Introducing My Daughter to The Secret of Monkey Island Was the Best Parenting Decision I Made During the Pandemic
Like many parents across the US, on March 13, 2020, I became a kindergarten teacher. That is, due to COVID-19, my daughter’s school shut down and my wife and I suddenly had to figure out how to maintain our full-time jobs as well as our sanity while taking care of two small children without any outside help.
As we quickly learned, 6-year-olds don’t have a ton of patience for video chat with groups of 20 students, so our school provided only 90 minutes of live “instruction” each week. That left a lot of dead air for mom and dad to fill. Most days, we didn’t have anything left in the tank after spending six hours persuading our kid to do three hours of assigned work in Google Classroom.
Even before the pandemic, as parents, it was tough to figure out how to impart when to “follow the rules” versus “challenge authority.” Certainly while we were in the midst of shelter-in-place, this tension was pushed to its limits between “Can you please just do what we ask without asking questions so mom and dad can get some work done?” and “All of our kids’ social interactions were abruptly digitized overnight so maybe can we cut them some more slack when they start acting out?” In a world where my daughter had suddenly lost control over everything, I thought that playing a game where she got to make all of the decisions might be a healthy escape.
In my mind, there was only one choice — an adventure game I loved dearly from my own childhood: The Secret of Monkey Island.
In this article, I hope to explain:
- What an adventure game is, how it differs from other types of games, and what makes it ideal for young kids.
- Why The Secret of Monkey Island is the perfect adventure game to start with (and how to get it).
- How to play an adventure game with your child.
Let’s dive in!
What is an “Adventure Game?”
To start, it is important to understand what qualifies as an “adventure game” and why it is a great fit for young kids. The Wikipedia definition captures it well:
An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle-solving.
Equally important to the interactive story and puzzle-solving design elements that define an adventure game are two that are forbidden: quick reflexes and irrecoverable actions (such as “death”). Note that not all “adventure” games satisfy this definition exactly, but the best ones generally do. As compared to other genres:
- An action game often emphasizes quick reflexes more than anything else. This includes “platformers” such as Super Mario Bros. or first-person shooters such as Quake.
- An action-adventure game is a hybrid of the action and adventure genres, though the balance between the two varies. The game may have a strong focus on one or the other.
- A role-playing game (RPG) is arguably the most similar to an adventure game, though it often has some element of “combat” and/or “[health] metrics” that are not found in a pure adventure game. If it feels like an adventure game, but you are required to “level up” as part of the quest, it’s arguably an RPG.
- A puzzle game is, expectedly, about puzzle-solving, but the puzzles often have the same general structure and increase in difficulty over the course of the game (e.g., Angry Birds, Portal). Although puzzle games are also friendly to those who want to exercise their brains rather than their reflexes, the puzzles are far less varied and there is no significant story component, as compared to adventure games.
Based on this categorization, trying to picture an “adventure game” might evoke the image of this [fictional!] computer game that Tom Hanks plays in the movie Big (1988):
and…this is fairly representative of the genre at the time. Though one thing that happens in Big is that young Josh Baskin is too slow to hit Enter after typing THROW THERMAL POD and his character succumbs to a fatal blow from an ice scepter. Although typing and timing are elements of some adventure games, this is not always the case. Generally speaking, if there is a puzzle in an adventure game that requires quick reflexes, you get unlimited attempts to try again rather than a single failure resulting in death.
Indeed, the creator of The Secret of Monkey Island (which we’ll get to!), Ron Gilbert, published an essay, “Why Adventure Games Suck” in 1989, enumerating a set of design guidelines to help maintain the “suspension of disbelief” that makes these games so great. In many ways, the brilliance of the adventure games that came out of LucasArts during the ‘90s was a reaction to the frustrations of Sierra’s adventure games (which, despite their design flaws, frequently outsold LucasArts, at least in the US, but more on that later).
A key word in this definition is story, and this design element, more than any other, is arguably what makes adventure games resonate with children. Think about how many times one of your kids has asked, “Will you please tell me a story?” As explained in Made to Stick (a book that I have personally found tremendously helpful in improving my professional communications), Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories are powerful tools to draw in your audience and land a message that sticks with them after they leave the room.
Certainly in my own experiences playing with my daughter, the desire to find out “what happens next” in the story is what motivated her persevere when she was stuck during a challenging part, which brings us to the other term I call out in the definition: puzzle-solving!
