Tag: enlightenment

Janitor by Kevin Lynn and Peter Seebach as “Seebs” [Comp02]

IFDB page: Janitor
Final placement: 5th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

Note: Janitor is one of those games where you figure out what you’re supposed to be doing as you go along. It doesn’t take a terribly long time to reach this conclusion, but I’m going to talk about it, and that could quite reasonably be seen as a big spoiler.

We’re in the 8th year of the IF competition, and we seem to be at the point where we’re officially recycling stuff. Having just finished a game (Coffee Quest II) that often feels like a cut-rate knockoff of Michael Gentry’s Comp98 entry Little Blue Men, I discover Janitor, which more or less recapitulates the gimmick from Comp97’s Zero Sum Game, by Cody Sandifer. That is to say: an adventure has just happened, the score is at full, and the PC’s job is to go around unwinding all the accomplishments and setting things back to how they were.

Janitor seems more or less unaware of Zero Sum Game and its “game over” successors like Comp98’s Enlightenment and Comp99’s Spodgeville Murphy — for example, it doesn’t do anything entertaining when asked for the FULL score tally — but happily, it implements the unwinding idea in a more fun way than ZSG did. I was pretty turned off by ZSG‘s callousness towards PC, NPC, and player alike, and the way it motivated the PC to undo everything (the PC’s mother didn’t approve of killing or stealing) was undercut by the game’s taunting of the PC as a “mama’s boy” (or girl). Janitor‘s more sensible approach is to cast the PC as an employee of a text adventure company who must reset the game world so that the next player will find all the puzzles unsolved and the treasures in their original locations.

To accomplish this, the PC can use magical “access corridors” that connect to various rooms in the “proper” game scenario, along with a “mimesis disruptor” that’s good for quite a bit of nifty description-switching. The locations and objects are described with a great deal of humor, and the layout and puzzles are imaginative and clever. I wasn’t able to finish the game in the two hours allotted, which disappointed me, because it looked just about ready to open up into a new and fascinating level. I’d recommend this game to those who enjoy puzzles and IF metalevels, but I’d also recommend waiting to see if there’s a debugged post-comp release.

I say this because unfortunately, Janitor‘s implementation doesn’t quite match up to the wit of its premise and its writing. For instance, there’s a puzzle that can be solved over and over again, bringing the player’s score down to zero in a flash (which is the goal) without really accomplishing much. There’s a bucket that is supposedly full of water, but is also described as empty. What’s more, this bucket ends up being the game’s sack object, which really makes very little sense — why would I automatically store stuff in a bucket of dirty water?

In addition, there is a thin but even layer of punctuation and spelling problems in the prose, and the writing sometimes fails to mention certain critical actions that the game undertakes on behalf of the PC; I went a good long time thinking an object had disappeared, when in fact the game had actually moved it to my inventory without ever saying so. Perhaps most irritating of all, the first portion of the game doesn’t tell you what your goal is supposed to be, except for the rather vague explanation that it’s your first day as a janitor. This would be fine, except for the fact that it fails to respond well to your attempts to actually clean stuff — most such actions are either unimplemented or met with a discouraging message. I’d much rather have seen the game obligingly handle every request to clean something, and let the score mechanism clue the player in to the larger goal.

Also, while I certainly appreciated the effort put into the hints, I was frustrated by the fact that they didn’t go so far as to lay out all the necessary tasks. Consequently, I was left wandering around the game with 4 points out of 100, unable to progress to the next stage because I couldn’t figure out the last lousy task the game wanted me to perform. The hints’ reassurance that “our beta testers consistently beat the game” was the opposite of reassuring, helping me instead to feel stupid as well as aggravated.

I can most certainly appreciate the impulse to avoid giving the game away in the hints — I didn’t even include any hints or walkthrough in my entry last year, foolishly thinking that anybody would be able to stumble through it. Even this year, I wanted to just include hints and no walkthrough, but thought better of it. When somebody only has two hours to play my game, I want them to be able to see as much of it as they can, and it’s really not my place to police their “fun level” by making sure they do it the hard way.

Despite its problems, Janitor was interesting and amusing, and I wish I could have seen it through to its end in the space of two hours. A walkthrough or more explicit hints would have allowed me to do that. Instead, I’m left wondering what I missed, in more ways than one.

Rating: 8.2

Out of the Study by Anssi Raisanen [Comp02]

IFDB page: Out of the Study
Final placement: 24th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

A few years ago, I made up some vocabulary to describe a common aspect of IF. I’m not really sure if anybody else uses it, but I’ve found it immensely handy. The vocabulary is this: I call a noun that appears in a room description a “first-level noun.” These nouns either will or won’t have descriptions implemented, and the more of them that are described, the better, in my opinion. Nouns that appear in the descriptions of first-level nouns I call second-level nouns. Nouns from second-level descriptions are third-level, and so on. The deeper these levels go, the more complete and immersive the interactive environment, as we’ve seen in previous games like Hunter, In Darkness and Worlds Apart. Out Of The Study puts this technique to some of the best use I’ve ever seen, going very deep indeed with its levels of description:

> x family photo
In the photo you see the professor together with his family.

