Adventure.exe
I'm an enjoyer of webcomics, as was betrayed from my very first Open Letters article when I pitted Pulitzer Prize-winning Michael Dirda against gamer and comic writer Jerry Holkins and sided with the latter. This is not just an alliance of convenience – my personal investment in Holkin's (and partner, Michael Krahulik's) comic, Penny Arcade, is serious and my enthusiasm for their work genuine. But at this point, Penny Arcade is something I read regularly, instead of checking obsessively. Obsession is something that comes in waves for me, a fixation that I repeat in my attachments to my favorite books, television shows, films and video games. The sort of obsession in which I tell friends about it every other time I see them, or purposely buy them the book or film, or sit them in front of my gaming system, in hopes I'll find someone else who can share my sudden, rabid excitement. It's a missionary fervor, in its way.Imagine, then, my feelings about MS Paint Adventures, Andrew Hussie's online opus, a comic that combines a wicked sense of humor, remarkable technical sophistication, stylistic simplicity and, get this, a gaming element. It's a lethal combo, as far as my own neurological configuration goes. Well written, clever as hell, and informed by the tradition of adventure games. These were games I grew up on, a form for which I, along with many others of my generation, feel considerable nostalgia.
A form, coincidentally, that has been having a remarkable renaissance of late. As usual, a little game history is in order.Mirroring Lucafilm's meteoric (glorious before it crashed and burned) trajectory, the entertainment software division of Darth George's own Galactic Empire had an incredible heyday. And while you will never find me speaking ill of Lucasarts' more central projects, Star Wars-based games like the arcade-style Rebel Assault or, my all-time personal favorite TIE Fighter (where you play as an Imperial pilot putting down damned rebel dissidents and terrorists!), some of their most appealing works were outside the Star Wars IP, in their adventurous, um... adventure game titles.Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Sam & Max; these are games that, if they do not bring on the full-scale theatrical nostalgia in your heart, lemme tell you, you missed out on something. The particular wonder of these games is that they pass the test all true classics must: they overcome their temporal circumstances. Perhaps the excitement of their newness is gone, but what made these games so remarkable, so good, is still there, still accessible, because it was something besides the constant procession of anti-aliased graphics and high speed physics engines.The adventure game's roots lie at the origin of digital storytelling. The first instance, the appropriately named Adventure, was text-based and began the tradition of text-based form. Which form reached its height in Infocom's titles, including the tremendous Zork. Irreverence and tongue-in-cheek humor heavily inflect these games, with lots of little in-jokes for anyone who happened to go to MIT during the late 70's and early 80's (like my father, who introduced me to the Infocom games in the first place). The real innovations, however, were in embracing the ability of text to do what graphical games of the same period could not, or could not do as easily – make story, exploration and puzzle-solving the central gameplay components. Paragraphs of description outlined rooms and listed objects, and the player navigated through and interacted with the world through commands like 'go north' or 'pick up elvish sword' or 'say “hello, sailor”'.Graphic adventure games evolved rapidly from the conceptual space of their text-based antecedents but, for very simple reasons, their popularity and sales rose to heights the sly need-to-know Infocom titles couldn't have hoped for. The player acted through a character on the screen, inhabiting a visual space (a forest, the interior of a castle, the surface of an alien world), and the objects were visible (if occasionally obscure). Instead of writing commands, the player could simply point and click, then select one of several options: examine, take, use, talk, etc. There was pre-programmed dialogue options, allowing for inter-character interchanges beyond just 'hello, sailor'. This proved much more intuitive (and entertaining) for non-programmers, for whom the weird grammatical constraints of text-based commands could be frustrating. The eventual addition of voice acting and complex animation also made the games more approachable and allowed for their natural sense of humor to expand to visual gags and the nuances of comic timing. And the best of Lucasarts games are extremely funny.Sam & Max Hit the Road, the adventure game based off of a comic written by in-house artist and company favorite Steve Purcell, is an excellent example. The heroes: Sam and Max, the Freelance Police, the former a suit-wearing, practical minded, sensible dog, the latter, his sidekick, a 'hyper kinetic, three foot, rabbity-thingy' with an unabashed taste for reckless mayhem. They are to vigilantes what privateers are to pirates, cruising the highways in a DeSoto Adventurer, going from cheesy tourist trap to cheesy tourist trap, solving mysteries while hacking through a jungle of Americana. They carry guns, commune with mole men, save sideshow freaks, endure musical numbers and educational sequences about great American naturalist John Muir sung/spoken by preserved animal heads. Absurd to the extreme, Sam and Max is a game that relies on its hilarious dialogue, bizarre puzzles and cartoonish depictions of US cultural nadirs, none of which demand technological wizardry and all of which require spot-on artistic direction and top notch comedy writers.
I played the demo for the game in 1995, just the demo, and while circumstances did not allow me to get the full version at the time, my Junior year of college, a full twelve years later, I still thought back to just how funny it was. I bought the disc through Ebay, played through the entire game, and, in characteristic obsessive-enthusiasm, went out and bought the collected comics and pushed both the book and the disc on anyone unfortunate enough to share peer-space with me. However I may believe that simulation has its own merits, good writing is always good writing, and funny jokes will always make me laugh. Analytically, I think it’s important to expand out from the space of narrative, but as a reader, I love a good story.The best example of just this principle is The Longest Journey (Den lengste reisen in the original Norwegian, though I'll leave translation critique to those better qualified). As Wikipedia has it: “[The Longest Journey] won praise from critics for its enigmatic, complex storyline and high production values, but was criticized for some of its more obscure puzzles.” Which is more or less the virtue and problem of all adventure games. The puzzles provide a crucial but often perplexing and contrived mechanic for an otherwise beautiful and sweeping story with superb writing. The height of perplexing contrivance I've thus encountered involved combining an inflatable rubber duck, a piece of rubberized cable and a heavy duty clamp, all in the name of retrieving some random object lying on some subway tracks. This is the essence of adventure gaming, the absolute height of the Chekhov's Gun principle – if you can pick it up, grab it, because it's useful.