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The Craft of Adventure

Five articles on the design of adventure games

(Second edition, plain text version)
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1 Introduction
2 In The Beginning
3 Bill of Player's Rights
4 A Narrative...
5 ...At War With a Crossword
6 Varnish and Veneer
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1 Introduction
===============

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us
many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets.
Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

-- Tom Stoppard, Artist Descending A Staircase

Making books is a skilled trade, like making clocks.

-- Jean de la Bruyere (1645-1696)

If you're going to have a complicated story you must work to
a map; otherwise you'll never make a map of it afterwards.

-- J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973)


Designing an adventure game is both an art and a craft. Whereas art cannot
be taught, only commented upon, craft at least can be handed down: but the
tricks of the trade do not make an elegant narrative, only a catalogue. This
small collection of essays is just such a string of grits of wisdom and
half-baked critical opinions, which may well leave the reader feeling
unsatisfied. One can only say to such a reader that any book claiming to
reveal the secret of how to paint, or to write novels, should be recycled at
once into something more genuinely artistic, say a papier-mache sculpture.

If there is any theme here, it is that standards count: not just of
competent coding, but of writing. True, most designers have been either
programmers `in real life' or at the `Hardy Boys Mysteries' end of the
literary scale, but that's no reason to look down on their better works, or
to begrudge them a look at all. Though this book is mainly about the larger
scale, one reason I think highly of `Spellbreaker' is for memorable phrases
like `a voice of honey and ashes'. Or `You insult me, you insult even my
dog!'



The author of a text adventure has to be schizophrenic in a way that the
author of a novel does not. The novel-reader does not suffer as the player
of a game does: she needs only to keep turning the pages, and can be trusted
to do this by herself. The novelist may worry that the reader is getting
bored and discouraged, but not that she will suddenly find pages 63 to the
end have been glued together just as the plot is getting interesting.

Thus, the game author has continually to worry about how the player is
getting along, whether she is lost, confused, fed up, finding it too tedious
to keep an accurate map: or, on the other hand, whether she is yawning
through a sequence of easy puzzles without much exploration. Too difficult,
too easy? Too much choice, too little? So this book will keep going back
to the player's eye view.

On the other hand, there is also a novel to be written: the player may get
the chapters all out of order, the plot may go awry, but somehow the author
has to rescue the situation and bind up the strings neatly. Our player
should walk away thinking it was a well-thought out story: in fact, a novel,
and not a child's puzzle-book.

An adventure game is a crossword at war with a narrative. Design sharply
divides into the global - plot, structure, genre - and the local - puzzles
and rooms, orders in which things must be done. And this book divides
accordingly.


Frequent examples are quoted from real games, especially from `Adventure'
and the middle-period Infocom games: for two reasons. Firstly, they will
be familiar to many aficionados. Secondly, although a decade has passed
they still represent the bulk of the best work in the field. In a few
places my own game `Curses' is cited, because I know all the unhappy
behind-the-scenes stories about it.

I have tried not to give anything substantial away. So I have also avoided
mention of recent games other than my own; while revising this text, for
instance, I had access to an advance copy of David M. Baggett's fine game
`The Legend Lives', but resisted the temptation to insert any references to
it. Except to say that it demonstrates that, as I write this, the genre is
still going strong: well, long may it.


Graham Nelson
Magdalen College, Oxford
January 1995


2 In The Beginning
===================

It's very tight. But we have cave!

-- Patricia Crowther, July 1972


Perhaps the first adventurer was a mulatto slave named Stephen Bishop, born
about 1820: `slight, graceful, and very handsome'; a `quick, daring,
enthusiastic' guide to the Mammoth Cave in the Kentucky karst. The story
of the Cave is a curious microcosm of American history. Its discovery
is a matter of legend dating back to the 1790s; it is said that a hunter,
John Houchin, pursued a wounded bear to a large pit near the Green River and
stumbled upon the entrance. The entrance was thick with bats and by the War
of 1812 was intensively mined for guano, dissolved into nitrate vats to make
saltpetre for gunpowder. After the war prices fell; but the Cave became a
minor side-show when a dessicated Indian mummy was found nearby, sitting
upright in a stone coffin, surrounded by talismans. In 1815, Fawn Hoof, as
she was nicknamed after one of the charms, was taken away by a circus,
drawing crowds across America (a tour rather reminiscent of Don McLean's
song `The Legend of Andrew McCrew'). She ended up in the Smithsonian but
by the 1820s the Cave was being called one of the wonders of the world,
largely due to her posthumous efforts.

By the early nineteenth century European caves were big tourist attractions,
but hardly anyone visited the Mammoth, `wonder of the world' or not. Nor
was it then especially large (the name was a leftover from the miners, who
boasted of their mammoth yields of guano). In 1838, Stephen Bishop's owner
bought up the Cave. Stephen, as (being a slave) he was invariably called,
was by any standards a remarkable man: self-educated in Latin and Greek, he
became famous as the `chief ruler' of his underground realm. He explored
and named much of the layout in his spare time, doubling the known map in a
year. The distinctive flavour of the Cave's names - half-homespun American,
half-classical - started with Stephen: the River Styx, the Snowball Room,
Little Bat Avenue, the Giant Dome. Stephen found strange blind fish,
snakes, silent crickets, the remains of cave bears (savage, playful
creatures, five feet long and four high, which became extinct at the end of
the last Ice Age), centuries-old Indian gypsum workings and ever more cave.
His 1842 map, drafted entirely from memory, was still in use forty years
later.