Generally speaking, the puzzles in an adventure game require some amount of logic and creativity, but are not “academic challenges” and therefore are generally accessible to all ages. (Though one notable exception is the use of puns, since those often require some minimum level of sophistication with language.) For example, consider this classic puzzle that can be solved by a kindergartner, yet will stump many adults:
As part of my personal journey in rediscovering adventure games, it has also been interesting figuring out what doesn’t work for kids (or at least my kids). As noted, action games are at the opposite end of the spectrum. If you’re curious to learn more and want a real page-turner, I strongly recommend the book Masters of Doom, which details the genesis of id Software. For the uninitiated (as I was), id is generally credited with inventing the first-person shooter genre, as it was responsible for Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, among others. In the book, co-founder of id, John Carmack (whose influence on the history of computer graphics cannot be overstated) is quoted during a brainstorming session for Doom:
“Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie; it’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”
As the story of id Software unfolds, co-founders John Carmack and John Romero ultimately go their separate ways. Romero, believing that his talents as a game designer can make up for the loss of his wunderkind technical co-founder, ends up falling miserably short in his next video game venture.
Not being well-versed in video game history, when I first read Masters of Doom in 2016, my main takeaway was: “Wow, id just kept winning based on having better and better graphics — I guess that must be the secret to video games today!” And then I realized that in 2020, I found myself engrossed by games where the character’s legs were indistinguishable from the wall:
At first, this was a little hard to reconcile, but this only serves to underscore how different the adventure and action genres are. As discussed later, the simpler graphics of some of these adventure games is part of what made them so fun, as they invited more imagination on the part of the player. Further, without dazzling graphics to fall back on, the stories and puzzles had to be top-notch to keep people engaged.
Why Should I Have My Kid Play The Secret of Monkey Island?
When it comes to famous first lines, “Call me Ishmael” ain’t got nothin’ on “Hi! My name’s Guybrush Threepwood, and I want to be a pirate!” Whereas the former is reminiscent of sleepy afternoons in high school English class, the latter sparks an electric mix of intrigue, excitement, and adventure.
The game’s manual provides the following introduction:
In The Secret of Monkey Island, you play the role of Guybrush Threepwood, a young man who has just hit the shores of Mêlée Island (somewhere in the Caribbean). Our naive hero’s travels have led him to Mêlée Island in a quest to fulfill his life’s ambition…to become a fierce, swashbuckling, bloodthirsty Pirate. Unbeknownst to Guybrush, however, there have been some strange happenings in the area surrounding Mêlée Island and the more mysterious Monkey Island. As he walks into this maelstrom of mystery, Guybrush will soon be very aware that things are not what they appear to be, that even bloodthirsty pirates can be scared, and that there’s more to being a pirate than swinging a sword and drinking grog!
Now who wants to be a pirate???
There are a lot of adventure games out there. Compared to The Secret of Monkey Island (hereinafter referred to as SoMI), most adventure games have fancy graphics, voice actors, and can be downloaded easily onto your mobile phone or tablet. SoMI has none of these things! (OK, the 2009 remake of SoMI has two of these three things, but we’ll get to why I discourage starting with that one later.) Given all that, why am I pushing SoMI so hard?
[Optional] A Not-so-Brief History Lesson
This section explains where SoMI fits in adventure game history and why it was such a breath of fresh air compared to those that came before it. If video game history isn’t your thing, feel free to skip this section and go on to the next one that explains why SoMI is a great game to play with kids.
The “adventure game” genre is so-named for Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as, simply, Adventure), the first text adventure game, released in 1976. There were no graphics: it printed text to the screen describing your situation and you had to reply with the action you wished to take. The original Adventure had only 193 vocabulary words, which meant that it was common that what you typed in might easily be understood by a human, yet was incomprehensible to Adventure, triggering a frustrating cycle of trial-and-error. (For example, enter building to enter the building at the start of the game does not work, but go building does.) Making things worse, it was fairly easy for your character to die, forcing you to start over. Although this introduced the world to interactive fiction, the gameplay needed refinement.
One of the more well-known text adventure games inspired by Adventure was Zork. Early versions of the source code dating back to 1977 have been recovered, though the first commercial release (Zork I) was in 1980, followed by Zork II in 1981 and Zork III in 1982. Like Adventure, Zork did not offer any graphics, but its text parser was markedly more sophisticated. For example, it was no longer limited to simple noun-verb commands (hit troll), but could tolerate more natural language (hit the troll with the Elvish sword).
In 1984, Sierra On-Line (who would become the industry leader in adventure games in its time) released King’s Quest, which was a massive step forward in the genre, being the first adventure game to introduce (gasp!) graphical animation into the game world so you could actually, you know, have your character walk around. To its credit, the game world also simulated depth perception, so you could walk behind objects and whatnot, so some consider it the first “3D-animated” adventure game. (Although Wikipedia may be correct in that King’s Quest was considered “3D” in 1984, it would most certainly be classified as 2D today.)
