Vespers by Jason Devlin [Comp05]

IFDB page: Vespers
Final placement: 1st place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

I came to this game knowing it had won the 2005 IF Competition. That couldn’t be helped. I was detaching from the IF community in that year, after my kid was born in June, but I was still dialed in enough to know the name of the winning game. It just took me almost twenty years to actually play the thing, that’s all. Because I just looked at its IFDB page, I also know that it won a bunch of XYZZY Awards, and that it has achieved lasting respect, still making it onto a list of Top 50 all-time IF games in 2023.

Starting with that knowledge gave me a rather unfair (albeit unavoidable) set of biases. Playing an acclaimed game, at least for me, comes with a higher initial bar of expectations, and maybe a little less tolerance for mistakes. Lucky for me, Vespers delivers on its promise, and earns its kudos. The religious subject matter is pretty alien to me, and religious games have been offputting to me in the past, so I appreciated the author’s note that Vespers “isn’t a religious game: at least not in the sense of trying to convert anyone”, and that he himself is “not Christian and wasn’t raised Christian”. Another unfair set of biases on my part, I suppose, but those upfront announcements helped me relax my guard and put my trust in the game.

Once I did that, I found it a rich and immersive experience, albeit in a disturbing way. I don’t think I’ve seen a better use of quotation boxes, with the possible exception of Trinity, which pioneered them after all. I hope it’s not too spoilery to say that Vespers uses quote boxes as a way to showcase the PC’s internal dialogue, an inner voice which becomes increasingly askew from its moorings, and which we learn later may have been leaking out for quite some time.

Yes, we have an unreliable narrator here, and maybe even an entire unreliable milieu, in a way that’s again hard to talk about without being too spoilery. And yeah, it’s a 20-year-old game (nearly), but I still strive to keep these comp reviews spoiler-free, as they’re about discovery after all. I’m making an exception, though. Fair warning: mild spoilers follow for both Vespers and Photopia, because I think there’s a fruitful comparison there.

There’s a moment in Photopia when what you’ve witnessed in the beginning comes back around, but this time with loads more meaning attached, and an oppressive sense of fait accompli. There’s nothing you can do to change what happens — after all, you already saw it happen — and indeed one of the knocks on Photopia was an alleged lack of interactivity, given the unchangeable nature of its central event. But I would argue that the very real interactivity of that game attaches the player to the event, and to the characters affected by it, with much greater ease than a similarly plotted short story could. You may not always be in the driver’s seat, but events witnessed from the passenger seat can still have a very powerful effect.

Vespers doesn’t hop perspectives the way Photopia does, but it does start with a decision already made by the PC, and everything else in the game flows from that decision. As the game goes on, the consequences of that decision become more and more clear, and it is the PC’s job to reckon with those consequences as best he can, within his declared moral framework.

And here’s where the Catholic setting becomes phenomenally useful to the game’s project, because it turns out we are dealing with an original sin. In Vespers, the sin was committed by the PC, but before he was being controlled by the player. We must inherit the consequences of that sin, and proceed as a flawed man moving through a flawed world. It’s as if the game begins with “*** You have lost ***”, and then asks, “Now what?” Nevertheless, and also true to its theme, Vespers does offer the possibility of redemption, at least on a personal level, even if a tsunami of suffering has overtaken the world. The path to get to that redemption is a very narrow one, but I think that also rings true in a Medieval setting.

I found this a brilliant use of interactive fiction, verging on profound. I have a fundamental quibble with the “good” path (albeit one that might be addressed if I understood Catholic theology better), and I did find a few places where the language or the coding fell down, but overall it’s clearly a well-tested and well-crafted game, which has absolutely earned its place among the all-time great works of interactive fiction.

Rating: 9.8

Beyond by Roberto Grassi, Paolo Lucchesi, and Alessandro Peretti [Comp05]

IFDB page: Beyond
Final placement: Tied for 2nd place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition

Here we are again: I couldn’t finish this game in two hours. I found it quite absorbing, and with 20 minutes left, I really debated whether to turn to the walkthrough or just play out my 20 minutes with a bit less dawdling around examining things, getting as far as I could. I picked the latter, but with 5 minutes left, I really wanted to know how the story turned out. So I peeked at the walkthrough, hoping to speed through to the end. NOPE! Turns out I was midway through chapter 4 of 7 (plus an epilogue) — just about halfway through, I reckon.

Back in the day I used to penalize games like this in my ratings, hoping to discourage people from this behavior. But it’s not like whatever I put here will deter people in, like, Comp06. Plus, as Michael Coyne taught me, authors have a strong motivation to enter their too-long games in the comp, and nothing I did as a reviewer could have changed that motivation anyway. And I’m obviously not trying to go through all these Comp05 games in six weeks — I started on these almost three years ago! So while I am still stopping after two hours to write a review, I’m not going to specifically take points off anymore, except to the extent that having to stop prematurely affected my enjoyment of the game. Heck, in some games stopping after two hours feels like a gift.

Stopping Beyond was disappointing, though, because I was deeply involved with its story, being pulled along at multiple levels. At the higher level, there’s a frame story, in which the PC is the spirit of an unborn child, exploring the reason why it wasn’t born. I was very wary when I encountered this premise, fearing that it would veer into an anti-choice polemic, but I needn’t have worried. Instead this concept brings us into a compelling murder mystery, in which we play a detective looking into the murder of a pregnant woman.

Really, I shouldn’t call the unborn spirit piece a frame story, because it returns after every chapter, in interludes where we see the murder scene as a ghost, or experience a bit of what life might have been like had the mother lived, or watch different scenarios of how that night might have gone, from a godlike remove. In the prologue, the game makes clear that the PC (and thereby the player) cannot affect her fate. She will never be born, and can only learn the circumstances surrounding that fact.

Thus the game takes place under a heavy layer of inevitability, similar to Photopia — a game to which Beyond pays a neat, subtle tribute by replicating one room and item description. And yet, also like Photopia, Beyond weaves a deeply compelling story around this unavoidable death. As the detective, we’re able to investigate the scene of the crime, talk to a wide variety of connected characters, and make clever observations that lead us closer and closer to solving the crime.

As any good mystery should, the plot takes several unexpected turns, and who knows how many more were in store, given that I was only halfway through the story when I reached my time limit? Not only is the plot well-crafted, but the presentation of the game is excellent as well. The whole thing renders in tan text on a black background, setting a nicely somber mood, and fantastic illustrations appear throughout the traversal, in that same color scheme. These illustrations might appear at the top of the text window, or on either side, and the game handles their appearance, persistence, and disappearance very smoothly, in a way that always enhances the story and never disrupts it.

The one Achilles heel in Beyond, I’m sorry to say, is that the game sometimes demonstrates a rather shaky command of English. Every so often there’s a mention of a baby “wrapped in white clothings”, or a character who says, “I have took the water”, or a phrase like, “I feel like I’m bringed away.” All things considered the errors aren’t overwhelming — certainly not the trainwreck that some broken English comp games turn out to be — but enough to throw me out of the story when they happen.

Nevertheless, this bothered me much less than it might have, and that’s down to the overall outstanding craft that was put into the game. It was one of those that I wish I could give more time, and maybe someday I will, but for now, I leave the story unfinished, but with admiration.

Rating: 9.3

Interview from SPAG [Misc]

[Duncan Stevens interviewed me in SPAG #31, the 2002 IF competition special. It’s rather odd to be interviewed in one’s own zine, but SPAG has a tradition of interviewing the top three finishers in the IF comp, and I won that year. However, when I won the next time, SPAG interviewed finishers 2-4. As with the other interviews, I’ve edited the text and added links as appropriate. The first paragraph is in my voice.]

For the annual competition issue, SPAG traditionally interviews the highest-placing authors in the comp, but I faced some rather unprecedented challenges when putting together this issue’s interviews. For one thing, since I won the comp, there really ought to be an interview with me, but for me to interview myself would be a little… unseemly, as Primo Varicella might say. As he has so often in SPAG‘s history, Duncan Stevens came to the rescue, crafting a set of interview questions which I could then answer without feeling too much like I had multiple personality disorder. Thanks, Duncan…

Paul O’Brian, author of Another Earth, Another Sky

SPAG: Well, you often ask SPAG interviewees to tell a bit about themselves, but SPAG‘s readers may not know much about you, so — out with it. Name, rank, and serial number?

PO: Okay, fair enough. I’m 32, which put me in my teen years during the Infocom boom — just about the perfect age to be, since I was old enough to understand and succeed at the games and young enough to have lots of free time to devote to them. I’ve lived in Colorado all my life, save for one ill-starred year in New York City, and I currently work in Boulder at the University of Colorado, where I got my degrees. My job there is in the Financial Aid office, as an “IT professional,” which basically means that I do all sorts of technical stuff, from programming to maintaining the network to creating queries that pull data from the university’s mainframe.

