Dungeon by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling [IF-Review]

[I originally reviewed this game for Mark Musante’s site IF-Review, in 2001.]

IFDB page: Zork

Archaeology

Zork I was the first text adventure game I ever played, and I played it a lot. That game occupied many, many hours of my time and, to this day, it remains one of only a few Infocom games I was ever able to solve without hints, due solely to my stubborn and relentless attention to it. Between those marathon childhood sessions and the occasions on which I’ve replayed it since, I have walked those underground caverns many times, and their geography is so fixed in my mind that I think if I should ever find myself transported there, I could navigate with ease. Or, at least, that’s how I used to feel, before I started playing Dungeon and got my internal map thoroughly whacked.

Dungeon is the predecessor to the Zork games; it was MIT’s answer to Crowther and Woods’ Adventure and, much like that game, it lived on a mainframe, since its prodigious size was too great for the personal computers of its day. When the authors decided to make a commercial go of the text adventure business, they chopped Dungeon into three sections, rearranging the geography and adding some new elements to each chapter, especially the second and third. I’ve played the Zork games many times, but I had always wanted to play the mainframe version in order to better understand just what was added and what subtracted. So when I opened the WinGlk version of Andrew Plotkin’s C translation of the game, I was prepared for some shifts in layout compared to my deeply-graven memories of Zork I.

What I wasn’t prepared for, though, was the way in which Dungeon gleefully confounds any sense of actual geography in exchange for making the game map another obstacle to be overcome. In Dungeon, connections that line up properly (for example, leaving one room to the south and entering the adjoining room from the north) are the exception rather than the rule. Instead, you may go west and find that to get back to where you came from, you have to go west again. In a recent article about crafting a good setting for fantasy IF [1], Emily Short addressed this tendency:

[In] the ideal IF setting, the parts of the setting relate to each other in comprehensible ways. Things are located sensibly. I dislike mazes not only because you do have to map them but also because they interfere with and scramble up the intuitive sense of place that I otherwise build up as I play.

In this sense, almost the entirety of Dungeon functions as a maze, and any coherent sense of place that might emerge is bound to get smacked down as soon as the next exit is explored. I have a pretty good knack for mapping in my head, and thus don’t tend to make a map while playing IF but, with this game, there was no way I could pursue that strategy. Thus, grumbling, I hauled out my copy of GUEmap and tried diligently to record the tortured web of interconnections that make up the Dungeon landscape. When I finally finished, I uploaded the results to GMD so that other players like myself won’t have to struggle through the game’s mazes on their own.

And oh, the mazes — in addition to the general illogic of its structure, Dungeon also sports several mazes, all of which carry the “warped connections” tendency to its furthest extreme. Of course, when seen from the historical perspective, these mazes make sense: Adventure had mazes, and since mazes are one of the easiest kinds of puzzles to create, it follows that the game attempting to top Adventure would have mazes of its own. What Dungeon does, though, is to twist the knife: not only does it present the player with mazes, it confounds the typical “drop item and map” strategy by having an NPC come along and remove or rearrange those items, taunting the player with comments like “My, I wonder who left this fine hot pepper sandwich here?”

When viewed with a modern eye, obstacles like this make clear how different is the stance of modern IF from its ancestors. Dungeon set itself up unambiguously as the player’s antagonist, and it wasn’t particularly concerned with telling a story, nor even with describing a world. Plot is nonexistent, and fabulous treasures are described with perfunctory lines like “You see nothing special about the sapphire bracelet.” Instead, Dungeon puts its energies into confusing and confounding the player, and wacky map connections are but the tip of the iceberg. Along with the aforementioned mazes, there’s the light source, which always runs out at the worst possible times. There’s the Round Room, guaranteed to tangle any map. There are the “secret word” puzzles, some of which still perplex me to this day, even though I know how they operate. And of course, there’s the thief, whose annoyances are both numerous and legendary. Dungeon wants nothing more than to see you fail, and it’s not overly concerned with how much fun you might be having. As Robb Sherwin asserted on rec.games.int-fiction recently [2], “Zork hates its player.”

Today’s IF, by contrast, works a bit harder to collaborate with the player, with the aim of creating a shared experience, both in setting and plot. Even the Zork games moved in this direction, at least in comparison to Dungeon, mitigating some of the latter game’s greatest excesses by straightening out many map connections, allowing more flexibility with the permanent light source, and providing a bit more description from time to time. The ways in which Infocom itself engineered the shift from “text-based puzzle games” to actual interactive fiction is a subject for another article, but what’s become clear is that where the emphasis was once on opposition, it has shifted steadily to cooperation.

