Introduction

"Quest" is a word enjoying extraordinary popularity and widespread usage in contemporary English. The term appears in many different contexts and diverse fields: Quest Diagnostics, a clinical laboratory; Quest, an IT management company; and the Oculus Quest VR system for games and "immersive experiences."¹ The range of fields and products covered by the word "quest" suggests its ubiquitous use in modern society. But what does it actually mean?

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary², quest appears as a noun or a verb. The noun has three definitions: (1) "a jury of inquest," (2) "an act or instance of seeking" and (3), which is marked as "obsolete," "a person or group of persons who search or make inquiry." As a verb, it has both intransitive and transitive variants with the intransitive variant presenting "to search a trail" or "to go on a quest" whereas the transitive form offers "to search for" or "to ask for." The Cambridge Dictionary³ only covers quest as a noun, defined as "a long search for something that is difficult to find, or attempt to achieve something difficult." Similarly, the Oxford Lexico online dictionary⁴ has a noun and intransitive verb form, with the noun form defined as "a long or arduous search for something" and the intransitive verb as simply the "search for something." These definitions have much in common, but the addition of the descriptive adjectives "long" and "arduous" and the phrase "difficult to find" in the Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries seems important. A quest is not something to be taken on lightly.

Looking at the etymology of the word reveals further notable details in its curious evolution. The Online Etymology Dictionary⁵, which sources its etymologies from six commonly used etymological dictionaries, has the noun form as the original form of the word, with the verb later coming into usage out of the noun. The root is given as an Old French modification of the Latin verb quaerere, which means to "seek, gain, ask." The Old French form, queste, was used in the early 14th century to refer to "a search for something (especially of judicial inquiries or hounds seeking game)." It was only in the late 14th century that the noun gained its more commonly associated romantic sense of an "adventure undertaken by a knight (especially the search for the Grail)." Nevertheless, this was a crucial development for the word. This romantic spirit transformed the word from merely descriptive of a difficult task to carrying significant meaning, a meaning which has carried it forward into the present, and into this present article – a discussion of the quest in video games.

This article will focus on the quest in video games: an important structural element that appears in many games across the world, past to present. It will start with a background to the term as it may be found in literary studies – its pre-history, if you will – before moving to the present and how it's been defined within game studies, leading to its contemporary usage and application.

The Literary Quest

The notion of a quest has been important in the history of literature – or at the very least Western literature - through the tradition of chivalric romance, as we noted in our etymological discursion above. Yet despite the form's long history, having existed since at least the 14th century, it has only recently seen academic scrutiny, particularly in Joseph Campbell's (1949) Hero of a Thousand Faces and Northrop Frye's (1957) Analysis of Criticism.

Campbell does not use the language of quests, instead feigning interest in the study of what he labels the "hero's journey" or "monomyth," so-called for its proposed similarity over the world. Even though he does not speak of the hero's journey as a quest per se, there are many similarities between the quest and the hero's journey, and it is referenced by game studies scholar Howard in his book on quests, such that the term deserves some unpacking. First, Campbell defines the hero's journey as when:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man." (1949, Loc 460)

He appends to this definition a detailed list of the stages of the journey, which he divides into: the call to adventure, supernatural aid, crossing the threshold, challenges and temptations, death and rebirth, transformation, atonement and finally return. The author then goes on to demonstrate how these stages operate in myths drawn from Classical, Buddhist and Christian sources, before his work takes a turn into psychoanalysis and religious studies. For Campbell, the hero's journey or quest is a deeply spiritual and religious journey that culminates in divinity. It is a revelatory experience that will affect in the reader "a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all" (Loc 3237).

In contrast to Campbell's spiritual approach, Frye's project (1957) is to elevate criticism for literature to the level of physics in the natural sciences, "an organized body of knowledge" or a "systematic study" (p. 11). His book isolates four constituent narrative "pregeneric elements of literature" or "mythoi" (pp. 161-2): the romantic, the tragic, the comic and the ironic or satiric. Of these, the quest plays a significant role in the romantic. He notes that "the marvelous journey is the one formula that is never exhausted" (57) and that "some symbols are images of things common to all men and therefore have a communicable power which is potentially unlimited, such symbols include those of food and drink, of the quest or journey [...]" (p. 118).

