Adventure



An adventure is an exciting or unusual experience. It may also be a bold, usually risky undertaking, with an uncertain outcome. 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. The term also broadly refers to any enterprise that is potentially fraught with physical, financial or psychological risk, such as a business venture, or other major life undertakings.

The word adventuress can mean a female who enjoys or partakes in adventures, but (particularly in older literature) it can also have the negative connotation of one who schemes for material advancement by the use her sexuality; a gold digger As an instance of the latter the Oxford English Dictionary cites "Our Adventuress had the pickings of a few Feathers from an old Gentleman who fell in Love with her".

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.

Adventure in 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.



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, or perhaps the safety of a person. On the way, the hero must overcome various obstacles. Mythologist Joseph Campbell discussed his notion of the monomyth in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell proposed that the heroic mythological stories from culture to culture followed a similar underlying pattern, starting with the "call to adventure", followed by a hazardous journey, and eventual triumph.

Video games
Many video games are adventure games.

Adventure in nonfiction
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
There are many sports classified as adventure sports, due to their inherent danger and excitement. Some of these include mountain climbing, skydiving, or other extreme sports.