To my mind, this shift is both appropriate and necessary, and what playing Dungeon illuminated for me is that this movement towards collaborative IF is not the same thing as the concurrent movement towards “literary IF”, though they are often confused for one another. I can envision a game that, like Dungeon, has no particular literary pretensions, but unlike Dungeon, isn’t trying to undermine its player through the use of arbitrary techniques like twisty map connections and unreliable light sources. I would assert that collaborative IF doesn’t need to tell a story, and it certainly doesn’t need to aspire to literary greatness, but it does need to work with the player to create a rich, interactive world, and it does need to be concerned with giving the player a positive, fun experience. Of course collaborative IF can be puzzleless, but it needn’t be — puzzles can be part of the fun, as long as they aren’t geared towards forcing restarts after 800 moves, or making the player do tedious, menial work.

The move away from antagonistic IF is the reason why things like mazes, limited light sources, and starvation puzzles are met with a chorus of jeers these days, but the elimination of these elements doesn’t necessarily dictate anything in particular about how literary or puzzleless a game might be. Instead, the change makes the whole experience of IF more about fun than bloody-minded perseverance; playing Dungeon makes it clear how necessary this change was, and how far we’ve come since those mainframe days.

REFERENCES

[1] Short, Emily. “Developing A Setting For Fantastical Interactive Fiction”, 2001.

[2] Sherwin, Robb. “Re: nevermind”. rec.games.int-fiction, 2001/06/05

The Cave Of Morpheus by Mark Silcox [Comp01]

IFDB page: The Cave Of Morpheus
Final placement: 32nd place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

Ah, another IF competition begins. There’s nothing quite like unzipping that big pile o’ games, firing up the random list generator, and diving into the first offering. Of course, the thing about diving is that you may find the water a bit less pleasant than you had anticipated. There’s a misspelling on the first screen. The game engine doesn’t recognize the “script” command. [I figured out later that there’s a “start transcript” command from the menu, whose functionality is happily improved from last year. I’ll keep it in mind for the next ADRIFT game I play.] Oh yes, and then there’s the wonderfully opaque ADRIFT parser:

WEAR CLOTHES
Wear what?

CLOTHES
Wear what?

AAARGH! CLOTHES! C-L-O-T-H-E-S! IF YOU DON'T RECOGNIZE THE WORD,
JUST SAY SO!
Wear what?

It’s not that The Cave of Morpheus is untested. The author’s notes claim that the game “has been beta-tested fairly extensively”, and I can believe it. Sadly, though, the testing cycles didn’t quite catch all the problems, whether they be with voice (“I slap the palm of your hand”), room descriptions full of dialogue that repeats on every “LOOK” command, or glitchy parser trouble that leads to output like this:

GET ALL
I pick up the library book and

Okay, enough bitching about the bugs. TCOM is a college game, combined with that wonderfully flexible genre, the nightmare story. Because much of the game’s action takes place in dreamspace, you’re not to take it amiss that, for example, you’re naked and can’t find any clothes in your own dorm room. Of course, once you see the game comment on the PC’s penis, then dream or no dream, your reaction may be the same as mine: “Ew.” When that comment turns out to be an extended metaphor about drooping flags… well, double ew.

TMI aside, there are a few other strangenesses about the design, but the dreamlike setting makes it hard to know whether they’re intentional or not. For example, there appears to be some random combat, and it can indeed kill you. All that’s necessary to survive is to run away, but as a player, I was still left asking, “What was up with that?” I never really found out.

Inexplicably, the game is split into two files, and right about the start of the second one, I thought it was about to take off into something really cool. The PC plays Crowther and Woods’ Adventure on his laptop, commenting along the way like so:

X BIRD
{You scratch your head. This Crowther 550 thing is getting weirder
and weirder. What the hell would a bird be doing hanging out in a
Colossal underground cave? And if it did find itself there, what
reason would it have to be happy??...}

“Wow!” I thought. What a neat concept — a mini-implementation of Adventure, but seen through the eyes of a particular character, thus shedding light on both the game and the character. Sadly, it turns out that this cool idea wasn’t the idea the game had in mind. Rather than a mini-implementation, the Adventure section is a very long non-interactive passage, one of those dismal IF moments where it doesn’t matter at all what you type; the game keeps choosing your actions even if you just sit there hitting Enter, waiting for a chance to actually do something again. The interplay between character and game still happens, but it feels rather ironic to have interactivity completely removed just as the game is paying homage to a seminal example of interactive text.

There are some pleasures available in TCOM — the character of Alice is nicely delineated, and I found the PC’s relationship with her quite believable. The spiraling, repetitive structure of the game made for some effective scenes, and the notion of some idealized version of Willie Crowther as Virgil to the PC’s Dante is well worth exploring. Though these gems are embedded deep within a bland setting and an unfriendly implementation, their simple existence makes me look forward to the author’s next game.

Rating: 4.5