Espen Aarseth, "Intrigue and Discourse in the Adventure Game"

(In Cybertext)

- Dungeons & Dragons as "oral cybertext" (also textual via rulebooks?)
- Adventure as folk art (Buckles)
- Elements of adventure games: Data/Processing Engines/Interface/User
- Sage advice: "study the various works that already exist and how they are played" rather than speculating/pontificating about the future aesthetic greatness of games
- Adventure has come to be understood as an ahistorical ur-text
- Alternative modes of discourse and pleasure (to traditional texts)
- Player prompts as keyholes, awaiting the right command (not "gaps" in the conventional sense)
- Aarseth seems to assume all adventure games feature some unnecessary elements or red herrings (surely some puzzle-like examples only include essential information/elements?)
- No story, only plot in adventure games (?)
- Intrigue: the player/"intriguee" must figure out the plot laid out by the intrigant
- Bizzare (and un-PC) analogy to autism?!
- Players willingly suspend capacity for normal language, abilities, etc. and accept the limited range of options offered by the game
- Intrigant (mediated by the "voice" or representation) is not the narrator or the (implied) author, rather the "whoever-it-is" in control behind the scenes, the "immanent adversary"
- Aporia/epiphany
- Adventure games take place between: Event plane/Negotiation plane/Progression plane
- "Puppet" seems to be Aarseth's proto-avatar (or at least, his proto-implied avatar)
- Aarseth overstates the difference (on a structural level) between textual and graphic adventure games - certainly some games (such as the LucasArts cycle of adventure games) are very different, but others, such as Myst, seem almost identical to text adventures beyond their audiovisual interface