder on Main Street. C.M. Ralph. Heizer Software. Macintosh. 1989. See also Caper in the Castro. My Horse Prince. Usaya. iOS/Android. 2016. Myst. Rand Miller and Robyn Miller. Cyan/Brøderbund. Macintosh CD-ROM. 1993. Mystery House. Roberta Williams. On-Line Systems (Sierra On-Line). Apple II. 1980. Night in the Woods. Alec Holowka, Scott Benson, and Bethany Hockenberry. Infinite Fall/Finji. Windows/macOS/Linux/PlayStation 4. 2017. The Nomad Soul. David Cage, Loic Normand, and Philip Campbell. Quantic Dream/Eidos Interactive. Windows. 1999. No Man’s Sky. Will Braham. Hello Games. Windows/PlayStation 4. 2016. Obduction. Rand Miller. Cyan Worlds. Windows. 2016. Omikron: The Nomad Soul. See Nomad Soul. Passage. Jason Rohrer. Windows. 2007. The Path. Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn. Tale of Tales. Windows. 2009. The Pawn. Rob Steggles, Peter Kemp, Hugh Steers, Ken Gordon, and Geoff Quilley. Magnetic Scrolls. Sinclair QL. 1985. Phantasmagoria. Roberta Williams. Sierra On-Line. Windows/MS-DOS. 1995. Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh. Lorelei Shannon. Sierra On-Line. MS-DOS/ Windows. 1996. Plundered Hearts. Amy Briggs. Infocom. ZIL. 1987. Pokémon Go. Tatsuo Nomura. Niantic. iOS/Android. 2016. Pong. Allan Alcorn. Atari. Arcade cabinet. 1972. Portal (as part of The Orange Box). Kim Swift. Valve Corporation. Windows/Xbox 360/PlayStation 3. 2007.

217

Ludography Price of Persia: The Sands of Time. Jordan Mechner. Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft. PlayStation 2/GameCube/Xbox/Windows. 2003. Prom Week. Josh McCoy, Mike Treanor, Ben Samuel, and Aaron Reed. Flash. 2012. Proteus. Ed Key and David Kanaga. Windows/OS X. 2013. Psychonauts. Tim Schafer. Double Fine Productions/Majesco Entertainment. Windows/Xbox/PlayStation 2. 2005. Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin. Chad Dawson and Raymond Crook. Double Fine Productions. PlayStation VR. 2017. Quake. John Romero, American McGee, Sandy Petersen, and Tim Willits. id Software/GT Interactive. MS-DOS. 1996. Queerskins: A Love Story. Illya Szilak and Cyril Tsiboulski. Oculus Rift. 2018. Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero (originally Hero’s Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero). Lori Ann Cole. Sierra On-Line. MS-DOS. 1989. Quing’s Quest VII: The Death of Videogames! Dietrich Squinkifer. Twine/Web. 2014. Read Only Memories. Ted DiNola, Philip Jones, and Sergio Kossio. MidBoss. Windows/OS X/Linux/Ouya. 2015. Redshirt. Mitu Khandaker. The Tiniest Shark. Windows/Mac OS X. 2013. Return to Zork. Doug Barnett. Activision/Infocom. MS-DOS. 1993. Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality. Brady Wright. Owlchemy Labs/Adult Swim Games. HTC Vive/Oculus Rift. 2017. Riven. Robyn Miller and Richard Vander Wende. Cyan/Red Orb Entertainment/ Brøderbund. PC/Mac DVD-ROM. 1997. Rogue. Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman. Unix. 1980. Sam & Max Hit the Road. Sean Clark, Collette Michaud, Steve Purcell, and Michael Stemmle. LucasArts. MS-DOS/Mac OS/Windows. 1993. Sam & Max: Season One. Brendan Q. Ferguson, David Grossman, Steve Purcell, et al. Telltale Games/GameTap. Windows. 2006–2007. Save the Date. Chris Cornell. Paper Dino Software. Ren’Py. 2013. The Secret of Monkey Island. Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman, and Tim Schafer. Lucasfilm Games (LucasArts). MS-DOS/Amiga/Atari ST. 1990. Shade. Andrew Plotkin. Inform/z-code. 2000. Shadow Man. Guy Miller and Simon Phipps. Acclaim Studios Teesside/Acclaim Entertainment. Nintendo 64/Windows/PlayStation/Dreamcast. 1999. The Shivah. David L. Gilbert. Wadjet Eye Games. Windows. 2006. Simon the Sorcerer. Simon Woodroffe. Adventure Soft. MS-DOS/Amiga. 1993. The Sims. Will Wright. Maxis/Electronic Arts. Windows. 2000. Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind. David Dunham. A Sharp. iPad/iPhone. 2018. Skyrim: See Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress. Tarn Adams and Zach Adams. Bay 12 Games. Windows/OS X/Linux. 2006–present. SOMA. Thomas Grip. Frictional Games. Windows/OS X/Linux/PlayStation 4. 2015. Space Quest. Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy. Sierra On-Line. MS-DOS/Macintosh/ Apple II/Apple IIGS/Amiga/Atari ST. 1986. Space Quest II: Vohaul’s Revenge. Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe. Sierra On-Line. MS-DOS/Macintosh/Apple II/Apple IIGS/Amiga/Atari ST. 1987. 218