Frye (1957) strictly defines the quest as "a sequence of minor adventures leading up to a major or climacteric adventure, usually announced from the beginning, the completion of which rounds off the story" (p. 186). Intriguingly, this definition appears to predict the future structure of most quest-based narrative games where the player's/hero's time is spent completing minor quests and tasks for non-player characters (NPCs), which by hook or by crook lead back to the main story quest – for instance, in the Witcher 3 (CDPR 2015), Geralt (the protagonist) must help a warlord find his estranged family, rescue his captured friend and steal holy relics from a druidic priest, all of which contribute to the greater quest of his finding his lost 'daughter' Ciri.

As part of his discussion, Frye (1957) identifies three stages to the quest adventure:

The complete form of the romance is clearly the successful quest, and such a completed form has three main stages; the stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero or his foe, or both, must die; and the exultation of the hero. (p. 186)

Notably, the quest adventures are constituted by events that challenge the hero – something that can be seen also in quests in video games, where events challenge both the character's ability to overcome an obstacle, and also through the character: the player.

The Quest in Game Studies

The first definitions for the quest in video games were developed in the early 2000s. In her 2003 paper, Tosca states that a quest "brings some or all the storytelling elements (characters, plot, causality, world) together with the interaction, so that we can define it as the array of soft rules that describe what the player has to do in a particular storytelling situation" (p. 6). In this case, Tosca is using the term soft rules to refer to the objectives that the player needs to complete in order to succeed in the quest and thereby progress in the game, whereas hard rules would be those rules that exist as the architecture of the game world. So, for example, if a quest was to "go to the next village and get a fish," the soft rules would be (p. 1) reaching the village without dying and (p. 2) acquiring a fish through whatever means the game's hard rules allow, such as maybe stealing it or paying with money gotten from treasure found on the journey.

Tosca's definition has the quest positioned as a story-rich task, where the player is trying to meet conditions imposed by the game. Aarseth (2005) elaborates that this is an important distinction from other games. All games have some sort of objective to meet, but quests are very particular objectives: "if we define quest to mean the hunt for a specific outcome, rather than just winning the game, then there are games that do not qualify, such as a standard Quake-type multiplayer death match game or games such as Tetris" (p. 369). The story-rich tasks of quests are not necessarily associated with the more traditional game objectives like winning, but with something else. With this in mind, Aarseth (2005) argues a quest game is "a game with a concrete and attainable goal, which supercedes [sic] performance or the accumulation of points" (p. 2). Specifically, he identifies three types of quest goals – place-oriented, time-oriented and objective-oriented (p. 3) – that can be combined in various fashions to produce a wide range of quest forms. For example, a place- and objective-oriented quest would be telling the player to "go here and collect that." There is something about these tasks of the quest that are meaningful beyond their simple completion, and this aspect resists clear definition.

Yet for Aarseth (2005), there is also a trade-off in accepting a quest from an NPC within a video game. He notes that

Quests force players to experience the game world, to go where they have not gone before, and barely can. The quest is the game designer's main control of the players' agenda, forcing them to perform certain actions that might otherwise not have been chosen, thus reducing the possibility space offered by the game. (p. 9)

He goes on to express that "these 'stories' are not co-told by the players, only uncovered and observed by them. Not gamer-as-author, but (at best) gamer-as-archaeologist" (Ibid.). In response to the restrictions of the quest, Aarseth suggests it is more interesting and better to rebel against such constraints, and push the limits of what the game's possibility space (Bogost, 2008) can offer. A counterargument to this line of reasoning would be that watching the story unfold through the quest is a reward that contributes to the meaningfulness of the quest. It is a deal between the developer and the player, and as a reward for going along with these restrictions and for meeting the objectives (whatever they may be), the player gets to experience a unique string of interesting events.

Tronstad (2001) does not define the quest as such, but rather points out a paradox with quest-meaning: "To do a quest is to search for the meaning of it. Having reached this meaning, the quest is solved" (p. 3). From this insight, she maintains that because a quest is not a quest after it is complete (at this point, it is history), so that therefore the study of quests in games should focus on their performative qualities, because "being acts before they are meaning, we must focus on the way quests act to understand the way they work" (Ibid.). To play the quest is the only path to grasping its meaning.

Tronstad (2001) highlights a difference between quests in literature and quests in video games: while quests in literature derive their meaning from the struggle of the characters over the course of an adventure, quests in video games additionally derive meaning from the concurrent struggle of the player against the challenges of the game. This creates a new form of meaning-making – the meaning of meeting a particular game challenge in the context of the game world. For example, in Dark Souls (Fromsoftware, 2011), one of the most difficult battles is against Ornstein and Smough, twin knight guardians of Lordran Castle, the epicenter of civilization and culture in the Dark Souls world. Being able to finally surmount the challenge posed by the two and proceed into the inner recesses of the castle is not only a critical turning point in the game's quest, but a personal triumph, a demonstration of hard-earned skill. The synthesis of these two moments, of the successful performance having won the battle and the events marking your character as a potential world savior, makes for a particularly meaningful experience, and one that is unique to quests in video games.