Despite these graphical advances, King’s Quest (and Sierra adventure games, in general) maintained the use of textual commands to control your character’s behavior. Although Zork verified that it was possible to implement a more tolerant parser with the technology at the time, users still often found themselves playing guessing games with what the computer could understand. Further, Sierra games were also known for having a multitude of ways for your character to die. Sometimes the story line was clever and the resulting death scene was humorous, but more often than not, it was for something seemingly innocuous or petty. For example, Sierra’s Police Quest was often criticized [or possibly praised, if the audience was a member of law enforcement] for being more focused on punishing the player for failing to follow proper police procedure than encouraging creative puzzle-solving.
Fortunately, rival game studio Lucasfilm Games/LucasArts (which was indeed an initiative spawned by George Lucas) made a hard break from the Sierra mold with their introduction of Maniac Mansion in 1987. It was a “point-and-click” adventure game, as your character could be controlled exclusively by the mouse. As an alternative to text parsers of yore, it offered a fixed set of 15 on-screen verbs that you could select with the mouse, followed by clicking on either an object in your inventory or an object on the screen to act on, thereby constructing a command for your character to execute. To find out which pixels on the screen corresponded to actionable objects, you had to select the What is verb and move the mouse around until you stumbled upon something you could interact with.
Maniac Mansion revolutionized adventure games in many respects, but one notable design element that remained unchallenged was character death/dead ends. That is, characters in Maniac Mansion were indeed susceptible to death (though not nearly as easily as compared to contemporary Sierra games); but more frustrating, you could easily make choices early in the game that would make the game unbeatable, which you would not discover until the very end, if at all. Co-designer/programmer of Maniac Mansion, Ron Gilbert [arguably one the most renowned game designers and programmers of point-and-click adventure games today], would address this in his subsequent work.
At LucasArts, Gilbert went on to work on Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (1988), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure (1989), and finally, The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) followed up by Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge (1991) a year later. In terms of gameplay, both Zak McKracken and Last Crusade were similar to Maniac Mansion, but SoMI offered some material improvements:
- Early releases of SoMI had 12 verbs, but eventually got down to 9, as Turn on, Turn off, and Walk To were dropped.
- The reduction to 9 verbs also saw the textual inventory list replaced with a graphical one!
- Now if you moused over an onscreen object you could interact with, its name would appear automatically. You no longer had to select What is all the time!
But perhaps most importantly, SoMI consummated the “no dead-ends” philosophy(*). That is, your character could not die (with one minor exception, explained below), and you could never get your character into an unrecoverable situation. No longer did you have to nervously save your game at every turn! The ease with which you could explore the world and command your character truly was a breath of fresh air to those who had played other adventure games up to that point (yours truly included).
Although Sierra is not mentioned by name, this section from the SoMI game manual unequivocally calls them out:
Our Game Design Philosophy
We believe that you buy games to be entertained, not to be whacked over the head every time you make a mistake. So we don’t bring the game to a screeching halt when you poke your nose into a place you haven’t visited before. We make it clear, however, when you are in a dangerous situation.
We think you’d prefer to solve the game’s mysteries by exploring and discovering, not by dying a thousand deaths. We also think you like to spend your time involved in the story, not typing in synonyms until you stumble upon the computer’s word for a certain object.
Unlike conventional computer adventures, you won’t find yourself accidentally stepping off a path, or dying because you’ve picked up a sharp object. There are a few dangerous situations where Guybrush can die, but to anticipate them takes just a little common sense, not excessive paranoia. Save the game when you think you may be entering a dangerous area, but don’t assume that every wrong step will result in death. Usually you’ll get another chance.
As best I could find, the first LucasArts game to feature this “Our Game Design Philosophy” passage in its manual was Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, though the guarantees around not dying are slightly weaker, as Zak McKracken has a number of ways to die whereas SoMI has exactly one. (Fear not, as the only way to die in SoMI is more of an Easter egg that you have to go out of your way to fall into rather than a devious trap. Google it if you’re curious, as I don’t want to spoil it for you!)
Upon further inspection, the version of “Our Game Design Philosophy” in SoMI appears to be exactly the same as that in Gilbert’s previous game, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, with “Indy” replaced with “Guybrush.” As Last Crusade is more of an action-adventure game (light on action; heavy on adventure), the warnings about death were apt, so arguably the language could have been softened for SoMI.
(*) Although Loom came out several months before SoMI and was the first in the LucasArts adventure series to realize the “no dead-ends” philosophy, I argue it was really SoMI that crystallized the full set of design principles that all subsequent LucasArts adventure games would follow.
That’s enough history — let’s get down to brass tacks!