I’ve been married for a little over six years, to someone who isn’t an IF aficionado but who is wonderful about supporting my work and my ambitions. I’m very verbally oriented (you may have noticed) and love the complex uses of language. I also really enjoy programming, so of course I’m a perfect candidate to love IF. Aside from that, my other passions are music and comics, the latter of which has made the Earth And Sky series such a fun project to do.

SPAG: How did you get interested in IF, and what led you to start writing your own IF?

PO: The long answer to this question is the editorial I wrote for my first issue of SPAG, number 18. In a nutshell: my dad is a computer enthusiast, and we were sort of “first on the block” with a home computer — initially an Atari 400, then upgrading to the sooper-big-time Atari 800. The first games I played on those machines either came in cartridge form or on cassette tapes, but shortly after he acquired a disk drive, he brought home Zork I for us to try together. He loves to bring home the coolest new things, and that was especially true when I was a kid; at that point the cool new thing was Zork. He lost interest in it before too long, but I was enchanted, and became a major Infocom devotee for as long as the company existed.

I learned about the Internet right around the same time I was writing a paper about IF for a graduate class, and so of course some of my first Gopher searches were on “Infocom” and “interactive fiction.” That led me to Curses, and once I figured out that there was a freely available language that would let me write Infocom-style games, suddenly a childhood fantasy was within reach. Being an Infocom implementor is still my dream job — pity about living in the wrong time and place for it.

SPAG: You’ve written four games now. What keeps you writing IF?

PO: Well, in the case of the last game and the next one, it’s the fact that I’ve made a promise to myself and to the audience that I won’t leave the storyline hanging. Other than that, I suppose it’s just the fact that I seem to have an unflagging interest in the medium. My first game was written to fulfill my dream of writing an Infocom-ish game, as I said above. LASH was just an idea that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go, and I knew that IF was the perfect medium for it. A lot of the drive to write the Earth And Sky games has to do with the fact that I really, really wanted to play a good superhero game, and I wasn’t entirely satisfied with any of the ones that had been released up to that point. So I wrote it because I wanted to play it.

SPAG: Another Earth, Another Sky is the second in a series. What led you to make a full-blown series out of this story, rather than a single self-contained game?

PO: One of the things I loved about superhero comics as a kid was their episodic nature. I really dug the way the stories just kept going and going, with characters and themes woven through the whole thing, disappearing and reappearing as the saga unfolded. Now, with the emphasis on story arcs that can be collected into trade paperbacks, that’s becoming less true in comics, but when I decided to write a superhero game, I knew it needed to be episodic. Besides, I really wanted to take another shot at the competition, and didn’t want to write something so big that it wouldn’t be appropriate for the comp. Also, as a corollary to that, I guess, I really wanted more and faster feedback than writing the whole thing as an epic would have given me. LASH took a very long time to write, and I wanted my next piece to be a bit smaller in scope.

SPAG: The first installment was essentially a superhero game, but Another Earth, Another Sky has sci-fi elements along with the superhero aspect. Is the series becoming a sci-fi series, or are there more genre twists ahead?

PO: I wouldn’t say it’s becoming science fiction, really, and I didn’t set out to do any genre blending with this game. What is true, though, is that these games are heavily influenced by the old Marvel comics from the 1960s, particularly The Fantastic Four — one of the reasons I chose “Lee Kirby” as my pseudonym for the first game was to acknowledge my debt to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, who wrote many of those early comics. The tropes of alien invasion and Big Science were intrinsic to many of Lee and Kirby’s stories, probably as an outgrowth of the science fiction comics that preceded that period’s big superhero revival, so that’s why you see those themes reflected in my games. Ultimately, though, I see superheroes as more a subgenre of fantasy than of science fiction, if the division has to be made.

SPAG: There seem to be allusions to other IF games here and there in AEAS — the setting for a large part of the game is reminiscent of Small World, the dome in the desert evokes So Far, the underwater scene has echoes of Photopia, and the touchplates reminded me of Spider and Web. Or am I imagining these connections?

PO: I wouldn’t say you’re imagining them, but I also didn’t consciously try to pay homage to any of those games with the elements you mention. However, I have played all of them, and there’s no question that everything that goes into my brain has an influence on me. Lots of people have mentioned the Small World connection, and I certainly remember feeling delighted with an IF landscape that formed a sphere, but the idea of having the PC be able to travel between disparate locales by means of superhuman leaps came more from old issues of The Hulk than from any particular IF game.

SPAG: The game is sprinkled with Emily Dickinson quotes. Any particular reason for relying on that particular poet?

PO: Well, aside from the fact that she’s pretty much my favorite canonical poet, Dickinson was also part of the genesis of the series. I went through a period where I decided to read every Dickinson poem, but I found it too exhausting to just read them one after another, so I interspersed them with comics. Indulging in this weird combination while thinking about what I wanted to write next gave birth to this superhero series where the codenames are some of Dickinson’s favorite touchstones, and the protagonists are named after the poet and her brother. The title and part of the inspiration for Another Earth, Another Sky came from the Dickinson poem that begins “There is another sky.”

SPAG: Will the third installment wrap up the series?

PO: That’s the plan at this point. I love writing these games, but it’s a little disheartening to realize that each episode takes about a year to complete. I certainly wouldn’t rule out further Earth And Sky games somewhere down the line, but I’ll be ready for a break from them once the third episode is finished.

SPAG: Any other plans for more IF writing?

PO: Beyond the third Earth And Sky game, I’m not sure. I think I’ll probably want to turn towards writing static fiction for a while, but I plan to keep editing SPAG, and I don’t see myself leaving the IF community unless it seriously deteriorates. So I’d say there’s an excellent chance I’ll find myself struck with some great IF idea and banging out code again sometime in the future.

IF Haikus [misc]

[Inspired by a haiku movie reviews site, I posted some IF haikus to the newsgroup, which started a fun thread. These could be construed as a bit spoilery, in a certain light.]

Zork I

I’m in a dark place
Without a lantern. I hear
the footsteps of grues.

Zork II

All my things are here
But I’m floating above them,
helpless. Damn wizard!

Curses

I can’t find the map.
I never knew my house was
so complicated!

Spider and Web

Yes. No. Yes. Oh, I
thought you were telling the truth.
Let’s try it again.

Photopia

Oh, I’m starting to
understand it all now. That
means I — stop. Stop. Stop!!

Twisty Little Passages by Nick Montfort (book review) [Misc]

[I wrote this review when the book was released, and also posted an abbreviated version at Amazon.]

Book cover for Twisty Little Passages
Just over ten years ago, I was holed up in the University of Colorado at Boulder‘s Norlin library, researching interactive fiction. I was a grad student in English, and had a final paper due in my Literary Theory class. Activision had recently released the Lost Treasures of Infocom bundle, reawakening my childhood love of IF, and I felt inspired to write a paper that connected reader-response theory to the actual reader-responsiveness of text adventures. I wanted to cite and to engage with previous academic work on IF, but unfortunately, though unsurprisingly, it had received very little serious critical attention. Sure, I found a few articles here and there, but what I really needed was something substantial, something that offered a critical vocabulary for talking about interactive fiction, that placed it in a literary context, and that presented a basic history of the form.

What I needed was Nick Montfort’s Twisty Little Passages. How strange and funny that ten years later, the paper I wrote for that class finds itself cited in the first book-length academic treatment of interactive fiction. True, the citation only occurs in a passing (and correct) dismissal of reader-response theory as anything but a very limited way into talking about IF, but it makes me feel like part of history nonetheless. Montfort’s book is just what IF needs to establish its rightful place in the scholarly discourse surrounding electronic literature, and indeed literature, full stop. It never fails to be informative, and frequently succeeds at being sharply insightful about the literary elements of IF.

However, Twisty Little Passages is quite suitable for readers outside the ivory tower as well. Though the book is clearly aimed at an academic audience, Montfort’s prose is blessedly jargon-free, clear, and effective, with generous doses of humor thrown in for good measure. Even in its most theoretical moments, the book manages to balance impressive rigor with unfailing clarity, a feat all too rare in literary theory. Consequently, it’s an entertaining read for general audiences and English professors alike. If you’re an IF aficionado like me, you’ll find Twisty Little Passages enlightening and fun, and if there’s anyone in your life who genuinely wants to know what interactive fiction is and why they should care, hand them this book.

Just the bibliography alone is a noteworthy achievement; Montfort has synthesized the already extant body of formal IF scholarship and mainstream coverage with much of the important amateur IF theory produced by people like Graham Nelson and Emily Short. Also included are a range of other contributions from the IF community and pieces covering the book’s other concerns, including riddles and computer science. In addition, there is a formidable collection of IF works cited, a list comprising much of the most influential interactive fiction of the past thirty years.