Ludography SpecTrek. Games4All. Android. 2009. Spore (and Spore Creature Creator). Will Wright. Maxis/Electronic Arts. Windows/ Mac OS. 2008. Standoff. See Active Shooter. The Stanley Parable. Original: Davey Wreden. Half-Life 2 mod. 2011. Remake: Davey Wreden and William Pugh. Galactic Cafe. Windows. 2013. Sunless Skies. Chris Gardiner, James Chew, and Olivia Wood. Failbetter Games. Windows/macOS/Linux. 2019. Syberia. Dominic Mercure and Patrik Méthé. Microïds/The Adventure Company. Windows/PlayStation 2/Xbox. 2002. Tacoma. Nina Freeman. Fullbright. Windows/macOS/Linux/Xbox One. 2017. Tales of Monkey Island. Mark Darin, Mike Stemmle, Chuck Jordan et al. Telltale Games. Windows/Nintendo Wii. 2009. Tass Times in Tonetown. Brian Fargo. Brainwave Creations & Interplay/Activision. Amiga/Apple II/Apple IIgs/Atari ST/Commodore 64/Macintosh/PC. 1986. Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side. Konami. PlayStation 2. 2002. Tomb Raider. Toby Gard. Core Design/Eidos Interactive. Sega Saturn/PlayStation/ MS-DOS. 1996. Toonstruck. Richard Hare. Burst Studios/Virgin Interactive Entertainment. MSDOS. 1996. To the Moon. Kan Gao and Lannie Neely III. Freebird Games. Windows. 2011. Trinity. Brian Moriarty. Infocom. ZIL. 1986. Tusks: The Orc Dating Sim. Mitch Alexander. Windows/macOS/Linux. 2015. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. Richard Lemarchand. Naughty Dog/Sony Computer Entertainment. PlayStation 3. 2007. Under a Killing Moon. Aaron Conners and Chris Jones. Access Software. MS-DOS. 1994. Unmanned. Paolo Pedercini and Jim Munroe. No Media Kings. Flash. 2012. Unreal. James Schmalz and Cliff Bleszinski. Epic MegaGames and Digital Extremes/ GT Interactive. Windows. 1998. Urban Chaos. Mucky Foot Productions/Eidos Interactive. Windows. 1999. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Adrian Chmielarz and Krzysztof Justyński. The Astronauts. Windows. 2014. Virginia. Jonathan Burroughs and Terry Kenny. Variable State/505 Games. PlayStation 4/Xbox One/Windows/Mac OS X. 2016. Virtual Virtual Reality. Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro. Tender Claws. Google Daydream. 2017. The Walking Dead. Telltale Games. Various platforms. Season One. Sean Vanaman, Jake Rodkin, Mark Darin et al. 2012. Season Two. Mark Darin, Sean Ainsworth, Stephen McManus and Harrison G. Pink. 2013–2014. Michonne. Chris Hockabout, John Bernhelm, and Michael McCormick. 2016. Season 3: A New Frontier. Matt Boland, Jean-Francois Guastalla, Matt Allmer et al. 2016–2017. Walk It Out. Hudson Soft Company/Konami Digital Entertainment. Nintendo Wii. 2010. 219

Ludography We Are Chicago. Victor Garcia. Culture Shock Games. Windows. 2017. Westworld: A Delos Experience (not publicly released). Reaktor/HBO. HTC Vive. 2016. What Remains of Edith Finch. Chris Bell. Giant Sparrow/Annapurna Interactive. Windows/PlayStation 4/Xbox One. 2017. The Witness. Jonathan Blow. Thekla. PlayStation 4/Windows. 2016. The Wolf Among Us. Ryan Kaufman, Joe Pinney, and Aaron Casillas. Telltale Games. Windows/Xbox 360/OS X/PlayStation 3. 2013–2014. Wolves in the Walls. Pete Billington. Fable Studio. Oculus Rift. Forthcoming. Zork. Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, and Bruce Daniels. Infocom. TRS80/Apple II. 1980. Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz. Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, and Bruce Daniels. Infocom. TRS-80/Apple II. 1981. Zork: Grand Inquisitor. Margaret Stohl. Activision. Windows. 1997.