In his book Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narrative, Howard (2008) defines a quest as "a journey across a symbolic, fantastic landscape in which a protagonist or player collects objects and talks to characters in order to overcome challenges and achieve a meaningful goal" (p. xi), weaving together the ideas of Frye, Aarseth, Tronstad and Tosca, while also drawing from Campbell's (1949) hero's journey. From his definition, he moves to address the issue of a quest's meaning, which he divides into three major categories.

The first is "meaning as initiation." In this case, "quests are meaningful because they immerse players in dramas of initiation, defined as gradual movement up through formalized 'levels' of achievement into a progressively greater understanding of the rules and narrative in a simulated world" (p. 26). He specifically cites those quests which position the player as members of guilds, and where completion of quests grants higher rank, status and benefits within that guild, which he compares with the experience of gaining ranks in secret societies such as the Freemasons, but his definition can be understood as more broadly referring to the meaning produced by player progress through the game world in various ways. Gaining more unique weapons in Dark Souls could be a progression system, for instance, or collecting metal flowers in Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games, 2017).

Does meaning as initiation play a role in the enigmatic deeper meaning of the narrative game quest? It does not seem unreasonable to claim that the player seeing her character(s) grow through quest completion is meaningful. Learning more about the world as the quests unpack the story and at the same time slowly building an intimate knowledge of the game systems required for success is a doubled pleasure based on twinned progressive understanding and could go some distance to explaining the meaning that supersedes winning or the acquisition of points that Aarseth (2005) hinted at.

In his second category for meaning, Howard (2008) splits the quest's "meaning as narrative" from that of initiation, defining it as that "which motivates the player through a back story that gives urgency to a task, or rewards the player through an explanation of the events that occur as a result of the task's completion" (p. 28). Here, narrative and initiation in the quest are structurally intertwined. This is to say that the meaning as initiation does not make sense without reference to the narrative, just as the emotional impact of certain moments of the narrative would be lost without reference to the challenges of progression underlining and highlighting the key events.

The final category of meaning in quests is the broadest of the three: "thematic meaning, communicated when the player acts out a set of ideas that comment upon the simulated world of the game and the 'real' world outside of it" (Howard, 2008, p. 28). As Horn (2021) argues, the latter two categories are too vague, which Horn aims to solve through the introduction of his "questing model."

The "Questing Model" proposes using quests as a methodological tool for analyzing narrative games. Horn (2021) argues that quests can be useful in that they can be used to break large games into "chunks" for analysis, providing the means for interrogating specific claims instead of making broad statements about a game that may tackle many different themes and ideas in the course of play. As part of his model, Horn synthesizes the work of Howard, Tosca, Tronstad and Aarseth, to define the quest in video games as "[1] a specific ludic set of tasks that [2] limits the player's possibility space in return for experiencing an [3] adventure for the characters involved, where an adventure is a journey across a symbolic landscape constituted of the following events – a departure, a struggle and the exultation of the hero" (p. 171). This definition intertwines the term's literary pre-history (as an adventure constituted of a journey with a departure, struggle and exultation) with its ludic present (a set of tasks limiting possibility space) to offer a succinct definition.

Case Studies: Quests in World of Warcraft

In terms of the applied study of quests in video games, Krzywinska (2006), Walker (2007), Karlsen (2008), Landwehr et al. (2009) and Gibbs et al. (2012) have all looked at quests within Blizzard's popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft (2004). Their ideas meditate on the precarious meanings that quests can produce and how these might be warped.

Krzywinska (2006) asserts that the fragmentation of the narrative in quests leads to a rich cumulative experience. She explains that this experience is "a certain type of depth engagement with the game [...] that goes beyond but also informs the types of tasks offered to the player" (p. 384). She elaborates that many of the quests in World of Warcraft contribute to developing the lore of the world, contending that it is this "mythological narrative 'casing' of the quest [that] helps to disguise the game's technologically based mechanics" (p. 388). In other words, the repetitive nature of the tasks in World of Warcraft is hidden or shrouded by the mythology, which is effective because "as with retellings of myths, battles are fought over and over again, and in this there is a cyclical/recursive organization of time" (p. 391).

