Tag: a mind forever voyaging

Really Late Reviews #1: The Space Bar [misc]

[I wrote a few reviews of graphic adventure games in 2001, and Stephen Granade hosted them on the About.com interactive fiction site he ran at the time. I called them Really Late Reviews because, well, I wrote them long after the games in question had been released. About.com has gone so far down the Internet memory hole that I can no longer retrieve those reviews in the context of the site, so I’m taking their dates from the original text files on my hard drive. That means this review of The Space Bar was written on January 27, 2001.]

For several years now, I’ve had a growing pile of commercial adventure game CDs sitting next to my computer. For one reason or another, I haven’t gotten around to playing them, but when the millennium turned, I decided I was going to change all that. I’m playing through them now, and for each one I play, I’m hoping to write a review. These reviews won’t be aimed at helping people decide whether or not to buy the games — they’re mostly out of print now, so the point is pretty moot. (Although many of them could no doubt be obtained through eBay or bargain bins.) Instead, I want these “Really Late Reviews” to be meditations on what works and what doesn’t in graphical adventure games, as illustrated by the successes and failures of each work under scrutiny.

The game on top of the pile was The Space Bar, Steve Meretzky‘s first post-Legend foray into graphical adventures. Meretzky has a good name among text adventure enthusiasts like me for having written landmark Infocom games like Planetfall and A Mind Forever Voyaging. I wasn’t as fond of his later works for Legend Entertainment, the Spellcasting series, because what clever writing and puzzles they did contain were submerged in a sea of juvenile, sexist humor, but they were commercial hits and plenty of people enjoyed them. After he left Legend, he founded a company called Boffo Games, Inc., and created The Space Bar, a large adventure game that was to be Boffo’s flagship product. Despite good reviews, the game sunk, and so did Boffo. Maybe this postmortem will provide a little perspective on just where TSB went wrong.

The game puts you in the role of Alias Node, a human detective on the seedy world of Armpit VI, investigating a robbery and murder whose culprit has been traced to a dive called The Thirsty Tentacle. The bar, like the rest of the galaxy, is populated by aliens of various races, but very few other humans. Your job is to interview these aliens, looking for clues about the identity of the killer, and using your special ability of “Empathy Telepathy” to enter their memories and guide those flashbacks to discover vital bits of information. In effect, these flashbacks serve as mini-adventure games in themselves, and the bulk of TSB is spent navigating the memories of various aliens, with occasional excursions back into the Thirsty Tentacle to meet other aliens and, finally, to catch the criminal.

The aliens are definitely the best part of the game, springing as they did from the imagination of Ron Cobb, the same guy who designed the eye-popping oddities that populate the Star Wars cantina scene. Copious background information on each alien species enlivens the game, and deepens the experience of otherness that permeates the flashbacks. Visually, too, the game does a terrific job with the aliens, and here we see one of the great strengths of graphical games. Text is wonderful for evoking interior worlds, but for the presentation of bizarre shapes and structures, it’s hard to beat good graphics. For example, a text game might tell you that Sraffans have hourglass-shaped pupils, but it would be hard put to present the labyrinthine network of veins surrounding the pupil, or to take your perspective inside those eyeballs as the flashback begins. TSB uses graphics in some clever ways throughout the game, including a freaky perspective from within the compound eyes of an insectoid race.

So The Space Bar is clever, and visually engaging. It also has its fair share of funny moments, thanks to Meretzky, who’s much funnier when he’s not aiming at 13-year-olds. Unfortunately, fun as it is to look at, it’s often not much fun to play. In struggling through the game, I found myself thinking quite a bit about the problems of translating text-game writing experience to the creation of graphical games, and wondering if TSB‘s many flaws stemmed from those problems.

Take, for example, the game’s interface. If you don’t have a parser and prompt, something must obviously take their place, and in this case it was the standard 360-degree panning worldview (with a bit of up/down axis as well), augmented by a multi-purpose onscreen device called the PDA: a combination map, inventory, system command portal, voice-mail receptor, and information storehouse. The idea of the PDA is a sensible one, but its implementation in TSB was extremely clumsy. Rather than occupying a stable portion of the screen, it rises up to half-obscure the main window whenever you click on it, spending the rest of its time half-visible, with half its features unavailable.

One of the most important of these unavailable features is the voice-mail indicator, which blinks when Alias receives a message. Because the light is obscured from view except when the PDA is fully visible, you end up receiving messages and not knowing it for dozens of turns, until the little voice inside your PDA says “Have you noticed your message light is blinking?” Why no I hadn’t, probably because I CAN’T SEE IT! It’s silly that the blinking light is hidden, but even the hidden light is a better solution than the one the game adopts occasionally, which is to have the PDA suddenly rise up and stop all action as a message comes in and is played.

When this happens (and it’s usually at the worst times), the player has to wait for the game to speak its message before continuing on with any actions, and therein lies another significant difference between graphical and text adventures. Text adventures print all their output, which takes pretty much no time at all. Graphical adventures have voice-acting, which means that to receive the dialogue, the player has to wait as long as it takes for that dialogue to be spoken… every single time. The voice acting in TSB is excellent, so it’s a pleasure to hear the dialogue in real time when you’re hearing it initially, but when you already know what’s going to be said, even the best voice acting can become tedious indeed. TSB often provides the option of hitting Esc to halt these sequences, but all too often Esc doesn’t have an effect, and you’re left drumming your fingers while a phrase plays for the tenth time.

Even worse, when realtime voices are overlaid on turn-based gaming, the resulting timing confusion can turn an extremely simple puzzle into a maddeningly difficult one. For example, in one of the flashbacks, you’re waiting for your name to be called before you can leave a particular room. However, there are about 10 voice phrases that play before that happens, each of which is around 30-45 seconds long. The phrases play one per turn, so if you perform actions which advance the turn counter (examining things, inventory management, etc.) and space them less than 30 seconds apart, the phrases pile up and play one after the other. When this happens, you’ll hear your name called, and try to leave the room, but the turn when you were supposed to do that has long passed, so the game goes on to say “Oh, too bad you didn’t leave the room — you lose” as you’re frantically clicking away. Doctors recommend against this sort of game design, as it leads to many cases of heads embedded in monitors.

Another sin of sound design which TSB commits over and over is having background noises drown out crucial information. For example, there’s a scene where you’re performing your actions while a thunderstorm rages in the background. In a text adventure, the scene would look like this:

> EXAMINE WATERFALL
The water sounds funny -- there might be something behind it.

KER-POW! Deafening thunder shakes the ground where you stand.

In The Space Bar, you click on the “Examine Waterfall” icon, and what you hear is the flashback character’s voice: “The water sounds funny. There mi– KER-POW! –it.” Then the sound you hear is yourself growling, as you realize that the game has stupidly and randomly allowed a background sound to prevent you from learning information that, as the character, you should theoretically already know. In other words, an actual sound has obscured a symbolic sound, the latter of which is only meant to represent the character’s interior dialogue. This happens over and over again, in several flashbacks, and each time it does, you have to repeat the action and hope you get lucky enough to hear the information you’re supposed to have.

That same thunderstorm flashback also features another one of TSB‘s biggest gaffes: the realtime puzzle. There’s a chase sequence in this flashback in which you have to make the correct series of clicks and rotations, in an extremely limited period of time, and if you don’t the flashback ends unsuccessfully. Maddeningly enough, this is exactly the time when your PDA chooses to rise up and halt all action until it finishes playing the incoming message. Because restoring from a failed flashback is blindingly dull [you have to listen to the failure message in real time, then get past the transition animation, then trigger the flashback again, then another transition animation, then the beginning-of-flashback animation, and only then can you restore your game], the punishment for failure is quite steep.

Add to this the fact that the processor load in that flashback makes cursor movement jerky, and panning unreliable, and you have one annoying roadblock. Now, I’m not of the school of thought that believes adventure games should never ever have realtime action portions, though I do believe it’s a bad idea to throw one arcade sequence into an otherwise traditional adventure game (which is exactly what The Space Bar does.) I enjoy both adventure gaming and twitch gaming, and don’t mind seeing the two mixed, but they have to be done well — if I fail, I want it to be because of slow reflexes, not a slow processor. My P-166 seems pretty pokey these days, but in 1997, when The Space Bar came out, it was well above the game’s minimum requirements.

Still, I gritted my teeth through many attempts at this puzzle before finally, gratefully getting past it. In a text adventure, that realtime puzzle would probably still be annoying, but because the processor demands of text are minimal, the computer’s speed would very likely not be the bottleneck that impedes completion of the puzzle.

Another side effect of the increased complexity of sounds, images, and animations in a graphical adventure game is their increased size and consequent separation onto multiple disks. The Space Bar comes on three CDs, two of which contain flashback material and the other one of which contains all the sequences within the bar itself. As a result, every time a flashback begins or ends, you have to switch CDs. I needn’t point out that a text adventure is highly unlikely to fill more than one CD and therefore to require such constant switching, but I will note that the drudgery of such switches imposes unnatural limits on both design and playing.

Because I was trying to minimize CD switching, I stayed within each flashback and tried to solve them in their entirety one at a time, instead of hopping from one to the next anytime I got stuck, as I probably would have in a text game. In effect, the disk switching became another of the game’s many resource management problems, but one of its least enjoyable. The best of these puzzles take advantage of the potential of graphics to easily demonstrate spatial relationships, and end up achieving effects that would be extremely difficult in a text game. The worst of them work through the game’s regular interface, and the presence of graphics and sound slows down the solving process to no real benefit. Elements that slow the process of solving a puzzle by means of arbitrary and pointless delays make that puzzle much less fun. Text has an advantage here, because its elements very rarely cause time delays.

Another advantage of text is its ability to clearly separate objects. For instance, in one of the game’s flashbacks, you stand before a house. There’s a boat locker in front of the house, from which you must obtain a vital object. The problem is that the locker blends in a bit with the house itself, and both the house and the locker are clickable objects. Consequently, you can click on several features of the house, all of which the game will process as the house itself. The only exception to this is the locker, but when the windows, the roof, the chimney, and the pipes are all called “House”, why would a player think that the little brown square representing the locker is anything but another unimplemented house feature? What’s more, you can get irretrievably stuck in the flashback and not know why — I had to look at a walkthrough, and when I did I said, “What locker?” In a text adventure, this simply wouldn’t be an issue, because objects don’t overlap:

Beside the House
Be it ever so humble, this is your home. The roof, windows, chimney, and pipes may all be a bit ramshackle, but they're all yours.

There is a boat locker in front of the house.

There’s no chance you could miss the boat locker (as I did playing TSB), because the interface never obscures it.

Reading through this review, I’m worried that it sounds like I’m railing against graphic adventures in general, and arguing that text is always better. I hope it doesn’t sound like that, because I don’t believe that. For one thing, The Space Bar has several problems that are equally possible in text adventures (an extremely irritating maze, several bugs, one of which almost kept me from finishing the game.) For another, I don’t think that superiority and inferiority enter into the equation at all — I just think that text adventures and graphic adventures are distinctly different forms, kind of like (to employ a tired analogy) novels and films. The skill sets required to create each of them overlap a bit, but not nearly as much as you might guess. Playing The Space Bar felt reminiscent of watching a film directed by a really good novelist who knows very little about moviemaking. You can see what was intended, and if you look harder, you can see why for the most part it all falls horribly flat.

Wishbringer [Infocom >RESTART]

IFDB page: Wishbringer
[This review contains many major spoilers for Wishbringer, medium-level spoilers for Beyond Zork, and some details that might technically be considered spoilers for Trinity and other Zork games. Also, I wrote an introduction to these Infocom >RESTART reviews, for those who want some context.]

Brian Moriarty is responsible for only three Infocom games, but what a trio it is. There’s Trinity, often hailed as the best game in the entire catalog, and pretty much always in the consensus conversation about the cream of Infocom’s crop. There’s Beyond Zork, which in many ways is a hot mess but which was also one of the most ambitious Infocom titles ever, in the ways it attempted to improve the text adventure interface and marry the IF tradition to the emerging CRPG. Then there’s Wishbringer, Moriarty’s debut and a charming work of quasi-Zorkian lore that mostly succeeds in its attempt to provide a friendly doorway into the world of interactive fiction.

>CONNECT THE GAMES

What I didn’t realize, at least not until playing Beyond Zork and Wishbringer in close proximity, is how many threads tie them together. It first occurred to me when we encountered the umbrella. You know the one — its handle is carved like a parrot’s head, I assume in homage to the one in P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins. Trinity gets cred for the way it references Travers, J.M. Barrie, Lewis Carroll, and others, but this particular Travers reference predates Trinity by a year. I saw it in Wishbringer and thought, “Is this umbrella in every Moriarty Infocom game?” Yep, sure is.

