[In 2001, I was asked to be a judge for a minicomp called PrologueComp, whose concept was that the entrants wouldn’t write games — just the text lead-ins that open games. The entries were limited to 2001 characters, either ASCII or HTML. There were 23 entries, and I didn’t review them all — just the ones I was assigned. I made an ordered shortlist to rank the pieces against each other. Also, there are a few “editorial” interjections by David Myers, who ran the comp. For this reprint, I’ve also added author attributions, which were absent in my original text (since I didn’t know who the authors were!)]
A couple of comments:
- Spoilers — it’s hard to worry about spoilers for something that takes two minutes to read, but I’ll try.
- Quality level was really pleasantly high. Short list decisions weren’t easy.
[Editor’s note: Paul’s shortlist rankings are at the end of this document.]
Comments for COMPULSION by Aris Katsaris
When all I’m reading is a prologue, you don’t have much time to hook me; you’d better do it fast. One of the best techniques for this is to float an intriguing idea, something I want to investigate further. That’s just the approach taken by Compulsion, and it works beautifully. The genre is science fiction, which is perfect for the kind of “big idea” hook used here. Some kind of mind-control technology has been introduced into the military of the 24th century, and we see the societal debate about it through a series of box quotes. Normally I’m not a big fan of one box quote after another, especially at the beginning of a game, but this game doesn’t overdo the technique (there are three), and the last one provides a nice punch to lead into the main character’s POV. Once we get there, we get terse, driving sentences and fragments, setting up an urgent situation very nicely. There are stumbles here and there — a general is named “Ira Asimov”, evoking Isaac Asimov to no focused purpose, and some of the punctuation is absent or misplaced (“Less than a hundred of them you are betting.”) [Editor’s note – likely due to the fact that the author used all 2001 of his bits], but overall this is a very strong beginning.
Comments for HOWL by Randall Gee
It’s funny, but in a very compressed format like this, tiny things start to seem really significant. Take, for example, formatting. When I read monospaced text on a computer screen, I prefer for it to be left-aligned, and for the paragraphs to be separated by blank lines. When it’s indented, as it is in Howl, I find it all runs together and feels more difficult to read. But even if it were reformatted, I don’t think Howl would do much for me, despite my abiding interest in wolves and werewolves. The conversation that opens the story feels stilted and cliched, and the punch that the last sentence was supposed to deliver fell flat for me, perhaps in part because I had begun to skim over the irritating formatting at that point. The sentences in the opening room description are almost insistently flat, which deflates whatever emotional impact the beginning might have had. If I encountered this opening in an actual game, I’d certainly keep playing, but with the hope that things would improve.
Comments for UNFERTH by Jamie Murray
When I was teaching writing, I found that there were certain styles I could recognize from miles away. One of these was the “I have swallowed a thesaurus” style, where things were never pretty but “resplendent”, and “brobdignagian” instead of big. Another was “adjective-o-rama”, where no noun was happy without some intensifying descriptor. Usually these styles were the outgrowth of some well-meaning teacher’s advice about word choice or vivid description, taken to an extreme. With clauses like “sooty cobbles and their hobbling troupes of leprous pigeons,” Unferth appears to suffer from both syndromes. The ironic thing is that although these techniques are presumably meant to make the writing more vivid and intense, they actually result in prose that is murkier (due to inappropriate adjectives — can raindrops really be “laurel-tinted?”) and choppier (due to the necessity of consulting a dictionary for every third sentence.) I have a healthy vocabulary, but even after reading the Unferth prologue several times I have only the vaguest idea of what’s going on, and I’m not particularly inclined to investigate further.
This prologue starts out in the hard-boiled mystery mode, with the detective talking to the femme fatale, and is so reminiscent of the opening to Dangerous Curves that it’s hard to avoid comparison to that game. Trouble doesn’t have nearly the panache with words that marked DC, and consequently I was feeling a little let down by it. What it does have, however, is a little surprise, a genre-blending trick that makes the whole thing seems much fresher. This surprise is handled well; it’s obvious enough by the end of the prologue, but on rereading it’s clear that the hints were there all along. However, by the time the story is rolling, it’s actually someone besides the PC who is performing immediate action — the prologue doesn’t suggest anything in particular for the PC to do as the game begins. Perhaps this might have been more effective if recast from the point-of-view of Raphael, the henchman. Nonetheless, I’d look forward to playing this game further, if only to see more of the fun surprises that happen when genres collide.
