What is an adventure?

 

I intend this blog to be about two things: adventures, both fictional and real, and items that are in some way collectable. So I ought to start with a discussion of what makes an adventure.

 

There is no fixed definition of an adventure, but a review of the existing explanations suggests an adventure has three critical components.

 

First is the unusual. The protagonist doesn’t necessarily have to travel to a different land, but they do have to be taken well outside their normal routines. Stories that are intimate studies of normal people living out normal lives, like Middlemarch, aren’t adventures. (The intro of Middlemarch actually says its protagonist would have been well suited to a grand adventure, but she was born at the wrong time and one never came her way.)

 

Second is risk. If it’s too comfortable, if it’s a luxury tour, it’s not an adventure. That said, extreme levels of risk, one wrong move and you’re dead levels, tend not to be sustainable. The Lord of the Rings is a very high-risk adventure, but even there the short bursts of extreme danger are balanced with long interludes where the characters recover in safe havens.  

 

Third is agency. That means the protagonist actively affects the course of their adventure. Where they have gone to a different land, they usually come back having changed it as well as being changed by it. So a pure dream or hallucination is not an adventure. 

 

So let's look at how adventures manifest. Really there are three forms: real-life, non-interactive fiction, and interactive fiction. 

 

Real-life adventures tend to revolve around travel and around "extreme", adrenaline-pumping activities. The emphasis is on going out of one's comfort zone, as opposed to having a relaxed break from normality.

 

Adventure has always been a major genre of fiction, going right back to The Odyssey. One could argue - in fact I will - that adventure is particularly well suited to fictionalisation, because the writer can condense out the boring bits and heighten reality to whatever extent, perhaps to include supernatural elements. (As opposed to, for example, comedy, where "you had to be there" for many of the most comedic moments.)

Interactive fiction really dates from the 1970s, with the development of the Dungeons and Dragons tabletop game, the Choose your own adventure series of books, and Will Crowther's Adventure computer game all around the same time. Yes there were earlier types of interactive entertainment, but none that really tried to turn the player into the protagonist of a nonetheless fictional adventure. This category therefore sits somewhat between the previous two, and is the one I intend to explore in most detail on this blog...