The Craft of Adventure - Part 3
       Five articles on the design of adventure games
     Graham Nelson (Second edition, plain text version)

@~Continued from last issue

4  A Narrative...

        The initial version of the game was designed and
implemented in about two weeks.
        -- P. David Lebling, Marc S. Blank, Timothy A. Anderson,
of `Zork'

        It was started in May of '85 and finished in June '86.
        -- Brian Moriarty, of `Trinity' (from earlier ideas)

 --- Away in a Genre ---

The days of wandering around doing unrelated things to get
treasures are long passed, if they ever were.  Even `Adventure'
went to some effort to avoid this. Its many imitators, in the
early years of small computers, often took no such trouble.  The
effect was quite surreal.  One would walk across the drawbridge of
a medieval castle and find a pot plant, a vat of acid, a copy of
Playboy magazine and an electric drill.  There were puzzles
without rhyme or reason.  The player was a characterless magpie
always on the lookout for something cute to do.  The crossword had
won without a fight.

It tends to be forgotten that `Adventure' was quite clean in this
respect: at its best it had an austere, Tolkienesque feel, in
which magic was scarce, and its atmosphere and geography was
well-judged, especially around the edges of the map: the outside
forests and gullies, the early rubble-strewn caves, the Orange
River Rock room and the rim of the volcano.  Knife- throwing
dwarves would appear from time to time, but jokey town council
officers with clipboards never would.  `Zork' was condensed, less
spacious and never quite so consistent in style: machines with
buttons lay side by side with trolls and vampire bats.
Nonetheless, even `Zork' has a certain `house style', and the best
of even the tiniest games, those by Scott Adams, make up a variety
of genres (not always worked through but often interesting):
vampire film, comic-book, Voodoo, ghost story.

By the mid-1980s better games had settled the point.  Any player
dumped in the middle of one of `The Lurking Horror' (H. P.
Lovecraft horror), `Leather Goddesses of Phobos' (30s racy space
opera) or `Ballyhoo' (mournfully cynical circus mystery) would
immediately be able to say which it was.

The essential flavour that makes your game distinctive and yours
is genre.  And so the first decision to be made, when beginning a
design, is the style of the game.  Major or minor key, basically
cheerful or nightmarish, or somewhere in between?  Exploration,
romance, mystery, historical reconstruction, adaptation of a book,
film noir, horror?  In the style of Terry Pratchett, Edgar Allen
Poe, Thomas Hardy, Philip K. Dick?  Icelandic, Greek, Chaucerian,
Hopi Indian, Aztec, Australian myth?


If the chosen genre isn't fresh and relatively new, then the game
had better be very good.  It's a fateful decision: the only
irreversible one.

--- Adapting Books ---

Two words of warning about adapting books.  First, remember
copyright, which has broader implications than many non-authors
realise.  For instance, fans of Anne McCaffrey's "Dragon" series
of novels are allowed to play network games set on imaginary
planets which do not appear in McCaffrey's works, and to adopt
characters of their own invention, but not to use or refer to
hers.  This is a relatively tolerant position on the part of her
publishers.

Even if no money changes hands, copyright law is enforceable,
usually until fifty years after the author's death (but in some
countries seventy). Moreover some classics are written by young
authors (the most extreme case I've found is a copyright life of
115 years after publication).  Most of twentieth-century
literature, even much predating World War I, is still covered: and
some literary estates (that of Tintin, for instance) are highly
protective.  (The playwright Alan Bennett recently commented on
the trouble he had over a brief parody of the 1930s school of
adventure yarns - Sapper, Dornford Yates, and so on - just because
of an automatic hostile response by publishers.) The quotations
from games in this article are legal only because brief excerpts
are permitted for critical or review purposes.

Secondly, a direct linear plot is very hard to successfully
implement in an adventure game.  It will be too long (just as a
novel is usually too much for a film, which is nearer to a longish
short story in scope) and it will involve the central character
making crucial and perhaps unlikely decisions at the right moment.
If the player decides to have tea outside and not to go into those
ancient caves after all, the result is not "A Passage to India".
(A book, incidentally, which E. M. Forster published in 1924, and
on which British copyright will expire in 2020.)


Pastiche is legally safer and usually works better in any case:
steal a milieu rather than a plot.  In this (indeed, perhaps only
this) respect, McCaffrey's works are superior to Forster's: then
again, Chaucer or Rabelais have more to offer than either, and
with no executors waiting to pounce.