In my notes on Compulsion, I remarked that the dictates of this competition leave precious little time to get the reader interested. Compulsion overcomes the problem with a Big Idea, and uses the natural genre of that technique, science fiction. TMOC uses a related trick: the Big Question. And wisely, the prologue embeds that technique in its home genre, the mystery. TMOC‘s application of the technique isn’t quite as skillful as that in Compulsion — there isn’t quite the sense of immediacy — but it was plenty good enough to get me very interested. There were a few things I wasn’t crazy about, like the abundance of InterCapped company names (“CreAgent”, “ComTrust”, etc.) and the inconsistent line spacing, [Editor’s note – I believe the author was going for a larger break right before and right after the title block, but could not properly simulate this because he’d run out of his 2001 bytes that way] but these were offset by some clever choices. Starting in the POV of the murder victim and jumping to the detective as our PC sets up a lovely bit of dramatic tension, albeit of a type that is rather difficult to handle in interactive fiction. In fact, I’d be curious to see how an actual game would handle giving crucial information to the player that the PC lacks. Perhaps this could only be a prologue, but even at that, it’s quite a good one.
Comments for WITHOUT WINGS by Robert Masella
Something that I’ve found interesting about the entries in this competition is how much they vary in their “IFness.” Some, like Compulsion, feel as if they had to have been lifted from an IF game — they give us the traditional intro, banner, initial room description, and prompt. In fact, Compulsion uses the additional convention of box quotes to reinforce the feeling that we’re definitely dealing with computer-assisted prose here. I tend to find these prologues the more compelling of the lot — they really give me the feeling that a piece of interactive fiction is beginning, and trigger those mechanisms in my brain that slide into identification with the PC and immersion in the game world. Then there are those prologues, like Unferth and The Madness of Crowds, that give us intro and banner, but no room description. These types of prologues stand or fall on the setup of their initial questions and on the quality of their writing, because by omitting the initial room description and prompt, they force us to imagine just where the game places us to begin with. And then, at the other end of the spectrum, there are prologues like this one, which are indistinguishable from the first few paragraphs of a short story, albeit one written in the second-person voice. This approach is hardest of all to pull off, and Without Wings just doesn’t make it. The setup needed to be extremely interesting in order to give me that IF hook, and the cliched parade of mental patients, full moon, drifting mist, and chittering horrors had me detaching right away. I guess it’s a combination of factors: the genre’s not particularly my cup of tea, this particular instance of it didn’t feel fresh, and the feeble, possibly-deluded PC was difficult to identify with. I probably wouldn’t read a short story that began like this, and what’s here just doesn’t feel much like a game.
Comments for PASSING ON by Ulrich Schreitmueller
Wow! This one was easily the biggest knockout of the samples I was assigned. For one thing, it’s one of the few entries that uses the HTML format of the contest to its advantage — the black background and the varying shades of text work to excellent effect. The faded grey text is perfect for the modernist technique of presenting suggestive, evocative word-fragments to evoke a dreamlike and semi-conscious state, while the brighter white text takes a more straightforward narrative tone. The interplay between the two sets up a highly compelling scenario, an immediate task to accomplish, and moves us smoothly into the first room description. That room description is excellent, using several senses (including the non-physical) to create a place that isn’t really a place, but rather a mental state. And then that final sentence — both chilling and exhilarating, not to mention an excellent spur to action. I also appreciated that the subtitle “A Prologue”, which is not only literally true for this entry, but feels like it would be perfectly appropriate even if this really were the beginning of a game. All in all, a bravura performance in a tiny space. Well done!
Comments for FADE OUT by Marc Valhara
A while ago (hell, I don’t know — maybe it was several years ago), somebody floated the idea of an IF game formatted like a screenplay. At the time, I remember being less than enthusiastic about the idea — I wasn’t sure just what advantage the format would bring. Now, as proof of concept, we’ve got Fade Out, which might be the prologue to that hypothetical game. To be honest, it still seems like a stylistic gimmick to me, but gimmicks have their place. Based on my extremely limited knowledge of screenplay convention, this one seems to deviate a little in some specifics, but that’s probably not such a bad thing, given the screen constraints that real IF would be working under. The one advantage conferred by the screenplay format is that it provides a legitimate excuse for such plodding text as “A wooden deck is to the north. A hallway is to the east, and a kitchen is to the west.” Many IF writers have puzzled over how to include such necessary information without its clunkiness detracting from their other writing, and this format provides just such a mechanism. Aside from that, though, it didn’t feel any more vivid than regular prose written in a “cinematic” style. The story itself provides an interesting beginning, and definitely made me want to keep playing, although I’d still view the screenplay gimmick with skepticism.