Something else that the bibliography makes clear is the value of Montfort’s personal connections. It’s peppered with references to emails and private conversations with some of the leading lights of IF history: Robert Pinsky, Graham Nelson, Steve Meretzky, and others. Montfort’s ability to gather such firsthand information highlights one of the most important things about Twisty Little Passages: not only is it the first book-length treatment of interactive fiction, it is the first formal treatment I’ve seen that approaches IF from the inside out, rather than from the position of a quizzical spectator. Montfort’s extensive experience in both the academic and IF communities lends him a brand of authority that previous commentators on IF lacked.

Of course, authority only gets you so far — it’s what you do with that authority that counts. That’s what makes the first two chapters of Twisty Little Passages such a particular pleasure: Montfort not only knows what he’s talking about when it comes to IF, he’s got quite a bit of original insight to offer about its literary and theoretical contexts. As with many works of literary criticism that seek to approach an underscrutinized area, the project of this book’s first chapter is not only to expose the topic’s theoretical underpinnings but to define and delimit a specific vocabulary for use in discussing it. Montfort does an excellent job of providing a clear definition of IF (and indeed of making the case for the term “interactive fiction”) and of defining a set of terms to identify the subcomponents of the IF experience. For example, according to the book, a session is “what happens during the execution of an IF program. [It] begins when an IF program starts running [and] ends when the program terminates”, while a traversal is “a course extending from a prologue to a final reply, and from an initial situation to a final situation” — thus a traversal can encompass many sessions (as frequently happens in the case of long, complex games), or a session can encompass many traversals (as happens with short games with high replay value.) Of course, at bottom the choice of terms is more or less arbitrary, but it is crucial that we be able to name the various parts of the IF experience — they are our stepping stones to more sophisticated discussions. Twisty Little Passages lays this groundwork admirably.

On the whole, this book seems more interested in surveying the territory of IF than in making unified arguments about it, but the exception to this is chapter two, where Montfort makes the case that the most important literary progenitor of IF is the riddle, and takes a counterpoint to the most famous analogy and contextualization of IF from the last decade:

The riddle, like an IF work, must express itself clearly enough to be solved, obliquely enough to be challenging, and beautifully enough to be compelling. These are all different aspects of the same goal; they are not in competition. An excellent interactive fiction work is no more “a crossword at war with a narrative” (Nelson 1995a) than a poem is sound at war with sense.

This is a brilliant and entirely convincing comparison. Montfort gives us a brief history of the riddle, and draws the necessary parallels to demonstrate IF’s similarities with it, leaving us with a new paradigm within which to view interactive fiction. Best of all, this angle of approach allows IF to be both story and game, both art and amusement, without detracting from the value of either.

Chapters three through seven, indeed the bulk of the book, are devoted to delineating the history of IF, from its mainframe beginnings to the current amateur renaissance. It’s an entertaining journey, and Montfort’s encapsulation of IF history is concise, approachable, and extremely informative. I found it a little frustrating, though, because it must of necessity skim over the ground rather quickly, especially as it moves into the Infocom era and beyond. Consequently, there are many moments of intriguing literary analysis of IF games, but they end almost as soon as they begin — practically every page contains material that could make a full article in itself. By the time I reached the end of the book, a sort of epilogue that takes inventory of the various ways in which the tropes of interactive fiction have made their way into our culture, I was already wishing for a sequel, one that assayed a more in-depth discussion of games like Mindwheel and Photopia instead of the tantalizing tidbits we get here.

Montfort has already done some of this sort of work, such as an article written with Stuart Moulthrop for an Australian digital arts conference, analyzing the role of Princess Charlotte in Adam Cadre’s Varicella. However, not much work of that sort could appear without Twisty Little Passages preceding it, just as in-depth conversations can rarely occur prior to introductions. This book creates a foundation for the inclusion of IF in literary discussions, and for further examination of specific IF works. Perhaps if we look back on IF criticism in another ten years, we’ll see that introduction as the most important service Twisty Little Passages performs.

Paul O’Brian
11 January 2004

Landscape and Character in IF [Misc]

[The following article was my contribution to the 2011 IF Theory Reader]

If we reduce interactive fiction to its essence, we can view it as a triangular relationship between three basic elements: Landscape, Character, and Action. It’s possible to write IF without objects, plot, NPCs or myriad other ingredients, but as soon as that first room description appears, it introduces a landscape, just as the first prompt ushers in the concept of Action.1 I would further argue that the interaction between these two elements inevitably creates some concept of Character. The character that emerges is the being that would perform the actions selected when presented with the landscape (and situation) at hand. Even if that character is not human, not organic, or not even embodied (an omniscient narrator, for instance, though that voice is almost never used in IF because of the form’s powerful insistence on connecting Action with viewpoint), Action must have an agent, and that agent is what we call the Player Character.

In this formulation, the only one of the triumvirate completely under the game’s control is Landscape. Action is entirely in the hands of the player, and Character lies halfway between the two. That last statement may require a bit more unpacking. If Character is determined by Action, why isn’t it entirely in the hands of the player as well? The answer is that while Action does determine Character, it isn’t the sole determining factor. The game itself can shape character by statements as blatant as “You’re Tracy Valencia,” or by something as subtle as a particular word choice in a parser response. However, I would contend that while blatant character-shaping statements and even subtle nudges from default responses are far from inevitable in IF, some sense of landscape must be included in any IF game, and that both the design and the description of this landscape are extremely powerful factors in determining character. It is my aim in this essay to examine the ways in which Landscape influences and creates Character, and to raise what I hope will be some interesting questions about the nature of their interrelationship.

MAP DESIGN

[This section contains minor spoilers for Adventure, Planet Of The Infinite Minds, Strangers In The Night, and Suspect. It contains medium-level spoilers for Lost New York and Stone Cell, and major spoilers for Shade and 1981.]

Space is continuous. The landscape of interactive fiction, however, consists of discrete units, connected to each other in various ordinary and sometimes extraordinary ways.2 By convention we call these units “rooms”, but in fact they can be anything from a tiny subsection of a room to an entire town, country, planet, or universe. How does a game’s subdivision of continuous space affect our perception of the character in that game? Let’s look at some examples.

An illuminating comparison exists between two pieces of IF with urban settings: Neil DeMause’s Lost New York (1996) and Rich Pizor’s Strangers In The Night (1999). In the former, the character travels through Manhattan and other areas of New York City during various points in history. The game frequently compresses neighborhoods, boroughs, and other such swaths of territory into single rooms, albeit lovingly described ones:

Lower East Side
The scene around you is one unmatched in any other time and place in human history: Acres of identical four- and five-story tenements packed cheek-to-jowl with people, people who spill out onto the sidewalks and fire escapes in search of a little space, a little air. The el tracks continue down the street to the north and south; to the east, the tenements seem to stretch on forever, though you're pretty sure they eventually end at the East River shore.

Within each time period, these areas connect to each other directly, even though they may have been separated by miles in reality. Occasionally, a “traveling message” such as “You trudge north for close to a mile, finally arriving at…” will interpose itself between locations, but more often the traveling interval passes instantaneously and without comment.

Strangers In The Night, on the other hand, painstakingly sets out its generic city map as a street grid, and provides almost no description for the lion’s share of its locations:

Broadway and 11th
You are at the intersection of Broadway and 11th Avenue. To the southwest is the security door for your apartment building; the Broadway Sineplex (which a few downtown residents still consider an amusing name for a movie theatre) lies to the northeast.

>n
Broadway (10th & 11th)

>n
Broadway and 10th
One of the streetlights is dim here; the shadows that are cast against the sidewalk are oddly deformed, giving the corner an otherworldly feel.

>n
Broadway (9th & 10th)
Somewhere in the distance, a car alarm starts blaring it's [sic] Call of the Wild to the concrete jungle. This is followed a few moments later by the sound of figerglass [sic] crunching and safety windshields shattering until the alarm ceases.

>n
Broadway and 9th

>n
Broadway (8th & 9th)

>n
8th and Broadway
Carl Tuck's Coffehouse [sic] is to the southeast.

At first glance, it might appear that about half the locations contain room descriptions. In fact, however, only the first and the last do; the dim streetlight and the car alarm are random atmospheric messages that can pop up in any street location. In fact, the only time a non-random message, or a description of any kind, appears is when the location adjoins the entrance to a puzzle-solving area, or to the PC’s home. The game’s city grid is comprised of about 80 locations, all of which may well have been compressed into one room in Lost New York.

It’s a natural impulse to discuss these choices as they relate to game design, or to talk about their successes and failures in creating immersion or facilitating strategy. What may not be so natural is to think about how these choices influence the way we think about the player character; I would contend that consciously or not, we perceive these two characters differently based on the way the games construct their surroundings. What we know about the PC of Lost New York is that she3 knows New York City well enough to identify its various areas instantly, even as they appeared over a hundred years ago. In fact, the game’s easy recognition of areas such as “The Goats” and “Ladies Mile”, not to mention the copious historical detail infused into many room descriptions, creates a tension between the game’s identification of the PC as “a tourist” and what we know about her from her subsequent experiences.

