Punchline behind the hotspot : structures of humor, puzzle, and sexuality in adventure games (with Leisure Suit Larry in Several Wrong Places)

Abstract

Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during the embryonic era of computers, hackers, and all that digitalized punk jazz, who would have guessed that one of the period’s juvenile narrative arts—“interactive fiction” it was called at the time—would soon lead to a pop cultural revolution? A young scholar named Mary Ann Buckles did. Having spent years analyzing a piece of software that the present history knows as the most influential of all computerized text-based playthings, Adventure, in 1985, Buckles eventually completed her doctoral dissertation with a first-ever focus on something that had thus far been struggling to be taken seriously by cultural critics: storygames running on computers. [Excerpt]