Again, when I introduced SoMI to my daughter, she was in kindergarten and only six years old. I had previously attempted platformers like Super Mario Bros. on the NES with her in the past, but those were met with resounding rejection because her reflexes were not up to the task. Although some kids’ initial response to the NES is: “I died immediately, but I want to get better at this,” it was clear that the introduction of Super Mario Bros. was not going to be the defining growth mindset moment in my kid’s life.
Though arguably, that demoralizing experience with action games helped me drive home the contrast with adventure games, which helped her be more open to persevering through the puzzles in SoMI. To that end, please indulge me as I enumerate the attributes of SoMI that make it a great fit for playing with a young child:
“You cannot die.” I repeated this until I was blue in the face. “Why are you afraid to go into that dark room? You can’t die.” “Why are you afraid to talk to that creepy person? You can’t die.” Because of her experiences with, well, basically any other video game she had played herself or had watched me play, my daughter took a lot of convincing that SoMI was actually different and no matter what she did, Guybrush Threepwood would not die. I believe once she internalized this, her attitude towards these games was forever changed for the better.
There are no dead-ends. A “dead end” in an adventure game would be an unrecoverable mistake, such as failing to pick up an item from a place that is unreachable later in the game when you actually need to use the item. SoMI has no dead-ends: even though there may be times when you think you have gotten yourself stuck in an impossible situation, you haven’t, and you never need to start over. It is important to get this through to your kid because often when something “bad” happens to your character, it is not because you made a mistake, but because “the game made the bad thing happen to your character” to advance the story. Helping avoid this sense of failure is helpful when encouraging one to try again.
Encourages experimentation. This is a corollary to “there are no dead-ends.” That is, if there are no dead-ends, one should have no inhibitions about trying things! Pick everything up; talk to everyone; explore every path through a dialog tree, etc. Again, it took quite a bit of convincing that SoMI was “a safe space” where it never hurt to try. (I have played a lot of these games, and I even catch myself getting stuck every now and then because I wasn’t frivolous enough!) As a parent, it was exciting to see how, over time, it took less prompting on my part to explore things as it became more self-initiated.
Not a test of reflexes. Again, the contrast to Super Mario Bros. was important here when introducing SoMI. I go into more detail about motor skills in the next section, but with respect to building confidence, it was important that I convinced my daughter that there would never be a puzzle that she would be unable to solve because she wasn’t fast enough with the keyboard or trackpad. Now, in reality, there is a handful of cases in SoMI where some amount of reflexes are required, but (1) in such cases, you always have unlimited chances to try again, and (2) the tolerance for reaction times is very generous (though maybe not generous enough for a six-year-old). To manage this, I made it clear that if we did encounter one of these edge cases, I would take over the controls for her, so long as she gave me the instructions for what she wanted me to do. (Somewhat related, Monkey Island is a 2D game, which makes it fairly easy for kids to move Guybrush around, compared to 3D games, such as Minecraft, which has a steeper learning curve.)
You have to read! In the original version of SoMI (as opposed to the Special Edition, discussed later), there were no voice actors. Everything “spoken” by a character is displayed as text on the screen, so if you want to know what someone is saying, you have to read it. As a parent trying to motivate their kindergartener to learn to read, this technological “limitation” was an asset! Further, SoMI has solid design features to make this more approachable to developing readers: (1) the speed of the dialog is configurable, so you can slow it down, and (2) the game can always be paused with the space bar, which happens to be the largest key on the keyboard. In practice, this meant that I set the dialog to play back at the slowest setting, and my daughter quickly learned to hit the space bar if she sensed she was going to struggle with the text on the screen, thereby giving her as much time as she/we needed to work through it before unpausing.
Technological limitations invite imagination. I found an interview with Ron Gilbert from 2017 where someone asks whether the technological limitations (i.e., 8-bit graphics) in older games are responsible for much of the charm. Specifically, because things could not be drawn to look realistic, you as the player had to inject your own imagination to “fill in the gaps.” Ron’s short answer was “yes” (though I encourage you to watch the full clip), and he noted that in his most recent game, Thimbleweed Park (2017), they deliberately avoid any close-up shots of the characters, as a more detailed rendering might break with how the player had envisioned the character up to that point. Personally, I know that when I played The Curse of Monkey Island, which was the first installment in the series to introduce voice acting, and I heard Guybrush and Stan for the first time, I was actually a bit sad because I preferred the existing voices I had built up for them in my imagination from SoMI and I could no longer hear them.
