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.

Myst’s images were largely static because it required offline rendering to create worlds beautiful enough to hold up to long scrutiny, while small bits of spot movement were added via Quicktime video to award attentiveness, creating interesting environmental details such as lapping waves or flittering butterflies. Doom’s engine, by contrast, creates lower-fidelity images in constant motion: the player will look at any one thing for only moments, while constantly racing through the environment fighting enemies who are also in constant motion.

Odysseus’s description is constructed so that we can enjoy each individual step and gain increasing pleasure as the overall plan becomes clear. The story is as much a riddle as Oedipus’s, but the answer to the riddle is not in a single word; it is in a series of beautifully orchestrated steps, an elegant algorithm for defeating giants.

Computer-based journey stories offer a new way of savoring exactly this pleasure, a pleasure that is intensified by uniting the problem solving with the active process of navigation.

With the invention of the movie camera, the journey story was again revived, and its variations include everything from the comic (e.g., Buster Keaton’s The General) to the cowboy melodrama (e.g., Stagecoach, The Searchers) and the feminist buddy film (Thelma and Louise). When television came along, journey stories (Wagon Train, Route 66, The Fugitive, and, of course, Star Trek) were among the most successful series. (22)