Adventure

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For other uses, see Adventure (disambiguation).

An adventure is an activity that is comprised of risky, dangerous, or uncertain experiences that are undertaken at least in part for the sake of physical or emotional excitement. The term is more popularly used in reference to physical activities that have some potential for danger, such as skydiving, mountain climbing, and extreme sports. The term is broad enough to refer to any enterprise that is potentially fraught with risk, such as a business venture or a major life undertaking. An adventurer is a person who bases their lifestyle or their fortunes on adventurous acts.

Adventurous experiences create psychological and physiological arousal, which can be interpreted as negative (e.g. fear) or positive (e.g. flow), and which can become a detriment as per the Yerkes-Dodson law. For some people, adventure becomes a major pursuit in and of itself.

Adventurous activities are typically undertaken for the purposes of recreation or excitement, such as multi-sport adventure racing or a traveler's adventure tourism. However, an adventurous activity can lead to gains in knowledge, such as in the case of the numerous pioneers who have explored and charted the Earth and, in recent times, traveled into space and to the Moon. As a more modern example, adventure education makes use of challenging experiences for learning.

In the context of a narrative, the adventure genre is typically applied to works in which the protagonist or other major characters are consistently placed in dangerous situations, and a character who lives by their wits and their skills is often called an adventurer. Adventure novels and adventure films are both prominent genres in their respective media, although the latter has fallen out of the spotlight with the rise of the modern-style action film. In games, the term is less consistently applied: the term "adventure game" is used in reference to video game that make use of exploration, interaction, and problem solving, while role-playing games use the term "adventure" in reference to specific pre-planned segments of gameplay.