You will laugh out loud. The comic writing for SoMI is untouchable. For sure, many of the jokes will go over your kid’s head, but you personally will definitely be laughing out loud (it’s also fascinating to see what jokes your kid does and doesn’t get). Perhaps the most memorable puzzle of SoMI is the “insult sword fighting” where the game designers brilliantly managed to square the circle of: “How do you create a video game about pirates that involves sword fighting, yet doesn’t test the player’s reflexes?” Incidentally, Orson Scott Card (of Ender’s Game fame) is credited with some of the writing here, though based on a “30th anniversary documentary” I recently watched on YouTube, Card notes that he got more credit than he deserved on this front!
It’s a “clean” game. Technically, SoMI has an ESRB rating of Everyone 10+ for “alcohol and tobacco reference, comic mischief, mild cartoon violence, and suggestive themes,” but you really have nothing to worry about. (The comic mischief is one of the reasons I wanted my daughter to play the game in the first place!) Given that most games seem to be developed primarily for adolescent-to-adult males, it is refreshing to find a serious adventure game that is also appropriate for young girls. Though the fact that there were exactly two female characters in the game (both of which are strong women, at least!) did not go unnoticed by my daughter…
The music rocks. This may seem like a small thing, but when you play an adventure game and are grinding it out when you’re stuck, revisiting the same places over-and-over to see what you have missed, you had better believe that having a killer soundtrack makes the repetition easier to swallow. As a kid, I happened to acquire SoMI on CD-ROM, which was also playable as an audio CD that I continue to enjoy to this day.
Teaches “real computer” usage (i.e., not a tablet). A good friend of mine had his son using a laptop rather than a tablet from an early age. His reason: “Tablets are for consumers and laptops are for producers.” Although there are admittedly folks doing “professional” work on iPad Pros these days, I tend to agree and I was happy that this experience exposed my daughter to the keyboard and trackpad. Although it is possible to get SoMI running on an Android device, the game was designed to be played with a mouse (hunting around the screen via the pointer is a fundamental part of the experience), which does not translate seamlessly to touchscreens.
It’s a real game. SoMI is a legitimately challenging computer game. If your child plays it all the way through, I would be sure to emphasize that “this is a game for older kids” and they should feel a real sense of accomplishment, regardless of how much help they got from mom or dad along the way.
OK, fine, just tell me how to get this game already!
The easiest way to get a legitimate copy of SoMI is to purchase it from GOG or Steam for $10 and play it on your PC.
If you have a Windows PC, stop reading NOW and go spend the $10. Do it. I’ll wait…The rest of this section is for folks who do not have a Windows machine or enjoy the unnecessary level of detail I cannot seem to resist when discussing this topic. Everyone else can feel free to skip ahead to How to Play an Adventure Game with Kids.
It appears that SoMI can still be purchased for Xbox, but the versions for iOS were pulled from the App Store years ago. Though note that all of these vendors are selling The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, but not the original SoMI. What makes it Special is the upgraded graphics, use of voice actors, and introduction of a built-in hint system. Rest assured that everything else about the game is true to the original. Indeed, the assets for the original game are bundled with Special Edition, so you can hit F10 at any time to switch between Special and SoMI without losing your place in the game! The one kicker is that the Special Edition is available for Windows, but not macOS or Linux. However…
…the original SoMI bundled with Special Edition can be extracted so it is playable on macOS or Linux via the magic of ScummVM (which, in turn, makes it playable on a ton of platforms that did not even exist when SoMI came out!). Unfortunately, wiring this up takes quite a bit of work. You see, ScummVM is a freely available piece of software that can run old games, but [for legal reasons] it does not include the games with it. That means you have to come up with your own copy of SoMI for ScummVM to run.
As best as I can tell, here are your options for playing SoMI on Mac or Linux:
- Get an original CD-ROM of the game and copy of the necessary bits for ScummVM (though originals can be pricey on eBay). I have my childhood copy of SoMI and I verified that copying the
MONKEY.000andMONKEY.001files from the CD-ROM to a folder on local disk namedmonkeywas sufficient for ScummVM to be able to run it (though some extra work is required to get the audio just right). Note the ScummVM wiki details which files you need to copy for various games. - Purchase the game on GOG or Steam and extract the bits you need for ScummVM. This thread explains how to do it, but it is admittedly pretty complicated. I have not attempted to do this myself, and it almost seems like you have to start from the most recent updates to the thread and work backwards because many of the links from the start of the thread no longer work.
- Instead of using ScummVM to run the original SoMI on your operating system, run Windows on your operating system and run Special Edition on it! Although this sounds complicated, it is likely easier than trying to extract the bits you need from the Special Edition for ScummVM. Personally, I run an unactivated version of Windows 7 under VMWare Player on my Linux machine, all of which is free. (You could also set up a dual-boot or use Parallels, but it’s easy to screw up a dual-boot and Parallels isn’t free. Crostini seems promising for Chrome OS, but it is only available on newer Chromebooks.) Although I prefer to play SoMI via ScummVM, I ended up having to set up Windows 7 on VMWare so I could play Tales of Monkey Island on my Linux box. This makes it possible for me to play a number of other classic adventure games on my Linux box, such as Myst Masterpiece Edition.
