Adventure

Exciting or unusual experienceTemplate:SHORTDESC:Exciting or unusual experience

An **adventure** is an exciting experience or undertaking that is typically bold, sometimes risky. Adventures may be activities with some potential for physical danger such as traveling, exploring, skydiving, mountain climbing, scuba diving, river rafting or participating in extreme sports. Adventures are often undertaken to create psychological arousal or in order to achieve a greater goal such as the pursuit of knowledge that can only be obtained in a risky manner.

## Motivation

Adventurous experiences create psychological arousal, which can be interpreted as negative (e.g. fear) or positive (e.g. flow). For some people, adventure becomes a major pursuit in and of itself. According to adventurer André Malraux, in his *La Condition Humaine* (1933), "If a man is not ready to risk his life, where is his dignity?".

Similarly, Helen Keller stated that "Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."

Outdoor adventurous activities are typically undertaken for the purposes of recreation or excitement: examples are adventure racing and adventure tourism. Adventurous activities can also lead to gains in knowledge, such as those undertaken by explorers and pioneers – the British adventurer Jason Lewis, for example, uses adventures to draw global sustainability lessons from living within finite environmental constraints on expeditions to share with schoolchildren. Adventure education intentionally uses challenging experiences for learning.

Author Jon Levy suggests that an experience should meet several criteria to be considered an adventure:

1. Be remarkable—that is, worth talking about
2. Involve adversity or perceived risk
3. Bring about personal growth

## Mythology and fiction

Some of the oldest and most widespread stories in the world are stories of adventure such as Homer's *The Odyssey*.

The knight errant was the form the "adventure seeker" character took in the late Middle Ages.

The adventure novel exhibits these "protagonist on adventurous journey" characteristics as do many popular feature films, such as *Star Wars* and *Raiders of the Lost Ark*.

 File:Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Carroll, Robinson - S001 - Cover.jpg
### Outdoors

Adventure books may have the theme of the hero or main character going to face the wilderness or Mother Nature. Examples include books such as *Hatchet* or *My Side of the Mountain*. These books are less about "questing", such as in mythology or other adventure novels, but more about surviving on their own, living off the land, gaining new experiences, and becoming closer to the natural world.

### Questing

Many adventures are based on the idea of a quest: the hero goes off in pursuit of a reward, whether it be a skill, prize, treasure, or perhaps the safety of a person. On the way, the hero must overcome various obstacles to obtain their reward.

### Video games

In video-game culture, 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. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of literary genres. Many adventure games (text and graphic) are designed for a single player, since this emphasis on story and character makes multi-player design difficult.

## Nonfiction works

From ancient times, travelers and explorers have written about their adventures. Journals which became best-sellers in their day were written, such as Marco Polo's journal *The Travels of Marco Polo* or Mark Twain's *Roughing It*. Others were personal journals, only later published, such as the journals of Lewis and Clark or Captain James Cook's journals. There are also books written by those not directly a part of the adventure in question, such as *The Right Stuff* by Tom Wolfe or books written by those participating in the adventure but in a format other than that of a journal, such as *Conquistadors of the Useless* by Lionel Terray. Documentaries often use the theme of adventure as well.

## Adventure sports

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There are many sports classified as adventure games or sports, due to their inherent danger and excitement. Some of these include mountain climbing, skydiving, or other extreme sports.Adventure sports has fast caught up in the Indian milieu. India offers immense opportunity for adventure lovers throughout its length and breadth. Angling & Fishing are two remarkable adventure activities among the many others that are offered in India. They are specially suited to the Indian subcontinent because of innumerable rivers that course through the expansive Gangetic Plains, and originate in the upper reaches of the magnificent Himalayas. The Indian Himalaya are an ultimate destination for adventure lovers and has attracted trekkers and lovers of nature Indian himalayas are the source of significant life giver rivers, like Ganges Beas, Satluj and their tributaries. The Himalayan mountain ranges of India offer breathtaking, highly challenging trekking routes. Mountaineering in India was introduced by the Europeans in the 18th century. India offers an exciting mountaineering experience to an adventure sport lover. The Himalayas that stretch from north-west of India to far north-east offers a number of high rise peaks that are considered ideal for mountaineering. Some of the places for mountaineering in India are Leh Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir, Garhwal and Kumaon Himalayas in Uttarakhand, Kullu valley and Lahul Spiti in Himachal Pradesh, and Sikkim and some other parts of north-eastern region.

## See also

* Adventure film
* Adventure playground
* Adventure travel
* Exploration
* List of genres
* Sports
* Tourism
* Travel

## References

1. ↑ Adventure.
2. ↑ Gomà-i-Freixanet, M (2004). "Sensation Seeking and Participation in Physical Risk Sports". *On the psychobiology of personality*. Elsevier. p. 187. ISBN 978-0-08-044209-9. https://books.google.com/books?id=6YjcgAn8TfsC&pg=PA187.
3. ↑ Keller, Helen (1957). *The Open Door*. Garden City, N.Y. Doubleday. https://archive.org/details/opendoor00kell.
4. ↑ Snow, Shane (2 December 2016). The Science of the Perfect Night Out (en).
5. ↑ <templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>Mansbach, Adam (12 February 2010). "Odysseus Remixed". *The New York Times*. Archived from the original on 1 January 2022.
6. ↑ <templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>Jenkyns, Richard (22 December 1996). "Heroic Enterprise – (Book review: The Odyssey translated by Robert Fagles)". *nytimes.com*. Retrieved 13 June 2013.
7. ↑ Paul, Zweig (1999). *The adventurer*. Akadine Press. ISBN 1-888173-72-6. OCLC 61858818. http://worldcat.org/oclc/61858818.
8. ↑ <templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>Canby, Vincent (26 May 1977). "A Trip to a Far Galaxy That's Fun and Funny". *The New York Times*.
9. ↑ <templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>Canby, Vincent (12 June 1981). "Movie Review: Raiders of the Lost Ark". *The New York Times*.
10. ↑ Adams, Ernest (29 December 1999). The Designer's Notebook: Three Problems for Interactive Storytellers.
11. ↑ Hitchens, Joe (2002). "Special Issues in Multi player Game Design". In Laramée, François-Dominic. *Game Design Perspectives*. Charles River Media. p. 258. ISBN 1584500905.
12. ↑ 16 Famous Explorers and Their Incredible Stories (en-US) (2018-12-04).

## External links

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* Martin Feeney *Going on a journey: Life in Year 10*
* Website of the Research Unit "Philology of Adventure": ongoing research project on the literary history of the adventure pattern
* What is an adventure? A definition of "adventure", "hero" and "epic" with an illustration of the hero's journey.
* Wikivoyage

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