Narrative and Spatial Form in Digital Media

Abstract

Simplistic by today’s standards, the graphical adventure genre has been overlooked in favor of the vast narratives unfolding across more recent three-dimensional virtual worlds and the complex social relationships within online environments. Yet this genre established practices in game construction that allow developers to foreground narrative experiences. Graphical adventure games made with the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion (SCUMM) engine like Ron Gilbert’s The Secret of Monkey Island were among the earliest to produce a sense of a temporal narrativity across the game’s many spaces that is not inscribed explicitly at the level of code. These games are therefore key to understanding the origins of video games as a narrative medium. This essay examines the source code to the SCUMM engine in order to show both how its spatialized data structures were used to produce temporal effects similar to those found in more familiar narrative media and how Monkey Island parodies the engine’s mechanisms.