Even though the player may be assigned very similar tasks (e.g., killing X number of enemy Y), the many quests work together towards generating a mythic attitude – slowly building up the lore of the world. They afford the opportunity for a meaningful cumulative experience. This idea sees some development in Walker's (2007) paper, which takes the form of an auto-ethnographic account of her experience with the many and varied quests of the virtual world of Azeroth. She argues that by breaking up the narrative into these small quest units the game becomes "a network of fragments, most of which are not necessary to experience the game fully, and yet which cumulate into a rich experience of a storied world" (p. 5). The fragmentary nature of quests and the corresponding fragmentation of narrative mirrors the way that today "we do things in fragments: we surf, channel flip and multitask" (p. 4).

For Karlsen (2008), this fragmentation does not necessarily build toward a meaningful experience. The author utilizes a comparative approach, comparing World of Warcraft to Discworld MUD, a text-based multiplayer online game. He argues that the quests in World of Warcraft are "easy to find and easy to solve" as a type of "easily accessible and temporary occupation while advancing towards maximum level" whereas quests in Discworld MUD by stark contrast are "hidden in the environment and employ syntax [...] that often are unique to each quest" and that are "regarded as a sort of aesthetic or creative reward" (n.p.). This leads him to suggest that designers of the Discworld MUD might have "loftier aesthetic ambitions" (n.p.) than the developers of World of Warcraft. The author concludes that the quest in World of Warcraft is transformed through repetition not into a cumulative mythical experience, but rather into labor, one that is ultimately unfulfilling, especially by contrast to the tailored experiences of the MUD.

Landwehr et al. (2009) take a different approach to the study of quests, utilizing quantitative relational text analysis to consider 6765 quests of the main game. Their goal was to look for differences in the most frequently used terms between the game's two major playable factions, the Alliance and the Horde, but the differences they found were minimal. Instead, they discovered that "the core of all quests is a small set of basic tasks that involve disposing of mobs [small, usually weak creature roaming the world] for NPCs, and whatever plot points exist must operate on a smaller scale" (p. 9). The authors state that "no narrative idea outweighs the general principle of dealing with mobs at the request of the quest-givers" (Ibid.). They conclude with a warning that without more variation in quest form, there will be a corresponding lack of narrative diversity, which they imply could hurt the future development of the game.

Landwehr et al.'s holistic approach (2009) draws attention to the larger trends among quests in the game and highlights commonalities, but this can also obfuscate the outliers that are themselves, individually, unique, and which have the potential to be profoundly moving. Gibbs et al. (2012), on the other hand, demonstrate the specific aesthetic value of certain quests of World of Warcraft in their sensitive study of memorialization in virtual spaces. They describe in detail the rendering of several extensive and complex quest chains by developers that remember the lives of players and game designers who sadly passed away before their time. They deduce that quests have become a form of contemporary "alternative commemorative practices," a "vernacular ritual" that "connects meaningfully to the contemporary lived experiences of individuals and communities" (n.p.). These quests "draw on an intertextuality of cultural material and human experience to create emotional journeys that speak to profound issues" (n.p.). Gibbs et al.'s study shows that uniquely designed, carefully tailored quest chains can be deeply provocative, suggesting that a more focused study of individual quests as opposed to broad statements about a game can be crucial – a point also made by Horn (2021).

Concluding Remarks

This brief article has discussed the ludic quest. It started with a consideration of the term's literary history through Campbell and Frye, noting that the quest is a series of adventures where the minor struggles all lead to a climactic final battle, the conclusion of which will see the exultation of the hero. It then moved to game studies, starting with a survey of the works of Tosca, Tronstad, Aarseth, Howard and Horn over the first decades of the 21st century. It discussed how the meaning of the quest that "supersedes the acquisition of points or winning" has been a matter of investigation with no firm conclusions. Finally, it offered a brief comparison of quest studies in World of Warcraft. In particular, it found that the line between "quest" and "labor" can become precariously thin. As game forms continue to evolve, and as businesses "gamify" their work tasks, the question of what the difference is between a quest and a job may continue to be contested. Undoubtedly, the quest is an important structural element of many games – particularly for narrative games – and as such it is certainly worthy of further investigation, especially with regard to the question of what makes a quest meaningful.

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Author Information

Benjamin Horn is an independent scholar and creative writer, currently working for a game studio in Hong Kong on a number of unreleased projects. His academic interests primarily concern the analysis and interpretation of narrative games, although he also enjoys reading on topics across the field of game studies. In his spare time, he enjoys playing games, reading and cooking.

Citation Information

Horn, B. (2022). Quest. In Grabarczyk, P. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Ludic Terms (Spring 2022 Edition). URL: https://eolt.org/articles/quest

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