What Video Games Taught Me: King’s Quest

[I started this post as a complaint about how I don’t like that my brain is trained to treat anxiety with isolation and video games. But in turn, it ended up becoming a treatise on defending the cultural significance of video games, which I think is a better, and vastly more lengthy topic, than “I am scared of everything, sad that I am scared of everything, bitter that I am sad, so instead I’ll play video games.” I often flinch in fear when wanting to write about video games, as I am well aware of the collective cultural disdain that is held for video games, the problematic tropes that have arisen in “gamer culture” (I hate that term, but there is some validity to that), and the major additions to the gaming library that are seen as a joke. But my brand of pathology, approach to life, and personal philosophy would not be what it is without the major influence that video games have had on my psyche, so maybe it is time to let that out into the sunlight for all to see, and me to finally be rid of the “gamer shame” that I often suffer from. So here goes nothing.]

I have been a gamer since birth. It’s funny, because I am not so much obsessed with video games. I don’t think about video games while doing other things; I don’t necessarily put other things off to play video games. Gaming has just been the primary cultural artifact through which I have, over the years, learned to ask questions and experience the world. I would argue that the cultural benefit of video games have often been overlooked by the more ridiculous components of their contribution, but this is true about every form of cultural artifacts, so I need not be so consumed to try to explain away their impact.

You either like or dislike video games. It is funny to live in a world where video games have not only become common place, but that even the least technologically savvy people have access to, and experience with, video games. I started my tenure as a gamer in 1984, when my father brought home our first family computer, the epic failure known as the IBM PC Jr. Now, while the PC Jr. might have been a market flop, it was the inter-dimensional portal through which I would step and see the world in a whole new light.

I began learning to read playing King’s Quest. KQI was the first graphical adventure game that allowed the player to move about the screen with a joystick and input commands into the command line. For instance, the second screen to left from the picture, the main character Graham walks alongside the pictured moat to a door. The player would position Graham in front of the door using the joystick and then type the command “open door” into the terminal at the bottom of the screen. There were even humorous responses when the player would input incorrect commands or even curse words. This sort of varied responses interactive game-play was ground breaking. All adventure games to date were either purely text with minimal abstraction, or text with static non-moveable imagery.

KQI was developed by Ken and Roberta Williams, the founders of Sierra On-Line. KQI became one of the most influential games of all time, leading to a seemingly endless stream of increasingly popular and more financially beneficial sequels, of which I have played at least six of the original series, as well as all-five of the King’s Quest “remakes” (They were less remakes than they were reenvisionings of particular episodes and side stories of the original series). My world was shaped by my playing of the King’s Quest series.

But what’s interesting is how I initially played KQI. I vaguely remember watching my dad play the game. I wanted to play. But I couldn’t read or write, which presented a problem in a game that demanded not only abstract thinking but the ability to type in commands for more abstract actions that were beyond the capabilities of early PC games. So at first my dad would sit beside me and instruct me as to what to type on the keyboard, and in the same breath, using that experience to teach me about how letters work in relation to one another.

One of the earliest memories I have is of my father explaining to me the silent letters in the words “take” and “knife.” One of the first things Knight Graham would have to do after speaking with the king and being sent on his main quest of recovering three priceless magical artifacts is to walk one screen over from the castle, move a rock, look in the hole, and take the knife Graham finds there. So of course, when my father told me to type “take knife,” explaining to me what those letters spelled, I had to interject and explain to it him that those letters indeed did not spell the “knife,” as “knife” does not have a k or an e in the sound of that word anywhere.

Let’s just say that, while my father was excited by my early interest in reading and writing, the time he had to dedicate to helping me play a video game waned rather quickly. But his wife came up with a brilliant solution. Both of them having beaten the game, they hand drew a map of the world, screen by screen, with the coordinating commands written at the bottom of each screen. This was the only kindness she ever afforded me, as the rest of our relationship was riddled with ridicule, disdain, and dismissal. I have in my later years, wished to thank her for the map, only to find out she had passed shortly after beginning my search. But I digress.

I immediately set out to conquer my new map of King’s Quest and in turn, played the game countless times, finding little nuances and nooks and crannies over the years. I must inform the writer that these were the days prior to public access to the internet, so there were no online guides or Reddit to go to and ask questions. You had to try and try again. Not having played the game in almost 35 years, I can still visualize the most successful path to take to get all the goodies and win the game.

King’s Quest taught me how to read. By the time we started learning to read in school, I was already digesting young reader books. In 4th grade, while my classmates were getting excited for Goosebumps books, I was reading The Chronicles of Narnia & The Hobbit. In what would have been my freshman year of high school, while incarcerated in Oregon Youth Corrections, I started reading Shakespeare, Plato, Alex Haley, & Fyodor Dostoyevsky. While living on the streets, panhandling, turning tricks, or waiting for the next lick, I would read Lionel Trilling, David Foster Wallace, or Leo Tolstoy. By the time I turned 18, I had read more than most Americans will read in three lifetimes. I don’t know who, what, or where I would be, were it not for King’s Quest.