MS Paint Adventures



MS Paint Adventures is a website created by Andrew Hussie to host adventures reminiscent of command line Adventure games, such as the original text adventure game, "Colossal Cave Adventure". The adventures are simulated through the creation of pages and pages of images, animated gifs, and Flash animations.

Introduction
Each Adventure is presented in a simple format that allows a MSPA Reader to follow along with the story as though they are playing a game. Although, in fact, it is not actually a game at all - just a series of images presented in the format of text-based adventure games.

This is part of the joke of the website itself - It simulates and attempts to warp in the actuality that the Adventure is actually a game, and the website is modeled in such a way that a Reader is actually typing in the commands and making the story move along according to the commands given.

An Adventure operates with the command previously given on the prior page (And if it is the starting of the game, the name of the Adventure that you are about to embark on) shown at the top. An image is then presented below that has the Adventure attempt to do what the command is given. For example, if a character named Bob is standing in an empty room with nothing but a pumpkin nearby, the command may be something along the lines of "Bob: Get Pumpkin." The resulting image of this command depends on certain rules, conditions, and various other absurdities that are maintained only in MSPA. In the example of the pumpkin, Bob will almost certainly not be able to get the pumpkin because the pumpkin may never have existed there in the first place anyway. This is because that is how pumpkins work in MSPA and is considered one of the constant gags in MSPA. The true constant in the Adventures is that of uncertainty. Below the image is a ">" character and then a blinking cursor, as though the game is expecting another command, and below that the next command or line of commands is given for the player to "Type" in. Through this medium the game is played until the game reaches its conclusion, or alternatively if an unfortunate Game Over is reached.

MSPA has several functions as well to maintain the Game Mentality - A player can choose to "Save" and "Load" the game as well as "Delete" their Save File - Which is a simple place holder of keeping their place as the players traverse through thousands of pages through the story.

Other various devices are used throughout the website to maintain the Adventure atmosphere - Through the use of capitalizing certain key words and typically using second person to narrate the actions going on, as if your decision causes you to have thoughts reactionary to the decision you made, often the case berating you on your poor decisions.

Concepts
The only real constants in the adventures are the generalizations made toward the games themselves and their uncertain, quirky and obtuse nature. With that, one could base on how these games are played. Each individual game is called an adventure, and these adventures must have characters to interact with the adventure, items for the characters to use, ignore, or abuse altogether, and locations for the character to exist in and traverse. Anything beyond this however can change immediately and drastically. The rules are never constant enough throughout game play for a typical gamer to "Catch on" to how the game works and theoretically, type in "Commands" to work them to their advantage.


 * Adventures
 * Adventures are what makes up a story. They set a theme or a groundwork for a small basis of what the game could be about, but the setting, the characters, or the items used may not be particularly consistent with the kind of Adventure. Problem Sleuth is based on the Prohibition Era, but it's more often the case than not that the characters in Problem Sleuth interact with items, characters and places that have nothing to do with that time period. In the case of Jail Break, after the game ends and the player Continues, the Prisoner almost immediately escapes from the jail and the game continues on regardless. Homestuck is set in the present, based on the technology used by John Egbert, Dave Strider, Rose Lalonde, and Jade Harley, but concepts of the game Sburb extend well beyond the current level of technology available in the real world.
 * Characters
 * The characters included in MSPA are varied and unique. Characters for the most part are made seemingly on the whim of how the story follows along with the commands, it is fairly unpredictable how the characters are going to act, react, or even transform based on the commands. Commands given to characters denote them by their name or even short hand if the name is particularly long, and often characters created are based on alter-egos of main characters or are created on the whim of a certain command succeeding or even failing.
 * Inventory
 * Many objects in these game worlds are used by the characters to activate or set off certain events as they progress through the game - This is known to MSPA readers as dealing with Weird puzzle shit. Weird Puzzle Shit occurs constantly and suggesting commands relating to objects around the area helps to solve the puzzles. It is the case most likely that objects are used in a more unorthodox manner or even worse, a manner that makes little to no sense.
 * Locations
 * The locations in Adventures are crucial to navigating and solving the game. There is a structure to how Locations work, and even in the absurdity there still is consistency in that one exit will certainly take you to the same entrance of another area.

Trivia

 * At 6000 pages and counting, MS Paint Adventures (when taken as a whole) is the longest webcomic yet created.