Someone who could wander through New York’s past with so much information at hand must be intimately familiar with the city, either through experience or study. Her interest and perception is mostly broad strokes — she’s more interested in generalities of an area than in its specific details, and her sense of history is sweeping rather than finely grained — but her knowledge is quite comprehensive. Even if the game had insisted that this was the PC’s first trip to the city, we would have to conclude that she is someone who for whatever reason has immersed herself in New York City history; how else to explain such detailed knowledge in the midst of the extraordinary experience of time travel? If the game proved unable or unwilling to address and resolve this question, that lacuna could hardly be anything but a flaw in the work, just as it would be in a novel where the main character knows things she shouldn’t.

Unlike the PC of Lost New York, the character in Strangers has almost no interest in ordinary detail, let alone history. He never finds himself musing about ironies or architecture as he treads the streets, and in fact usually notices nothing but the bare identity of the location. Together with the game’s specification of the PC as a vampire, these facts can lead us to a few conclusions about this character. He sees the city not as human tapestry or even interesting backdrop, but rather as a sort of maze he must navigate in order to locate prey. The lack of room descriptions impels us to move quickly from one location to the next, replicating the urgency of the character’s thirst for blood. His disinterest in local color might even be seen as an undead disdain for the fleeting effluvia of mortal life. The game’s overall presentation isn’t quite strong enough to give this effect full potency, but all the same we know quite well that there is a significant difference between these two characters. The Lost New York PC, even if she were a vampire searching the streets for prey, couldn’t help but notice the landscape and be aware of its heritage, while the Strangers PC could be thrust into any time in the city’s history and would evince a similar disregard for anything but the most minimal details of place.

On the other end of the detail spectrum from Strangers is Andrew Plotkin’s Shade (2000), where the entirety of the action appears to be taking place in the player character’s studio apartment. In this one-room environment, however, movement is possible, and the game responds to this movement not by placing the character in a new room (as is the case with most IF), but rather by making a series of alterations to room description and scope for the current room. If the PC is in the center of the apartment, for example, the game first mentions objects close at hand, such as the computer desk and stereo, while reserving mention of the kitchen and bathroom areas for the later parts of the room description. When that character moves to the kitchen, however, text about the counter, the refrigerator, and such occupies the beginning of the room description. The desk and stereo are still visible from that location, and still mentioned, but are only visible, not accessible for touching or other manipulation until the character returns to the center of the apartment.

When Shade was released, this approach to map design was hailed as an innovative subversion of the conventional IF map, which it is. It is also a fitting choice for characterization purposes. The overlapping, connected nature of the apartment landscape makes clear to us that this is an environment with which the character is intimately familiar, and that even while he inhabits one area of it, his awareness of the other areas does not abate. The map design makes the apartment belong to the character in a way that it would not were it separated into discrete rooms. This sense of familiarity, of safety, and of enclosure makes the game’s later revelations all the more powerful, as the familiar dissolves into the strange, and safe enclosure into fatal exposure.

A similar effect, the subdivision of one room into many separate locations, appears in a variety of games, including Infocom’s Suspect (1984) and Steve Kodat’s Stone Cell (1999). In the former, it’s a grand ballroom that the game presents as nine separate locations, and the effect is to make the room feel enormous. The character in Suspect is a reporter at a party being given in a mansion, and the game’s map design underscores her sense of awe at the opulent surroundings — where the house’s owner’s perception of the ballroom might be closer to that of the character in Shade, the guest’s mind demands more concrete conceptual boundaries in order to take in the scope of the area.

Stone Cell achieves a different effect by performing the same gridlike subdivision on a much smaller room, the eponymous stone cell. Room descriptions and common sense tell us that this room is much smaller than the ballroom in Suspect, so the game’s partitioning of that space, rather than conveying immensity, instead reflects the PC’s awareness of the room’s tiniest details as a result of his imprisonment. What makes this design particularly effective is that the game initially presents the cell as one location, then expands it into a grid after the character sleeps, thus reflecting not only the character’s growing familiarity with his surroundings but also his growing desire to scrutinize each detail of the premises in hopes of escape.

The opposite effect is available, too, when games compress the extremely large, even the inconceivably large, into a single room description. One of the more extreme examples of this technique occurs in Alfredo Garcia’s Planet Of The Infinite Minds (2000), where the character might find himself here:

The Beginning of Space
All around you, distant suns flicker and twinkle. Painfully bright points of light seem to appear suddenly from out of the ether, as another retracts into obscurity. En masse, the effect renders a carnival of vibrant colours and astonishing beauty.

The simple fact of the character’s existence in this location tells us something about that character: that she has transcended humanity, attaining a sort of bodiless, godlike status. Since the game starts with the PC as a simple librarian, its transportation of her to such an abstract vista carries with it the implication of personal disembodiment and removal from reality as well. What’s more, her ability to know that the location is “The Beginning Of Space” rather than, say, a Christmas tree festival viewed through a hangover, suggests a metahuman omnipotence that we must assume has been granted to the character, at least temporarily.

The connection between map design and character stretches to the deepest roots of IF, for the majority of Adventure‘s (1976) map is named and divided in ways that would make sense to a spelunker. From the way that the game comfortably names areas of the cave as “rooms”, and indeed even the names of those rooms, which draw on caving vocabulary such as “Bedquilt” and “Y2”, we can clearly identify that the character in that game is an experienced cave explorer. Thus, even in the earliest days of IF, when games made virtually no overt effort to characterize the PC, character was already emerging as a function of landscape. The character in Adventure, while unraced, gender-neutral, ageless, nameless, and faceless, was nonetheless made distinct from the player herself by the way he perceived the landscape of the cave, seeing rooms and twisty little passages where a different character might have experienced the area quite differently.

In the hands of a skilled author, the effect of landscape on character can make for a portrayal that is very striking indeed. Take, for instance, Adam Cadre’s 1981 (2001)4. The first room description of the game is as follows:

New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven. The worst place on earth. The town is dirty and industrial, the students are sloppy, everything is horribly expensive. And you had to cash in $3600 of your stock to get here. But it was necessary. Four years at this place is enough to ravage anyone. You have to rescue her, your first true love.

Her dormitory lies to the north.

Already, we can see a dramatic narrowing of scope occurring. The character is so unconcerned with the details of his location that he compresses an entire town into one unit, dismissing all of it as “the worst place on earth.” Then the broad outlines of location gain sudden, sharp focus: “Her dormitory lies to the north.” The contrast between the vague, reviled whole of New Haven and the focus on the dormitory, set apart in its own line, suggests to us that the character’s concentration on his goal is unhealthy, perhaps even obsessive, and moving north confirms this suspicion:

New Haven, in her dormitory
You're standing in front of her door. It's closed. It's always closed. You've shoved approximately one hundred poems and letters under that door. You figure she's probably read about half of them.

Scope narrows even further here, from one building to the tiny area in front of one of that building’s doors. The room descriptions certainly confirm our impression of the main character’s unbalanced and obsessive nature, but even without them, the basic funneling performed by the map design would get the point across admirably. When we discover that the PC is John Hinckley, Jr., and that the door in question is to Jodie Foster’s dorm room at Yale, the revelation is terrifically powerful, because via its map design, the game has already taken us directly into the viewpoint of its would-be assassin.

ROOM DESCRIPTIONS

[This section contains minor spoilers for A Change In The Weather, Heroes, Varicella, and Zork I. It contains medium-level spoilers for Once And Future and Wearing The Claw, and major spoilers for Nothing More Nothing Less.]

Of course, in 1981 it’s more than just map design that clues us into the character — the room descriptions themselves make it clear that we are seeing the game’s landscape as filtered through one individual’s highly idiosyncratic viewpoint. Short, choppy sentences give the text a jittery feel, contributing to the general tone of uneasiness. We know the character has some access to wealth because of the “$3600 of your stock” line. We also know the character is either a heterosexual male or a homosexual female from the reference to the true love as “her.”5 And we certainly know how he feels about New Haven.

Cadre is particularly skilled at bringing character across through room description, as in this example, the first room in Varicella (1999):

Salon
You've funneled the lion's share of the palace improvements budget -- and most likely the tiger's share as well -- into renovating the salon... not that the Philistines you live among are equipped to appreciate it. From the plush Quattordici chairs to the handsome volumes in the library to the imported Ming tea service to the steward you hired to attend to your grooming needs, this is an oasis of taste and comfort in what is otherwise a fairly uncomfortable and tasteless building. Ah, well. When you become Regent you'll have greater latitude to redecorate. The arched windows overlook the western gardens, while the exit leads east.

