ALH Online Review, Series VII 1
Anastasia Salter, What is Your Quest?: From Adventure Games to Interactive Books (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 200 pp.
Reviewed by Tara Fickle, University of Oregon
Despite their formative impact on innumerable adolescents who came of age during the
1980s and early 90s, the adventure genre of computer and video games, defined by such
classics as Zork, The Secret of Monkey Island, and King’s Quest, had until very recently
been dismissed as a moribund species, a brief blip in the history of video games. Yet
that epitaph, Anastasia Salter argues, may have been a premature one, obscuring the
genre’s continued influence as both storytelling and gaming platform. Indeed, this
largely ignored archive of “abandonware,” in Salter’s account, has produced as heirs
some of today’s most commercially successful forms of interactive media, particularly
those “edutainment” applications which combine reading and playing through touchbased devices like the iPad. Reframing these convergences of book and game as a sign
not of literature’s precipitous decline but of its ever greater significance, Salter
celebrates the long history of such hybrid cultural productions and highlights their
expansive potential for enhanced creativity and collaboration.
The adventure game genre, which takes its name from the 1976 text-based computer
game Adventure (later known as Colossal Cave Adventure), involves a single player
becoming the protagonist in an interactive story, utilizing a combination of puzzlesolving and world exploration to propel the narrative forward. While adventure games
share with other genres, notably role-playing games (RPGs), a focus on story-driven
gameplay and the use of avatars, they tend to feature comparatively “sedate and
cerebral” (21) gameplay, in which combat or reflex-coordination challenges (think Pong
or Pac-man) do not play a major role. In the introduction to What’s your Quest?, Salter
sketches out some of the ways in which the genre’s emphasis on story over action was
informed by and, in turn, might inform, theories of narrative and readership, with a
particular focus on the “interactive” elements of digital storytelling which transform the
reader into a potential cocreator of the text in a literal sense.
The first chapter contextualizes the adventure game genre by examining some of its
predecessors, including tabletop fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons;
“gamebooks,” commonly known as “Choose Your Own Adventure” books; and textbased games and interactive fiction, including Zork and a number of online Multi-User
Dungeons (MUDs). Salter considers this latter genre’s purely text-based interface as a
direct precursor to Mystery House (1980, Sierra), the game which she considers to have
truly “launched” (36) the adventure genre by incorporating primitive graphics in the
form of line drawings. The innovations and mechanics of Mystery House and its
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contemporaries are explored in Chapter 2, while Chapter 3 applies these insights to an
in-depth study of the King’s Quest Series, also created by Sierra.
These early chapters’ focus on the mechanics underlying the adventure game’s
interactive narrative experience, particularly Salter’s illuminating discussions of the
save-game function and the role of orality, distinguishes Quest itself from other
scholarship on game history—much of which, like Jesper Juul’s Half-Real or the edited
collection Gaming as Culture, tends to focus on action-arcade games or role-playing
games. While in conversation with these traditions, Quest follows more closely in the
footsteps of scholars of interactive fiction and electronic literature, with the early
chapters demonstrating particular affinities to—and frequently invoking—Espen
Aarseth’s Cybertext, Nick Montfort’s Twisty little passages, and Katherine Hayles’ Writing
Machines. Like these scholars, Salter insists that “traditional measures of narrative (or
the expectations we bring to the literary canon) are insufficient when considering
storytelling that takes alternative forms” (8). Her efforts to articulate the unique
properties of the liminal space “between book and game” (8) through sustained
attention to the subtle but significant distinctions between, for example, “platform” and
“medium,” or “orality” and “literacy,” constitute a valuable contribution to this nascent
but influential critical conversation.
The second half of Quest is devoted to historicizing and documenting the rich and
multifaceted forms of “participatory culture”—a term Salter borrows from Media
Studies scholar Henry Jenkins—which the adventure game genre has made possible.
She identifies and dissects an impressive array of “fan-communal” (159) productions,
from novelistic adaptations to crowd-sourced projects to modified or “reloaded”
versions of the original games, all of which she considers emblematic of the adventure
game genre’s ability to narrow the distinction between player and reader, and
ultimately between consumer and producer. Those who are interested in studying,
teaching, or developing games will find themselves well-served by Salter’s accessible
discussion in these latter chapters of a number of free- or low-cost software and tools in
the public domain, such as Adventure Game Studio, which made many of the fan
productions she discusses possible.
The seven body chapters ultimately coalesce into a compelling counternarrative which
Salter uses. At the close, to challenge reigning assumptions about the sui generis nature
of “magical and revolutionary” (157) twenty-first-century devices like eBook readers
and the Apple iPad. Demonstrating the indebtedness of the technology, and attributing
its explosive success, to the legacy of the adventure game genre, the conclusion notes
the latter’s influence in some of the earliest iPad marketing strategies, like the
interactive picture books included at launch to showcase the device’s potential as a
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platform for media interaction as well as consumption. As the earliest adventure games
once did for Gen X and Y, touch-sensitive devices like the iPad are, in Salter’s
estimation, profoundly changing an entire generation’s developing relationship to
storytelling and literature as such; for it is, ultimately, not so much through the machine
itself but in “the human networks enabled by the machine that literature is being
reformed” (175).
The salience and timeliness of this ambitious and wide-reaching intervention will be
immediately obvious to those who have maintained even a passing interest in the game
industry over the last decade. Internet-based digital distribution platforms like Steam
(2003) and Good old Games (2008), which allow users to download and play thousands
of different commercial and independent games new and old, have soared in
popularity; and, if the list of Steam’s most popular user-submitted tags is any
indication, a significant percentage of the service’s 125 million users are seeking out
games that satisfy the same desires Salter attributes to the adventure game genre: those
that are “Story rich,” “Retro,” and even “Difficult.” Indeed, Salter’s focus on the King’s
Quest series seems almost prescient: in 2015, an independently developed
“reimagining” of the series was released on Steam to great anticipation and largely
favorable reviews. In short, just as Salter considers fans heroic for keeping a
commercially moribund genre alive, her own efforts to recuperate the genre for critical
exploration have equally far-reaching potential. One expects to see the threads she lays
out picked up by scholars in a number of disciplines, particularly in nontraditional
areas like the digital humanities.
To offer one example: while readers who grew up during the golden age of the
adventure game genre will likely find especial pleasure in reading Quest—particularly
its nine pages of full-color illustrations—those academic readers who came into critical
consciousness during this era will also likely feel a pleasurable twinge of nostalgia
while reading the book. For Quest implicitly makes a strong case for a second
convergence and historiography: that of interactive fiction and reader-response
theory—itself usually considered, if at all, an equally small blip in the twentieth-century
history of literary criticism. I am thinking particularly of our own scholarly version of
“abandonware:” in the dusty recesses of JStor, one can discover a remarkable fossil
record of interactive fiction’s flirtation with serious academic criticism of the past, from
Anthony Niesz and Norman Holland’s essay “Interactive Fiction” (1984) in Critical
Inquiry to Richard Ziegfeld’s “Interactive Fiction: A New Literary Genre” (1989) in New
Literary History. Like Salter, these critics seized on the literary potential of computermediated storytelling, and their insights were arguably central to the climate of readerresponse criticism (à la Iser and Fish) circulating at the time. Indeed, the concept of the
text as inherently interactive made early digital artifacts an especially fecund site for the
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consideration of audience and theories of reception— arguably laying the ground for
what would later become the brief but hot-blooded debates between ludology and
narratology in the 1990s and 2000s. Quest allows us to recognize and pursue such
overlooked intellectual connections and scholarly hybridity and offers a model for
considering their enduring impact on the current field of literary criticism and
production.