Everything else is a mere, pale shadow of what they created -- in fact, Myst and Riven are actually categorically different from their many imitators, sui generis. Not only that, but we aren't likely to see any new breakthroughs in the field, since the graphical adventure genre is not just expensive and difficult to develop but also unpopular: Most gamers prefer multiplayer shooters, strategy games and simulators of various kinds. Even the other adventure game fanciers want to interact with game characters or role-play à la Dungeons and Dragons.

Not me. Some people call all that stuff fun; I call it stress. I live in Manhattan, where instead of the elements, we have humanity. Just walking down a sidewalk in Midtown requires about all the strategizing I care to do on any given day, and by the time I get home, more interaction is the last thing I'm in the mood for. Don't even ask about role-playing. The imaginary environments in games like Myst and Riven offer me something I rarely get unless I leave town or hole up in my apartment: solitude. Of course, I have to hole up in my apartment to play any computer game, but even a merely decent graphical adventure game can make me feel like I've been transported to strange new lands -- lands blissfully devoid of other people.

The truly great games, the ones like Myst and Riven, invoke a potent sense of place -- which to my mind is the imaginal thing that the digital medium is best at creating. Although we sit at our computers alone, we really are communicating with others and building relationships when we send e-mail and participate in lists and discussion boards; digitized social life is real, not virtual. But the sensation of travel we have when we do something like "go" to a Web site is utterly metaphoric and illusory. That illusion reaches its most sophisticated form in the nonexistent "spaces" we "move" through in computer games. So while action game fans will no doubt scoff to hear it, I'll go out on a limb and assert that Riven is the greatest computer game of all time because it creates the most persuasive, immersive, alluring sense of place.

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Of course, Riven, like Myst, used a still-image "slide show" format, which, in an age of 3-D game engines, has earned it yet more scorn from aficionados of the cutting edge. Nevertheless, Riven, the place, feels 10 times more real to me than the settings of the 3-D adventure games I've played. I'm not opposed to 3-D per se -- I would love to be able to explore the islands of Riven in all 360 degrees of their enigmatic beauty, and indeed 3-D game play is a selling point for a recently released sequel to Myst and Riven, Myst III: Exile.

In contrast to its predecessors, Exile offers the ability to look up, down and all around the various environments you explore in playing it. And Exile certainly is a fine piece of eye candy. The player travels to several different "ages" -- which is Myst-speak for alternate universes, although the typical Myst age consists of a fairly small island set in a vast and otherwise uninhabited sea. Each of the four largest ages has a different theme, for example, "energy" for the barren, rocky Voltaic Age, whose chief features are mechanical devices like steam engines and water wheels, and "nature" for the trippy Edanna Age, a place entwined with weird exotic plants whose sinewy vines, tumescent fruits and oversize orchids suggest the workings of an overheated, but interesting, sexual imagination.

The fan boards at sites like RivenGuild have been raging with debates about the quality of Exile's graphics (the worth of the dissatisfied parties' hardware has been called into question, and them's fightin' words), but on my basic iMac, running in software mode (I don't have a video card), it all looks just fabulous.

And yet, like Rand Miller in a recent interview, I'd have to call Exile a "distant cousin" of Myst and Riven rather than a "grandchild." One member of the RivenGuild community may have put it best when he plaintively wrote that Exile hasn't found its way into his dreams the way Myst did when he first discovered that earlier game. It's not that Exile isn't scrupulously faithful to the Myst mythos; it is. And it's not as if it doesn't stick pretty close to the aesthetic and thematic concerns that wove through the previous two games; it does. In fact, it's hard to find any motif or notion in Exile that can't be traced directly back to something in Riven or Myst -- from the Pacific Northwestern feel of the architecture, a sort of "Middle Earth goes art nouveau" look, to its use of mechanical puzzles that rely on the player's real-world understanding of cause and effect. (One exception, and a delightful one, is the way the puzzles in Edanna are based on the workings of ecosystems.)

Yet what Exile feels like is not so much a new work in the spirit of Myst and Riven as a simulacrum. It's as if someone had painted a vase of sunflowers or a cornfield in the manner of Vincent van Gogh; the result could quite possibly be an appealing picture, and it might even convince a casual observer, but it still wouldn't be a van Gogh. The analogy is grandiose, I admit, but at its kernel lies an elusive truth about the nature of art. Myst and Riven feel like art, while Exile feels like an entertainment. The superficial similarity of the three games makes the distinction that much more important, but also that much harder to nail down.

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