- What would Guybrush do? Hint: remember he’s a pirate. I do not condone this approach, but if you do go this route, the least you can do is buy a legitimate copy of Thimbleweed Park, Day of the Tentacle, or Broken Age (all of which are fantastic adventure games, available on all platforms) or something to put money in the original designers’ pockets.
I hope you can find a solution that works for you!
As a final heads-up, if you end up playing the Special Edition, it differs from the original in some key ways as compared to playing in ScummVM.
The good:
- There is a built-in hint system! If you are stuck, all you need to do is press H to get a hint that is specific to your current progress in the game. Although I find the print version of the original hint manual quite charming, it is too easy to accidentally “read too far ahead” and give yourself more hints than you intended. Incidentally, the print version of the hint manual for Monkey Island 2 improved upon this by requiring one of those “red cellophane decoders.” This was a clever improvement, though even reading the table of contents might reveal something that you meant to work out on your own.
- The updated art for the background scenes is beautiful! That said, I agree with a number of critics who feel this new rendering of Guybrush looks weird and prefer the original, more pixelated version.
The not-so-good (which may make you reach for F10):
- It has voice actors. If you were relying on SoMI to force your kids to read, you might want to disable this. Fortunately, it supports turning the voice volume down to zero while leaving the music and sound effects at full blast.
- Pausing the game cuts to the game management screen, so you can’t use this as a way to pause with the captions on screen to give early readers a chance to catch up. Subtitle speed in classic mode is still configurable (and pause works as it always did there).
- It allows only 10 “save game” slots whereas ScummVM allows 100. I find it’s nice to be liberal with saving games so that you can go back and rewatch cut scenes or replay your favorite parts without much effort. (Indeed, later LucasArts games made rewatching cut scenes a built-in feature of their adventure games.)
- The verbs and inventory no longer appear on-screen by default:
ctrlwill overlay the table of verbs andaltwill overlay your inventory. The benefit is that this leaves more pixels for the scene, though personally I find having all of my options displayed in front of me at all times helps spark solutions to the puzzles.
My recommendation is to play whichever version is more engaging to you, but avail yourself of the hint system in the Special Edition if you find yourself getting frustrated because you have been stuck on the same puzzle for too long.
How to Play an Adventure Game with Kids
Hopefully I have finally convinced you to give this whole “adventure game” thing a shot! As I spent much of the past year playing these games with my 6-year-old, I like to think I have picked up a few tips along the way that will improve the overall experience for both you and your kiddo:
Play the Game Yourself First, By Yourself
If you aren’t into adventure games yourself, this may be a tall order. For example, according to howlongtobeat.com, the average time to beat The Secret of Monkey Island is 7 hours. Bear in mind that is based on self-reported data from people who read web sites like howlongtobeat.com [and who actually finished it!], so if you’re new to these type of games, expect to take even longer. If you don’t have the patience or interest in playing through the game, you can always search for a walkthrough, which is the term for a self-reported write-up (or often these days, video) of the steps you need to take to make your way through an adventure game.
By playing the game yourself first (or reading through the walkthrough), you can give “just the right amount of help” when your kid gets stuck. Every child has their own capacity for grit. I am assuming you know what your kid’s is. For example, if you know that it took you an hour to solve a puzzle, either due to sheer difficulty or because you were wandering around in the wrong place for too long, you might want to provide some “gentle redirection” to prevent your young player from spending too much time pursuing a fruitless path. Alternatively, maybe you want them to have the experience of making that discovery themselves and you think they can handle it. Again, this depends on a combination of perseverance, interest, and experience of the player, which you are in a unique position to evaluate.
In particular, note that some puzzles might effectively be impossible for your child, so you certainly want to intervene when they get to one of those to avoid a total meltdown. For example, one of the things that comes into your possession during SoMI is gunpowder, so if you child lacks a rudimentary understanding of how firearms work, they may have no reasonable chance of figuring out what to do with it on their own. Similarly, there is heavy use of puns and/or double meanings in LucasArts adventure games, so your kid might benefit from some help with those, too.
You may receive a bit of pushback from your kin on the “playing it by yourself” part. I know I did. Daughter always wanted to know what Daddy was playing, and at first I let her, but then I decided to stop. The number one reason: spoilers. For example, I assumed that if she watched me play Loom, she would forget everything by the time I let her play it six months later. Wrong. Remember that adventure games are stories, and that kids love stories, so they hang on to details you wouldn’t expect. As a result, there was more “reciting” than genuine puzzle-solving than I intended when it was finally her turn to play.