That’s nothing, though, compared to the ties between Wishbringer and Beyond Zork. Look at this:

  • A Magick Shoppe where “a concealed bell tinkles merrily.”
  • For that matter, funky spellings like “magick” and “shoppe”
  • Hellhounds and eldritch vapors
  • A lighthouse
  • A cat that you can pick up, but which squirms out of your arms in a few turns
  • Anthropomorphic platypi belonging to royal courts
  • A whistle connected with transportation
  • Connections from the fairy tale in the Wishbringer documentation — fields of Frotzen, a coconut of Quendor, hungry Implementors
  • A horseshoe for luck
  • Chocolate in your inventory

Dante and I played these games out of order, but having played through Wishbringer it became clear how much Beyond Zork was in part a project to solidify the connections between Moriarty’s first game and the Zork universe. That said, Wishbringer is clearly a Zork game even without those connections forward. For one thing, it’s got the grues. By this point Dante and I had dressed up like a grue, repelled grues, even become a grue. Wishbringer let us comfort a baby grue and get milk out of a grue fridge — a fittingly adorable grue variation for this beginner’s game.

Even more on-the-nose was the “shimmering trail” to a location called “West of House”, complete with mailbox and leaflet. In keeping with the game’s less-austere tone, this mailbox pops out of the ground and follows you around, like a mute echo of Planetfall‘s Floyd. The game’s messaging is a little muddled around this Zorky callback, though. When we first walk the path, we get a “shock of recognition” upon arriving West of House — seemingly we’ve been here before, and perhaps this mail clerk is even the Zork adventurer somehow? When we leave, though, it says:

As the house disappears into the distance, you get the distinct feeling that, someday, you will pass this way again.

Which is it, Wishbringer? Were we there before or will we be again? I guess, given the number of games that have quoted that location, both could be true. In fact, Zork Zero, both a future and a past game depending on your perspective, even had its share of ties to Wishbringer — an ever-burning candle, some granola mines, and even the trick of transforming a landscape, at least in its prologue.

>EXPLORE LANDSCAPE. G.

That transforming landscape trick is one of the best things Wishbringer does. Experiencing a landscape, then re-experiencing it after a fundamental change, is a powerful technique in IF, and a fantastic way to create emotional resonances for the player and the character. Steve Meretzky would later take this approach to its apotheosis in A Mind Forever Voyaging, but Moriarty lays wonderful groundwork here.

The cover of Infocom's grey box for Wishbringer. Two hands are cupped around a bright purple light. Text above reads"Through strange, savage zones your way will be shown by the magical stone called WISHBRINGER".

Cleverly, the game’s design forces us to cross Festeron before it transforms, so that we can’t avoid seeing a variety of different locations that will then take on a different cast in Witchville. I wonder, though, if the time limit in the early game serves this design very well. With Mr. Crisp and the game itself urging us to hurry hurry hurry, we’re led to not only take the most direct path, but to rush through locations without noticing their features.

I think I’d rather the game had made the Magick Shoppe a little harder to find, so that we must traverse and pay close attention to more of Festeron, and therefore feel the creepiness of its change all the more strongly. In addition, sometimes a message in Witchville will clearly reference a change from Festeron, but if the player hasn’t visited that location prior to the switch, that message pretty much goes to waste. An example is the broken speaker in the church when you pick up the candle.

I shockingly failed to mention in my Spellbreaker review that it was the very first Infocom game that Dante and I played in this entire project that didn’t force us to restart. Hooray for Lebling and his excellent design, breaking away from one of the most tedious IF traditions! I mention this because Dante and I voluntarily restarted Wishbringer due to the time limit discussed above. It wasn’t that the game became unwinnable without this restart, but that we wanted to experience more of Festeron so that we could better appreciate Witchville.

We volunteered for something else, too. Wishbringer, as I said, is a game for newcomers to interactive fiction, and therefore tries not to be too forbidding in its puzzles. Consequently, many of the game’s puzzles can be solved either the old-fashioned way, or alternately via the magic(k) wishes of the title stone. Dante and I, playing our ninth Zorky game, felt like experts at this point, so we set out to solve the game without using any wishes at all.

It’s a sign of Wishbringer‘s craft that this path felt challenging but not daunting. We were able to complete the game in nine sessions, ranging from 30 to 90 minutes each, and the one time we got really stuck it was our own fault, because we’d failed to take a pretty obvious action. (For the record, we didn’t read the love note once it was out of its envelope.) Once we got over that hurdle, it was pretty smooth sailing to the endgame.

>WISH FOR MULTIPLE SOLUTIONS

I don’t have the greatest sense of how various tropes and techniques developed in 1980s interactive fiction outside of Infocom — for that you’d have to turn to Aaron Reed or Jimmy Maher. But at least within the Infocom canon, Wishbringer was the first to thoroughly integrate a sensibility of multiple puzzle solutions. Sure, these date back as far as Zork I, though that game’s version of “multiple solutions” generally involved one that made sense and one that was a cutesy (or nonsensical) magic word. Its commitment to multiple solutions was as haphazard as the rest of its aesthetic.

Wishbringer, on the other hand, puts multiple solutions at the core of its design, and the result is a world that not only feels more welcoming to beginners but also feels richer and more real. After all, we don’t have wish-granting stones in our world, but we generally do have multiple approaches available when confronted with a problem, so when a game world offers multiple paths through the same barrier, it’s easier to believe in that world, even when some of the paths are magical. Let’s not forget — some of the problems are magical too!

Even better, just as the protagonist has multiple ways of solving problems, so too do the antagonists have multiple ways of causing problems. Wishbringer is the rare mid-80’s game in which enemies learn from their mistakes. Find a hole that lets you out of the prison cell? Well the next time you get thrown into that cell, that hole has been patched with concrete. Escape again? Nevermind — they’ll just throw you into the ocean.

The opening screen of Wishbringer, including a prompt preceded with "Okay, what do you want to do now?"

Playing a beginner’s game as experts, it was hard for Dante and I to judge just how easily an IF newbie would accustom to it, but we could certainly see that Wishbringer was doing its best to be welcoming. Even beyond the multiple puzzle solutions, there’s friendly text like “Okay, what do you want to do now?” before the first few prompts, gradually tapering off so that it doesn’t become tedious. There’s also this friendly death message:

Looks like the story’s over. But don’t despair! Interactive fiction lets you learn from your mistakes.

We looked at each other after our first time seeing this message, and agreed with a smile that for accuracy’s sake, “lets you” should probably be replaced with “often forces you to”.

Even so, we found Wishbringer a charming experience, and a very pleasant end to our journey through Infocom’s Zork titles. As cat lovers, we especially appreciated that the point of the story is to rescue a cat, and in an even more satisfying way than Beyond Zork had allowed. With nine games down, we had only one remaining in our list, and it would be a new experience for both of us, given that I’d never played it to completion. Moonmist awaits!

PAX East Part 1: The Suite Life of Zarf & Co. [Misc]

[I originally posted this on my other blog, >SUPERVERBOSE, way back when it was on livejournal. It’s the second in a series of posts about my visit to PAX East 2010, which was life-altering in a good way. I’ve cleaned up the text ever-so-slightly.]

*************************
There were further travel adventures after the plane arrived — I found my way to the subway without any trouble, and got off at the right stop, but it was dark and raining, and I was quite disoriented. Lucky for me, there appeared on the horizon a lovely Au Bon Pain with free wireless access. I ducked in and got my bearings over a delicious lemon danish & chocolate-dipped shortbread. Mmmmm… empty calories. Also, let’s hear it for the Internet — it was so great to 1) figure out the right path to my hotel via Google Maps, 2) write Laura to tell her I’d made the plane, and 3) look up sunrise tables to figure out when I’d have a little light on my side.

Armed with this information, I walked to my hotel as the sun rose, and asked them if there was any way I could pretty please get into a room early so I could grab a nap before proceeding with the rest of my day. Unfortunately, they’d been sold out the night before, so they didn’t have any rooms open that early. They took my phone number and suggested I grab a leisurely breakfast — they’d call me when something opened up. The rain had turned to snow at that point, so I opted to stay within the hotel. They had a cafe with a nice (albeit hotel-expensive) breakfast buffet, so I camped out up there for the next couple of hours until they finally called me with the good news.

Got a room, got into bed. Blessed sleep.

At 12:30 I arose, cleaned up, figured out my train path, and headed over to the IF hospitality suite. This was a room in the Hilton arranged by Andrew Plotkin (aka Zarf) on behalf of the People’s Republic Of Interactive Fiction (a Boston-based IF group) to be a welcoming space for PAXies interested in IF. They printed up friendly fliers and everything (click images for larger versions):

Photocopy - the front side of a flyer advertising "The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction" Hospitality Suite at PAX East 2010, listing various IF-related events at the con and in the room.

Photocopy - the back side of a flyer advertising the IF Hospitality Suite at PAX East 2010 - a faux IF transcript about finding the suite.

When I got there, I was pleased to find that it was pretty crowded! Not only that, it was full of people I’d known online for more than 15 years! Zarf was there, of course — we’d never met, although we’ve been in the same community since 1995. Also there was the estimable Stephen Granade, another guy I’ve known since the very beginning but never been face-to-face with. A few people I’d met at an IF gathering several years ago, so I wasn’t completely overwhelmed with face-to-name energy, but still, it was pretty amazing.

Top 5 awesome things about the IF suite

1) The swag! Robb Sherwin put together a great IF promotional CD (this, but updated with newer stuff) to give out to visitors. There was also a nifty postcard, with art on the front and a handy how-to on the back. Plus: badge ribbons, stickers, buttons, and nametags!

2) The food! Zarf & co. were kind enough to provide lots and lots of chips, M&Ms, and soda, and others brought delicious treats as well. Across the hall, Ben Collins-Sussman and Jack Welch even provided beer! Woo hoo!

3) The energy! At any given moment, there were usually two or three conversations going — newbies connecting with veterans, different subsections of the community interconnecting, people getting acquainted who had never really met before. People talked about IF, and also about their lives, what was happening at the conference, and what was for dinner that night.

4) The special guest stars! Don Woods, co-creator of the original Adventure, came to an IF panel and chatted with folks. I got to hang at the edge of a conversation between Emily Short and Steve Meretzky, so I got to thank the latter for his work, which has meant a lot to me over the years. Especially A Mind Forever Voyaging. Wow. Jason Scott hung out for a while doing his larger-than-life, bursting-with-anecdotes thing. It was a bit like a bunch of indie bands hanging out together, and then occasionally Paul McCartney or Robert Plant might drop by.

5) The people! I suppose this is a superset of the previous one, but holy cow, this room was PACKED the entire weekend! There was something really special about this locus of passion and force about IF. I loved talking to people who were new to the scene. I loved talking to people who had become community celebrities in the time I’ve been out of the loop. I loved talking to people I’ve known for years from the other side of a screen. I loved being in that room.

Zork Zero [Infocom >RESTART]

IFDB page: Zork Zero
[This review contains lots of spoilers for Zork Zero, as well as at least one for Zork I. Also, I wrote an introduction to these Infocom >RESTART reviews, for those who want some context.]

The earliest game in the Zork chronology was one of the latest games in the Infocom chronology. Zork Zero emerged in 1988, two years after the company was bought by Activision, and one year before it would be shut down. Zork was Infocom’s most famous franchise by far, and this prequel was the company’s last attempt to milk that cash cow, or rather its last attempt with original Implementors on board. Activision-produced graphical adventures like Return to Zork, Zork: Nemesis, and Zork: Grand Inquisitor were still to come, but those were fundamentally different animals than their namesake. Zork Zero, written by veteran Implementor Steve Meretzky, was still a text adventure game.

However, there was a little augmentation to the text this time. Along with a few other games of this era, Zork Zero saw Infocom dipping its toe into the world of graphics. The text window is presented inside a pretty proscenium arch, one which changes its theme depending on your location in the game, and also provides a handy compass rose showing available exits. Some locations come with a thumbnail icon, many of which are pretty crudely pixelated, but some of which (like the Great Underground Highway) are rather memorable. Most crucially, several important puzzles and story moments rely upon graphics in a way that hadn’t been seen before in a Zork game, or any Infocom game for that matter. In order to make these nifty effects work in Windows Frotz, our interpreter of choice, Dante and I had to do a bit of hunting around in the IF Archive — thus it was that we solved our first puzzle before we even began the game.

>EMBIGGEN ZORK. G. G. G. G.

