OPERATE SHOVEL ON CANDELABRA

Adventure Quest has the bravery to place itself in an interesting sort of Chinese finger trap. On the one hand, if it were to constrain itself to interactions and scenarios appropriate to its source material and never go beyond that (with perhaps a bit of straining at the seams for entertainment value) then a certain percentage of the audience would feel that it lacks ambition, or was veering into the awkward and perhaps performance art realm. The alternative, which is the choice that it in fact made, is to treat the characters as capable of breaking out of their artificial, 1983 era technological constraints, and resist. Assert their own reality. Forcefully. Unfortunately, perhaps another portion of the audience (that I happened to find myself falling into) found this material rather trying. It felt a little hollow, uncreative, and perhaps the "easy" direction for it to go.

At the beginning of the play, the hero conforms to the normalcy of his world. His movements are somewhat stilted, and he constantly shouts out commands that are answered back by a disembodied voice. LOOK. TALK TO GUARD. GIVE ROPE TO GUARD. Though perhaps not everyone in the audience would have appreciated it as much as I may have (although judging from the intensity of the crowd's response and applause during the very brief scene settings I'd have to conclude that people really did enjoy that element of it as well), I felt that the play was strongest when it embraced the terribly strange confines of its existence. An existence where, upon navigating a Byzantine dialogue tree to receive a desultory item, the only appropriate response is a brief, barely perceptible expression of satisfaction, an abrupt about face, and SAVE. The first time that happened, it felt really wonderful in a way that would be hard to articulate to someone that doesn't view themselves as a gamer.

Anyway, my musings upon returning home from viewing the performance on its last night. And, um, this was the first piece of theater I've seen. Which seems to horrify people. Look, I've read enough Mamet essays to know quite a lot about plays! I've just never, like, been to one. Well, until now.

Verdict: yes.











Ah, another support for my view that Adventure Quest was mainly driven by its adherence to its constraints rather than its attempts to resist them (in its prolonged exploration of the protagonist's anguish over his trend of murdering people, which is what every reasonable person knows is the only possible result from a simple experiment like USE DAGGER ON CULT MEMBER) is that every supporting character remained locked into the "system" laid down by the mechanics (that is to say they had an extremely limited range of verbal responses toward any given statement, and an even more limited stable of physical motions available to perform, essentially existing on a 5-10 second, very unnerving loop [the women, especially, really nailed this element of their performances with absolutely mind blowing smiles, wide eyes, and hilarious exaggerations of feminine swaying]) remained, to me, the absolute backbone of the play. Hearing a piece of canned dialogue the third time was somehow more entertaining than hearing the protagonist question his lack of memory. Dude. LOOK AT MEMORY. Or better yet, READ JOURNAL.

This play also had the great fortune to follow on something of an adventure game resurgence. No? Everyone loves to bring out the old trope about how niche the genre is, and make some snide remarks regarding Doom ruthlessly butchering the odd, peaceful point-and-clickers.

But does this really still stand? Lately on most of the news portals there's been comments on some new Monkey Island thing (that I obviously didn't investigate very thoroughly), and further news regarding some kind of Lucas Arts/Steam un-archiving of its collection of classic SCUMM titles.

Now, to me, that didn't mean bupkis. Adventure games have never really been my thing. Myst, yes, but that was unavoidable in that time, and not repeated. I tried Day of the Tentacle, and really wanted to like it, but moving a cursor with directional arrows and an overlong verb set makes every object an absolute nightmare. Maybe I'm just a little too young. Maybe I was playing Quake. Probably.



What's really weird is that I've just recently been starting to explore a game that shares a lot of structural and dynamical similarities with Myst (something that, confusingly, I've never seen done before), and another that channels a machine I've never known to exhibit an aesthetic I can't not love with a gameplay system both utterly alien and of course intuitively familiar (with the perfect amount of verb sets and descriptive flavor text). And they're both free. And the second (a true black and white game, finally!) doesn't even require a download. Embrace the lack of save, my friend. When it's over, it's over. Enjoy your stupid deaths. Some of them might even scare you.

We'll see if I can come up with something interesting and worthwhile to say about either beyond that brief, mysterious pitch. But the point was, go adventure games.