This description follows several paragraphs of introduction, which announce the player character as one Primo Varicella, Palace Minister to a recently deceased king, and Machiavellian schemer for the throne. Even without that introduction, though, this room description would frame the character aptly. From the “lion’s share” clause we know that the character is in charge of improvements to a palace, and from the room name we know that he is in the Salon mentioned in the first sentence; therefore we can conclude that he is employed by the palace in which the game begins — a succinct way to bring across Varicella’s position and occupation. Moreover, the phrase “live among” tells us that he resides at the palace as well. The “tiger’s share” clause gives us an example of his sardonic humor, and the “Philistines” reference an example of his snobbery. His identification of the chairs and tea service, and the contrast to the “uncomfortable and tasteless” remainder of the building, communicate clearly that this is a man of very strong preferences, a persnickety aristocrat whose refined tastes run to the extremely expensive. Finally, the character’s ambitions, and the drive behind them, are summarized neatly: “When you become Regent you’ll have greater latitude to redecorate.” Just by seeing one room through this character’s eyes, we learn all the essential facts about him that will carry throughout the game.

If there’s a continuum that measures the degree to which a game’s room descriptions blatantly shape character, it’s fair to say that Varicella is probably on the extreme end of it. Does that mean that the room descriptions of games on the other end don’t shape character at all? Predictably, my answer is no — the effect is just a bit more subtle. To illustrate, let’s compare descriptions from two different games, neither of which has character as its focus. First, from Andrew Plotkin’s A Change In The Weather (1996):

Rocky Outlook
A wide angular tongue juts out from the hillside. The park stretches off to the north and west, a vast expanse of luminous meadowland, patched with the dark emerald of forest. The streams are already shadowed in their beds. In the distance, a lake reflects red fire, beneath the greater fire that leaps silently on the horizon.

A trail leads southwest down the hill, towards the bridge. From where you stand, it turns southeast and continues upward, deeply cut into the hillside. A narrower trail leads more steeply up to the east.

Zork I (1981) by Infocom offers a location that is very nearly analogous:

Rocky Ledge
You are on a ledge about halfway up the wall of the river canyon. You can see from here that the main flow from Aragain Falls twists along a passage which it is impossible for you to enter. Below you is the canyon bottom. Above you is more cliff, which appears climbable.

Though their locations may be similar, these two characters are very different indeed. Weather‘s wanderer takes the entire first paragraph to describe the area with intense, poetic language. The words don’t directly narrate the emotions felt by the character, nor impute opinions like the descriptions in Varicella, but they deploy vivid adjectives like “luminous” and “dark emerald”, and powerful metaphors — the tongue of rock, the red fire of sunset reflected in a lake, the setting sun as a “greater fire that leaps silently on the horizon.” This is a character whose soul is moved by the grandeur of a natural landscape. Only after this reverent depiction does the character notice practical details: the trails and where they lead.

Zork‘s PC, on the other hand, goes directly for the practical. She mentions the river’s passage only in terms of whether she can enter it. What she notices about the cliff is that it is climbable. Though the natural scene — a canyon, a river, a waterfall — is probably quite impressive, the description is almost entirely mechanical. There are no rapturous sentences about the stark rock of the cliff or the sparkling river. Adjectives are almost entirely absent, and where they do exist their purpose is highly prosaic: “river” further identifies “canyon”, as “Aragain” does “Falls” and “canyon” does “bottom.” Other descriptors exist solely to describe travel options: “impossible” and “climbable”. Indeed, she sees every element of the scene only in terms of how it can be manipulated or traversed, and this viewpoint is consistent throughout the game, just as the intense description of natural phenomena is a constant in Weather. Both games’ main focus is puzzle-solving, but when we compare how their characters each view a similar scene, it becomes clear how different the characters are from each other.

Comparing the PCs of two different games illuminates important differences between the characters, and the effect is even more potent when several points of view are available within the same game — instead of seeing how two different characters view analogous locations, we get to see how they view the exact same location. Several recent games have made use of this technique: J. Robinson Wheeler’s Being Andrew Plotkin (2000), Stephen Granade’s Common Ground (2000) and my own LASH (2000) among them. The current apex of POV-diversity, though, probably belongs to Heroes (2001) by Sean Barrett. This game offers a minimal landscape of something like a dozen locations, but gives five different viewpoint options through which to view it. For instance, the opening location of the game as viewed by a Zork-like adventurer:

Temple Way
The grimy, ramshackle buildings of Oldtown dutifully try to reform themselves as you progress east down Temple Way, but nothing besides the temple itself makes any real pretense of belonging anywhere other than Oldtown. Or rather, nothing besides the temple and Baron Sedmon's nearby mansion.

a King:

Avenue
This broad avenue leads right into Temple Square, the heart of fabulous New Oldtown. Towering over the square to the east you do perceive your stark white Temple of Justice, beautiful and well-appointed, offering a statement to the neighborhood: this, this is what progress is about. Sadly, the buildings around you are scarcely up to this new standard; Baron Ventillado's house north of the square is much more satisfactory. How you hate having to come here. This would all be so much simpler if Blackhelm were found dead one morning, but it's never happened yet, despite your best efforts.

a thief:

Shadowy Road
Sturdy, functional buildings lie in and out of shadow on the road to the temple square. Simple architecture, devoid of handholds; closely spaced buildings, devoid of alleyways; uncut walls, devoid of windows: the builders in this area knew how to encourage amateurs to go elsewhere.

a mage:

East-West Road
Randomly arranged paving stones form this street, proceeding east towards a more attractive arrangement. The darkened buildings lean sloppily over the edge of the street, reducing the energetic potential of the strict east-west layout. West the road leads back into the seething mess that is Oldtown.

and finally, a dragon:

Open Tunnel
We were surrounded by the man-things' structures, structures of dead trees and rock and distortions of iron. Beneath us we felt the arrangements of stone into a path for man-things' mobile receptacles. We could smell hints of the Crystal along the path to the east.

Where the adventurer just sees a temple, the King sees the temple as his own possession, a symbol of his attempts to renovate and improve the city. Where the mage sees leaning buildings distorting the street’s pristine geometry, the thief sees those same leaning buildings as a source of precious shadow. Through the use of a past-tense, second-person plural voice, Heroes renders the dragon’s viewpoint quite alien, and emphasizes that dissonance by showing us how the dragon sees the street: an “open tunnel”, contrasted with the more irregular shapes of nature and constructed by contemptible “man-things.” Heroes takes excellent advantage of Landscape’s ability to reveal Character, and through its use of multiple viewpoints, it leverages the power of the Landscape-Character axis to accomplish something more: the revelation of Landscape via accumulated details from a variety of characters. The descriptions coalesce in the player’s mind to create a picture of the location that is much more complete than any one viewpoint could provide, while at the same time establishing distinct portraits of each viewpoint character.

Other games have made use of changing room descriptions in order to demonstrate change or progression in a single PC, or to give us that character’s revised perspective as a situation changes. Nothing More, Nothing Less (2001) by Gilles Duchesne is a case in point. The first puzzle of this slice-of-life game takes place in a bathroom, initially described like so:

Bathroom
I’ve seen bigger bathrooms, but must admit this smaller one suits our needs well. There’s a small sink with a cabinet under it, a mirror, a bathtub (equiped [sic] with a shower head and curtain) and a toilet.

However, after the character urinates6, the toilet clogs and begins to overflow. Unprompted, the game reprints the room description, which now reads as follows:

Bathroom
I’ve seen bigger bathrooms, but must admit this smaller one suits our needs well. There’s a small sink with a cabinet under it, a mirror, a bathtub (equiped [sic] with a shower head and curtain) and a toilet.
Right now, my attention is also grabbed by: the toilet tank. Water keeps flowing from the tank, nearing the bowl’s edge.

The room description stays the same, but the game adds a sentence to demonstrate that the character’s attention has become focused on one particular aspect of the room: the toilet tank. This sentence serves gameplay purposes, indicating that the toilet tank is in fact implemented and thereby hinting toward the solution of the “overflowing toilet” puzzle. In addition to this, the attention sentence demonstrates a shift in the character, showing us his revised perspective as well as the fact that he’s quick-witted enough to think immediately of the toilet tank in this crisis. The other sentence is typical of IF room descriptions, indicating an action currently taking place in the room and lending urgency to the character’s desire to solve the puzzle. After the character opens the tank, lifts the toilet float, and fixes the stuck valve to stop the toilet running (alas, too late to prevent water flowing onto the floor), the game once again reprints the room description, this time altered considerably:

Bathroom
I’m now standing barefoot in some icy water. I’ve seen bigger bathrooms, but must admit this smaller one suits our needs well. In fact, at this very moment I’m terribly glad the floor isn’t bigger, as it would only mean more water to remove. There’s a small sink with a cabinet under it, a mirror, a bathtub (equiped [sic] with a shower head and curtain) and a toilet.
Right now, my attention is also grabbed by: my towel.