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INDEX

Note: Locators with letter ‘n’ refer to notes. AAA (triple-A) games 170, 208 Aarseth, Espen 8, 129 AbleGamers 15 accelerometers 73, 190 action-adventures 4, 14, 35, 40, 76 Active Shooter 127 Adams, Scott 39 Adult Swim shows 186 Adventure (Atari) 34 n.2 Adventure (Crowther and Woods) 5, 34–8, 115, 201, 204 Adventure (Microsoft) 40 n.5 Adventure Gamers (website) 23 adventure games. See also other specific/ related entries challenges 40 definitions 5–11, 38–42 design 42–3 experiments 42–3 failure and decline 9–10, 15, 22, 34, 55–7 mechanics 44–50 need for 4–5 origins and development 7–10, 34–55 “outsider” notion 10–11, 19 outsider/radical makers 19–22 outsider/unconventional characters 11–19 pillars (core elements) 6–7, 26, 42–4, 50, 87–112, 177 search for 22–5 Adventure International 38, 39 aesthetics 4, 6, 7, 10, 22, 26, 27, 33–4, 36, 42, 48, 55–6, 63–4, 72–4, 76, 79, 81, 103, 104, 121, 122–5, 137, 138, 139, 151, 161, 164, 170, 186 agency 20–2, 61–4, 66, 67, 70–1, 72, 75, 76, 80–1, 83, 88, 91, 101, 103, 108, 116, 122, 127, 129, 131, 158, 159, 164, 170, 189, 201, 203, 209 AIDS 148, 160

air tap 192 Aladdin project 183, 184 Alexander, Mitch 164 Alone in the Dark 66 altgames 20 Anchorhead 57 Anderson, Nels 102 animation 8, 40, 48, 61, 62, 73, 115 annotations 83 Anthropy, Anna 15, 18, 20, 194 antiestablishment fan games 15 Apple 150, 170, 190, 205 Apple IIGS 168, 169 arcade games 36, 40, 61, 65, 74, 128, 208 ARPANET 5, 35 arrow keys 40–1 art assets 67 art brut 19 artificial intelligence (AI) 189, 195, 202, 204 Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK 134 ASCII art engine 20 Asobo Studio 6, 178–9, 191 assets 55, 67, 75, 76, 135, 137, 194 Atari 34 n.2, 35, 120 Atari VCS 178 audio amplification 192 audio logs 92, 96, 135 augmented reality (AR) 27, 170, 175, 176, 178, 189–93, 194, 210 avant-garde 21–2, 138–9, 140 avatars 12–14, 16, 40–1, 65, 74, 104, 107, 109, 115, 126, 134, 141, 149, 177, 179, 180, 188, 189, 193 Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, The 79 Bachelard, Gaston 28 BAFTA awards 135 Bailenson, Jeremy 181

Index Barlow, Sam 104, 108, 210–11 Bates, Bob 46, 47, 48, 50 Batman 68 BBC 96 BBS 160–1 BDSM 163 Beck, Duane 46 Beginner’s Guide, The 17 Benjamin, Walter 116 Benthic Love 157 Berlyn, Mike 168 Berlyn, Muffy 168 Beyond: Two Souls 72 Beyond Good & Evil 14 bin Laden, Osama 209 BioShock 96 BioShock Infinite 18 Bishop, Stephen 201 n.1 Black Mirror: Bandersnatch 83 Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab 177, 178 blind interactive fiction 15 Blow, Jonathan 21, 87, 91 Bogost, Ian 120, 178 Bouetet, Mish 13 Bowie, David 72 box office 56 Braid 10, 87 Brice, Mattie 157 Briscoe, Robert 135, 136, 138 Broken Age 6 Bruner, Kevin 66, 67, 68, 82 Buckles, Mary Ann 39 Building Stories (Ware) 131 bulletin-board systems 150 Burke, James 96, 97 Bush, George W. 209 button-based interaction 179 Bycer, Josh 70, 71 Cage, David 72, 76, 175 camera 41, 56, 66, 67, 73, 81, 102, 159, 177, 180, 189, 190, 201 Caper in the Castro 147–9, 160, 168, 170, 205 Carbo-Mascarell, Rosa 122 Carrington, Nigel 135 cassette tapes 22, 38, 200 casual games 74, 78, 121, 124, 138, 153 CD-ROM 22, 48, 55, 65 Césure 125 Chamberlain, William 202 n.2

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Chang, Edmond 149, 154–5, 157, 160, 161 CharityWare 148 Chess, Shira 17, 79, 121 Chinese Room, The 135 choice-based games 50, 81, 201 Choose Your Own Adventure 23, 45, 71, 208 n.4 cinematic choice games 25, 61–84 definition 62 influenced by cinema/filmic conventions 62–3 origins 63–6 cinematic reality 176 cinematography 62 Circuit’s Edge 14 Climb, The 177 close-up 62, 151, 201 CoDie awards 7 Colonel’s Bequest 14 Colossal Cave Adventure 34 n.2 combat elements 22, 40, 56, 100, 124, 125, 140, 159, 195 comedy 10, 53–4, 148, 157, 188–9 Coming Out on Top 153, 163 Coming Out Simulator 2014 21 command-line parser 33, 56 commands 33, 34 n.2, 35, 37, 40, 46, 47, 56, 94, 106, 122, 141, 192 CompuServe 50 computer games 2, 13, 17, 35, 36 computer-generated graphics 65, 189 Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Nelson) 38 computer programming 33, 149, 202 computer role-playing game (CRPG) 39, 45 Connections (TV series) 96 Connors, Dan 66 consoles 36, 73, 151, 152, 176, 179, 180, 183 controllers 73, 74, 122, 154, 176, 177–82 coordinated movement 40 Count, The 35 countdown timer 80 critical commentary 5 Cross, Katherine 166–7 Crowther, Patricia 35, 36, 201 Crowther, Willie 34–5, 36 curated platform 24, 63–4 Curry, Jessica 135, 136, 138 cut scenes 3, 46, 62, 65–6, 73, 90 cyberdrama 6 Cybertext (Aarseth) 8