Once we did start, we found that graphics weren’t the only way Meretzky found to expand on the Zork legacy. He also expanded on it by… expanding it! Over and over again, we were knocked out by the scope of this game. It’s enormous! Our Trizbort map had 208 rooms, and that’s not even counting ridiculous location “stacks” like the 400-story FrobozzCo building or the 64-square life-sized chessboard. By contrast, our map for Zork I had 110 rooms, and Zork III had a meager 59. So many locations. So many puzzles. So many objects. So many points! You’ll score a thousand hard-won points in a successful playthrough of Zork Zero. Dimwit Flathead’s excessiveness is a frequent butt of Meretzky’s jokes in this game (e.g. a huge kitchen that “must’ve still been crowded when all 600 of Dimwit’s chefs were working at the same time”), but if Dimwit were to design an IF game, it would definitely be this one.

The largesse still doesn’t apply to writing noun descriptions, though. For example:

>X CANNONBALL
There's nothing special about the cannonball.

>X UNICORNS
There's nothing unusual about the herd of unicorns.

>X FJORD
It looks just like the Flathead Fjord.

Even this late in Infocom’s development, they still hadn’t adopted the ethos that the most skilled hobbyists would take up later, of enhancing immersion by describing everything that could be seen.

Similarly, inventory limits are still around to vex us, and they hit especially hard in a game like this, which is absolutely overflowing with objects. Because of those limits, we followed our tried-and-true tactic of piling up all our spare inventory in a single room. In the case of Zork Zero, we knew we’d be throwing a bunch of those objects into a magic trophy case cauldron, so we stacked them in the cauldron room. By the time we were ready for the endgame, that room’s description was pretty hilarious:

Banquet Hall
Many royal feasts have been held in this hall, which could easily hold ten thousand guests. Legends say that Dimwit's more excessive banquets would require the combined farm outputs of three provinces. The primary exits are to the west and south; smaller openings lead east and northeast.
A stoppered glass flask with a skull-and-crossbones marking is here. The flask is filled with some clear liquid.
A 100-ugh dumbbell is sitting here, looking heavy.
Sitting in the corner is a wooden shipping crate with some writing stencilled across the top.
A calendar for 883 GUE is lying here.
You can see a poster of Ursula Flathead, a four-gloop vial, a shovel, a box, a spyglass, a red clown nose, a zorkmid bill, a saucepan, a ring of ineptitude, a rusty key, a notebook, a harmonica, a toboggan, a landscape, a sapphire, a glittery orb, a smoky orb, a fiery orb, a cloak, a ceramic perch, a quill pen, a wand, a hammer, a lance, an easel, a wooden club, a bag, a silk tie, a diploma, a brass lantern, a notice, a broom, a funny paper, a stock certificate, a screwdriver, a gaudy crown, a ticket, a dusty slate, a treasure chest, a blueprint, a saddle, a fan, a steel key, a walnut shell, a manuscript, an iron key, a package, a T-square, a fancy violin, a metronome, a scrap of parchment, a proclamation, a cannonball, a sceptre and a cauldron here.

That certainly wasn’t everything, but you get the idea.

In fact, this game was so big that its very size ended up turning into a puzzle, or at least a frustration enhancer. Dante and I flailed at a locked door for quite a while before realizing that we’d had the key almost since the beginning of the game. We forgot we’d obtained an iron key by solving a small puzzle in one of our earliest playthroughs, and the key itself was lost in the voluminous piles of stuff we had acquired. When we finally realized we’d had the key all along, it was nice to open up the door and everything, but it also felt a bit like we should be appearing on the GUE’s version of Hoarders.

Not only did the scope of Zork Zero obscure the answers to puzzles like that, it also functioned as a near-endless source of red herrings. It’s possible to waste immense amounts of time just checking locations to see if you’ve missed anything, because there are just so many locations. The FrobozzCo building was of course an example of this, but even more so was the chessboard, which soaked up tons of our time and attention trying to figure out what sort of chess puzzle we were solving. Not only was exploring the whole thing a red herring, but so was making moves and doing anything chess-related!

The cover of Zork Zero

On the other hand, the game’s sprawling vistas can also evoke a genuine sense of awe, somewhat akin to seeing the Grand Canyon from multiple viewpoints. There was a moment in the midgame where we’d been traversing a very large map to collect various objects, and then the proper application of those objects opened up a dimensional gateway to an entirely new very large map. Shortly afterward, we realized that in fact, the puzzle we’d just solved had in fact opened up five different dimensional gateways, some of which eventually connected to our main map but many of which did not! Moments like that were breathtaking, not just because of all the authorial work they implied, but also because of the gameplay riches that kept getting laid before us.

Sometimes, to make things even sillier, the effects of the giant inventory would combine with the effects of the giant map. One of those offshoot maps mentioned above contained a special mirror location, which would show you if there was anything supernatural about an object by suggesting that object’s magical properties in its reflection. Super cool, right? Well yeah, except that inventory limits, combined with incredible object profusion, required us to haul a sliver of our possessions during each trip to the mirror, and each trip to the mirror required a whole bunch of steps to accomplish. (Well, there was a shortcut through a different magical item, but we didn’t realize that at the time, and in fact only caught onto that very late in the game, so didn’t get much of a chance at optimization.)

So yes, the mirror location was a wonderful discovery. Less wonderful: hauling the game’s bazillion objects to the mirror in numerous trips to see if it could tell us something special. But then when we found something cool that helped us solve a puzzle: wonderful! This is quintessential Zork Zero design — an inelegant but good-natured mix of cleverness, brute force, and sheer volume. The capper to this story is that there’s one puzzle in particular that this mirror helps to solve, but we fell prey to Iron Key Syndrome once again and somehow failed to bring that puzzle’s particular objects (the various orbs) to the mirror, obliging us to just try every single one orb in the puzzle until we found the right one.

>RECOGNIZE ZORK TROPE. G. G. G. G.

Those orbs felt pretty familiar to us, having just recently palavered with Zork II‘s palantirs. (Well, the game calls them crystal spheres, but c’mon, they’re palantirs. Or, as Wikipedia and hardcore Lord of the Rings people would prefer, palantíri.) However, familiar-looking crystal balls were far from the only Zork reference on hand. As I said, Zork Zero appeared late in Infocom’s history, and with the speed at which the videogame industry was moving, Zork I had for many already acquired the reflected shine of a bygone golden age. Thus, nostalgia was part of the package Infocom intended to sell with this game, which meant Zork tropes aplenty.

One of the best Zorky parts of the game concerns those dwellers in darkness, the lurking grues. In the world of Zork Zero, grues are a bygone menace. As the in-game Encyclopedia Frobozzica puts it:

Grues were eradicated from the face of the world during the time of Entharion, many by his own hand and his legendary blade Grueslayer. Although it has now been many a century since the last grue sighting, old hags still delight in scaring children by telling them that grues still lurk in the bottomless pits of the Empire, and will one day lurk forth again.

Oh, did I fail to mention that this huge game also contains an interactive Encyclopedia Frobozzica, with dozens of entries? Yeah, this huge game also has that. In any case, “the bottomless pits of the Empire” might sound familiar to longtime Zork players, or to readers of Infocom’s newsletter, which was for several years called The New Zork Times, until a certain Gray Lady‘s lawyers got involved. As NZT readers would know, there was a time before Zork was on home computers, before it was even called Zork at all. It was called Dungeon, at least until a certain gaming company‘s lawyers got involved.

In Dungeon, there were no grues in the dark places of the game, but rather bottomless pits — a rather fitting fate for someone stumbling around in a dark cave, but the game was more than just a cave. As the NZT tells it:

In those days, if one wandered around in the dark area of the dungeon, one fell into a bottomless pit. Many users pointed out that a bottomless pit in an attic should be noticeable from the ground floor of the house. Dave [Lebling] came up with the notion of grues, and he wrote their description. From the beginning (or almost the beginning, anyway), the living room had a copy of “US News & Dungeon Report,” describing recent changes in the game. All changes were credited to some group of implementers, but not necessarily to those actually responsible: one of the issues describes Bruce [Daniels] working for weeks to fill in all the bottomless pits in the dungeon, thus forcing packs of grues to roam around.

Sure enough, in Zork Zero prequel-ville, when you wander into a dark place, you’ll get the message, “You have moved into a dark place. You are likely to fall into a bottomless pit.” In fact, at one of the lower levels of the enormous map, we found a location called “Pits”, which was “spotted with an incredible quantity of pits. Judging from the closest of them, the pits are bottomless.” Across the cavern, blocked by those pits, was “an ancient battery-powered brass lantern”, another major Zork nostalgia-carrier. Fittingly, to get to the traditional light object, we had to somehow deal with the even-more-traditional darkness hazard.

Lucky for us, yet another puzzle yielded an “anti-pit bomb”, which when thrown in the Pits location causes this to happen:

The bomb silently explodes into a growing cloud of bottomless-pit-filling agents. As the pits fill in, from the bottom up, dark and sinister forms well up and lurk quickly into the shadows. Uncountable hordes of the creatures emerge, and your light glints momentarily off slavering fangs. Gurgling noises come from every dark corner as the last of the pits becomes filled in.

Thereafter, when the PC moves into a dark place, the game responds with a very familiar message: “You have moved into a dark place. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.” Luckily, the game provides an inexhaustible source of light in the form of a magic candle, so there are no terrible light timers to deal with. Some things, nobody is nostalgic for.

A screenshot from Zork Zero showing the message "You have moved into a dark place. You are likely to fall into a bottomless pit."

Lack of a light timer made it easier to appreciate this game’s Wizard of Frobozz analogue, the jester. Like the Wizard, this guy pops up all over the place at random times, creating humorous magical effects which generally block or delay the PC. Sometimes those effects are themselves Zork references, such as when he sends a large deranged bat swooping down, depositing the PC elsewhere as it shrieks, “Fweep! Fweep!” Also like the Wizard, his effects get less funny the more they’re repeated. And also also like the Wizard, he figures prominently into the game’s plot.

However, unlike the Wizard, he functions in a whole bunch of other capacities as well. He’s the game’s primary NPC, appearing to deliver jokes, adjudicate puzzles (especially riddles), occasionally help out, congratulate solutions, and hang around watching the player struggle. He’s not quite an antagonist but certainly not an ally, and you get the sense he’s controlling far more than he lets on. In other words, he’s an avatar for the game itself, and in particular the twinkling eyes of Steve Meretzky.

>LAUGH. G. G. G. G.

Meretzky’s writing is witty and enjoyable throughout — it’s one of the best aspects of the game. He clearly revels in tweaking Zork history, as well as in reeling off line after line about the excessive Dimwit, e.g. “This is the huge central chamber of Dimwit’s castle. The ceiling was lowered at some point in the past, which helped reduce the frequency of storm clouds forming in the upper regions of the hall.” Probably my favorite Zork reference was also one of my favorite jokes in the game:

>HELLO SAILOR
[The proper way to talk to characters in the story is PERSON, HELLO. Besides, nothing happens here.]

Meretzky is also not above retconning previous bits of Zork lore that he disagrees with, such as his Encyclopedia Frobozzica correction of a detail in Beyond Zork‘s feelies: “The misconception that spenseweed is a common roadside weed has been perpetuated by grossly inaccurate entries in the last several editions of THE LORE AND LEGENDS OF QUENDOR.”

Speaking of feelies, this game had great ones, absolutely overflowing with Meretzky charm. Infocom was still heavily into copy-protecting its games via their documentation, and in typically excessive fashion, this game did that many times over, providing a map on one document, a magic word on another, and truckloads of hints (or outright necessary information) in its major feelie, The Flathead Calendar. This calendar called out to yet another aspect of Zork history, the wide-ranging Flathead family, with members such as Frank Lloyd Flathead, Thomas Alva Flathead, Lucrezia Flathead, Ralph Waldo Flathead, Stonewall Flathead, and J. Pierpont Flathead. The game’s treasures are themed around these figures, which was not only a lot of fun but also allowed me to do a bit of historical education with Dante, who still references Flatheads from time to time when mentioning things he’s learning in school.

The feelies establish a playful tone that continues through to the objects, the room descriptions, and the game’s general landscape. There are also great meta moments, such as the “hello sailor” response above, or what happens when you dig a hole with the shovel you find: “You dig a sizable hole but, finding nothing of interest, you fill it in again out of consideration to future passersby and current gamewriters.” Also enjoyable: the response to DIAGNOSE after having polymorphed yourself, e.g. “You are a little fungus. Other details of health pale in comparison.”

Meretzky even brings in a trope from Infocom’s mystery games, in probably the most ridiculous joke in the entire thing. There’s a location containing both a cannonball and a number of “murder holes”, “for dropping heavy cannonballs onto unwanted visitors”. This is obviously an irresistible situation, and the results are worth quoting in full:

>DROP CANNONBALL THROUGH HOLE
As you drop the cannonball through the murder hole, you hear a sickening "splat," followed by a woman's scream!
"Emily, what is it!"
"It's Victor -- he's been murdered!"
"I'll summon the Inspector! Ah, here he is now!" You hear whispered questions and answers from the room below, followed by footsteps on the stairs. The jester enters, wearing a trenchcoat and smoking a large pipe.
"I'm afraid I'm going to have to order Sgt. Duffy to place you under arrest, sir." You grow dizzy with confusion, and your surroundings swirl wildly about you...
Dungeon
A century's worth of prisoners have languished in this dismal prison. In addition to a hole in the floor, passages lead north, southeast, and southwest.