--- Magic and Mythology ---

Whether or not there is "magic" (and it might not be called such,
for example in the case of science fiction) there is always myth.
This is the imaginary fabric of the game: landscape is more than
just buildings and trees.

The commonest `mythology' is what might be called `lazy medieval',
where anything prior to the invention of gunpowder goes, all at
once, everything from Greek gods to the longbow (a span of about
two thousand years).  In fact, anything an average reader might
think of as `old world' will do, the Western idea of antiquity
being a huge collage.  This was so even in the time of the
Renaissance:

    One is tempted to call the medieval habit of life mathematical
    or to compare it with a gigantic game where everything is
    included and every act is conducted under the most complicated
    system of rules.  Ultimately the game grew over-complicated
    and was too much for people...

(In some ways, the historical counterparts of the characters in a
medieval adventure game saw the real world as if it were such a
game.)

That last quotation was from E. M. W. Tillyard's book `The
Elizabethan World Picture', exactly the stuff of which game-
settings are made. Tillyard's main claim is that

    The Elizabethans pictured the universal order under three main
    forms: a chain, a series of corresponding planes and a dance.

Throw all that together with Hampton Court, boats on the Thames by
night and an expedition or two to the Azores and the game is afoot.

Most games do have "magic", some way of allowing the player to
transform her surroundings in a wholly unexpected and dramatic way
which would not be possible in real life.  There are two dangers:
firstly, many systems have already been tried - and naturally a
designer wants to find a new one.  Sometimes spells take place in
the mind (the `Enchanter' trilogy), sometimes with the aid of
certain objects (`Curses'); sometimes half-way between the two
(Level 9's `Magik' trilogy).

Secondly, magic is surreal almost by definition and surrealism is
dangerous (unless it is deliberate, something only really attempted
once, in `Nord 'n' Burt Couldn't Make Head Nor Tail Of It').  The
T-Removing Machine of `Leather Goddesses of Phobos' (which can, for
instance, transform a rabbit to a rabbi) is a stroke of genius but
a risky one.  The adventure game is centred on words and
descriptions, but the world it incarnates is supposed to be solid
and real, surely, and not dependent on how it is described?  To
prevent magic from derailing the illusion, it must have a coherent

rationale.  This is perhaps the definition of mystic religion, and
there are plenty around to steal from.

What can magic do?  Chambers English Dictionary defines it as

    the art of producing marvellous results by compelling the aid
    of spirits, or by using the secret forces of nature, such as
    the power supposed to reside in certain objects as `givers of
    life':  enchantment: sorcery: art of producing illusions by
    legerdemain:  a secret or mysterious power over the
    imagination or will.

It is now a commonplace that this is really the same as
unexplained science, that a tricorder and a rusty iron rod with a
star on the end are basically the same myth.  As C. S. Lewis, in
`The Abolition of Man', defined it,

    For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to
    subdue reality to the wishes of man.

Role-playing games tend to have elaborately worked-out theories
about magic, but these aren't always suitable.  Here are two
(slightly simplified) excerpts from the spell book of `Tunnels and
Trolls', which has my favourite magic system:

    Magic Fangs - Change a belt or staff into a small poisonous
    serpent.  Cannot "communicate" with mage, but does obey mage's
    commands.  Lasts as long as mage puts strength into it at time
    of creation.

    Bog and Mire - Converts rock to mud or quicksand for 2 turns,
    up to 1000 cubic feet.  Can adjust dimensions as required, but
    must be a regular geometric solid.

Magic Fangs is an ideal spell for an adventure game, whereas Bog
and Mire is a nightmare to implement and impossible for the player
to describe.

If there are spells (or things which come down to spells, such as
alien artifacts) then each should be used at least twice in the
game, preferably in different contexts, and some many times.  But,
and this is a big `but', the majority of puzzles should be soluble
by hand - or else the player will start to feel that it would save
a good deal of time and effort just to find the "win game" spell
and be done with it.  In similar vein, using an "open even locked
or enchanted object" spell on a shut door is less satisfying than
casting a "cause to rust" spell on its hinges, or something even
more indirect.

Magic has to be part of the mythology of a game to work.  Alien
artifacts would only make sense found on, say, an adrift alien
spaceship, and the player will certainly expect to have more about
the `aliens' revealed in play.  Even the traditional magic word
"xyzzy", written on the cave's walls, is in keeping with the
centuries of initials carved by the first explorers of the Mammoth
cave.

@~To be continued

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