Index Daggerfall 119 DARPA 182 dating simulators 23, 26, 150, 151–4, 161–6, 208, 211 subversive 154–60 Day of the Tentacle 12–13, 19, 24, 53 DayZ 117 Dear Angelica (film) 185, 187 Dear Esther 6, 26, 33, 100, 103, 117–18, 123, 125, 127, 132, 134–9, 140, 141 death, trope of 18, 70, 74, 78, 79, 124, 127–9, 136, 137, 140, 157, 207 depression 158, 165 Depression Quest 8, 21, 165 depth-sensors 180, 190 design framework 5, 25, 55 design innovation 8, 26, 91, 111 Detroit: Become Human 72, 73, 74, 75–6, 78, 79, 193 dialogue trees 4–5, 27, 62, 67, 80 Digital Antiquarian blog, The (filfre.net) 8 digital distribution 23 digital games studies 8, 11, 14, 17 n.4, 72 disability, players with 15 disk images 24 Disney Imagineering 183 display 178, 182, 189, 190 distribution platforms 10, 23, 24, 150, 166, 167 DIY guides 195 Doki Doki Literature Club 157–8, 164, 208 [domestic] 123 Dontnod Entertainment 25, 62, 76–9 Doom 16, 124, 125 Dormann, Claire 13 Doroski, Drummond 127, 128 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 19 Dragon Age 148 Dragon’s Lair 61–2, 74, 81 drama management 110 Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator 161–3, 164, 194, 208 Dreampark (Niven and Barnes) 64 Dubuffet, Jean 19 Dungeons & Dragons 39 Dwarf Fortress 64, 88, 110–11 Eburne, Jonathan 11, 28 Edith Finch 115, 125, 127 editing 62, 181

editorial policy 23 80 Days 8, 111 Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The 88, 117–18, 119 electronic literature 6 Elite 119 Elliott, Jake 203 Emmy awards 185 emotional experiences 68, 76, 77, 139, 187 empathy 18, 68, 74 emulators 24–5 enactment 64, 72 Encyclopedia of Microcomputers 41 endings 63, 71, 73, 74, 82, 99, 129, 153–4, 158, 162–3, 207 engines 9, 20, 24, 26, 65, 66, 67, 94, 100, 105, 110, 123, 125, 135, 138, 157, 195, 211 EPCOT 183 Eric the Unready 13, 46–7 escape rooms 4 Ether One 125 Every day the same dream 121 experimental games 125–6, 134 experimentation 33, 42–3, 45, 52, 53, 54, 65, 90, 111, 129, 169, 177, 186, 188, 208 exploration 4, 5, 6, 11, 21, 23, 25, 26, 35, 36, 41, 42, 43–4, 48, 50, 52, 53–4, 63, 65, 67, 71, 78, 87–91, 94, 97, 98, 100–2, 104, 125, 128, 129–30, 140, 149, 177, 181, 188, 191, 196, 208 metaphors of 107–9 Explorer 119, 120, 141 expressive input 25, 44–50, 54, 55, 65, 81, 98, 180, 192, 193, 205, 206 eye tracking 176, 181–2 Fable 148 Fable Studio 185 Façade 64 Facebook 184 Fahrenheit 72, 80, 83 failure 7, 10, 41, 42, 54, 61, 76, 89, 90, 97, 106–9, 169, 181, 183, 188 Fallen London 8 Fallout 148 Falstein, Noah 181 Famicon 151 fantasy adventures 39, 188 Fate of Atlantis 127–8 Fernández-Vara, Clara 6, 43–4, 110