None of these characters (except the jester) occur anywhere in the game outside this response. Sergeant Duffy, as Infocom fans would know, is who you’d always summon in an Infocom mystery game when you were ready at last to accuse the killer. By the way, the Dungeon isn’t locked or anything — it’s a gentle joke, not a cruel one. The only real punishment is having to traverse the huge map to get back to wherever you want to be. I’ll stop quoting Meretzky jokes in a second, but I have to throw in just one more, because of the surprising fact that it establishes:

>EAT LOBSTER
1) It's not cooked. 2) It would probably bite your nose off if you tried. 3) You don't have any tableware. 4) You don't have any melted butter. 5) It isn't kosher.

Turns out the Zork adventurer (or at least the pre-Zork adventurer) is not only Jewish, but kosher as well! Who knew? Though, given that the kosher objection comes last, after lack of cooking, tableware, and butter, their commitment may be a bit halfhearted after all.

The cover of Zork Zero's Flathead Calendar feelie

Amidst all the humor, Meretzky hasn’t lost his touch for pathos either, with a design that themes several puzzles around the sense of ruin and decay. For example, we found an instruction to follow a series of steps, starting from “the mightiest elm around.” In Zork Zero, this is an enormous tree stump. Meretzky has learned some lessons from Planetfall and A Mind Forever Voyaging about how to make a landscape that inherently implies its bygone better days. Even in the Zork prequel, the adventurer is traversing a fallen empire.

>REMEMBER PUZZLE. G. G. G. G.

Zork Zero isn’t just a prequel in narrative terms. As we kept finding old-timey puzzles like the rebus or the jester’s Rumpelstiltskin-esque “guess my name” challenge, Dante had the great insight that as a prequel, this game was casting back not just to an earlier point in fictional universe history, but to puzzle flavors of the pre-text-adventure past as well. Relatedly, as we ran across one of those vintage puzzles — The Tower of Hanoi Bozbar — he intoned, “Graham Nelson warned us about you, Tower of Bozbar.”

He was referencing a bit in Graham’s Bill of Player’s Rights, about not needing to do boring things for the sake of it: “[F]or example, a four-discs tower of Hanoi puzzle might entertain. But not an eight-discs one.” Zork Zero‘s tower split the difference by having six discs, and indeed tiptoed the line between fun and irritating.

However, if we’d been trying to do it without the graphical interface, the puzzle would have vaulted over that line. The game’s graphics are never more valuable than when they’re helping to present puzzles rooted in physical objects, like the Tower or the triangle peg solitaire game. Clicking through these made them, if not a blast, at least bearable. Those interactions do make for an amusing transcript, though — hilarious amounts of our game log files are filled with sentences like “You move the 1-ugh weight to the center peg” or “You remove 1 pebble from Pile #3” or “You are moving the peg at letter D.”

Just as some concepts are much easier to express with a diagram than with words, so are some types of puzzles much easier to express with graphics. Infocom had long been on the record as disdaining graphics, and indeed, I still think text has a scene-setting power that visuals can’t match. Meretzky’s descriptions of Dimwit’s excessive castle have more pith and punch than a visual representation of them could possibly muster. However, a picture is so much better than a thousand words when it comes to conveying a complex set of spatial relations. Even as early as Zork III‘s Royal Puzzle, Infocom leaned on ASCII graphics to illustrate those spatial relationships, because that just works so much better. Once they had more sophisticated graphics available, the range of Infocom’s puzzles could expand. It’s ironic that the first thing they did was to expand backwards into older puzzle styles, but then again it’s probably a natural first step into exploring new capabilities.

Going along with the overall verve of the game, those old chestnut puzzles revel in their old chestnut-ness. Zork Zero is a veritable toy chest of object games, logic challenges (e.g. the fox, the rooster, and the worm crossing the river), riddles, and other such throwbacks. Of course, there are plenty of IF-style puzzles as well. (There’s plenty of everything, except noun descriptions.) Sometimes these could be red herrings too — all the Zorky references kept leading us to believe we might see an echo of a previous Zork’s puzzle. Hence, for example, we kept attempting to climb every tree we saw, fruitlessly.

The IF parts of the game don’t hesitate to be cruel, either. I’ve mentioned that every single Zork game made us restart at some point — well Zork Zero was no exception. In this case, it wasn’t a light timer running out or a random event closing off victory, but simply using up an item too soon. We found a bit of flamingo food early in the game, and fed it to a flamingo… which was a mistake. Turns out we needed to wait for a very specific flamingo circumstance, but by the time we found that out, it was far too late. This flavor of forced-restart felt most like the experience we had with Zork I, where we killed the thief before he’d been able to open the jewel-encrusted egg. The difference is that restarting Zork Zero was a much bigger deal, because we had to re-do a whole bunch of the game’s zillion tasks.

A screenshot from Zork Zero showing Peggleboz, its version of the triangle peg solitaire game

On the other hand, while this game does have a maze, it is far, far less annoying than the Zork I maze. In general, the design of Zork Zero does a reasonably good job of retaining the fun aspects of its heritage and jettisoning the frustrating ones. Except for that inventory limit — interactive fiction wouldn’t outgrow that one for a while longer. And while there are a couple of clunkers among the puzzles (I’m thinking of the elixir, which is a real guess-the-verb, and throwing things on the ice, which is a real head-scratcher), for the most part they’re entertaining and fun.

Before I close, since I’ve been talking about old-fashioned puzzles, I’ll pay tribute to a moment in Zork Zero which beautifully brought together old and new styles. As one of several riddles in the game, the jester challenges the PC to “Show me an object which no one has ever seen before and which no one will ever see again!” Now, we tried lots of solutions to this — air, flame, music, etc. — but none of them worked, and none of them would have been very satisfying if they had worked. Then, at some point, we realized we had a walnut with us, and if we could open it, the meat inside would certainly qualify as nothing anyone had seen before.

Then, after much travail, we were able to find a magic immobilizing wand, then connect that wand with a lobster, which turned into a nutcracker. After that it was a matter of showing the walnut to the jester to solve the riddle. That was a satisfying moment, made up of connecting one dot to the next, to the next, to the next. But it wasn’t quite over:

>SHOW WALNUT TO JESTER
"True, no one has seen this 'ere me -- but thousands may see it in years to be!"

>EAT WALNUT
"I'm very impressed; you passed my test!

That final capper turned a good puzzle into a great one — a solution that felt smart and obvious at the same time. Unfortunately, eating that walnut wasn’t enough to defeat Zork Zero‘s hunger puzzle. (Not a hunger timer, mind you — a reasonable and contained hunger puzzle.)

For that, we needed to become a flamingo, and eat the flamingo food. RESTART!

Interactive Fiction And Reader-Response Criticism (academic paper) [Misc]

[As I mentioned in the previous post, I wrote a paper about IF for a graduate class in literary theory, circa 1994. I think it’s the first thing I ever wrote about interactive fiction — before I knew anything about the indie IF scene or the int-fiction newsgroups at all. Below is that paper, HTML-ized and with various links added, but otherwise identical to what I turned in.]

>examine the map
The map shows a network of boxes connected by lines and arrows, with many erasures and scrawled additions. Something about the pattern is maddeningly familiar; but you still can’t put your finger on where you’ve seen it before.

>examine the book
The open book is so wide, it’s impossible to touch both edges with your arms outstretched. Its thousands of vellum leaves form a two-foot heap on either side of the spine; the rich binding probably required the cooperation of twenty calves.

The magpie croaks, “Then stand back! ‘Cause it go BOOM. Awk!”

>read the book
It’s hard to divine the purpose of the calligraphy. Every page begins with a descriptive heading (“Wabewalker’s encounter with a Magpie,” for instance) followed by a list of imperatives (prayers? formulae?), each preceded by an arrow-shaped glyph.

The writing ends abruptly on the page you found open, under the heading “Wabewalker puzzles yet again over the Book of Hours.” The last few incantations read:

>EXAMINE THE MAP
>EXAMINE THE BOOK
>READ THE BOOK
—Trinity with Paul O’Brian

An electronic fiction is not only a fictional universe but a universe of possible fictions.

–Jay David Bolter (Tuman 34)

The long passage above is from a fictional text about an adventurous individual who discovers the secrets of a magical land in order to avert nuclear annihilation on Earth. It has all the qualities of a traditional1 fantasy narrative — fantastic setting, magical transportation, eerie symbolism — but it is not a traditional fantasy narrative. It has no pages, no hard covers, in fact it isn’t a book at all. It is a piece of computer software, an adventure game entitled Trinity, one which boasts no graphics or fancy features — just text and a “parser” programmed to understand simple sentences typed by the player. Its makers, a company called Infocom, call it “interactive fiction,” and the sentences following the “>” sign were typed by me, accepted into the computer, and processed for a response. The scene I chose was a rather metafictional one, where the player/reader comes across a book within the context of the game which records every move that he or she types at the prompt (“>”).

Interactive fiction (hereafter shortened to IF) is an extremely new form, the most primitive incarnation of which surfaced only about 20 years ago, but already it challenges deeply entrenched notions of narrative, authorship, and reading theory. It demands (and helps to enact) new theories of subjectivity, and presents us with a narrative form which is familiar in some ways, but which in other ways is utterly alien. Its novelty and its radical differences from print narrative make it difficult to theorize, but I hope to make a few definite steps in that direction here. As I see it, literary criticism of traditional texts, especially reader-response criticism, can help us in an endeavor to understand this new form. Theorists like Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, and Stanley Fish have created theories aimed at traditional texts which seem custom-made for interactive fiction. In this paper, I will attempt to theorize the computer text through the lens of their theories, and to explore the avenues opened by interactive fiction which offer both a better understanding of this tremendously potent literary form and a fresh perspective on literary theory itself. Before this is possible, however, we need a clearer understanding of the subject at hand.

WHAT IS IF?

Previous critical approaches to IF have had to concern themselves so much with explaining how it came to exist that by the time they got to theorizing, they had largely run out of steam. I hope to avoid that trap by providing an extremely brief history of the evolution of IF, and referring the curious reader to Anthony Niesz and Norman Holland, who provide the best concise narrative of IF’s development.

IF developed in the early 1970s on large university mainframe computers, at which point it was little different from the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels of print fiction (“If you want to get in the helicopter, turn to page 12. If you want to go home, turn to page 16”). David Lebling and Marc Blank, working on the mainframe at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-authored Zork, the first game whose parser could understand complete sentences (“Get all but the dagger and the rope”) rather than simple two word commands (“look frog”). The game, a sword-and-sorcery treasure hunt in the Dungeons and Dragons pattern, spread rapidly to other mainframe systems and was such a tremendous success that when personal computers began to proliferate, Blank and Lebling transposed Zork to the PC format and founded a company, Infocom, from which to sell it. Again, it was successful, and Infocom followed it with four sequels (a fifth is forthcoming) and more than 25 other works of IF in the literary traditions of mystery, science-fiction, adventure, romance, and others. Many other companies created programs which followed this trend, but Infocom remained the publisher not only of the highest quality software, but that most dedicated to textual IF rather than graphics or sound-augmented games; for the purpose of clarity and simplicity, this paper will deal only with Infocom programs.2

As indicated by the passage quoted from Trinity, the text of interactive fiction comes in rather short blocks, interrupted by prompts. At a prompt, the program will wait for the player to input her next move. The narrative will not continue until the player responds. Input can consist of anything from the briefest commands (“yell”) to fairly complex sentences (for example, an instruction manual lists “TAKE THE BOOK THEN READ ABOUT THE JESTER IN THE BOOK” as a possible command). The program addresses the player in the second person singular (“you still can’t put your finger on where you’ve seen it before”), a mode which raises interesting questions about the reader’s subjectivity.

IF also calls into question the basic notion of narrative linearity. An Infocom advertising pamphlet reads:

you can actually shape the story’s course of events through your choice of actions. And you have hundreds of alternatives at every step. In fact, an Infocom interactive story is roughly the length of a short novel in content, but there’s so much you can see and do, your adventure can last for weeks, even months. (Incomplete Works)

If the shape of a traditional narrative is a line, an interactive narrative is better conceived of as a web.3 Each prompt, each location in the story, is a nexus from which hundreds of alternate pathways radiate, each leading to new loci. This is not to say that IF destroys linearity, but rather that it removes the responsibility for creating linearity from the author and hands it over directly to the reader. Readers of an IF create their own line through the text, a line which can be different at every reading.

