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Spaces of Adventure
One of the wonderful qualities of digital game spaces is their plasticity and flexibility. The emphasis in recent years on photorealistic, logically consistent 3D game spaces has eschewed experimental approaches to space design in favor of increasingly "realistic" ones. Yet by exploiting the flexibility of the computer medium, space can be a powerful narrative tool. For example, take the Atari 2600 game Adventure, arguably the first graphical adventure game. Let's begin by looking at the backstory of Adventure from the game manual: An evil magician has stolen the Enchanted Chalice and has hidden it somewhere in the Kingdom. The object of the game is to rescue the Enchanted Chalice and place it inside the Golden Castle where it belongs. This is no easy task, as the Evil Magician has created three Dragons to hinder you in your quest for the Golden Chalice. There is Yorgie, the Yellow Dragon, who is just plain mean; there is Grundle, the Green Dragon, who is mean and ferocious; and there is Rhindle, the Red Dragon, who is the most ferocious of all. Rhindle is also the fastest Dragon and is the most difficult to outmaneuver.
There are three castles in the Kingdom; the White Castle, the Black Castle, and the Golden Castle. Each castle has a Gate over the entrance. The Gate can be opened with the corresponding colored Key. Inside each Castle are rooms (or dungeons, depending at which Skill Level you are playing). The Castles are separated by rooms, pathways, and labyrinths. Common to all the Skill Levels is the Blue Labyrinth through which you must find your way to the Black Castle. Skill Levels 2 and 3 have a more complicated Kingdom….[11] This embedded narrative weaves together traditional elements of character, setting, and conflict (Evil Magician, Kingdom, and hidden treasure) with explicit descriptions of the spatial mechanics of the game (keys open gates, castles are connected by pathways and labyrinths, higher skill levels have more complex kingdoms). This introductory description even makes explicit the ways that spatial arrangements acquire narrative meaning. For example, according to the text, what is it that makes Rhindle the Red Dragon the most ferocious dragon of them all? It is his ability to move through space more quickly than the others. Within Adventure, the player is represented as a square dot that moves through the space of the game, collecting and using objects, avoiding enemies, and navigating the kingdom in order to find the hidden chalice. As Wolf pointed out in his taxonomy of game spaces, Adventure represents space as a series of interconnected adjacent rooms, each room displayed one at a time. When a player enters a new room, the player's dot appears on a point at the edge of the screen corresponding to the entrance of the room. If the player uses an exit to leave the room, a new room fills the screen. As opposed to a more contemporary, smoothly scrolling space, Adventure's spatial scheme designates each room as a kind of theatrical tableau, a self-contained scene that focuses the dramatic action. This elegantly spare structure, imposed in part by technological limitations, nevertheless perfectly suits the mythical fairytale narrative of the game. For example, when a player enters a room with a locked castle gate, movement is severely restricted to the lower and side borders of the screen, clearly evoking the experience of being locked out. On the other hand, when the proper key opens the gate, a simple but dramatic animation of the raising castle portcullis transforms the space of the castle from imposing barrier to inviting gateway, leading to new spaces beyond.
closed castle
open castle
Much of Adventure's delightful use of space comes from its inconsistencies. The room one reaches inside a castle, for example, is larger than the castle appears from the outside. This illogical use of space expresses the magical nature of the game narrative and reaches true virtuosity in the construction of the game's four labyrinths. As suits the creation of a mad Evil Magician, these mazes do not follow a consistent topography. The labyrinths all exist as a series of self-contained rooms with passageways. However, entrances and exits from the rooms do not follow a consistent spatial logic but instead wrap around in erratic ways. The image to the right shows a map of the Blue Labyrinth, along with indications of the wraparound entrances and exits from each room. The experience of navigating these mazes can be initially disconcerting, especially because some of them are darkened "catacombs," where you only see the walls in a limited area immediately surrounding your dot. It is possible in these mazes to feel completely and utterly lost—a wonderfully appropriate emergent narrative effect. Yet at the same time, the labyrinths are not gratuitously complex, containing only three, four, or five rooms. The difficulty of moving through them comes from their magical wraparound logic, not from an overabundance of navigational choices. This is a well-designed, balanced spatial challenge. The player never loses a strong sense of the overall system, and over the course of playing several games, learns to navigate the mazes with greater and greater ease.
Blue Labyrinth (expanded view)
Inside the Black Castle
More than in most games, the formal, representational, and interactive qualities of Adventure's spaces contribute directly to the game's rich narrative experience. You finally locate the Black Key in the Catacombs and you race through a labyrinth toward the locked Black Castle. But then you come across Rhindle, the Red Dragon! Can you squeeze by Rhindle, or will you end up trapped in the narrow corridors of the maze? You can only carry one object at a time, and you dropped the Sword when you found the Black Key. With the Sword, you could slay Rhindle. But can you remember exactly where it is? You better decide quickly, because Rhindle is rapidly approaching! These emergent narratives are ensconced within the larger fairytale context of the game, and are made possible by the way that the simple yet structurally intricate space of Adventure frames and enables game action. The formal game elements become narratively meaningful within the story context that the game provides. [11]Atari Inc., Adventure. Atari Game Program Instructions (Sunnyvale, CA: Atari, Inc., 1980), p. 2–3.