There are several changes, doing several different sorts of work within the description. The first, the “icy water” sentence, indicates a change in the room itself, one that is reflective of situation rather than character, though of course the way the character chooses to relate this situation — emphasizing discomfort by noting his bare feet and describing the water as “icy”, conveying a mood of urgency without panic — does accomplish some characterization. A later sentence takes a fact of the bathroom addressed by earlier descriptions (its small size) and relates it to the new situation, revealing a practical and rather optimistic side to the viewpoint character. This sentence also demonstrates that the character’s perspective, while pragmatic, is not particularly scientific, since a larger floor wouldn’t actually mean more water to remove, only a greater surface area from which to remove it. Later, we get a new “attention” sentence; the toilet tank is no longer in focus, and instead the character is thinking of his towel. Note that this towel was not mentioned in any of the previous room descriptions, because the character had no particular need of it. Nothing More, Nothing Less makes extensive use of this technique, heightening realism by filtering not only the general experience of landscape through the PC, but also specific points of focus as well. Finally, once the toilet is plunged and the water toweled and mopped, the PC has showered, and his feline nemesis has entered the room, the bathroom’s description changes to this:

Bathroom
This a bathroom, of which I’ve seen more than enough in the last minutes. Come to think of it, I’ve seen enough of it for the whole day. And the presence of that hairy pest doesn’t improve my morale. Azrael licks one of his paws, while keeping an eye on me.

The character’s perspective on the bathroom has changed once more, marking the end of his progression from bland interest, through urgent focus, and resting finally at mild exasperation. The emotional registers aren’t extreme, but the room descriptions convey very clearly the changes taking place within the character as a response to the changes that occur around him. In games like this, Landscape does even more shaping of Character than usual by virtue of its changing prose.

A final aspect of how Landscape reveals Character lies in the concept of elision: what rooms does the game avoid describing, and how do those gaps influence our understanding of the character? Many games take the character, via non-interactive cut-scenes, or even simple transitions, through landscape that we never get to see from the PC’s perspective. My experiences as an author have taught me about this phenomenon; in my first game, Wearing The Claw (1996), I elided an entire sea voyage. In practical terms, I made this choice because I didn’t have the time, energy, or skill to implement the journey as an interactive experience, but its absence from the game couldn’t help but affect the PC’s characterization. His reluctance to relate the details had to be explained somehow, so I made him someone who is deeply intimidated by the ocean, someone who would want to block out the experience of being at sea as much as possible:

Soon you find yourself at sea for the first time in your life, and you learn that the rocking and swaying of a small boat on a choppy sea does little to relax you. Nausea swells and recedes like the the [sic] waves beneath you, and though the journey to the isle of the Goergs takes little more than an hour, it ends none too soon for you.

I’m not willing to make the claim that elision always contributes to characterization — sometimes cuts are in place just to serve a story’s structure, leaving things unimplemented even though the character certainly would notice them. However, there are times that what isn’t described is just as important as what is. These sorts of gaps are particularly noticeable when they contrast with the player’s expectations, as happens from time to time in Kevin Wilson’s Once And Future (1998). One particularly memorable absence in that game is the matter of the cat: late in the game, Frank Leandro (the PC) is required to obtain a bit of cat hair for a magical recipe, and conveniently enough happens across a stray cat who sheds a bit into his hand and rides his shoulder for a while. A while later, that cat jumps into the chimney of a boarded-up house (chasing a bird) and disappears. Frank has a sword that cuts through anything, but the game forbids him from cutting through the boards to find the cat, saying “You could, but there’s not much point to it.” So however much the player may want to make sure that the kitty is okay, she is constrained by Frank’s disinterest; the inside of the house isn’t part of the map, because Frank doesn’t see the point of exploring it.

A PC-CENTRIC VIEW OF INTERACTIVE FICTION

[This section contains minor spoilers for The Beetmonger’s Journal, medium-level spoilers for Hamlet (the Shakespeare play), and major spoilers for Photopia.]

It’s possible that objections may arise to some of the points I make above, on the grounds that what I ascribe to character could just as easily be seen as a particular author’s writing style, a game’s depth of implementation, or even the formal constraints of IF itself. It’s quite true that I’m taking a PC-centric view — this is how I experience interactive fiction, and it’s easy to feel that it’s simply how the form works, but I certainly acknowledge that there are other, equally valid approaches. It’s also true that the PC is not the only possible point of view within a work of Interactive Fiction. In The Beetmonger’s Journal (2001) by Scott Starkey, for instance, some very nifty POV-jumping occurs in sections where the PC is the hero of some stories being read by the frame characters — from time to time those characters are interrupted in their reading, and we get a small cut-scene from their point of view.

However, what I would argue for is the extreme difficulty of disconnecting the point-of-view from the Player Character at the point of action. The IF prompt implies a certain kind of remote control: the player is to type in an action which will then be executed within the game. Invariably, this action is performed by the PC. Indeed, this is the very definition of Player Character. Similarly, landscape descriptions, especially when that landscape is available for traversal and manipulation from the game prompt, almost cannot help but be filtered through the PC, because all the knowledge conveyed in them is available for use at the point of action. If room description were to convey something that the PC couldn’t possibly know, such as the color of an object when the character is blind, the result would be severe cognitive dissonance for the player. If we type “OPEN BLUE DOOR” and the blind PC is able to do so, we must conclude that the PC is not blind after all — that’s how powerful the connection is between Character and Action. Because Landscape, Character, and Action are so intimately connected, it’s quite difficult to avoid making Landscape a function of Character, especially as the two get nearer and nearer to Action.

Given this PC-centric take on IF, it’s worth asking what possibilities reveal themselves as open or closed in its light. We’ve already seen some of what’s opened, from Heroes‘ cumulative place-building to Shade‘s resonant evocation of the familiar, and no doubt future games will continue to explore the power of the Landscape-Character axis. Conversely, one element that seems rather alarmingly curtailed is the possibility of dramatic irony. For instance, imagine Shakespeare’s Hamlet as an IF game, in which the player controls Hamlet, but is allowed (as a reader) to see Polonius stepping behind the arras in the queen’s bedroom. In order to retain the dramatic irony of the scene, Hamlet must stab the arras and inadvertently kill Polonius, but why would the player order him to do so, knowing what Hamlet doesn’t? In other words, how can the player be allowed to know things that the character doesn’t if that knowledge is expected to facilitate dramatic irony? The only answer I can think of is to force the PC’s actions, to make Hamlet stab Polonius no matter what the player orders, but as soon as that happens, the interactivity drops out of the IF game, and thus Action is removed from the equation. I’m not prepared to contend that this sort of dramatic irony is impossible, but the game that solves this problem will be a major breakthrough.

The work that’s probably come the closest to this grail is Adam Cadre’s justly revered Photopia (1998). Thanks to its fragmentation of the narrative line and its array of POV characters, when the climactic scene arrives, we know all the awful freight of what’s about to happen. We also can’t stop it — in order to achieve its dramatic irony, Photopia must remove our power to act. There’s an argument to be made that this sort of moment becomes even more powerful in interactive fiction, the useless prompt underscoring the inevitability of the character’s tragic fate. That’s as may be, but it doesn’t change the fact that PC and Action are still inextricably connected, and the only way the PC can be made to do something inevitable is to remove control from the player. Photopia cleverly makes the inevitable moment a car accident, thus giving the PC only a split-second to react (and thus providing a plausible context for lack of choice) and making his default desires identical to the player’s desires (STOP THE CAR!), but in the final analysis, the moment is still achieved by removing control from the player, and indeed the great majority of the criticism directed towards Photopia has been of its non-interactivity.

If Action is to retain its place in the IF triangle, Landscape and Character must remain inextricably connected. Their powerful bond to each other creates many exciting possibilities for the development of both, possibilities that have begun to be exploited in the last several years, and which no doubt will continue to yield opportunities for development. What’s also true is that noticing this connection and its potential still only scratches the surface of character development and landscape exposition in IF. Character can be revealed not just through landscape, but through objects, plot, direct narrative, and many other devices. In turn, while character is the primary lens for landscape, that landscape can alter greatly from the passage of time, from plot events, from NPC actions, or hundreds of other vectors, and each change to character and landscape deepens both. We’ve only just started finding the techniques, and it’s a heady feeling. We’re at the beginning of an art form — there’s much more undiscovered territory to explore.