IF AND TRADITIONAL TEXTS

Though it is highly divergent, IF is not completely divorced from traditional texts. For one thing, most IF themes, settings, and structures are drawn directly from literary traditions established by traditional print authors. This extraction can range from simple genre duplication, as in the generalized science-fiction feel of Starcross, to the direct appropriation of character and setting, as in Sherlock: Riddle of the Crown Jewels, a mystery based in Arthur Conan Doyle’s London.

Moreover, the programs often incorporate traditional texts into their packaging, texts which frequently contain clues to the puzzles contained within the game. Trinity, for example, includes a comic book dealing with the themes of the text. A Mind Forever Voyaging, which Infocom calls its “entry into the realm of serious science fiction such as 1984” (Unfold), contains an initial chapter in print which sets the scene for the computer narrative and introduces the player to his “role” within the game.

The line between interactive fiction and traditional print texts becomes further blurred when the player uses the SCRIPT function. SCRIPT commands the computer to print out a transcript of the game as it is being played, so that players can have a hard copy of the text they produce in collaboration with the game. Because of its radically different configuration, IF disrupts many of the characteristics often taken for granted in print fiction. For example, as Niesz and Holland point out, “Because the fiction is inseparable from the system that enables someone to read it, one cannot, as it were, hold the whole novel in one’s hand… One cannot look back at what went before” (120). One way to address these differences is through the SCRIPT function. Indeed, a game like Infidel, which includes a complex system of “hieroglyphics” for the reader to decipher, almost demands some type of transcription if the player is to be able to put the pieces of the code together. Furthermore, most players of IF make maps on paper in order to keep track of the complex web of locations the story. Though IF is essentially a computer-bound form, its readers often find themselves taking pen (or printer) to paper in order to resist the evanescence of screen scrolling.

However, IF’s removal from traditional texts is also one of its greatest advantages. In fact, I would argue that without computer technology, creating interactive fiction would be extremely difficult if not impossible. Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels not only demand an arduous amount of page-flipping, the options they provide are only of the multiple-choice variety, as opposed to the much greater vocabulary-oriented option locus of IF. As Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan argue, “the more intricate page-turning a text demands, the more conscious its reader is likely to become of the native sequence that he is being made to violate” (12). The computer’s advanced ability to handle high-speed calculations allows the text to become more truly interactive without any of the alienation produced by the print text which violates its own conventions. This makes the computer a necessary tool for IF; it is the only medium which allows the type of interactivity at issue here.

Finally, it is important to remember that although IF differs radically and in many ways from traditional texts, it is still a text. Its sentences and paragraphs may be interspersed with and guided by player input, but those sentences (as well as the sentences typed by the player) are still units of language susceptible to theories designed to analyze all such units. Literary theory is not obviated by the interactive text; rather it is pushed into new arenas.

THE NARRATIVE CURTAIN

Neil Randall’s analysis of IF includes a lucid explanation of one of its most noteworthy features: “interactive fiction disrupts the concept of the novel’s ‘last page’… an interactive fiction work’s only indication of ending… is the story’s announcement that the quest has been solved” (189). This effect is part of what I call the narrative curtain. IF allows its reader a certain initial area to explore, but draws a metaphorical curtain around its boundaries, a curtain which promises further expansion at the same time as it blocks the way. The reader’s task is to find the tools necessary to draw back the curtain and continue her progress through the narrative.

This curtain also operates at the level of player input. A player encountering an IF text for the first time has no idea of the limits of the program’s vocabulary, and must discover these limits by trial and error. Even after lengthy interaction, the player is always unable to construct a definitive list of words the parser understands — there always remains the possibility that the program understands words that the player hasn’t attempted. Thus, the curtain remains, promising expansion but blocking the reader’s vision of that expansion. This curtain is again made possible by the computer’s ability to hide parts of the text from the reader, a capability which print simply does not have, unless the narrative is serialized and forcibly withheld from its reader. It is this curtain which allows Niesz and Holland to conclude that “writing and reading as processes replace writing and reading as products” in IF (127).

“In general, the structure [of IF texts] is the Quest” (115), assert Niesz and Holland, and I would argue that this structure has been dictated by the power of the narrative curtain. Without a quest for the player to complete, the narrative curtain becomes more frustrating than satisfying. If the curtain is a puzzle to be solved, then passing through it is an achievement, but if it is simply an arbitrary barrier, the desire to cross it decreases along with the reader’s interest in the story. However, I would argue that without the narrative curtain, a player’s desire to make a line of IF’s web suffers serious attrition. If the text simply sprawls out before the reader with no particular narrative thrust, IF becomes less powerful and engaging than traditional fiction. However, the curtain still remains on the level of input, and if the text presents a world for the player to explore, the reader’s desire to discover the intricacies of that world erects yet another form of the narrative curtain — the allure of textual frontier, of undiscovered country. I would argue that the barrier of the narrative curtain is IF’s analog to the element of conflict in traditional narratives — a text can exist without it, but that existence is a dull one indeed.

A further effect of the narrative curtain is its impact on narrative time. The reason why an IF text can take “weeks, even months” to complete is because it takes time to discover how to pass through the various curtains it constructs for its reader, and the program won’t allow its reader to continue until she has discovered the secret of its puzzle. In other words, unlike readers of a traditional narrative, IF players can’t turn the page until they “deserve” to, that worthiness being earned by puzzle-solving. Computer fictions can adjust narrative time not only through forcing the reader to wait for blocks of text, but by challenging him to pass tests before the story can continue.

This brings up another salient point about IF — the frustration it causes when its reader finds herself unable to solve the puzzle. Nearly every player of Infocom games has experienced the sensation of being “stumped.” In the practical arena this has translated into hint book sales for Infocom, Inc. But what of IF theory? I would suggest that when the narrative curtain becomes impenetrable, IF is in its greatest danger of becoming unfriendly to the reader. The player is likely to simply stop playing if the obstacles become too difficult, allowing the curtain to become permanent and leaving the reader with a frustrating sense of lack of closure. However, there are important caveats to this point. Randall articulates the first:

Even when the reader cannot formulate a solution to advance the interactive text, she can usually back-track to a previous screen or side-step to another… In backtracking, the reader re-reads portions of the text, often many times over, in an effort to find a clue that will allow the barrier to be breached. By side-stepping, the reader hopes to return to the barrier with a new sense of how to surmount it. In either case, what is continuous is not the plot but rather the development of the reader’s knowledge of the world in which her character is travelling. (190)

The other point is that even when the reader leaves the program, the narrative curtain still possesses power. Players often return to a puzzle which is stumping them after weeks or months of inactivity, whenever a new approach occurs to them. When these are the circumstances and the curtain finally is pierced, the satisfaction of achievement is proportionally heightened.

The notion of the narrative curtain brings out one of the most interesting features of IF, its casting of the reader as bricoleur. The closest analog to this casting in traditional texts is in the mystery novel, where the reader often watches actively for clues in order to beat the textual detective to the solution of the crime, gaining thereby a certain sense of satisfaction and even superiority. However, in a mystery novel the answer will be revealed as long as the reader keeps reading. IF, on the other hand, forces the player to collect and combine pieces of the text and recontextualize them in order to pass through the narrative curtain, even if that bricolage is as simple as finding a key for a locked door. Until the player makes the connections the program wants, the Quest simply will not progress, though the line of the story may continue.

THE INTERACTIVE SUBJECT

The question of reader subjectivity is already incredibly complicated, and the advent of IF only adds more questions rather than answering any of those already extant. Thus, this section can only scratch the surface of this intriguing question, but I hope to address some of the main points.

Georges Poulet addresses questions of subjectivity in his essay “Criticism and The Experience of Interiority,” and brings up a point which is useful to the analysis of IF: through the medium of language, both author and reader are forced by the limited nature of their communication to exclude their actual lives and take on the “roles” which the language demands. Of course, the reader’s adjustment is greater because the author is choosing the words while the reader is making sense of them. IF texts complicate the assumption of such “roles.” Since the player is the direct agent of action in the story, one could argue that he is more himself than when reading a traditional text. However, this argument has a complicated flip side.

First of all, the reader’s subjectivity is constrained by the inevitable limits of the parser. Thus when I engage with Zork I am forced into the role of someone who cannot use certain words (the vast majority of words, actually). Moreover, the Quest structure demands that its readers assume the role of someone who cares about completing the task at hand. Thus, Zork asks me to become someone who would kill trolls and remove treasures from an underground labyrinth. Further, IF settings are often quite removed from reality, demanding another role adjustment, belief in hyperspace or magical mushrooms, for example. Finally, the text sometimes forces the player into a more specific persona. In Infidel, for example, the reader’s character is a ruthless, greedy archaeologist who is deserted at the narrative’s outset by his underpaid and overworked crew. Plundered Hearts, an interactive romance set in the 18th century, casts the player as a young woman who is captured by pirates. This role-casting can become highly specific, as in Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, where the player is cast as Arthur Dent, the protagonist of the Douglas Adams novel from which the game is adapted. Other games however, allow interactive adjustment of the player’s role. Beyond Zork, for example, allows the player to create a “character”, which she names and for which she chooses the degrees of six different attributes (strength, compassion, etc.) from a fund of percentage points. Bureaucracy asks the player to fill out a form listing certain vital statistics (name, address, boy/girlfriend, age, etc.) and then further confounds that player’s subjectivity by forcing him into a specific situation with little or no bearing on reality and using the statistics provided to torment the player’s persona (The boy/girlfriend runs off, etc.)4

I would argue that no matter what the level, the player of IF texts is forced to some degree to assume the type of role which Poulet asserts for traditional texts. This role is further enforced by the program’s second person singular mode of address. When a typical sentence of IF is “You can’t go that way,” it’s clear that the text enacts an enforced recontextualization on the reading subject. This is where postmodern theories of subjectivity present themselves as useful tools for examination of the interactive subject. Postmodern theory generally accepts the subject as already fragmented, a fragmentation which is easy to see in the interactive subject. I would suggest that readers of IF texts, especially while they are in the process of reading, are excellent examples of “cyborgs,” as Donna Haraway uses the term. In “A Manifesto For Cyborgs” Haraway argues that the distinction between human and machine has already become so blurred that we experience day to day life as cyborgs, thinking of mechanical devices as extensions of our own subjectivity. For the IF player, reading a computer screen and typing English commands on a keyboard in order to direct a mystery narrative in the persona of Dr. Watson, this assertion isn’t difficult to accept.

INTENDED, IMPLIED, AND IDEAL READERS

The nascent stages of the formation of reader-response criticism were characterized by theorists like Walker Gibson and Gerald Prince, who constructed theories of readership which attempted to complicate the idea of reader reception by suggesting that texts ask readers to adjust their own perceptions of reality in order to conform to textual paradigms. We have already seen that IF forces a complicated and fragmented subjectivity on its reader, and examination of Gibson’s and Prince’s theories can help us to better understand this process.

Gibson, in “Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers,” postulates a “mock reader,” arguing that “every time we open the pages of another piece of writing, we are embarked on a new adventure in which we become a new person — a person as controlled and definable and as remote from the chaotic self of daily life as the lover in the sonnet” (1). IF seems to literalize this process, while complicating it with the question of player agency. Although the player does assume a certain role, she also directly controls the actions of that persona. Thus, like traditional texts, IF constructs a niche into which the player must force herself, but within that niche she is allowed a freedom of movement unheard of in traditional texts.

Gerald Prince’s article “Introduction to the Study of the Narratee” introduces (appropriately enough) his concept of the narratee, “the narratee being someone whom the narrator addresses” (7). Prince goes on to use this concept to subdivide the types of readers. He distinguishes the real reader, the individual with the book in his hands, from the virtual reader, the intended audience of the author. He also posits an ideal reader, who would theoretically have a perfect understanding of the text in all its nuances. This ideal reader is, of course, a fiction. The narratee is separate from of these, though it incorporates elements of each. Like Gibson’s “mock reader” the narratee is someone who the real reader becomes in the process of reading. Since the narratee is the person to whom the narrative is directed, the text itself dictates the narratee.

These classifications are intriguing, but IF demands not only new categories but new scrutiny of the old ones. I would suggest three basic categories which have the mnemonic advantage of all starting with the same letter: Intended, Implied, and Ideal readers. The Ideal reader of an IF text is just as fictional as the one Prince stipulates. An Ideal reader would know the entire vocabulary of the parser, understand immediately how to pass through each narrative curtain, and appreciate every aspect and nuance of the interactive text. The Intended reader, on the other hand, while still a fictional construct, is more firmly within the realm of possibility. Intended readers are who the author of the IF text had in mind as average consumers. They would be able to appreciate the text and solve the puzzles, and would hit on some of the IF’s features, but would still leave some narrative curtains standing, and may miss some textual nuances. Implied readers are analogous to mock readers and narratees; they are the reader-personas to whom the narrative is directed. The text makes certain assumptions about them, such as their fluency in English and their basic grasp of textual conventions, but none about their ability to pass through narrative curtains or to grasp textual nuances. Each of these readers is a fictional construct, and together they form a continuum, from Ideal to Implied, into which the real reader necessarily must fall.