> x family
The professor is standing in the photo with his wife and five
children.

> x children
The photo is really rather old as the children in it are still very
young. You know that none of them lives at home anymore. On the left
there are twin boys, looking to be of the age at which they have just
started going to school. In the middle, the youngest child, just a
baby, is sitting in her mother's lap. It seems to be hardly one year
old: you cannot tell if it's a boy or a girl, even from the clothes.
[...]

> x baby
The baby, whose sex you are not able to tell, is dressed in a pink
overall.

> x overall
It is just an ordinary babies' outfit.

Given that OOTS is a one-room game, this depth of implementation goes a very long way towards making the environment feel real and interactive. Intriguingly, the point of this depth isn’t just to increase immersion; it’s actually an element of the game’s puzzles, and clues are often buried several levels deep. Enlightenment, from Comp98, explored this technique a little, but OOTS takes it much further.

This game’s puzzles are definitely its best feature. Like many one-room games, it has only a modicum of plot — you’re a thief who has been trapped inside the place you’re robbing, and you must investigate the environment to figure out how to escape. To do so, you have to figure out the mindset of the room’s occupant, and all the regular puzzles are subsections of that overriding goal. The design is generally sound, and I appreciated the fact that the environment was so richly implemented, but it would have been a lot more fun were it not so buggy. There’s a bit of an insect theme in this game, but actual game bugs are not welcome no matter how many metalevels of irony they provide.

Some of the problems may have been due to the ALAN parser; for instance, I found I couldn’t refer to objects by their adjectives, as in the following example where both a “torn photograph” and a “family photograph” are in scope:

> x photograph
[It is not clear which photograph you mean.]

> x torn
[You must supply a noun.]

Being able to refer to an object by any of its name words is a behavior I’ve come to love in IF, and I missed it a great deal during this game. Other things were clearly the game’s fault. For instance, “examine” and “read” were implemented as different verbs, but their implementation was not well-tested, resulting in exchanges like this:

> read books
There is nothing written on the books.

Hope you didn’t pay too much for those books, professor — they aren’t worth the paper they aren’t written on.

Between the game’s bugs, its quirks, and its lack of a walkthrough, I came thisclose to just abandoning it altogether. Happily, some folks over at ifMUD helped me get unstuck so I could reach the ending. Unhappily, that ending is a bit of a disappointment. OOTS succumbs to the temptation to tack on a rather cutesy “twist” ending, but my reaction to it was neither “awwwww” nor “whoa!”, but rather “huh?”

In my view, all that ending does is to make hash of everything that came before, as well as to make the player’s labors seem rather fruitless. I don’t even think it can be justified as bringing some sort of justice to the thief, because it’s unclear how much reality has actually shifted, or how much we are to assume about the game as a whole. There are some good puzzles and a very well-crafted setting here, and with a round or two more of testing and a better ending, OOTS could be a pretty good piece of IF.

Rating: 7.0

About my 2002 IF Competition Reviews

2002 was the eighth year of the IF competition, and everything was pretty firmly in place. That includes the games and authors, who occupied the usual range from ugh to wow, and in fact pushed the top of that range back up above where I found it in 2001. It also includes me.

By 2002 I’d been reviewing comp games for many years, and I was very comfortable in the critic role. Without being too egotistical about it, felt like I could write reviews that would not only explain the my reaction to game and give useful feedback to the author, but at least sometimes do so in a way that would be useful for lots of aspiring authors, not just the one who wrote the game in question.

Writing all those other reviews had also made me deeply conversant with the history of the comp, which became increasingly helpful, as more and more comp games seemed to be in conversation with their predecessors. This certainly happened on the stylistic level — for example the “pure puzzle game” flavor I’d identified in previous years’ games like Colours and Ad Verbum continued in 2002 with games like Color And Number and (to a lesser extent) TOOKiE’S SONG. Koan was a tiny puzzle game in the spirit of In The Spotlight or Schroedinger’s Cat. Janitor was a cleanup game like Enlightenment and Zero Sum Game.

Dialogue with previous IF also happened at the thematic level — A Party To Murder called straight back to Suspect, Coffee Quest II to Little Blue Men, and so forth. Finally, at the most abstract level, games like Constraints clearly functioned as meta-commentary on the medium itself.

Knowing the domain as I did helped me to feel like I could be a good teacher for newer authors. But even better, closely examining my reaction to a game and explaining it to myself by writing about it, especially informed by a long history of doing so, was the very best way of being a student. The great thing about the IF comp is that it provides such a wide variety of approaches, so in getting analytical about my own responses, I can understand what works and what doesn’t work across a whole range of styles. Particularly helpful were games like The Temple, whose approach inspired my own future work.

2002 was my third time as a competition entrant, and much to my amazement, my first time as a winner. I was genuinely shocked to win the competition — I really did not think my game was the best one. (But who am I to argue with the judges? 🙂 ) My own favorite game of the 2002 comp, by a pretty wide margin, was Till Death Makes A Monk-Fish Out Of Me!. In my meta entry about the 2001 comp, I stupidly asserted that my not reviewing All Roads because I’d tested it was “the first and only Comp where I didn’t review the winner”, but of course this is not true! I didn’t do so in 2002 or 2004 either, because my games were the winners.