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Index festivals 24 Fidelio Incident, The 129 file-destroying mechanics 154, 158, 164 file explorers 45 Firewatch 4, 6, 17, 26, 33, 87, 90, 99–103, 108, 203 Firmament 188 first-generation adventure games 34–44, 190, 191 first-generation computers 35–6 first-person games 16, 45, 64, 117, 122, 192, 193 first-person perspective 9, 123, 127, 138 first-person shooters 4, 26, 117, 123–9, 135 Flanagan, Mary 123 flashbacks 73, 126 flash cuts 73 floppy disk 2, 22, 55 flowchart 75, 77 Flower 180 FMV (full-motion video) games 6, 14, 22, 48, 65, 81, 83, 104, 153, 177, 178, 201 Forest, The 119, 120 foveated rendering 181 Fragments 6, 27, 179, 191–3, 210 framing 19, 21, 62, 66, 81, 82, 91, 185, 201, 208, 210 Frankenstein games 22, 200 FrontierVille 155 Froschauer, Adrian 71 Frost, Robert 140–1 Fulbright Company 130 Full Throttle 66 Gabriel Knight 3 7, 9 Gallery, The 188 Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, The (Strauss) 158 Game: The Game, The 158–9 Game Developers Conference 43, 55, 175 Game of the Year awards 88, 104 Game of Thrones 68, 71, 74 gameplay 1, 4, 6, 17, 26, 35, 48, 64–5, 67, 89, 90, 103, 121, 135, 150, 152, 161, 189–92, 195–6 Gamergate 10, 21, 118, 119 n.2, 165 GameSpot 97 game studies 8–9, 36 Gatekeeper 194

224

Gayme 147 Gaynor, Steve 130–1 gesture tracking 176 Gilbert, Ron 3, 4, 9, 65 GOG 24 Golden Joystick awards 7 Gone Home 26, 100, 117, 118, 126–7, 129–34, 137, 138, 165, 203 Google Cardboard 184, 190 Google Daydream 188–9 Google Play 205 Google Tango 190 Gorman, Samantha 189 Grand Theft Auto 17, 56, 160 graphical games 6, 7–8, 40 Graveyard, The 121 Gray, Leighton 162 Grayson, Nathan 74 Grim Fandango 7, 15–16, 66 Grip, Thomas 130 Grodal, Torben 179 Guardians of the Galaxy 68 Hadean Lands 6 Half-Life 2 135 Halo 11 Hamlet on the Holodeck (Murray) 64 hand-coding 48 hardware 1, 15, 24, 180, 182, 184, 190, 194 Harper, Todd 161, 167 Harvat, Zachary 132 Harvey, Auriea 121 Hatoful Boyfriend 155–6 HBO 177 head-mounted displays 182, 189, 190 heat sensors 192 Heavy Rain 72, 76, 80, 191 Heineman, Rebecca 168, 169 Heizer Software 148 Henry (VR film) 185 Hero Vision 190 Her Story 6, 26, 87, 88, 104–9, 210–11 Hesse, Hermann 19 hidden object games 4, 78 n.3 high-fidelity 123, 135 high-resolution 46, 141 Hildebrandt, Magnus 201–2 Hinton, S.E. 13 Hobbit, The 42 n.6 Hollinger, Veronica 19–20

Index Hollywood 65, 73, 74 holodeck 64, 72, 74, 176–7, 180, 182, 189, 192 home computers 7, 36, 38, 56, 169, 181, 188 hot spots 78–9 Howling Dogs 21 HTC 184 Hunt the Wumpus 36 Hutchison, Andrew 125 hybrids 20, 22–5, 36, 40–1, 45–6, 72, 150, 169, 200 Hypercard 147, 150, 170, 205 hypermasculine games 13, 17, 124 hypertext 202 IBM PC 38, 40 n.5 IBM PCjr 40 n.5 Ice-Bound Concordance, The 111 icons 45, 78, 79, 169 I Expect You to Die 6, 184 IGN 82, 97 illusion 16, 36, 63, 71, 75, 80, 177, 208 imitation 129 immersion/immersive 36, 42 n.6, 43, 47, 62, 64, 73, 83, 98, 116, 119, 121, 126, 129–31, 175, 177, 178, 179–82, 183–5, 187, 188, 189, 191–4 IndieCade 24 Indie Fund 135 indie games 10, 11, 21, 24, 26, 27, 104, 110, 111, 118–21, 123, 130, 135, 150, 155, 165, 170, 188, 208, 211 Indigo Prophecy 72 Infocom 8, 14, 20, 22, 35, 38, 46, 141, 168, 201, 211 infrared projectors 180 input devices 45, 178 interactive digital narrative (IDN) 6 interactive drama 64, 185 “Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame ‘Adventure’” (Buckles) 39 interactive fiction/interactivity 1, 5, 6, 8, 10, 15, 16, 20, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 36, 38, 42–3, 46, 57, 61–5, 68, 70, 71–7, 82–3, 95, 104, 111, 117, 122, 136, 140–1, 151, 154, 164, 167, 170, 175–7, 179, 185, 194, 200, 208, 211 internet 35, 195, 208 n.4 Interplay 169 interval-friendly games 121

