In Search of Monkey Island

We’re a whiny bunch, adventure gamers, always reminiscing about the “good old days” and bemoaning the new games that can never quite capture the magic of the classics. I’ll let you in on a little secret: We’re getting dumber, too. Okay, maybe it’s not fair to pin this on the adventure gaming community at large, but I, for one, am getting dumber. There was a time, back in the 90s, when I could play through a game on my own and make it all the way to the end. I spent hour upon hour mapping out screens and puzzling over riddles. I dedicated myself to months of perseverance and hard work. The fact is, back when hint books cost ten dollars I didn’t have and the Internet wasn’t around yet, I was a whole lot smarter. And finishing a game, after all that effort, was a hell of a lot more satisfying.

Twelve years and a college degree later, I can’t seem to make it through any game on my own. A mere twenty minutes of wandering and I start stomping my feet under the desk. Next thing I know I’m online clicking through hints. Worst-case scenario, I give up on the game and move on to another. I’m not sure how this happened to me. It’s not as if games are getting harder. Pointing and clicking took a lot more effort before hotspots and smart cursors came along. Negotiating with text parsers was even more of a challenge. So why is it that I had the patience to finish games like Myst and King’s Quest 6 as a kid in the 90s, but now, although I’m fully capable of holding down a job and doing my own laundry and paying my credit card bills on time, I can’t manage to play through Syberia or a Law & Order game without outside help? Am I really getting dumber? Or is there something about the way my brain works now that makes my gaming experiences intrinsically different from how they were back then?

When my boyfriend suggested spending our vacation on a houseboat, I saw the ideal opportunity to test myself. We’d be on Lake Shasta for six days with no television or cell phone coverage, no Internet, no contact with the outside world. I could load up an adventure on my laptop and bring it into a controlled environment. This vacation would be an adventure gaming experiment, the perfect chance to play a game like I did in the old days—start to finish, with no Internet a click away when I got stuck.

To up the ante, I decided to choose a LucasArts title. I’m a self-proclaimed Sierra junkie, but I’ve had much less exposure to LucasArts games. Considering I’d be spending the week “at sea” (or “at lake,” as it were), why not The Secret of Monkey Island? All I knew about the game was that it had something or other to do with pirates. Seemed perfect.

The log that follows contains my observations during the course of this experiment. I didn’t know, when I started, what playing an old game on a laptop in the middle of a lake would reveal. I really hoped it would reveal something, though—I would be wasting a lot of time that I could spend tanning if it didn’t.

Day 1

Lake Shasta is about a four-hour drive from our house in San Francisco. It was almost sundown by the time we were settled on the boat so we didn’t go very far before docking. As I write this, Geoff is making rum punch from a recipe he found on the Internet before we left. We’re just like a couple of pirates!

I have a confession to make: I did save a walkthrough onto the laptop before we left home. I just couldn’t stand the thought of getting stuck early in the game and wasting the whole week. Maybe I’m a little insecure, too, about my ability to progress without a safety net. I’m not going to refer to it, though. Not once. Pirate’s honor.

The boat’s AC power only works when the generator is turned on, and the generator uses up gas. I will have to use the laptop battery until it runs out, then recharge it when the boat’s motor isn’t in use. Geoff is still in mild disbelief that I brought a computer along on our vacation. The thing is, he likes boats. I like adventure games. This way we can both be happy.

I felt bad starting my game on our first night of vacation, so we played a few rounds of Scrabble instead. At one point Geoff leaned over to blow a mosquito off the board and ended up blowing all the tiles onto the floor. He swore he didn’t do it on purpose even though I happened to be winning. I went on to win the next two games anyway. Maybe I’m not getting dumber after all.

Day 2

Fired up Monkey Island after breakfast. The interface is different from what I’m used to, but the premise is all too familiar: Some guy shows up in some place with dreams of becoming something he’s not. The game might as well be called Pirate’s Quest.

I finished the first of the three tests and dug up the “buried treasure.” Names I’ve heard so many times—Guybrush, Elaine, LeChuck—are finally falling into context. So far I’m impressed with how much I’ve been able to accomplish without a single hint. That monkey dance map would have had me stumped for weeks if I’d played this game when it first came out. Maybe after so many years of adventuring, decoding cryptic maps has become second nature.

I’m grounded for now—the battery on the laptop died just as I was pitching tainted meat to the pack of poodles outside the governor’s mansion. I can’t charge it up again until later when we run the generator. Oh well. Guess I’ll have to go lie in the sun.