As a tourist attraction (and, since Stephen's owner was a philanthropist,
briefly a sanatorium for tuberculosis, owing to a hopeless medical
theory) the Cave became big business: for decades nearby caves were hotly
seized and legal title endlessly challenged. The neighbouring chain, across
Houchins Valley in the Flint Ridge, opened the Great Onyx Cave in 1912. By
the 1920s, the Kentucky Cave Wars were in full swing. Rival owners diverted
tourists with fake policemen, employed stooges to heckle each other's guided
tours, burned down ticket huts, put out libellous and forged advertisements.
Cave exploration became so dangerous and secretive that finally in 1941 the
U.S. Government stepped in, made much of the area a National Park and
effectively banned caving. The gold rush of tourists was, in any case,
waning.

Convinced that the Mammoth and Flint Ridge caves were all linked in a huge
chain, explorers tried secret entrances for years, eventually winning
official backing. Throughout the 1960s all connections from Flint Ridge -
difficult and water-filled tunnels - ended frustratingly in chokes of
boulders. A `reed-thin' physicist, Patricia Crowther, made the breakthrough
in 1972 when she got through the Tight Spot and found a muddy passage: it
was a hidden way into the Mammoth Cave.

Under the terms of his owner's will, Stephen Bishop was freed in 1856, at
which time the cave boasted 226 avenues, 47 domes, 23 pits and 8 waterfalls.
He died a year later, before he could buy his wife and son. In the 1970s,
Crowther's muddy passage was found on his map.


The Mammoth Cave is huge, its full extent still a matter of speculation
(estimates vary from 300 to 500 miles). Patricia's husband, Willie
Crowther, wrote a computer simulation of his favourite region, Bedquilt
Cave, in FORTRAN in the early 1970s. (It came to be called Colossal Cave,
though this name actually belongs further along.) Like the real cave, the
simulation was a map on about four levels of depth, rich in geology. A good
example is the orange column which descends to the Orange River Rock room
(where the bird lives): and the real column is indeed orange (of travertine,
a beautiful mineral found in wet limestone).

The game's language is loaded with references to caving, to `domes' and
`crawls'. A `slab room', for instance, is a very old cave whose roof has
begun to break away into sharp flakes which litter the floor in a crazy
heap. The program's use of the word `room' for all manner of caves and
places seems slightly sloppy in everyday English, but is widespread in
American caving and goes back as far as Stephen Bishop: so the
Adventure-games usage of the word `room' to mean `place' may even be
bequeathed from him.

Then came elaboration. A colleague of Crowther's (at a Massachusetts
computing firm), Don Woods, stocked up the caves with magical items and
puzzles, inspired by a role-playing game. Despite this, very many of the
elements of the original game crop up in real life. Cavers do turn back
when their carbide lamps flicker; there are mysterious markings and initials
on the cave walls, some left by the miners, some by Bishop, some by 1920s
explorers. Of course there isn't an active volcano in central Kentucky, nor
are there dragons and dwarves. But even these embellishments are, in a
sense, derived from tradition: like most of the early role-playing games,
`Adventure' owes much to J. R. R. Tolkien's `The Hobbit', and the passage
through the mountains and Moria of `The Lord of the Rings' (arguably its
most dramatic and atmospheric passage). Tolkien himself, the most
successful myth-maker of the twentieth century, worked from the example of
Icelandic, Finnish and Welsh sagas.

By 1977 tapes of `Adventure' were being circulated widely, by the Digital
user group DECUS, amongst others: taking over lunchtimes and weekends
wherever it went... but that's another story. (Tracy Kidder's fascinating
book `The Soul of a New Machine', a journalist's-eye-view of working in a
computing firm at about this time, catches it well.)


There is a moral to this tale, and a reason for telling it. The original
`Adventure' was much imitated and many traditions are derived from it. It
had no direct sequel itself but several `schools' of adventure games began
from it. `Zork' (which was to be the first Infocom game) and
`Adventureland' (the first Scott Adams game) include, for instance, a
rather passive dragon, a bear, a troll, a volcano, a maze, a lamp with
limited battery-power, a place to deposit treasures and so on. The earliest
British game of real quality, `Acheton', written at Cambridge University in
1979-80 by David Seal and Jonathan Thackray (and the first of a dozen or so
games written in Cambridge) has in addition secret canyons, water, a
wizard's house not unlike that of `Zork'. The Level 9 games began with a
good port of `Adventure' (which was generally considered at the time, and
ever since, to be in the public domain, on what legal grounds it's hard to
see) and then two sequels in similar style. All these games had a standard
prologue-middle game-end game form: the prologue is a tranquil outside
world, the middle game consists of collecting treasures in the cave, the end
is usually called a Master Game (Level 9 expanded on the `Adventure' end
game somewhat, not so well).

Of this first crop of games, `Adventure' remains the best, mainly because it
has its roots in a simulation. This is why it is so atmospheric, more so
than any other game for a decade after. The Great Underground Empire of
`Zork' is an imitation of the original, based not on real caves but on
Crowther's descriptions. `Zork' is better laid out as a game but not as
convincing, and in places a caricature: too tidy, with no blind alleys, no
secret canyons. Its mythology is similarly less well-grounded: the
long-gone Flathead dynasty, beginning in a few throwaway jokes, ended up
downright tiresome in the later sequels, when the `legend of the Flatheads'
had become, by default, the distinguishing feature of `Zorkness'. The
middle segments especially of `Zork' (now called `Zork II') make a fine
game, one of the best of the `cave' games, but `Zork' remains flawed in a
way that many of Infocom's later games were not.

In the beginning of any game is its `world', physical and imaginary,
geography and myth. The vital test takes place in the player's head: is the
picture of a continuous sweep of landscape, or of a railway-map on which a
counter moves from one node to another? `Adventure' passes this test,
however primitive some may call it. If it had not done so, the genre might
never have started.