Like Without Wings, this entry provides neither banner nor room description, giving us instead three basic paragraphs of fairly generic setup. The premise in this entry doesn’t really give any indication as to where the game is going, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in a real IF game. However, this is not a real IF game, just a three-paragraph prologue, and in these circumstances, leaving the PC’s situation so dull and open does little to draw me in. Sure, it’s clear enough that something’s going to happen, but the range of things that could happen is so vast that until something more specific comes along, there isn’t much drama there. In fact, if I were a betting man, I’d venture that this is the actual prologue to somebody’s WIP, snipped and entered into this comp on a whim, and its failure in this context serves to prove that not all good prologues stand on their own. Sometimes, a prologue just does some basic work of setting up a character and situation, and it’s the first section of the game that actually gets the ball rolling. (I’m chuckling now, thinking of what the beginning of LASH would look like if entered into this comp — very short, and very dull.) That’s a perfectly acceptable way of structuring an IF game, but it doesn’t have much to offer as a set piece on its own.
[Editor’s long note – Actually, it is possible that I was thinking about LASH subconsciously when designing this contest, and so I want to correct Paul’s modesty. In part, I was envisioning the question of what makes some comp entries irresistible and others easily avoided. The conclusion I came to was that sometimes the prologue determines whether the player is hooked or not. I recall thinking beyond just prologues and further about games where there is not much prologue material, but there is a readme.txt or an ANNOUNCE on usenet which tells what the setting/motivation of the game are going to be. ::These comments were written before the announcement that we may, in fact, soon witness TrailerComp.::
This is rarer with comp games, which don’t often have such extra material that doesn’t reside directly in the game file. More generally, that would be termed “feelies”, though the term has gotten pretty loose from the original intent, which generally used to mean pictures or other non-text material that accompanied and buttressed the game, rather than introducing it. My memory may be failing me, but I seem to recall LASH having either a readme.txt or a usenet ANNOUNCE which greatly piqued my interest about the game concept. Frankly, without that prologue-ish material, I don’t know if I would have played LASH.
Below is the actual LASH startup text (as opposed to the readme/ANNOUNCE), for readers wondering about what Paul meant by “very short, very dull”:
LASH -- Local Asynchronous Satellite Hookup
An interactive utility for communicating with your MULE robot
New users should type "HELP".
Release 11 / Serial number 000806 / Inform v6.15 Library 6/7
DISCONNECTED
Type "CONNECT" to link to your MULE robot.
Type "HELP" for help.
>
Author’s own words: “Not exactly the world’s most gripping prologue.” ]
[Paul’s note from 2024: I think David is thinking of the announcement I posted to rec.games.int-fiction when I released the game.]
This prologue does an excellent job of suggesting what the game will probably be like, and this works both for it and against it. On the plus side, the setup is quite clever and original — I’m strongly intrigued by the idea of “an interactive foray into the myths and legends of Ancient Egypt,” and would be quite excited to play such a thing. The notion that the action will begin after the PC dies is a nifty one — I’ve never played Perdition’s Flames, so I’m not sure how closely this game might parallel it, but I was always tickled by the idea of starting with “*** You have died ***”. On the less positive side, however, what seems clear is that at the beginning of this game, you’ll be forced to select a limited number of resources from some larger group of them, and which resources you select will determine your success later on in the game. I hate when games do this, because there is really no way of knowing which resources will be needed until you run into the puzzles. Saying “you will have to choose wisely” implies a level of context that is simply not available to me at the beginning of a game — in situations like this, I invariably find that what seemed like wise choices at the time turn out to be woefully insufficient, and that short of reading the author’s mind, I had no way of anticipating the problem. So I’d play on with hope of seeing more of this game’s interesting setting, but dreading its structure all the while.