Endnotes

1 A note about terms here: First, I should note that by “interactive fiction”, I refer to text IF. Some of the points here are certainly applicable to graphical or mixed-media IF as well, but some may not be. Secondly, the general concepts of Landscape, Character, and Action aren’t meant to be taken too literally. IF could be (and in many cases has been) created with a map of entirely abstract locations, or one location, or location descriptions that consist entirely of describing what’s absent. Similarly, actions might involve no actual action (WAIT, for example, or THINK), and a character can be anything from an intrepid adventurer to an ear of corn. However, I would contend that these elements are present in some form in all IF — indeed, the absence of these elements (such as the absence of landscape in Eliza) removes the work from what might reasonably be called interactive fiction.
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2 This trait isn’t entirely restricted to text games, but while no text game offers continuous space, some graphical games, such as Half-Life and Zork: Grand Inquisitor, do in fact offer a continuous, unbroken environment through which the PC travels. In that case, map design becomes a much less powerful factor in fixing Character, and in fact it might be argued that in those cases, the term “map design” has more or less lost its meaning, and might be better called “level design” or something similar.
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3 The subject of how description influences our perception of PC gender could occupy another entire essay, and is out of scope for this one. Consequently, in the case of games that don’t explicitly specify the gender of the PC, I’ll rather arbitrarily select one, trying to hit a more or less even ratio between the two.
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4 1981 is credited to the pseudonymous A.D. Mcmlxxxi, and Cadre has never claimed credit for it. In private correspondence, he explained that this is because the game was a bit of a rush job, not polished enough for something he would put his own name on. He agreed to be credited for the game in this essay on the condition that I put in a note explaining that he “wasn’t actually trying or anything with that one.” That 1981 is the game Cadre produces when he isn’t even breaking a sweat is a testament to his skill as an author.
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5 Or a bisexual of either sex, it probably should be said.
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6 This is one of the very few times that excretion has appeared in an IF game without being a function of rather dodgy toilet humor. Instead, the game plays it completely straight — just another element in its realistic scenario.
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Twisty Little Passages by Nick Montfort (book review) [Misc]

[This is a review I wrote in 2004, of the first book-length academic study of interactive fiction: Nick Montfort’s Twisty Little Passages. I also posted a version of this review on the Amazon page for that book.]

Just over ten years ago, I was holed up in the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Norlin library, researching interactive fiction. I was a grad student in English, and had a final paper due in my Literary Theory class. Activision had recently released the Lost Treasures of Infocom bundle, reawakening my childhood love of IF, and I felt inspired to write a paper that connected reader-response theory to the actual reader-responsiveness of text adventures. I wanted to cite and to engage with previous academic work on IF, but unfortunately, though unsurprisingly, it had received very little serious critical attention. Sure, I found a few articles here and there, but what I really needed was something substantial, something that offered a critical vocabulary for talking about interactive fiction, that placed it in a literary context, and that presented a basic history of the form.

What I needed was Nick Montfort’s Twisty Little Passages. How strange and funny that ten years later, the paper I wrote for that class finds itself cited in the first book-length academic treatment of interactive fiction. True, the citation only occurs in a passing (and correct) dismissal of reader-response theory as anything but a very limited way into talking about IF, but it makes me feel like part of history nonetheless. Montfort’s book is just what IF needs to establish its rightful place in the scholarly discourse surrounding electronic literature, and indeed literature, full stop. It never fails to be informative, and frequently succeeds at being sharply insightful about the literary elements of IF.

However, Twisty Little Passages is quite suitable for readers outside the ivory tower as well. Though the book is clearly aimed at an academic audience, Montfort’s prose is blessedly jargon-free, clear, and effective, with generous doses of humor thrown in for good measure. Even in its most theoretical moments, the book manages to balance impressive rigor with unfailing clarity, a feat all too rare in literary theory. Consequently, it’s an entertaining read for general audiences and English professors alike. If you’re an IF aficionado like me, you’ll find Twisty Little Passages enlightening and fun, and if there’s anyone in your life who genuinely wants to know what interactive fiction is and why they should care, hand them this book.

Just the bibliography alone is a noteworthy achievement; Montfort has synthesized the already extant body of formal IF scholarship and mainstream coverage with much of the important amateur IF theory produced by people like Graham Nelson and Emily Short. Also included are a range of other contributions from the IF community and pieces covering the book’s other concerns, including riddles and computer science. In addition, there is a formidable collection of IF works cited, a list comprising much of the most influential interactive fiction of the past thirty years.

Something else that the bibliography makes clear is the value of Montfort’s personal connections. It’s peppered with references to emails and private conversations with some of the leading lights of IF history: Robert Pinsky, Graham Nelson, Steve Meretzky, and others. Montfort’s ability to gather such firsthand information highlights one of the most important things about Twisty Little Passages: not only is it the first book-length treatment of interactive fiction, it is the first formal treatment I’ve seen that approaches IF from the inside out, rather than from the position of a quizzical spectator. Montfort’s extensive experience in both the academic and IF communities lends him a brand of authority that previous commentators on IF lacked.

Of course, authority only gets you so far — it’s what you do with that authority that counts. That’s what makes the first two chapters of Twisty Little Passages such a particular pleasure: Montfort not only knows what he’s talking about when it comes to IF, he’s got quite a bit of original insight to offer about its literary and theoretical contexts. As with many works of literary criticism that seek to approach an underscrutinized area, the project of this book’s first chapter is not only to expose the topic’s theoretical underpinnings but to define and delimit a specific vocabulary for use in discussing it. Montfort does an excellent job of providing a clear definition of IF (and indeed of making the case for the term “interactive fiction”) and of defining a set of terms to identify the subcomponents of the IF experience.

For example, according to the book, a session is “what happens during the execution of an IF program. [It] begins when an IF program starts running [and] ends when the program terminates”, while a traversal is “a course extending from a prologue to a final reply, and from an initial situation to a final situation” — thus a traversal can encompass many sessions (as frequently happens in the case of long, complex games), or a session can encompass many traversals (as happens with short games with high replay value.) Of course, at bottom the choice of terms is more or less arbitrary, but it is crucial that we be able to name the various parts of the IF experience — they are our stepping stones to more sophisticated discussions. Twisty Little Passages lays this groundwork admirably.

On the whole, this book seems more interested in surveying the territory of IF than in making unified arguments about it, but the exception to this is chapter two, where Montfort makes the case that the most important literary progenitor of IF is the riddle, and takes a counterpoint to the most famous analogy and contextualization of IF from the last decade:

The riddle, like an IF work, must express itself clearly enough to be solved, obliquely enough to be challenging, and beautifully enough to be compelling. These are all different aspects of the same goal; they are not in competition. An excellent interactive fiction work is no more “a crossword at war with a narrative” (Nelson 1995a) than a poem is sound at war with sense.

This is a brilliant and entirely convincing comparison. Montfort gives us a brief history of the riddle, and draws the necessary parallels to demonstrate IF’s similarities with it, leaving us with a new paradigm within which to view interactive fiction. Best of all, this angle of approach allows IF to be both story and game, both art and amusement, without detracting from the value of either.

Chapters three through seven, indeed the bulk of the book, are devoted to delineating the history of IF, from its mainframe beginnings to the current amateur renaissance. It’s an entertaining journey, and Montfort’s encapsulation of IF history is concise, approachable, and extremely informative. I found it a little frustrating, though, because it must of necessity skim over the ground rather quickly, especially as it moves into the Infocom era and beyond. Consequently, there are many moments of intriguing literary analysis of IF games, but they end almost as soon as they begin — practically every page contains material that could make a full article in itself. By the time I reached the end of the book, a sort of epilogue that takes inventory of the various ways in which the tropes of interactive fiction have made their way into our culture, I was already wishing for a sequel, one that assayed a more in-depth discussion of games like Mindwheel and Photopia instead of the tantalizing tidbits we get here.

Montfort has already done some of this sort of work, such as an article written with Stuart Moulthrop for an Australian digital arts conference, analyzing the role of Princess Charlotte in Adam Cadre’s Varicella. However, not much work of that sort could appear without Twisty Little Passages preceding it, just as in-depth conversations can rarely occur prior to introductions. This book creates a foundation for the inclusion of IF in literary discussions, and for further examination of specific IF works. Perhaps if we look back on IF criticism in another ten years, we’ll see that introduction as the most important service Twisty Little Passages performs.

Blue Chairs by Chris Klimas [Comp04]

IFDB page: Blue Chairs
Final placement: 2nd place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Chris Klimas! Now there’s a name from out of the mists. Klimas released a game called Mercy in 1997 that garnered rave reviews for its writing and its pre-Photopia puzzleless design. (In fact, it was nominated for that year’s Xyzzy awards in both story and setting.) Then, he contributed a little fable called Once to the Textfire hoax, and disappeared shortly thereafter.

Now he’s returned, and what a welcome return it is — Blue Chairs is not only his best work, it’s the best game I’ve played so far in this comp. Klimas has a hold of something very powerful — interactive fiction steeped in surrealism and symbolism. This sort of thing has been tried before, but Blue Chairs is the best realization of it that I’ve seen. At the beginning of the game, the PC ingests a powerful hallucinogenic drug. True, you have the choice not to do so, but if you make that choice, the story winds up in a dead end, albeit an intriguing and well-executed dead end. This sort of thing always feels a bit like a sucker punch to me, especially when the only real choice is followed up with a “why in the world did you do that?” sort of message as it is here, but the game is so wonderfully crafted that I forgave it immediately.

The z-code “special effects” that Blue Chairs uses to represent the drug taking hold are very trippy and extremely effective, and from that point forward the game slides brilliantly between dream and reality. IF is an amazingly powerful vehicle for this kind of writing, because you’re not just reading about someone’s reality shifting around him — in a certain sense, those shifts are actually happening to you as you traverse the game’s world. Blue Chairs got so deeply into my head that when someone interrupted me while I was playing, I felt as if I was the one dreaming, as if the intrusion of reality into my game session was just as sharp and unexpected a lurch as the sudden hallucinations that happen to the PC. What makes these hallucinations so powerful, I think, is the fact that they’re full of compelling symbols and archetypes, mixed with totally ordinary objects. In this way, they really do feel like dreams. Blue Chairs‘ heady blend of symbol and story got its hooks deep into my psyche. It blew my mind. I love when that happens.

