Adventure Rock

» see bbc.co.uk/cbbc/games/adventurerock as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Adventure Rock started as CBBC World, the BBC's attempt to build a virtual world for the children who watched its channel. The code underneath came from Belgium: Ketnetkick, a world made for Ketnet, the children's service of the Flemish public broadcaster VRT, developed by Larian Studios long before Larian was the Baldur's Gate 3 company. The BBC licensed it, redeveloped it for a British audience aged six to twelve, and put it out in April 2008.

You downloaded a client for Windows and arrived on an island. You customized an avatar, and a floating robot called Cody taught you the controls and then followed you about a landscape cut into themed regions with their own tasks. Much of the play was collection: hundreds of cog-shaped tokens scattered through the world, pages torn out of a book, the purpose of which was never fully explained to anyone.

The framing story was pitched at the right age. A rift had appeared on the CBBC website leading somewhere unknown, two presenters had been sent through to investigate, and the site carried their dispatches back as a blog from a place with more questions than answers. Richard Deverell, who ran CBBC, told BBC News it was "a good example of the way we need to go", and that children were at the vanguard of where Children's BBC was heading.

~ the dossier ~

~ nobody else on the island ~

The design decision that makes Adventure Rock worth remembering is the one it is never credited for. There were no chatrooms. There was no currency and nothing to buy with real money. Two children in the same world at the same time could not see each other's avatars and had no mechanism for communicating at all.

Set against Second Life, which was the reference point every British newspaper reached for in 2007, that is an extraordinary thing for a public broadcaster to ship. The BBC had a child protection problem it could not afford to get wrong, and it solved it by removing the other children. What was left was a single-player game that happened to run on a server.

~ the study ~

Because it was the BBC, the world came with a research program attached. CBBC and the University of Westminster ran a year-long joint project funded by BBC Future Media and Technology together with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, beginning in July 2007, on how children engage with virtual worlds. It was the first time the BBC had run a structured commissioning round for academic research of this kind.

Workshops took place in December 2007 and January 2008 with 75 participants aged seven to eleven, drawn from five mixed groups around the UK, and the findings were presented at a Conference on Virtual Worlds for Children on 23 May 2008. One of the explicit research questions was why the BBC had chosen to build a closed world where avatars could not meet, and what the children themselves made of that.

~ taken down ~

What killed it was more ordinary than any of the above. The CBBC games messageboards filled up with children who could not get the client downloaded, and with children who had downloaded it and could not get it to run. Nobody came to fix any of it. Players drifted off. Areas of the island that had been locked at launch, including a roller coaster, were still locked when the whole thing was switched off.

The shutdown happened in 2009 and the BBC published nothing to mark it, which is why no page anywhere gives a day or a month. What survives is a copy of the client that someone uploaded to the Internet Archive, plus an academic paper about children's engagement with a world that stopped existing shortly after the paper was finished.

I was twenty-four in 2008 and still at university, which puts me a long way outside the target audience of a BBC property for primary school children that you needed a British childhood and a Windows machine to find in the first place. The reason I can describe it at all is the research project, and that is a funny way for a game to be preserved: not by its players, but by the people who were studying them.

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