Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 7. Adventure
Traveling is one of the most memorable and exciting experiences a person can have.
Newdiscoveries,unusualdetails,andpermanentsurprisesmakeyougladandhappy.
The life becomes so real and tangible. This is why adventure games will always be
topical, since they let you travel in virtual worlds, evoking pleasant emotions.
Beginning of a journey
Early prerequisites of adventure games can be found in postmodernist experiments
with storytelling, which took place long before modern computers were born. Once
writers understood that the structure of a topic was not fixed, but could be very flex-
ible, they were given a chance to create a new type of literature: non-linear stories
with several plots. Readers only needed to get some new directions to work with
chapters in a topic; a new map to travel a topic was required.
When you are talking about experimenting with a narrative, of course, the first name
that comes to mind is that of the Argentine magician, a fabulous writer,
Jorge Luis
Borges
. In 1941, he wrote a short story called
An Examination of the Work of Herbert
Quain
where he talked about the literary heritage of a fictional novelist, who among
others created a novel called
April March
. It featured a structure that can be called
a tree of events. The plot can be constructed based on nine alternative beginnings
that lead to a single finale. Thus, there were 13 chapters in that fictional novel with
nine different versions of the beginning, three possibilities of intermediate events, and
one finale.
Jorge Luis Borges
successfully demonstrated a model of a branch-based
structure of the story.