The advantage of this system of classification is not so much in its accuracy, but in its utility for further complicating questions of authorship and intentionality. For example, one problem with the Ideal reader is that, although she would grasp textual nuances perfectly, her perfect ability to instantly pierce narrative curtains would detract from her overall interactive reading experience. I would argue that part of the pleasure of the text lies in the challenge of bricolage which it issues the reader, and if solving the puzzles is no challenge, then that pleasure is drastically decreased. The Implied reader, on the other hand, while he may be familiar with basic conventions of IF, may also be immediately stumped or may disagree violently with the ideological content of the text. Thus, the “narratee” of IF may in fact be alienated by the text to an even greater degree than he would be by a traditional fiction.

Furthermore, the idea of intentionality is a highly dubious one, and even more so in IF. If we accept that traditional fictions are created by readers in conjunction with texts, as reader-response critics assert, then the author drops out of the picture. IF encourages this process through the tendency of computer software publishers to elide the names of programmers. More importantly, however, the notion of intentionality receives a staggering blow from the basic form of the text: one which refuses to acknowledge itself as complete until the reader fills in its gaps.

FILLING IN ISER’S GAPS

The notion of the narrative gap was first articulated by Wolfgang Iser. In “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” Iser asserts that “a literary text must therefore be conceived in such a way that it will engage the reader’s imagination in the task of working things out for himself, for reading is only a pleasure when it is active and creative” (51). If this sounds remarkably like IF theory, the reason is that Iser conceived of reading as an active, creative process, whose agent is continually filling in the blanks for the text. Iser finds these blanks, or “gaps”, in areas of the text which somehow thwart our preconceived expectations: “whenever the flow is interrupted and we are led off in unexpected directions, the opportunity is given to us to bring into play our own faculty for establishing connections — for filling in the gaps left by the text itself” (55). I would argue that this description still applies to IF — the blocks of text in an IF program are just as capable of producing such moments of unexpectedness as any in print fiction.

However, IF obviously adds another level to the notion of gaps in a text. As Randall points out, “interactive fiction displays two types of narrative gap: the traditional type filled unconsciously by the reader, and a manifest type shown on the computer’s screen” (189). Every time the reader sees a prompt, she is expected to input some command, without which the story is simply halted. This prompt, this halting, is clearly a new type of narrative gap, one which the reader fills in more literally than Iser ever imagined.5 Iser assumes that readers of traditional texts always imaginatively fill in the gaps left by the text at its unexpected moments. IF, however, goes one step further, by forcing an active reading. It is this forceful narrative gap which makes IF so friendly to analysis in reader-response models. Far more than in a traditional text, the reader must respond if the text is to continue to reveal itself. Moreover, that response must consist of elements which the text can parse, or else the reader receives a message like “I don’t know the word ‘deconstruct'” (for example) and is returned to the prompt.

Iser uses the metaphor of constellations to clarify his theory: “two people gazing at the night sky may both be looking at the same collection of stars, but one will see the image of a plough, and the other will make out a dipper. The ‘stars’ in a literary text are fixed; the lines that join them are variable” (57). Iser’s stars are the printed units of language, and his lines are the conscious or unconscious connections drawn by the reader. I would contend that IF adds even more resonance to this metaphor. The reader of IF not only draws the connections Iser refers to, but activates explicit connections between textual blocks at every prompt, creating her own unique “constellation” of narrative, one whose shape clearly manifests itself in the line of the story under her guidance.

IDENTITY THEMES IN IF

If IF indeed helps to extricate and document the ways in which readers fill in narrative gaps, what can we learn from the differences in the constellations they create? One theory which presents itself as useful for answering this question is the one presented by Norman Holland in “UNITY IDENTITY TEXT SELF”. In that essay, Holland argues that unity and text have an analogous relationship to identity and self, the former term in each pair being an abstraction from patterns evidenced by the latter term. He argues further that because we are each possessed of and immersed in an identity, we extrapolate textual unity according to certain themes inherent in that identity (and the same applies to our extrapolations of the identities of others). For Holland, reading is a process in which, the pieces of self interlock with the pieces of text to form a reading, an interpretation of text which is inevitably stamped with the reader’s “identity theme.” Under this paradigm, interaction with an Infocom game operates like zipping up a zipper — the self and text interpenetrate to form a seamless narrative line, the direction of which must indicate elements of the reader’s identity theme.

However, there is a definite danger of oversimplification in this model. For one thing, no two readings of an interactive text, even by the same reader, are exactly the same. This fact calls into question the notion that identity themes can be traced even when the reading process is made more visible. In fact, it seems entirely plausible to me that the varying narrative lines of the interactive process are part of another binarism analogous to those Holland discusses. Rather than a pattern which shows itself in one reading, the visible identity theme evoked by IF is more accurately (I would argue) an extrapolation of tendencies within a grouping of several narrative lines from the same reader. Thus, as identity is to self and unity is to text, so the visible identity theme is to the group of narrative lines.

Moreover, Holland’s model allows no room for change. I would argue that the experience of interactive fiction has a direct effect on the reader, and that the crossing of a narrative curtain drastically affects the next reading of that same situation. Once I’ve discovered, for example, the secret of the Echo Room in Zork, I am highly unlikely to spend as much time there as when I was trying to puzzle it out. Conversely, the crossing of narrative curtains often allows the text to expand, showing the reader new locations or new features. It seems plausible to me that the text and player of IF can be read as providing growth stimuli for each other. Thus interactive fiction is a mutual growing experience, not only for the reader, but for the text as well, and the result of such a reading is not a text imprinted with the reader’s identity theme or a reader stamped with the themes of the text, but a unique collaboration of reader and text, one which partakes from both in order to create an unprecedented result.

READING AND WRITING: OBSOLETE CATEGORIES?

As we progress further and further into theorizing IF, it becomes increasingly clear that notions of authorship and readership are becoming more and more difficult to define. It is at this point when the theories most useful to us are those of the paradigmatic theorist of reader-response criticism, Stanley Fish. “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics” was the article which announced Fish’s perspective on the reading process, a perspective which has come to be identified almost programmatically with reader-response criticism. In it, Fish posited meaning as an event, a “making sense” enacted by the reader. By closely reading sentences, and analyzing their capacities for forming meaning in a temporal dimension through the succession of words, Fish showed that meaning is not extracted from a text as if every word in it were received simultaneously. Fish analyzed the dynamics of expectation to demonstrate meaning as a sequence of mental events. His article attempted to change the typical critical question “What does this sentence mean?” to “What does this sentence do?”

I would argue that in the creation of an IF narrative, both the author and the reader are continually asking themselves this crucial question. Authors of interactive fiction write with the consciousness of their medium. They are aware of the narrative’s enforced gaps, and of the narrative curtains they are constructing, and this awareness inevitably affects their writing. For example, text in IF often contains hints about how to pass through certain narrative curtains. The magpie in the passage from Trinity I quoted at the beginning of this paper is squawking part of a formula by which the player may pass through a crucial narrative curtain. Without the magpie’s help, the bricoleur/player would have no idea how to cross this juncture in the narrative. Those sentences were clearly constructed with a mind towards what function they would serve, what they would do. Players of IF texts confront the same question at every prompt. The player typing commands into the computer is forced to continually ask herself “What will this sentence do?” so that she may better communicate with the program. The experience of writing for a parser provides constant reminders of authorship, audience, and action of units of language. It forces upon us the question which Fish only asserts.

The answers to this question seem to show up more clearly in interactive fiction, but this appearance itself is highly dubious. Though authors discover the effect of their sentences on game testers, they obviously cannot learn this effect for every player at every juncture. In fact, since meaning is created through the interaction of player and text rather than player and author, the author’s thoughts become irrelevant. It is the text which ultimately asks the crucial questions. Conversely, though the player always sees the results of his commands, they are not always clear or easily interpreted. While the text usually guides or blocks input, it occasionally does both, and sometimes does neither, producing a response like “Try to phrase that another way.” Though both player and text are asking “What will this sentence do?” the answer is neither easy nor clear.

This is where Fish’s notion of interpretive strategies comes into play. In “Interpreting the Variorum,” Fish asserts that “Texts are written by readers, not read, since, the argument now states, the formal features of the text, the authorial intentions they are normally taken to represent, and the reader’s interpretive strategies are mutually interdependent” (Tompkins xxii). Fish’s argument for traditional texts must be modified a little for IF, because the form muddies the distinction between author and reader. Not only is the reader utilizing interpretive strategies, the text is as well, and furthermore those strategies must coincide if the narrative is to progress. For a narrative curtain to be drawn, the reader needs to have a strategy which will allow her the correct pieces for her bricolage, and the text must have a strategy with which to interpret the player’s input. In this paradigm, the player and computer together fit rather well into Fish’s concept of the “interpretive community,” “made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions” (“Variorum” 182).

However, to truly accept this concept, it is crucial that we absorb one final ideological prop, the notion of self as text as advanced by Walter Benn Michaels in “The Interpreter’s Self: Peirce on the Cartesian ‘Subject'”. In Michaels’ interpretation of the pragmatic philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, “our minds are accessible to us in exactly the same way that everything else is. The self, like the world, is a text” (199). Once we accept this dictum, several previously unsettling aspects of IF finally fall into place. First of all, if we can read the self as a text, we can just as easily read the text as a kind of self, especially the text of IF, which actively seeks input. With this understanding, interactive textuality is thrust into a new light. In the interaction of the computer program’s self/text with the player’s self/text, there is no reader and writer. They read and write each other. In the radical realm of interactive fiction, the theories of reader-response critics become facts, and in fact are surpassed. Not only does the reader actively fill in textual gaps, but the text fills gaps in the reader, plants seeds for ideas which haven’t come yet. Human and computer, when both are understood as both self and text, become a true interpretive community, each community producing its own unique fictions.

“Reader” and “text” become provisional terms. The text is a reader just as the reader is a text. Even “player” and “program” are problematic. The IF is, after all, attempting to program its human reader into certain responses, and is doing so with a significant element of playfulness. Interactive fiction, by enacting reader-reception theory, has stripped the most basic terms of literature of their apparent meaning, and cast us into a new location. It is one which is alien and unfamiliar, but it is also a nexus from which radiate thousands of branches of possibility.6

Endnotes

1 Because of its utility and clarity, I here reprint and appropriate for my own use Neil Randall’s definition of a “traditional” text:

Throughout this article I will use the term “traditional” to refer to literature printed on paper, usually in book (rather than magazine) format. I considered such terminology as “book fiction” or “Gutenberg literature” to avoid collocating such diverse novels as Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind and Barth’s Sabbatical, which have in common only the fact that they are written by Americans and printed on paper, but such terminology proved more cumbersome than it was worth. “Traditional”, therefore, says nothing of the degree to which a work is or is not avant-garde; it is simply a reference to medium. (190)

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2 The sources of the programs I refer to are two anthologies of Infocom programs, The Lost Treasures Of Infocom volumes I and II. Since these packages contain a total of 31 texts, I find it easier to simply cite the collection than each individual text.
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3 My analysis of the shape of IF owes much to theories developed for hypertext, a type of computer construction related, but not identical to, IF, the primary difference being that hypertext’s method of branching involves “clicking” with a mouse on a significant word or phrase rather than typing words for a parser. Discussions of hypertext which are useful for analysis of IF are included in my list of references.
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4 Other games vary the persona of the reader even within the context of the program. Border Zone, for example, is divided into “chapters,” each of which casts the reader in a new character.
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5 However, even this literalization is problematic due to the fact of the parser. I would argue that Fish’s notion of societally mediated boundaries to interpretation comes in handy here. Just as the reader’s imagination is not free to fill in the gaps in just any way, so the player’s input is restricted by certain ambiguous boundaries.
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6 This paper only attempts to examine IF as it looks through the lens of reader-response criticism. A more complete discussion of IF would include sections on the idea of the varying levels of code inherent in reading an IF text, some system for evaluating quality, a consideration of the political implications of simulation, questions that still remain open, and of course the obligatory “speculation on the future” section. I had originally planned on these, but the project simply became too large. When I revise this paper to turn it into an article, those sections will be included. [LOL Yeah, right. That never happened. –PO 2000]
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References

Bolter, Jay David. “Literature in the Electronic Writing Space.” In Myron C. Tuman (ed.), Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Writing With Computers. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992: 19-41

Campbell, P. Michael. “Interactive Fiction and Narrative Theory: Towards An Anti-Theory.” New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly 10.1 (1987): 76-84