Finally, playing the game by yourself should be fun (it is a game, after all)! One thing that made playing materially less fun for me is when I had an audience who was, shall we say, less patient than myself. For example, when I enter a new room in an adventure game, I want to take my time to explore room to ensure I haven’t missed anything. Other times, I might just want to grind it out and retrace many of my steps because I’m stuck. Trying to do that with, “Daaaaad, this is boring!” in the background certainly doesn’t help. By allowing yourself the authentic adventure game experience, with all its tribulations in addition to its triumphs, you can help tailor the experience to your child to ensure it is a good one.
Read the Manual
An adventure game manual, when well-done, is a short read. Most of what you need to know is “revealed” to you in the course of the game, so you only need to put in a little bit of time up front before getting started. There are often some key lines in there that are worth your attention, such as the actions that can bring your game to an end. I have found it to be valuable when setting expectations with a child whether it is possible to “die” or not. Here some samples from various LucasArts game manuals where each game is slightly different with regards to death:
- “Unlike conventional computer adventures, you won’t find yourself accidentally stepping off a path, or dying because you’ve picked up a sharp object. There are a few dangerous situations where Guybrush can die, but to anticipate them takes just a little common sense, not excessive paranoia. Save the game when you think you may be entering a dangerous area, but don’t assume that every wrong step will result in death. Usually you’ll get another chance.” — The Secret of Monkey Island
- “Since many adventure game players prefer solving puzzles to testing their reflexes, we’ve provided opportunities for you to steer Indy around any and all fighting — if you’re clever enough.” — Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
- “Don’t be afraid to experiment. Nothing in the game can ‘kill’ you.” — Loom
- “Anything potentially disastrous that happens to the crew of the Attila mission is supposed to happen to them.” — The Dig
Specifically, within the canon of LucasArts point-and-click adventure games, I believe only Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders have true “dead ends.” That is, a dead end is an action you can take that prevent you from winning the game, but the game will not tell you and therefore you could potentially wander aimlessly with a sense of false hope. (At least in the games where it is possible to “die,” it is transparent that you have made a misstep.) Incidentally, Mansion and Zak were the first two such games in the history of LucasArts: this “design flaw” was eliminated in all subsequent games.
Most manuals provide a small walkthrough to explain how to get navigate the first puzzle or two in the game. Experienced adventure games will likely go out of their way to avoid this section, but novice gamers might enjoy this as a “confidence boost” when getting started. Some go a bit further (such as the Zak McKracken manual) and provide a more detailed list of hints that may be useful as you progress through the game. Whether you take this “help” is up to you, but it is good to know whether it is there.
Finally, among the LucasArts games, a handful of them came with an additional text to supplement the manual. Having access to these is often material to making your way through the game:
- Maniac Mansion came with a poster.
- Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders came with a newspaper.
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came with a “Grail Diary.”
- Loom came with the Book of Patterns.
As you can see, digital versions are freely available online, though physical versions can go for a small fortune on eBay and the like.
Learn the Controls
Although a point-and-click adventure game can be played exclusively with the mouse, I would not recommend it. Consider how the mouse-only flow plays out:
- mouse around until you find the region of the screen that corresponds to an object you want to act on
- move the mouse to the part of the screen where the “verbs” are, and left-click on the appropriate action, such as Pick up
- move the mouse back to the original region of the screen and left-click
Note this requires moving the mouse quite a bit, remembering exactly where something is, and a lot of precision throughout. For small hands with developing motor skills, this can be challenging if not outright exasperating, particularly when mistakes are made and one has to start all over.
By comparison, consider how the keyboard-and-mouse flow plays out for the equivalent action:
- mouse around until you find the region of the screen that corresponds to an object you want to act on
- let go of the mouse (as to avoid accidentally moving the pointer) and press p on the keyboard
- left-click on the mouse
With less mouse movement, this results in fewer errors and will give your child more confidence in their command of the game. (Anyone who has played Maniac Mansion and has struggled to find the pixel on a completely black screen that corresponds to a light switch only to have to start all over again once they moused away to select Turn on knows this pain well.)
Again, this is where spending a little time with the manual pays off. For example, in The Secret of Monkey Island, although p is an intuitive mnemonic for the verb [P]ick up, there are two other verbs that start with p: Push and Pull. It turns out that their keyboard shortcuts are s (pu[s]h?) and y ([y]ank?), respectively, which you would only know if you bothered to read the manual. Similarly, when choosing what to say during an interactive dialog, you can use the number keys to identify the desired response to the list rather than clicking on it (which I learned by reading the manual). Again, I only have a sample size of one, but there were far fewer errors when using the keyboard, and nothing was more frustrating for me than a cry of, “That’s not what I wanted them to say!” because someone clicked on the wrong line.