Comments for CATHARSIS by Kevin F. Doughty
I found this prologue pretty unsatisfying, though it might work if it was attached to an actual game. On its own, though, it just doesn’t give me enough information to go on. Part of the problem is that it’s disjointed — it hardly gets started with its narrative voice before it’s interrupting itself with a journal excerpt. Then the journal excerpt stops, and we get a title and room description. Consequently, instead of a smooth introduction, this prologue feels as if it can’t make up its mind what approach it wants to take. Another factor is the absence of any substantive information about the character and setting. We can piece together that the PC is a traveler, and that the world is dark, maybe post-apocalyptic, but that’s about it. When I read “The children here are still burning things,” the implication of the “here” was that the PC was from somewhere else, but the prologue never tells us where that is, or where “here” is. What’s more, it never tells me who I am, how I ended up in my current situation, or why I should care about it, instead dumping me unceremoniously into a cellar. Again, this might work in a real game, where this information could be gradually revealed, but in this format, that information is not forthcoming. Also, what does catharsis have to do with anything? There’s no evidence that the PC is in any particular pain, and we’ve seen no other characters, so it would seem there’s not much of an opportunity for catharsis to occur. Finally, there’s the writing, which had several nice moments but overall felt rather awkward and affected. When I see a phrase like “this state of existence cruelly named ‘survival'” in a character’s journal, I can accept it as an example of that character’s melodrama and inarticulateness. But when the narrative voice itself is using clumsy phrases like “heightened the impact of its meaning”, I have to believe that there is a general problem with the writing. I’d keep playing this game, but I’d expect it to be the product of a beginning writer, and hope to find some gems in among the problems.
Comments for YOU: TENSE, ILL by Alexandre Owen Muñiz
There was a bit of debate among the judges as to what the title of this entry actually is, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s You: Tense, Ill. I love this title, because it does so many different things in such a tiny space. It reinforces the information in the introductory paragraphs about how the PC has been damaged by its foray through a dishwasher. It serves as a diagnostic report on the PC’s initial condition. And finally, the pun on “utensil” cracks me up, and lets me know that this game is going to approach its subject matter with a healthy dose of humor. [Editor’s note: you could be right. However, when I asked the entrant to view his entry to make sure that I’d gotten the display ok, he did not comment on my choice to list it on the main page as “A Gardenburger of Forking Paths”] The “forking paths” pun and the play on Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” serve a similar purpose, and I enjoyed them quite a bit. The premise at work here is clever and interesting — I adore the notion of aliens observing us by taking the shapes of ordinary objects. What’s clear, though, is that this is no ordinary PC, and that its range of action is going to be extremely limited, to say the least. The prologue does a wonderful job of letting us know what must be done, but the PC is so unusual that I’d venture the traditional IF interface would need to be adapted in order to accommodate it. It’s not the prologue’s job to explain these interface changes, but I was a little dismayed by not seeing a “first-time players should type HELP” sort of message. You can be sure that “help”, “info”, and “about” would be the first few things I’d try anyway, and that if those weren’t productive, I’d be completely at sea about where to even begin this game. In those circumstances, my glee at the good stuff this prologue does would probably turn into irritation at the more important things it doesn’t do.
Here’s another prologue that presents us with a highly unusual PC, and only provides the barest of hints as to that PC’s nature. Setups like this make me nervous, because I worry that I’ll lack the context necessary to enjoy the game. Having an unusual PC is well and good, but when that PC has special powers, unusual modes of action, and highly unusual goals and viewpoints — all of which this PC seems to have — then I want the game to give me enough context or instruction about these things so that my first hundred moves don’t consist of blindly flailing about, hoping to hit on information that the PC already knows. This prologue doesn’t give me much indication that the information is forthcoming, which is worrisome. It does have two great strengths, though: its writing and its level of intrigue. By the time I got to the end of this prologue, I really wanted more, and that’s a good thing. I found the viewpoint character highly intriguing, and the hints of the major conflict were delivered in a very compelling manner. The prose itself was excellent — “From within the fire” provided a wonderful “whoa!” moment, and the details are well-chosen. Some of the sentences, especially the first, are so dense and elliptical that they recall Emily Short, which is pretty much always a good thing. If this were a story, I’d be hooked. As an IF game, it’s got me both hooked and worried that the crucial exposition won’t come soon enough, if at all.
Short list rankings:
1. Passing On
2. You: Tense, Ill
3. Compulsion
4. Thirteen Cards, Well Suited
5. The Madness of Crowds
6. Trouble in Paradise
7. The Book Of The Dead
8. Catharsis