inventory-driven puzzles 43, 63, 67, 70, 92, 105, 151, 188 itch.io 150, 167 iteration 68, 72, 150, 184 Jaffa, Veve 21 Jensen, Jane 9 Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives 186 Journey 35 joystick 178, 180 JP LeBreton 124 jumping mechanic, platformer 33, 100, 101, 120 Jurassic Park: The Game 74 Juul, Jesper 106 Kafka, Franz 19 Kareem, Soha 20 Kentucky Route Zero (KRZ) 27, 199–212 Keogh, Brendan 132–3 keyboard 36, 45, 46, 122, 178 Kickstarter 5, 119 n.3, 175, 184 Kidder, Tracy 38, 39 Kinect 180–1, 190 King’s Quest 2, 8, 9, 13–14, 22, 33, 35, 40–1, 52, 53, 56 Kleinman, Erica 77 Knuth, Donald 202 Koenitz, Hartmut 140 Ladykiller in a Bind 163 laserdisc 61 Last of Us, The 148, 170 Laurel, Brenda 64 Lebling, Dave 33 legal issues 24 Legend Entertainment 46 Lei, Brianna 147 Leisure Suit Larry 8, 11, 19, 55, 160, 203 Letter from an Unknown Woman (film) 137 Letter to Three Wives, A (film) 137 LGBT/LGBT games 14–15, 21–2, 128, 147–9, 150, 157, 160, 161, 166–7 LGBTQ Video Game Archive 14, 160 Life is Strange 4–5, 76–8, 193, 208 Life, game of (Conway) 202 n.2 Limbo 33, 34 linearity 65, 67, 82, 135, 203, 208 literary realism 132 literary studies 5

225

Index live streaming 83, 165, 200 Longest Journey, The 16, 56, 123 Loom 1–3, 6, 8, 11, 22, 28, 55, 66, 115, 141, 200, 211 loveable loser types 11–12, 17, 82–3, 203 Lowe, Al 40 low-fidelity 73, 125 LucasArts 8, 12, 45, 53, 66, 67, 80, 127, 169 Lumiere 125 Lunar 36 Mac OS X 194 Magic Leap 176, 190, 194 magnetometer (mobile phone) 190 Maher, Jimmy 8, 14 Maloney, Molly 68, 76 MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) 24 Manhunter: New York 127 Maniac Mansion 65 Mankiewicz, Joseph L. 137 Mario Kart Wii 180 Márquez, Gabriel García 202 n.2 Márquez, Shannon 202 n.2 Mask of Eternity 22, 56 Mason, Graeme 119 Mattel 190 Mawhorter, Peter 81 Meat Log Mountain 156–7 media studies 5 Meer, Alec 139 mental illness 21, 158 mental models 42, 53 menu-driven interface 44, 46, 100, 177, 208 metagaming mechanics 77 metatextuality 38, 79, 157, 189 Metroid 100 Michie, Donald 202 Microsoft 38, 40 n.5 Microsoft HoloLens 179, 190 Miller, Greg 82 Miller, Rand 1 Mind: Path to Thalamus 125 Mind Forever Voyaging, A 8 Minecraft 68 minigames 127, 208 misfit games 12, 22, 203 mixed reality 27, 176, 177, 185 MMOs 35 mobile games 121, 189

226

Molander, Troy 66 monochrome graphics 183 Montfort, Nick 8, 178 moon landing simulators 36 Moonmist 14 Morsell, Victoria 65 motion capture 73, 75 motion sensors 179, 180 motion sickness 177 mouse 45, 46, 169, 178 multimedia 6 multiplayer online games 23 Murder on Main Street 148 Murray, Janet 64, 192 music 46, 124, 125, 130, 135, 138, 139, 157, 203–6 My Horse Prince 156 Myst 1, 6, 7, 8, 16, 17, 22, 33, 52, 55, 91–3, 99, 102, 115, 119, 125, 188, 205 Mystery House 8, 22, 151, 201 National Organization for Women 17 NCOSE 166–7 near-photorealistic visuals 72 Nelson, Ted 38, 202 Netflix 83 next-gen platforms 175, 181 Night in the Woods 5, 17–19, 24, 33 Nintendo 100, 118, 151, 179, 183 Nomad Soul, The 72 No Man’s Sky 4, 120 noninteractive films 62, 73, 104, 185 Nooney, Laine 35 nouns 44, 46, 48, 50 OASIS 181 Obduction 6, 188 object menus 46 object recognition 176 O’Conner, Alice 139–40 Oculus Rift 175, 184 Oculus Story Studio 185, 194 Omikron: The Nomad Soul 72 One Hundred Years of Solitude (Márquez, Gabriel García) 202 n.2 online games 56 on-screen UI 15, 45–6, 55, 80, 104, 119, 126, 169 open-source engine ports 24 open web platform 170