Besides Another Earth, Another Sky, the only games I did not review were Buried! and Castle Maze, because they were withdrawn and/or disqualified.

I posted my reviews of the 2002 IF Competition games on November 15, 2002.

Enlightenment: A One-Room Absurdity by Taro Ogawa [Comp98]

IFDB page: Enlightenment
Final placement: 5th place (of 27) in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition

What is it with all the one-room games this year? There must be some kind of movement happening in the collective IF unconscious which says “Plot? Who needs it? Give me one room, and as long as it’s got one or more puzzles in it, I’m happy.” Well, sometimes I’m happy too. And, more or less, this is one of those times. Despite its title, Enlightenment has very little to do with gaining awareness or understanding Zen koans. To say what it does have to do with would probably be a bit too much of a spoiler, but it involves deliberately placing yourself in a situation that most text adventurers would avoid at all costs. Because of this, it took me a little while to actually catch on to how the game is supposed to work — I just couldn’t believe that deliberately placing myself in danger was the right path. It is, though, and getting there is all the fun. Like last year’s Zero Sum Game, Enlightenment puts the PC at the end of an adventure of dizzying proportions. Unlike Zero Sum Game, Enlightenment isn’t really an unwinding of the PC’s accomplishments — you get to keep your score, and even increase it. You’ve already overcome dozens of obstacles, collected lots of treasures, and scored 240 points out of 250; now there’s just the little matter of getting past a canonical troll bridge and scurrying out of the caverns with your loot. But how? In the game’s words:

If only you hadn't used your Frobozz Magic Napalm on that ice wall...
If only you hadn't used your TrolKil (*Tm) to map that maze...
If only you hadn't sold your Frobozz Magic Tinning Kit.
If only you hadn't cooked and eaten those three Billy Goats Gruff...
... or that bear ...

If ONLY you'd checked the bloody bridge on your way in.

This brief excerpt is representative of the writing in the game: it is both a very funny parody of the Zork tradition as well as an enthusiastic participation in that tradition. In fact, as you can see from the above quote, the game actually features some familiar parts of the Zork universe, such as Frobozz Magic products, rat-ants, and even certain slavering lurkers in dark corners. Activision apparently granted permission for this usage, as they did for David Ledgard in his adaptation of the Planetfall sample transcript for his game Space Station. Activision’s willingness to grant permissions for such usage, as well as their donation of prizes to the competition and their sometime inclusion of hobbyist IF on commercial products, is great news for a fan community like ours — their support of IF means that more people will devote their time to it, resulting (hopefully) in more and more good games. Enlightenment is one of the good ones, and one of its best features is its writing. Another way in which it is unlike Zero Sum Game is that it doesn’t take an extreme or harsh tone. Instead, the writing is almost always quite funny in both its comments on text adventure cliches (the FULL score listing is a scream) and its usage of them. The game is littered with footnotes, which themselves are often littered with footnotes. Sly allusions and in-jokes abound, but they’re never what the game depends on, so if you don’t catch them, you’re not missing anything important. Of all the one-room games I’ve seen this year, Enlightenment is definitely the best-written.

It even includes some fun outside documentation in the form of the HTML edition of the latest issue of Spelunker Today: “The magazine for explorers and adventurers.” This kind of mood-building file has been included with a few competition games this year, and Enlightenment‘s extras are definitely the best of the bunch. The writing in the faux magazine is just as good as the writing in the game, and the graphics look sharp and professional. I like these little extras — they really do help set the mood of a game — and they definitely add to the fun of Enlightenment. The one problem I had with this game was that, although the writing is funny and clever, it is sometimes not precise enough to convey the exact nature of a puzzle or its solution. In a heavily puzzle-oriented game like Enlightenment, this can be a major setback. For example, at one point in the game you’re called upon to cut something, but it won’t work to use your sword on it. You must find something else to cut with. Well, there is something else, but that object is never described as having a sharp edge. This is one of those puzzles that made me glad I looked at the hints — the only way I would have ever gotten it is by brute force, and that’s no fun anyway. In another instance, a part of the setting is described in such a confusing way that I still don’t quite understand what it is supposed to look like. Part of the difficulty, I think, is that the game features a gate, with metal spikes at its bottom set into the stone floor. Now, this made me think of bars, like you might see on a portcullis. However, as far as I can determine the game actually means a solid wall, with spikes at the bottom, which I wouldn’t describe as a gate. This kind of imprecision is a real problem when the objects so imprecisely described have to be acted upon in precise ways in order to solve puzzles. So I used the hints for a number of the puzzles, and I don’t mind that I did, because I wouldn’t have solved them on my own anyway. But imprecision aside, I’m still glad I used them, because it enabled me to play all the way through Enlightenment, and the trip out of that one room was well worth taking.

Rating: 8.6