Note that even within the LucasArts canon, keyboard shortcuts and interaction models changed quite a bit over time, so take a minute to familiarize yourself with the controls for your current game. You will be much happier if you can devote your mental energy to solving the puzzles if you don’t have to get distracted by the fundamentals of moving your character around the screen.
One other thing to look out for is how the game communicates whether you are in a cut scene. Specifically, a cut scene is when the game takes complete control of the action and you can only observe, as if you were watching a movie. (Often this communicated in a subtle way, like the mouse pointer no longer becoming visible.) It is important to understand this game element and communicate it to your child or else you might find yourselves hopelessly trying to change an outcome over which you have no control. Moreover, sometimes the transition out of a cut scene may be subtle and is part of the puzzle itself!
Don’t Expect to be Off-Duty
I will admit that, selfishly, I initially thought that maybe if I could get my daughter hooked on The Secret of Monkey Island, I could use this as an alternative to Netflix-as-a-babysitter to get a little more of my own work done. In my case, it was quite the opposite, though I expect every kid is different in this regard. (Though as we have played more of these games, she has become much more independent.)
Although my daughter seemed to genuinely enjoy playing, she would only play with me. Even if I just needed to take a break to go to the bathroom, she was unwilling to make a single move until I came back. Although this was antithetical to the sense of independence I had hoped to instill, I got over it, and honestly, it was a lot of fun. As I mentioned previously, some puzzles would have been impossible for her, so it was for the best that I was there to redirect and support her, helping build her confidence. Best of all, I got to celebrate with her every time she had a “Eureka!” moment, which is reliably my favorite part of whatever game we are playing.
Conclusion
If you made it all the way through this article, you deserve a break. Maybe you should go play a game?
More seriously, I hope I have given you an appreciation for adventure games as well as the information you need to decide if this is something you want to introduce to you and/or your kids. As noted, age-appropriate adventure games that are engaging and challenging are hard to come by, which is one of the many reasons The Secret of Monkey Island stands out among the rest.
I hope to write about more games that fit the bill in the future, though if you can’t wait, I would also look into the sequels, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge as well as The Curse of Monkey Island. I would say that both are more difficult than SoMI, but fortunately, both also include an “easy mode” that preserves the full story while omitting some of the more challenging puzzles, which may be the right option for your budding gamer. If you can’t be bothered to mess around with installing old games on desktops, Broken Age is a wonderful game from LucasArts alum Tim Schafer that I have also been enjoying with my daughter. As it is a “modern” game (released in 2014), it is also available on tablets and game consoles, so we have been enjoying it on the iPad, which feels a bit more casual.
PostScript: Why Did I Write This?
Putting in the time to research and compose an 8,000+ word article that tries to convince parents to go through a ton of effort to set up a 30-year-old video game for their small children to play [and to play it themselves] is arguably a strange way to choose to spend one’s nights and weekends. It seems unlikely that many people will make it all the way through this piece, let alone install The Secret of Monkey Island, so why do it?
More than anything, I deeply enjoyed playing SoMI with my daughter, and I want others to have that experience with their own children. If you are someone who isn’t particularly comfortable with computers or video games, then investing the time to set up SoMI is likely a tall order. I get it. Nevertheless, I did my best to add context, enumerate the benefits, and provide detailed instructions to hopefully inject enough activation energy for you to give SoMI a shot and increase the chances that the overall experience is a positive one for you and your child.
Further, there are so many people out there shilling products that “teach STEM.” Living in Silicon Valley, we hear about [and give into] a lot of them (we own our share of Osmo products, for example), but instead of “teaching kids to code,” how about we give them a reason to code in the first place? Many, many people the software industry started programming because they played games and then wanted to build one of their own. My hypothesis is that adventure games, at least age-appropriate ones, will have a much wider appeal to young audiences than action games. If we can leverage that to spark a genuine interest in technology, we win.
Finally, I wish there were more games like SoMI, particularly for kids. In writing this, I hope to hear from folks with recommendations. I have discovered a lot of great adventure games through this journey, but most were designed with adolescent males in mind, so I have had trouble figuring out what to play next with my daughter. Ideally, there would be an “adventure game renaissance” of sorts and we would see more games like this, though I’m skeptical the economics work out. Though if we could just get Disney to sell the rights to Monkey Island back to Ron Gilbert, then perhaps that’s all we really need.