Index Ophüls, Max 137 Osworth, A.E. 195–6 Outsider, The (Wilson) 19 “outsider,” notion of 10–11, 19 Outsiders, The (Hinton) 13 Outsider Theory (Eburne) 28 Owlchemy Labs 179, 186, 187 Packard, Edward 208 n.4 Paik, Nam June 208 n.4 parody games 13, 157, 187 Passage 121 Path, The 121 Patreon 140, 150 Pavlounis, Dimitrios 132 Pawn, The 42 n.6 PC Gamer 16 Pedercini, Paolo 121 people of color 14–15, 21–2, 195 Perks of Being a Wallflower, The 13 permalife games 128–9, 135, 140 Phantasmagoria 6, 14, 65 photorealistic aesthetic 74, 135, 194, 195 Photoshop 45 pillars of adventure games (core elements) 6–7, 26, 42–4, 50, 87–112, 177 tension between 87–91 Pinchbeck, Dan 134–9 Pixar 185 pixel hunting 78, 91 Plana, Tony 16 platform studies 5 PlayStation 73, 180, 184 playtesting 68 playtime 94, 119, 123 Plotkin, Andrew 43, 95 Plundered Hearts 14, 15 point-and-click games 6, 23, 55, 92, 115 point-of-view 20 Pokémon Go 189–90 Policeman’s Beard Is Half-Constructed, The 202 n.2 Pong 36, 45 pop culture 61, 68, 155, 177, 189 popups 70 Portal 23 Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time 10 profanity 118 programming 33, 149, 202 Prom Week 111

props 135 prose 35, 36, 44, 48 Proteus 125, 140, 141 punchlines 53 pure strategy games 23 puzzle platformers 4, 7, 39, 41–2 foundational features 33, 39–40 timer-based 36 puzzles/puzzle-solving 5, 9, 40, 41–2, 43, 54 and exploration pillars 21, 42, 43, 44, 94, 108–10 logic and observation 92–3, 95 revelatory and simulative 50–5, 108 Pyschonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin 188 Quake 124, 125 Quantic Dream 25, 62, 72–9, 175 queer games 21–2, 132–4, 147–50, 160–4, 166–70 queergaming 149, 154–60, 162 queer media 132 Queerskins: A Love Story 195 quick time(r) events (QTEs) 73–4 Quicktime video 125 Quing’s Quest VII 21 Quinn, Zoë 20, 21, 165 racing games 180 RACTER 202 n.2 Ralph, C. M. 147–8, 150 Read Only Memories 21 Ready Player One (book and film) 177, 181 Ready Player Two (Chess) 17, 79 reality media 27, 175–96 recommendation algorithms 23–4 recording 55, 96, 135, 200, 204, 206–7 Redshirt 164, 165 reflex-driven games 5, 11, 37, 39, 40, 61, 72–3, 127, 153 Relf, Graham 119, 120, 141 remasters 24 remix 5, 6, 20, 21, 201, 205 Ren’Py 150, 157 repetition 121 repurposing 5, 6, 18, 21, 26, 135, 154, 179, 190, 193, 205, 211 Return to Zork 65 revelatory puzzles 3, 19, 33, 50–6, 98–9, 101–3, 108, 111, 126, 154, 160, 180, 183, 210

227

Index reverse-engineering code 20, 24 reviews 24, 102 rewind-time mechanic 10, 53, 76, 77 Reznor, Trent 124 Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality 27, 179, 186–9 Rise of the Videogame Zinesters (Anthropy) 8, 20 Riven 7, 16, 17, 52, 54, 89 Rogue 39 roguelikes 39, 40, 88 Rohrer, Jason 121 role-playing games (RPGs) 13, 23, 35, 39, 56, 76, 111 roleplay rails 68, 76 romance games 5, 22, 134, 148–50, 152–5, 157–8, 160–4, 170, 211 Rubeck, Levi 140–1 Ruberg, Bonnie 21, 128, 149, 160, 164 Ryan, April 16 Ryan, Marie-Laure 61, 176, 193 Saatchi, Edward 185 Sam & Max Hit the Road 8, 13, 66, 67 sampling 64 Samyn, Michaël 121 Save the Date 77 Schell, Jesse 64, 184 Schuette, Kim 42 sci-fi 19, 76, 181, 182, 194 scripting 48 Secret of Monkey Island, The 3, 8, 13, 21, 24, 66, 94–5, 193 Sega Genesis 17 Seifert, Viva 105 Seraphin, Austin 15 Shade 57 Shadow Man 14 Shaw, Adrienne 149, 160 Sherlock, Connor 140 Shivah, The 16 side-scrolling platformers 33, 83 Sierra On-Line 8, 11, 14, 22, 35, 40, 45, 65, 127, 141, 169 Sim City 44 Simone, Gail 70 n.2 Simon the Sorcerer 11–12 Sims, The 17, 64, 119 n.3, 148 simulation/simulative puzzles 25, 36, 42, 44, 47, 50–5, 64, 110, 111, 132, 158, 164, 179, 194, 195, 200, 209