Fish, Stanley. “Interpreting the Variorum.” In Jane Tompkins (ed.), Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism To Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980: 164-184

Fish, Stanley. “Literature In The Reader: Affective Stylistics.” In Jane Tompkins (ed.), Reader-Response Criticism:From Formalism To Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980: 70-100

Gibson, Walker. “Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers.” In Jane Tompkins (ed.), Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism To Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980: 1-6

Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto For Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980’s.” Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65-107

Holland, Norman N. “UNITY IDENTITY SELF TEXT.” In Jane Tompkins (ed.), Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism To Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980: 118-133

Infocom. The Incomplete Works of Infocom, Inc. (advertising pamphlet) Cambridge: Infocom, 1985

Infocom. The Lost Treasures Of Infocom. Cambridge: Infocom, 1992

Infocom. The Lost Treasures Of Infocom II. Cambridge: Infocom, 1992

Infocom. You Are About to See The Fantastic Worlds Of Infocom Unfold Before Your Very Eyes. (advertising pamphlet) Cambridge: Infocom, 1984

Iser, Wolfgang. “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.” In Jane Tompkins (ed.), Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism To Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980: 50-69

Kelly, Robert T. “A Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Alike: Aesthetics and Teleology in Interactive Computer Fictional Environments.” Science Fiction Studies 20 (1993): 52-68

Landow, George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992

Michaels, Walter Benn. “The Interpreter’s Self: Peirce on the Cartesian ‘Subject’.” In Jane Tompkins (ed.), Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism To Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980: 185-200

Moulthrop, Stuart. “Reading From The Map: Metonymy and Metaphor In The Fiction of ‘Forking Paths’.” In Paul Delany and George P. Landow (eds.), Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991: 119-132

Moulthrop, Stuart and Nancy Kaplan. “Something to Imagine: Literature, Composition, and Interactive Fiction.” Computers And Composition 9.1 (1991): 7-23

Niesz, Anthony J. and Norman N. Holland. “Interactive Fiction.” Critical Inquiry 11.1 (1984): 110-29

Poulet, Georges. “Criticism and The Experience of Interiority.” In Jane Tompkins (ed.), Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism To Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980: 41-49

Prince, Gerald. “Introduction To The Study Of The Narratee.” In Jane Tompkins (ed.), Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism To Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980: 7-25

Randall, Neil. “Determining Literariness In Interactive Fiction.” Computers and the Humanities 22 (1988): 183-91

Tompkins, Jane. “An Introduction To Reader-Response Criticism.” In Jane
Tompkins (ed.), Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism To Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980: ix-xxvi

Ziegfeld, Richard. “Interactive Fiction: A New Literary Genre?”. New Literary History 20.2 (1989): 341-372

Ad Verbum by Nick Montfort [Comp00]

IFDB page: Ad Verbum
Final placement: 4th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Among Infocom enthusiasts, the game Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head Or Tail Of It doesn’t tend to get singled out for a lot of praise. It has its fans, sure, but rarely receives the hosannas granted to such works as Trinity, A Mind Forever Voyaging, or even Planetfall. Its detractors, on the other hand, can be extremely vocal and emphatic. Ironically, though, the thing its critics decry is in fact the game’s greatest strength: it is a near-total break from IF convention, setting aside adventuring and role-playing to focus instead on wordplay, puns, and cliches. A typical Nord and Bert puzzle asks you to type a spoonerism, cliche, or bad old joke into the command line, which the game will then recognize and advance the story for you.

Naturally, if you despise puns, or if you don’t know a lot of cliches, or if you don’t enjoy wordplay, Nord and Bert isn’t the game for you. Because I love language and have a pretty firm command of English idioms, I loved Nord and Bert, though I certainly found myself relying on the hints at a few points. Still, it’s not surprising that fans of Trinity-style IF find themselves caught short when playing the game — it’s nothing like any other Infocom game, or really any other piece of IF. Until now. Ad Verbum is very much in the spirit of Nord and Bert, but instead of focusing on English idioms, it focuses on the words themselves, having a ball with all manner of challenging restrictions on expression.

For example, there’s a room where every single word starts with “S”. I’m not kidding — every single word. Don’t believe me? Here’s the room description:

Sloppy Salon
Simple social space, sadly spoiled. Some skewed situation's sequel,
surely. Seemingly, slovenly students sojourned -- scraping,
scratching, scuffing surfaces.

Stuff: ... stainless steel stapler... sizable sofa.

Now, I’ve seen some amazing room descriptions in my years of playing IF, but this one just blows my mind. I can’t believe the sheer linguistic bravado of it. Not only that, the author performs a similar feat in four other rooms, one for the letter “E”, one for “N”, one for “W”, and another for “S”. Not only that, each room has customized library responses consisting of only words beginning with the appropriate letter. In these rooms, as you might gather, the game will only accept input beginning with the appropriate words — the challenge is to come up with words that tell the parser what you want to do while staying within the linguistic restriction. Keep a thesaurus handy while playing this game.

Just for these rooms alone, the game is a towering achievement. To come up with not just a room description, but actual library responses that make sense for all commands, in such a restricted form, is incredible. Beyond this, though, is the achievement in parsing — I shudder to think what this game’s code must look like. And those four rooms are just one part of the whole thing. Ad Verbum overflows with linguistic challenges of this nature, and I had a hell of a lot of fun playing it.

At least, I had fun until the time I typed in an answer that should have worked under the game’s rules, but which the game didn’t recognize. And there we have the danger of this kind of game. Its wordplay challenges are so mind-wrenching that when I do come up with an answer that works, the game had better accept that answer, or I’ll get frustrated very quickly. Up until about halfway through Ad Verbum, I found that it was very well prepared to handle anything I threw at it. However, as I moved to other puzzles, it started to reject perfectly valid commands, which caused me to lose faith in the game with distressing speed, despite how impressed I had been with it up until then. After that frustrating period, I turned to the help and didn’t try very hard to solve the rest of the puzzles, which is a shame because some of them were really excellent puzzles.

The problem is that because Ad Verbum requires such specific input, when it isn’t prepared to handle what little input is valid under its rules, it seems much more broken than does a typical IF puzzle when it rejects alternate solutions. I can’t say I blame it — frankly, I’m astonished by how well coded it is already, even despite what it still lacks — but that didn’t make my experience any more fun when the game was rejecting correct answers. Ad Verbum sets itself a highly bizarre challenge, bravely taking up the mantle of Nord and Bert. When it succeeds, it provides immense intellectual pleasure. When it fails, it generates great frustration, and helps me understand just a little bit more of what those Nord and Bert bashers are on about.

Rating: 8.6

[Postscript from 2020: Ad Verbum won the XYZZY Award for Best Puzzles, in a ceremony held on ifMUD. In accepting the award, Montfort gave the most astounding acceptance speech I’ve ever seen. I reproduce it here in full, from its archive on Montfort’s site:

Ahem, awesome! Author accepts an appealing award affably.

As author’s actions affirm, alphabetical arrangements always amused author. Assembling assorted arbitrary ASCII, ad absurdo, as adventure and acquisition, appeared attractive.

And accordingly, author attacked adventure, abandoning ars amatoria, abandoning athletic activity, appearing agonizingly antisocial. After arduous attempts and assays, author actualized adventure.

Accolade and adventurer appreciation authentically affects author.

Acknowledgement appears appropriate: author appreciates all assistance and aid, awfully. An acolyte (“alone,” as acolyte’s appellation asserts) accoutered abundant authentication aid, assuredly above average.

Author asserts again: acclaim’s absolutely appreciated. Adieu!]

Unnkulia X by Valentine Kopteltsev [Comp00]

IFDB page: Unnkulia X
Final placement: 27th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

In the beginning, there was the 1995 IF competition. This competition had but One Rule: all entries must be winnable in two hours or less. The competition has gotten grander and more complex since then, but it has remained a competition for short games, not Curses-length epics. Somewhere along the way, though, the One Rule got mutated a little. I quote from this year’s rules: “Judges must base their judgement of each game on at most the first two hours of play… Authors may write a game of any length they desire, but should keep this rule in mind when determining the length of their entry.” This rule has been in this form, more or less, since 1998. Still, the competition has remained oriented towards short games.

There are some obvious reasons for this. For one thing, it takes less time to write a short game. The more objects, locations, NPCs, plot points, and such you cram into your game, the more work your game will be to produce, at least if you want to maintain a reasonable level of quality. I would argue, however, that there are other reasons to keep long games out of the competition. From a judging standpoint, I don’t feel comfortable evaluating a game unless I’m reasonably confident that I’ve seen most or all of it. If A Mind Forever Voyaging, for instance, were to be entered in an IF competition, I know for certain that I wouldn’t have an accurate picture of it after only 2 hours of play. I felt differently about Zork III before and after the Royal Puzzle. I could go on, but you get the idea. Consequently, the ratings given to a large game don’t really reflect the game as a whole, just its beginning sections. Also, it’s really comparing apples to oranges to put something like Worlds Apart up against something like, say, Winter Wonderland. Even if two games have a similar tone, or similar puzzles, or a whole raft of other similarities, length does matter. Ahem.

Nowadays though, the competition has become, to use a worn-out but apt phrase, a victim of its own success. Authors enter anything they write into the competition just because it’s so high-profile and receives so much ink (or electrons, or whatever.) They figure that even in the worst case, they’ll get a whole bunch of people playing and writing about their game, so why not enter it? I feel a rant coming on about this. The first part of my rant is directed at authors. Look, people, entering a game that is too long (or too buggy, or too poorly proofread, or otherwise inappropriate for the competition) is an abuse of the judges’ time. The feedback and recognition you get this way are ill-gotten.

Moreover, I would contend that especially in the case of overlong games, you’re not really benefiting that much, because whatever recognition and feedback you get are only based on the first two hours, not your game as a whole. You created an entire game, but if it’s just one of fifty entries, and it’s quickly apparent that two hours ain’t gonna cover it, not by a long stretch, how many of those players do you think will return to your game? How many people will see and give you feedback about the other three-fourths of the game that they didn’t get to during the comp? How much are you really benefiting from all that comp attention?

And while I’m on the topic, let’s move to the second part of my rant, which is directed to the community at large. Listen, I love the competition. It’s one of my favorite things about the IF community. But let’s face the problems that it has. The magnetism of the competition, the idea that it’s the best place for every game, is something we all need to work harder to address. Do your part. Release a long game (or a short one) outside of the competition. Write a review of a non-comp game for SPAG or XYZZYNews. Participate in things like the IF Review Conspiracy and the IF Book Club. Most importantly, post post POST about non-comp games. Make a commitment to post a reaction to any non-comp game you play. It doesn’t have to be a review. It doesn’t have to be thorough. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be smart. It just has to be done, because if it doesn’t get done, the authors who don’t abuse the competition will end up losing out, and that’s not right. So please — do it. Your efforts will benefit yourself and everybody else in the IF community.

Just to be democratic, the third part of my rant is addressed to myself, and people like me, people who write long, thorough reviews of every comp game. We are part of the problem. I recognize that consistency is important to us, and that’s why we devote more or less the same amount of space to each comp game. However, there can and should be limits. Don’t even play games that have catastrophic bugs, let alone review them. Any attention those games get contributes to the perception that it’s better to release a buggy game in the comp than a polished game in the Spring. We must work to prove that this perception is fallacious and untrue. As for overlong games, review them if you feel you must, but don’t feel obligated to spend much of the review talking about the game itself — spend it instead on some adjacent topic like the problem of inappropriate games in the competition.

I mean, for god’s sake, Unnkulia X is 865K! The thing is only 45K smaller than Once and Future! It’s freaking huge! Yes, it’s fairly well done, implemented with care and only a few lapses in English. (There’s a lot of unfamiliar diction, which I assume is attributable to the author’s first language being something other than English, but most of these alien word choices are rather refreshing instead of jarring.) Of course, I only got 60 points out of 300 after two hours, so these assessments are based on what I have to assume is the first fifth or so of the game. If it were the whole game, I’d probably give it about a 9. Considering it’s a fifth of the game, I think that works out to about a…

Rating: 1.8

Kaged by Ian Finley [Comp00]

IFDB page: Kaged
Final placement: 1st place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Kaged is totalitarian IF. I mean that in two ways. First, the game’s setting is a paranoid, Kafkaesque dystopia, where a totalitarian government is clearly in control. The game tips us off quite early to the fact that it’s placing us in a very dark world indeed. The introductory text is full of capitalized phrases, phrases like High Inquisitor and Citadel of Justice. These give us a clue that the powers in charge surround themselves with an overwhelming air of authority, and the intro’s gory imagery makes it obvious that all is not well in this Stalinist wonderland.

