Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider — Manchester Game Centre

Adventure games.jpg — Front cover of Aaron A. Reed, John T. Murray and Anastasia Salter’s book, *Adventure Games*

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider

Aaron A. Reed, John T. Murray and Anastasia Salter

Bloomsbury, 2020

Aaron A. Reed, John T. Murray and Anastasia Salter’s Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider could be described as book of two parts. Following the logic of its title, it begins by setting out a definition of adventure games and describing the history (the rise and fall) of the genre before moving on to explore the thesis that these games were, and still are, the province of the outsider – be they players or game makers. These two parts are neatly connected by the book’s account of the ongoing history (or life) of adventure games that that is charted from classical adventure games such as Zork (1980), Loom (1990) and Myst (1993) to recent titles, some less obviously “adventure games” than others, such as Firewatch (2016), No Man’s Sky (2016), Life is Strange (2015) and Kentucky Route Zero (2013-2020). Quite how this history is constructed is one of the book’s most interesting features - as the authors remark, the book is not a “survey of a dead genre” but “a necessary and overdue look into a mode of game making and playing still vital for designers to understand” (5).

The book’s first section describes the evolution of adventure games, offering both a definition and a history that focuses on the genre’s heyday - a period roughly identified as being between Zork and Riven (1997). Broadly speaking, the definition focuses on the idea of “conceptual” rather than “skill-based” mastery and includes, in varying degrees, the genre’s “three pillars”: story, puzzles, and exploration. These three elements make up what the authors call “the adventure game triangle”, a formulation that makes it possible to view these elements as working in a productive tension, and, at the same time, to investigate games that might otherwise fall outside of a rigid list of key ingredients.

Accordingly, it becomes possible to examine games that might not immediately be considered adventure games in the classic mode. So, alongside familiar text- and graphic-based adventures such as Crowther and Wood’s Adventure (1977), Zork, and King’s Quest (1984), the book offers consideration of “cinematic choice games” (a key example offered is Telltale Game’s hugely popular The Wolf Among Us (2013)), and modern storygames that diverge further still from the model by emphasising certain elements of adventure games over others: Witness (2016), which sacrifices story, Firewatch (2016) which sacrifices puzzles, and Her Story (2015) which sacrifices exploration. The resulting readings prove productive (the book is characterised by the close and sensitive attention paid to the games under discussion) in making clear the lasting impact of adventure games, including ongoing attempts to reconcile the tensions inherent in the genre, on contemporary design.

While present throughout, the second thread of the book, the connection of adventure games with “outsiders” (be they players or makers), is explored in detail in the last four chapters. Broadly defined as “one who is excluded, isolated, or otherwise apart from a center or majority and its norms”, the outsiders considered include “the geeky, socially ostracized hackers who created and played the first generation of adventure games”, the victims of Gamergate and their games, the “‘non-gamer’ outsider customer”, the “rebel outsider, making queer or altgames”, the “outsider auteur”, the “disabled outsider” and “outsider players who find solace in different kinds of games from their more mainstream peers” (10-11). The argument unfolds through a series of extended readings of games, beginning with the focus on exploration of physical space found in walking simulators taking Gone Home (2013) and Dear Esther (2008) as its examples. The discussion then turns to games that focus on the exploration of emotional space through readings of queer romance games, dating sims, and visual novels, traversing a history of games that ranges from C. M. Ralph’s Caper in the Castro (1989), listed by the LGBTQ Video Game Archive as “the first gay and lesbian themed computer game”, to Angela Washko’s exploration of consent and the politics of the male pick-up artist in The Game: The Game (2018). The penultimate chapter turns its attention to the future of adventure games, focusing on virtual and augmented reality games (the key example is Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-Ality (2017) to consider the potential for players to identify with protagonists and their worlds. Finally, the book concludes with an extended discussion of Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy’s Kentucky Route Zero, a game that encapsulates much of the thinking behind the book and of the absorbing, puzzling, and at times frustrating, genre it describes.

Readers and players with an interest in adventure games, and those interested in the genre’s many descendants, will undoubtedly find Reed, Murray and Salter’s book both useful and enjoyable. The definition of the genre (and in particular the formulation of the “adventure game triangle”) are of great interest, and the history of the evolution of the genre with its gestures to future developments will likely inspire much discussion. Similarly, those interested in the alternate, outsider, experience of video games will find much of interest. From both perspectives the selection of games is extremely well thought out – this reader added many games to the “to play” list – and while the book does pursue a thesis, that thesis is clearly drawn from and through the games themselves. Aligned to its focus on outsider players/designers, one of the book’s most impressive aspects is the way in which it reimagines the hierarchies that underpin critical work by drawing on the kinds of material that would be expected in traditional academic work (generally speaking, the peer-reviewed work of other academics) alongside an equal amount of work from designers, players, and reviewers. To conclude, Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider is a hugely useful account of the genre, written by knowledgeable and passionate authors. It is not, they tell us in the introduction, “a hagiography of adventure games” (28) but it sort of is. In a good way.