228

single-player games 56 Six Ages 111 SJW (social justice warrior) games 119, 147 Skyrim. See Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Sleep No More (play) 131 slow games 120–1 Slow Year, A 120–1 social media 150 Software Publisher’s Association 7 software studies 5 Solnit, Rebecca 116 SOMA 124 Sony 184 Soul of a New Machine, The (Kidder) 38 soundscapes 149 Source (game engine) 134–5 space mapping 176 Space Quest 6, 8, 11, 34 spatialized audio 176 SpecTrek 189 speech recognition 176, 195 speedrunning 121 split screen 73 Spore Creature Creator 45 Squinkifer, Dietrich 21 Stanley Parable, The 77, 123 Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV series) 64, 176 Star Wars 66, 183 Steam 23, 24, 150, 164–7 Steam Curators 24 storage 22, 36, 151, 178 storyboard 65 storygame 6, 26, 27, 39, 43, 66, 100, 107, 109, 123 n.4, 185, 187 story machines 64–5, 75 storytelling 8, 26, 27, 34, 37, 61–7, 72, 91, 95, 116, 117, 124, 130, 141, 149, 170, 182, 185, 193, 199 Strauss, Neil 158 Stuart, Keith 124 subculture 121 subversive dating simulators 20, 37, 154–60, 164 Sunless Skies 111 survival games 23 survival horror 35, 127, 131 Syberia 56–7, 123 Tacoma 130 tags 23–4, 25, 107, 165

Index Tale of Tales 121 talking simulators 87 Tass Times in Tonetown 168–9 television adventure games 67 Telltale Effect 63, 80–2 Telltale Games 10, 24, 25–6, 62, 63, 66–76, 78–80, 83, 127, 141 Tender Claws 188–9 tester feedback 55 text adventures 6, 7, 8, 14, 15, 20, 22, 33, 34, 40–1, 46, 105–6, 201 text input/output 33, 105–6 theory of design 7 third-person adventure games 126, 201 3D graphics 9, 16, 22, 55–6, 65, 72, 94, 125, 177, 178, 183, 185 thumbsticks 73 time-limited choice games 68, 80, 127 Tomb Raider 56 Toonstruck 48–50 To the Moon 118, 123 n.4 touchpads 73 “Toward the design of a computer-based interactive fantasy system” (Laurel) 64 trackball 178 Treverton, Gregory 209 Trinity 8, 33, 34 Tusks: The Orc Dating Sim 163–4 Twine games 8, 20–1, 150 Twisty Little Passages 8 Twitch 165 Twitter Bot 94 2D adventures 6, 55, 123 Ubisoft 76 Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune 88 Under a Killing Moon 6, 65 Unity port 135, 190, 200 Unix 40 Unmanned 126 Unreal 124 unreliable narration 20, 126 Unseld, Saschka 185 Urban Chaos 14 user interface (UI) 4, 6, 23, 25, 43, 45–6, 55, 92, 105–7, 149, 169, 176, 177, 179, 180, 186, 188, 192, 195– 196, 208 Valve Corporation 23, 135, 166 Vanaman, Sean 87

Vanishing of Ethan Carter, The 191 Veale, Kevin 132 verbs 44–7, 49, 55, 100, 115–16, 169–70, 177 VGA graphics 22 VHS 105 video games 10, 82, 104, 122, 128, 137, 140, 160, 164, 167 Videogames for Humans: Twine Authors in Conversation (Kopas) 8 violence 17, 18, 23, 123–9, 164, 166 Virginia 125, 126, 127, 135 Virtual Boy 183 Virtual Drag 195 virtual reality (VR) 6, 27, 175–96 failures/challenges 180–1, 193–6 history 182–5 immersive input 179–82 and literature 193 mechanics 186–9 motion sickness 177 storygames 185 virtual reality headsets 182, 183, 184–5 Virtual Virtual Reality 188–9 visual novels 4, 6, 22, 23, 26, 147–70 visual odometry 190 voice acting 16, 22, 48, 55, 67, 135, 193 voice commands 192 “Walking” (Thoreau) 115–16 Walking Dead, The 68, 70, 71, 76, 80, 82, 83 walking simulators 4, 24, 26, 35, 87, 100, 115–41, 149, 193, 203, 208 Walk It Out 118 Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Solnit) 116 Ware, Chris 131 Washko, Angela 158, 159 We Are Chicago 21 Westworld (movie) 64 Westworld (TV series) 177 Westworld: A Delos Experience 177 WEVP-TV 200 What Remains of Edith Finch 115, 125 White, Olivia 103 Wii balance board 118 Wii Remote 179–80 Williams, Roberta 9, 14, 35 Wilson, Colin 19 Windows 95 105 Witness, The 26, 87, 91–9, 102, 103, 108

229

Index Wolf Among Us, The 68–70, 75, 78, 80–1 Wolves in the Walls 185 Woods, Don 34, 35, 36, 37, 201, 202 writing 8, 39, 49, 67, 74, 110, 137, 157, 161, 209 X Reality (XR/cross reality) 176

230

Yang, Robert 165, 195 YouTube 83, 153, 166 zoom-in/out 79, 115, 135 Zork 6, 7, 8, 33, 39–40, 47–8 Zork II 94 Zork: Grand Inquisitor 16 ZZT 20