When we reach the first room, a number of standard props are waiting for us: heavy, immovable desks symbolizing the drudgery of work; a seal and inkpad hinting at numbing bureaucracy; a solid iron typewriter, a technological relic to tell us that we’re in a place where innovation is squashed, where the status quo is upheld and even enforced for its own sake; and of course, a standard uniform, reminding us unsubtly that the PC is just one of a million pieces in the authoritarian machine. Then, finally, when we reach the first important scene of the game, we enter the chamber of the High Inquisitor himself. The Inquisitor’s job in this society is described thus: ” All decisions and power lay solely in the Inquisitor’s hands, the legal hocus-pocus of the past swept away. True Justice at last.” The irony is as thick as anything you’ll find in A Mind Forever Voyaging, and if you don’t get the point by now you never will. I found it all about as pleasant and effective as a hammer blow to the face. That is to say, Kaged is unremittingly, relentlessly dark in plot, setting, and characterization, and it certainly worked on me, spooking me into some of the sharpest paranoia I’ve ever experienced in IF.

Remember, though, I mentioned that there are two ways in which Kaged is totalitarian IF. Not only does it depict a totalitarian regime, it enacts one as well. With the exception of one branching point, both directions of which are functionally equivalent, and both of which put you at the same spot, your path through Kaged is very much predestined. Deviations from it are not tolerated. Commands that don’t advance the story tend to be met with terse dismissal: “That’s ridiculous.” Others are rejected with the rationale that the risk they involve is too dangerous, not that the game minds your taking the risks it intends. A few choices simply aren’t implemented at all.

A great deal of this is quite appropriate and logical, given the game’s setting. Surveillance cameras are everywhere, as are guards, and it’s a sensible design choice to disallow obviously suicidal commands with a “You don’t want to do that” type of message. In addition, this design dovetails neatly with the game’s plot. However, there are times when Kaged oversteps even these bounds, laying a controlling hand on the player to enforce the plot very rigidly indeed. For example, I figured out much of the foreshadowing in the game rather early on, and tried some rather reasonable actions to test my conclusions. Despite the fact that these actions would not have placed the PC in danger, certainly no more than most of the actions that the game requires to advance the plot, they were forbidden under the simple rubric of “You don’t want to do that.”

This bothered me — if I’ve figured something out, why can’t I act on that knowledge? Because it isn’t time yet, the game tells me, and besides it wouldn’t be in character. But when a game slips hints to you and then forbids you from acting on those hints, it has moved beyond simply shaping the character. In the case of Kaged, I felt very much that the game itself became an example of the kind of dictatorial control that it ostensibly was working to decry.

That being said, I’m in a dilemma about how to rate it. On the one hand, I have to admit that it does an outstanding job at achieving what appear to be its goals. By the end of the game I was twitchy, angry, and thoroughly awash in the reality-questioning quasi-madness brought on by works like Brazil and 1984. Like those works, Kaged is a kick in the head all the way through, and a very powerful kick at that. In a way, I love this — I find it a brilliant indictment of authority run rampant, and perhaps even a radical thesis on the problems of non-interactive IF. All that makes me want to rate Kaged quite highly indeed.

On the other hand, if I give it what it wants, doesn’t that make me complicit? If I truly believe in resisting totalitarianism (and I truly do), then shouldn’t I resist Kaged and its demands by giving it the lowest rating possible? Shouldn’t I raise my voice as strongly as possible to insist that IF like this is unacceptable? Maybe I should. But then again, what about that old rationale of irony? Sure, Kaged shows us totalitarianism, and controls us with an iron hand, but isn’t it just making a point by doing so? Sure. Of course it is. It’s all ironic, you see? That’s what it is. And it certainly would be overly paranoid of me to think of that as just a rationalization.

Rating: 9.6

Sylenius Mysterium by Christopher E. Forman as “whomever wrote it” [Comp97]

IFDB page: Sylenius Mysterium
Final placement: 18th place (of 34) in the 1997 Interactive Fiction Competition

[Because of the nature of Sylenius Mysterium, any or all of this review could be considered a spoiler. In addition, spoilers are present for Freefall and Robots. You have been warned.]

There seems to be this strange impulse in the text adventure community to recreate the experience of graphical arcade games using the Z-machine. The first evidence I ever saw of this trend was Andrew Plotkin‘s “Freefall”, a z-machine Tetris implementation using realtime opcodes to reproduce the geometrical game with ASCII graphics. Others have followed, including Torbjörn Andersson’s “Robots”, which recreates one of the earliest video games, and a DOOM implementation which I haven’t played. I have to say that this notion baffles me. When I first saw “Freefall”, I thought it was good fun. It struck me as a typically amazing Plotkin programming exercise which showcased the versatility of the z-machine. But it didn’t become an arcade staple on my machine. As a text adventure, it was pretty wild. As Tetris, it was pretty average. I played it once or twice to see what it could do, then deleted it. “Robots” I kept, but I don’t play it.

Now here’s Sylenius Mysterium (hereafter called SM), the bulk of which is a textual emulation of a horizontally scrolling run-and-jump game, a la Pitfall or Super Mario Brothers. This kind of thing used to come up as a joke on the IF newsgroups from time to time, and now here it is, a real game. Unfortunately, SM demonstrates the reason that those games were implemented graphically in the first place. Namely, it’s silly to implement an arcade game in descriptive mode. (“You begin walking right.” “You execute a running jump.” “Beneath you is a low wall.”) These types of structures are what graphics are best at doing, and they were being done 15 years ago. It’s both more fun and less confusing to see an arcade environment in graphics, and if even ancient computers are capable of doing so, what’s the point of making a text adventure which simply produces an inferior copy of the original? Playing SM just made me wish that the author had sacrificed portability and implemented the arcade section in graphics. Hell, even cheesy ASCII graphics would have made for a more fun experience than one long room description reading “A panoramic landscape, parallax layers of empty, ruined buildings, scrolling by with your movements.” It seems to me that text is good at certain things and so is graphics, and to make a text version of Pitfall makes about as much sense as a joystick-and-fire-button version of A Mind Forever Voyaging. It’s great to know that the z-machine has realtime capabilities to produce a text arcade game, but surely those capabilities can be put to better use.

SM does have a prologue which operates in a traditional text adventure mode, and this section of the game is quite well-done, with the exception of a number of problematic bugs. The game does a very nice job of defining an engaging and convincing setting and characters, as well as creating a sense of nostalgia for the old gaming consoles. The Atari system was my first introduction to videogames that could be played at home, and I have many fond memories of days spent at friends’ houses playing Missile Command or Donkey Kong or Pitfall. In fact, the game evoked nostalgia so well that my disappointment was all the sharper when I realized that its “arcade” section was nothing more than realtime text.

Prose: The prose in the IF section of the game was really quite accomplished, so much so in fact that it sent me to the dictionary a couple of times to confirm the meaning of unfamiliar words. All the game’s elements, from the sterile quiet of a mall after-hours, to the almost exaggerated “skate punk” main character, to the loving descriptions of the old-time game consoles, were written in a style that I found quite rich and absorbing.

Plot: The plot in SM is mainly a device to whisk the player to the arcade section. The plot of that section is (intentionally, I think) extremely pure and simple: find the bad guy and undo his evil deeds.

Puzzles: Again, the puzzles outside the arcade section were few, and those inside the arcade section can’t really be called “puzzles” in the traditional sense, though I would argue that the game does propose an interesting juxtaposition between the challenges of a Mario Brothers-style arcade game and IF puzzles — the two are closer than they are sometimes thought to be. Those puzzles within the IF section were usually quite simple, though from time to time bugs arose that made the simplest actions seem unintentionally like puzzles themselves.

Technical (writing): The writing was technically excellent.

Technical (coding): Here there were a number of problems. I was keeping a text file of all the major bugs I found until I realized that the author had provided no email address (not even an anonymous remailer for comp97) to which bug reports could be sent. Suffice it to say that there were a number of situations, both inside and outside the arcade section, that needed much improvement. That being said, however, I’m willing to forgive quite a bit from someone who takes on a project as ambitious (even though I personally don’t find it to be very interesting) as the arcade section of SM. That section suffers from game-killing bugs of the “FATAL: No such property” variety (or at least it does under WinFrotz), but the working sections of it seemed to work quite well, and I salute the serious effort it must have taken to create them.

OVERALL: A 6.8

A New Day by Jonathan Fry [Comp97]

IFDB page: A New Day
Final placement: 10th place (of 34) in the 1997 Interactive Fiction Competition

A New Day is an ambitious piece of work which attempts to examine IF metalevels in a fairly original way. Its author bills it as his first real work of interactive fiction (he dismisses Stargazer, his entry in last year’s competition, as a kind of instructional prelude to his actual IF writing career); in Fry’s words, A New Day is the first thing that is “for better or worse, truly a Jonathan Fry game.” More often than not, it’s better. Although the game certainly packs some frustration and confusion (the unwelcome kind, not the pleasurable kind), it also provides some fresh surprises and a thought-provoking premise.

I found the plot a little difficult to follow, but from what I could piece together, the game opens shortly after its author has died (apparently electrocuted by his laptop), leaving his IF work in progress an incomplete shambles and ruining his plans to enter the competition. In addition, something else has emerged on which the author hasn’t planned: an entity who calls himself Winston. Winston claims to have been created as a part of the game, but gained sentience all on his own, along with some measure of control over the game’s virtual setting. He further contends that he himself has entered the game in the competition so that you (the player) could help him investigate the author’s death. Thus in the first few moves of the game we already have the real author (who appears in the acknowledgments section), a fictional representation of the real author, the game, the game’s characteristic representation of itself (or an aspect of itself), the player, the player’s murky fictional avatar within the game (just what is the interface simulating?), etc. Things get even more complicated from there.

Clearly, A New Day wants to position itself in the avant-garde of IF and explore fictional levels in the manner of experimental modern fiction. This is certainly a worthwhile project (and one that has been touched upon by many games including A Mind Forever Voyaging, Piece of Mind, and Bureaucracy), and A New Day manages to break some intriguing ground along the way. However, the game is by no means an unqualified success. The author overuses one off-the-wall prose technique in one section of the game, a little of which would have gone a long way. Also, I found the puzzles often to be counterintuitive and confusing. Finally, the game gives the impression of having bitten off a bit more than it can chew. I found myself wondering if the author had carefully thought through all the semantics and implications of the levels he imagines — by the end it all seems a bit of a muddle. Still, A New Day has some shining moments, and the author is right to think that it’s a significant step up from Stargazer. I look forward to the continued maturation of Jonathan Fry’s artistic voice.

Prose: The prose is smooth in some areas, faltering in others. On occasion the author still suffers from the awkward phrasing which plagued him in Stargazer, but it’s clear that a significant improvement has been made. The Athens section does a nice job of communicating the feel of the city (or so it seemed to me, but then I’ve never been to Athens), and other parts of the game neatly sidestep the necessity for strong prose by deliberately excluding description. [SPOILERS AHEAD] In addition, the author pulls a wild prose stunt about 2/3 of the way through the game, breaking down the most basic conventions of words and sentences in order to simulate a software crash. This works wonderfully at first; Fry uses an well-judged combination of sense and nonsense to convey the barest notion of setting. However, it becomes pretty tiresome after a while (and the nature of the puzzles dictated that I would be seeing a lot of that area). Fry finds the right balance of gibberish with text for his experiment, but misses the mark in measuring how much is too much in the larger context of the game. [SPOILERS END]

Plot: I’ve recounted much of the plot above, so I’ll just say here that I found it to be one of the most complicated, but also one of the most predictable, of the competition games I’ve played so far. The levels of representation certainly do get entangled (perhaps moreso than the author bargained for), [SPOILERS AHEAD] but some elements, such as the “revelation” that Winston was the murderer and the final, climactic scene inside the guts of the computer, were strictly pro forma. The combination makes the game feel rather more gimmicky than it should, as if the stylistic devices haven’t been considered beyond their immediate surprise value. [SPOILERS END]

Puzzles: I found A New Day‘s puzzles to be rather difficult and counterintuitive on the whole. The last puzzle was especially tough, but more because I wasn’t clear on exactly how the setup of wires and sockets and etc. was arranged. I’m inclined to think that this is more a fault of the prose than necessarily a shortcoming in the puzzle itself –however, in its present form the unclear prose made a difficult puzzle quite impenetrable for me. I also found many of the puzzles to be rather gratuitous, working against rather than with the flow of the story. Examples that come to mind are the tourist’s handbag and the password in the garbled section.

Technical (writing): The writing was fine on a technical level.

Technical (coding): The game included some nice coding touches, including an exits list on the status line which was context-sensitive depending on what section the game found itself in. Also, Winston was quite thoroughly programmed, which helped to flesh out his character and deepen his effectiveness. Overall, Fry’s coding job was admirable.

OVERALL: A 7.7