Sitting in our first group meeting to discuss what we wanted to do with our video game web site, Shawn asked me what games I liked. Slightly embarrassed, I admitted that I didn’t play video games, but I was interested in gaming as a genre. Apparently, convinced some miraculous transformation would take place and I would suddenly remember some distant video gaming experiences that were floating deep in the recesses of my remembered self, Shawn told me to think about it and in the meantime, do a little research. Over the course of the meeting, I listened to Shawn, Jeff, and even Barb, the other non-gamer, talk about video games with a depth and engagement I didn’t realize was possible. I remembered Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros., but what did those games have in common with narrative theories?

Without warning, I remembered one game I played for a short time in high school, a game that I had thoroughly enjoyed. If I remembered correctly, it had a narrative plot behind it. I announced to the group that I just might have something more to contribute than my honed researching skills. When I mentioned The 7^th Guest, the game from high school, I found myself knee-deep in video game history. They told me about the entire movement of point and click puzzle games and how that video game form is rapidly declining in popularity. This short discussion got my proverbial wheels turning, and I decided to find out more about the game and the form of The 7^th Guest and why the rest of the world didn’t enjoy it as much as I had.

When CD-ROM drives first became popular on the market, video game designers and developers were determined to show the world all of the amazing things the drive could do (Jong 1). Many companies started, "to develop . . . software that aim[ed] to harness the capacity of the CD-ROM to deliver the multimedia capability of the home computer" (Jong 1). Games like The 7^th Guest and Myst were the industry’s initial answer to the CD-ROM craze. Today, games such as these are commonly referred to as point and click puzzle games because the game player merely points and clicks the cursor on the screen to move through the game, which is basically a collection of logic-based puzzles. Once all the puzzles are successfully solved, the game is over. As mentioned above, two of the most widely known games of this type were The 7^th Guest and Myst. Although both games were very similar in purpose and graphic appearance, The 7^th Guest fizzled out and died while Myst turned into a multimillion dollar seller, selling 3.5 million units by 1997 (Weil 9), and spawning a complete series of Myst installments (Osborne 1). How can two games so similar in format, purpose, sound, and appearance conclude in so strikingly different places? The reason lies in Myst’s more emotionally compelling narrative structure, a narrative that made audiences care about the game and its outcome.

The logic-based puzzles in both The 7^th Guest and Myst were comparable in difficulty; they "typically range from easy to moderately difficult and require general cleverness or a little brainstorming" (Mar 2). The puzzles are imbedded in the games’ settings and are revealed to the audience one by one as the player navigates through the game. Graphically, the game designers "took advantage of the CD’s huge storage capacity to create a gaming experience quite unlike any other" (Osborne 1). The visual aspects of the games are outstanding. For example, while "walking" through the Stauf mansion in The 7^th Guest, players are confronted with a setting so detailed that "Each wall, piece of furniture, and object is intricately and realistically presented" (Mar 2). Both games have strong soundtracks that set tone, mood, and atmosphere in the games (Griffiths 2). The music done for the new CD-ROM format was compelling because "It had never been done before. A new medium, a new format, a new game structure" (Sanger 6). All of these aspects were imbedded in relatively simple narrative texts.

The 7^th Guest is centered around the fictional story of Henry Stauf, the creator of Wonderworld Toys and Puzzles, and owner of the infamous Stauf mansion, in which you, the player known as the Ego, are trapped. While inside, you witness the ghostly deaths of the six other guests and are left to "foil Old Man Stauf’s devilish puzzles and solve the mystery of the secret seventh guest" (Mar 1). The original Myst is relatively similar to The 7^th Guest. The player is trapped on a deserted island and is compelled to explore the island while solving puzzles in order to save the family also trapped on the island.

If the games are so similar, why did Myst develop such a strong staying power and The 7^th Guest and its sequel, The 11^th Hour, were merely able to write themselves "onto a page in the computer gaming history" (Jong 1) never to be played again. As mentioned above, the reason lies in Myst’s emotionally compelling narrative as opposed to the emotionally distant narrative of The 7^th Guest. In The 7^th Guest, players are compelled by only a sense of personal satisfaction in completing the game. Other than gaining the rather anticlimactic identity of the mysterious 7^th guest, there is no other emotionally compelling incentive to continue play. In Myst, the fate of the family rests in the player’s hands. Without the player, the family is deserted on the island with not chance of survival. The audience, driven by a desire to save the family, continues tackling the puzzles because of the emotionally compelling nature of the narrative.

This rather simple narrative discrepancy in The 7^th Guest and Myst, to some extent, explains my own experiences with The 7^th Guest. I only played the game for a month or two until I found more pressing and entertaining things to do. I wasn’t concerned about the beautiful ghostly figures in the game. There was absolutely nothing I could do to prevent the murders, and discovering the identity of the 7^th guest was not going to bring the characters back to life, characters I actually didn’t care about at all. The characters are dark and mysterious; the audience is invited to make suppositions about their limited moral characters throughout the game as the full motion video clips expose them as reprehensible people. As a member of the emotionally detached audience, it was much easier to push the exit button and leave the game when I was tired rather than persevere through the game. I knew that the beautiful images, scenery, and full motion video clips would be there whenever I wanted them, and in the meantime, there was absolutely nothing I could do about the group of dead people haunting the house. I never played Myst, but if I had, it is possible that if I reflected on the fate of the family still trapped on the island, I, their only hope, would have been more compelled to either continue play or at least return more often in order to save them.

This difference in narrative, when examined as a part of the whole game design, genre, and purpose, seems rather minute. It is easy to doubt that the emotional involvement an audience has with the characters in a video game could predict the success and staying power of any game. However, this comparative analysis of The 7^th Guest and Myst suggests that this narrative discrepancy is the reason Myst is "one of the biggest-selling computer games of all time" (Osborne 1) and The 7^th Guest is comfortably tucked away in the back of a file drawer in my parents’ guest room.

Works Cited