Even in text games like Adventure

In classic adventure games, you spend a lot of time walking. The world would usually be divided into stage-sized screens which your avatar must move across, at walking pace, to reach an edge and the next linked area. These animations can seem painfully slow by today’s standards. Some games, including parts of Loom, would zoom out to sprawling vistas to make environments seem especially epic, your character reduced to a cluster of tiny pixels lost in immensity, the journey to the edge of the screen even more drawn out. Even in text games like Adventure or point-and-click games like Myst, where movement is instantaneous, players still spent much of their time navigating complex environments, retracing their steps to return to earlier areas looking for clues, unsure where to go next. Mainstream game design has moved toward minimizing these down times, adding mechanics like fast travel or quest markers to get players straight to the next point of interest, another filing away of the adventure game’s rough corners.

But readers cannot easily return to the overview in order to get a sense of where they are or how much is left to read. In trying to create texts that do not “privilege” any one order of reading or interpretive framework, the postmodernists are privileging confusion itself.

Its lasting appeal as both a story and a game pattern derives from the melding of a cognitive problem (finding the path) with an emotionally symbolic pattern (facing what is frightening and unknown).