An adventure is an exciting experience that is typically a bold, sometimes risky, undertaking. 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.
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.”
Some of the oldest and most widespread stories in the world are stories of adventure such as Homer’s The Odyssey
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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.
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.
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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.
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.