The psychedelic design was my favorite thing about the game, but a close second was the writing. Blue Chairs does an outstanding job of creating an utterly convincing PC, showing us the world as described by that character, then fracturing his world all to hell, capturing the interrelated parts of his personality like collecting hurricane-blown leaves. At the end, I felt like I really knew Dante. (Yeah, the PC’s name is Dante Hicks, and not only does he share a first and last name with the lead character in Kevin Smith’s Clerks, he also spends the entire game searching for a girl named Beatrice, a beautiful collision of high and low allusion.)

I don’t know that I had too much respect for Dante, but more on that a little later. There were so many sublime turns of phrase, so many funny moments, that my game transcript is littered with “ha”s and “whoa”s and “very nice”s. The game’s implementation was strong, too. Most actions were reasonably anticipated, often with hilarious or terrifying results. I only found one problem, but unfortunately it was quite a doozy. Late in the game, I was working on a puzzle and had come very close to the solution, but not quite hit it. A look at the in-game hints set me straight, and off I went to solve it. Except… the solution didn’t work. Near as I can tell, some kind of bug makes that puzzle unsolvable, which came as a crashing disappointment to me. In a game as strong as this one, a serious bug is all the more unexpected.

Luckily, Blue Chairs‘ design is open-ended enough that even an unsolvable puzzle didn’t prevent me from finishing, though the time limit nearly did. I just barely got done within the two hour window, and towards the end I was opening hints liberally, because I very much wanted to complete the game before rating it. There are multiple endings, too, though they’re nowhere near simple enough to be classified as “winning” or “losing.” (I’m about to discuss those endings in general terms — nothing too spoilery, but you might want to skip the rest of this review if you’re particularly spoiler-sensitive.)

By the time I saw the endings, I was feeling pretty ambivalent about the game’s main character. Right after Dante swallows the drug in the game’s first scene, here’s what it says:

It seems like now would be an excellent time to reflect why you, once a consistently above-average student full of ambition and love, just bought an unknown but almost certainly illegal substance from a stranger and drank it without a second thought.

A fine question indeed, and the game resists the idea of an answer, insisting that there’s nothing in Dante’s life to explain his rootlessness and ennui, that it “just happened, one second at a time.” That being the case, the sort of slacker malaise that Dante exudes is all the more unsympathetic — it’s tough to feel sorry for somebody who has led an incredibly privileged life, free of hardship, but still manages to be desperately unhappy just because he thought things would be so much more shiny, so much more interesting.

Blue Chairs calls itself “a chance to change,” but leaves it up to us to decide which ending really constitutes the change. I think it’s a pretty sure bet that it’s not the one where a soft-focus lens suddenly snaps onto Dante’s life, where the whole thing turns into a Thomas Kinkade painting. That one felt like the ending of Rameses to me, an insistently perfect fantasy that fulfills the PC’s wishes, wishes that have been unrealistic from the start. I’m not sure the other one is any better, though. There’s a kind of letting go to it, but I’m not sure that it’s letting go of the right thing.

Dante comes to a kind of peace with his inaction, but I’m not convinced he’s dropped the binary thinking, the idea that there’s something perfect just beyond his grasp, and that without it, everything is worthless. I think he still may be lost, because as long as he’s locked in that stark dualism, the next illegal substance from a stranger won’t be that far away. Like I said, I rushed through the end — maybe there are other paths I didn’t find. But from what I saw, Dante may not have a chance to change after all. Anyway, that’s just what I thought. You should really play Blue Chairs and think about it a while yourself.

Rating: 9.5

[Postscript from 2021: Blue Chairs was the last parser game Klimas wrote, but he wasn’t done with IF yet, not by a long shot. In 2009, he created Twine, a parser-less IF authoring tool that has arguably had the biggest impact on the IF Comp, and indeed the broader interactive fiction world, of anything since Inform. He’s created a number of other games too.]

Unraveling God by Todd Watson [Comp02]

IFDB page: Unraveling God
Final placement: 12th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

And so the legacy of Photopia continues. Here we have a linear, puzzleless narrative, told in small portions out of chronological order, each of which is preceded by a blank screen with one word in the center. Sound familiar? Of course, there are differences: all segments are told from the same point of view, and rather than being a vision of tragedy, Unraveling God is more of a morality tale in the familiar Things Man Was Not Meant To Know tradition. I also don’t mean to suggest that UG is some sort of lame rip-off. It isn’t. I don’t think this game is trying to be Photopia, but is using many of the tools that Photopia used first in order to tell its story.

What we may in fact be seeing is the development of a new subgenre of IF; maybe fragmentation is such an effective way to tell a puzzleless IF story that it’s bound to become a time-honored technique in story-heavy games. The story and the writing are certainly the feature attraction in this game. You play Gabriel Markson, a scientist who has stumbled across a way to freeze organisms in suspended animation without the use of cryogenics. You are also, as a number of well-judged character details indicate, not a very nice guy. The game’s prose does a fine job of portraying the PC as a complex villain, someone who has elaborate mental structures dedicated to justifying his behavior, and this portrayal makes his opportunities for redemption meaningful. There are one or two logical gaps in the story, but for the most part events interlock nicely, which also lends power to the story’s climax.

The technical elements, unfortunately, weren’t as trouble-free. To begin with, UG started with the inherent disadvantages of the ADRIFT parser, and didn’t manage to overcome them with careful compensation like The PK Girl did. Because the game is more or less puzzleless, the parser’s deficiencies didn’t hurt it as much as they hurt this year’s other ADRIFT game, A Party To Murder, but they were still fairly irritating. In addition, this game had its own unique problem, which was that it was plagued by a mysterious lack of articles. For instance:

X FOLDER
A typed label on the manilla folder reads, "Time Magazine draft
article." Manilla folder is closed.

GET FOLDER
You take manilla folder from the desk.

OPEN IT
(manilla folder)
You open manilla folder.

This kind of thing happened throughout the game, and kept reminding me of that old Saturday Night Live skit from the 80s where Tonto, Tarzan, and Frankenstein sing or read well-known works like “The Raven”: “Once upon… midnight dreary… While pondered… weak, weary…” The frequent injection of unintentional comedy doesn’t do much for a dramatic story. The grammar errors didn’t help either.

Still, I found some value in UG despite these flaws, and there’s one more thing I’d like to point out about it: this game is pretty clearly a work of Christian IF, and it is Christian IF done properly. I’m not a Christian, and I’ve been offended in the past by games like Jarod’s Journey whose overt mission is an evangelical one. This game chooses a richer path, which is to tell a story set in a world in which Christian myths turn out to be true, and exploring the consequences and subsequent choices for the characters once this revelation occurs. It’s not exactly great religious literature, but it does manage to portray a Christian world without condescension or arrogance. Because it allows a little complexity into its world, UG ends up a more thought-provoking and rewarding piece of work than the sort of Christian IF that just wants to shout scripture at the player.

Rating: 6.9

Constraints by Martin Bays [Comp02]

IFDB page: Constraints
Final placement: 19th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

I’m far from the first person to make this claim, but I think every piece of art is, to some greater or lesser degree, about the art form itself. Every novel is at least a little bit about the novel, every film is at least a little bit about the cinema. And every text game is at least a little bit about IF itself. Then there are those that are very much about the form. Constraints is one of these. It disarmed me by admitting upfront, in fact brandishing, the fact that it was going to consist of constrained interactions. It then sets out to explore not only the idea of constraint, and the ways that interaction in a text game can be constrained, but how to make those constrained interactions effective, and even fun.

Of course, it’s not the first game to tread this ground — Photopia and Rameses have famously drawn from the same well — but it’s the first one I’ve seen that devotes itself so purely to the concept, free of any particular narrative or character. However, because of the way it’s structured, it’s rather difficult to talk about without giving too much away. What I can say, though, is that although at one point it enumerates the types of constraints it claims to employ, there is one that it doesn’t include in its list but which features prominently throughout the game.

I’m referring to the fact that although you have the opportunity to play several characters in Constraints (all of whom are in some restricted situation, natch), they all share a common trait: the desire not to be constrained. In each scenario, I struggled for a bit against the circumstances, but then tried doing things that would indicate a certain peace with the situation. Each time, I was rebuffed, instructed that the character’s desire outweighed whatever notions I might have about graceful acceptance. I’m not complaining about this. It’s quite legitimate to instruct a player about how to behave in character when a character is specified, and in a game this skillfully done, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the additional level of constraint was quite intentional.

The idea intrigues me, though. How much of what we call constraints in our lives are simply produced by our own desires, more or less independent of our circumstances? When we feel held down, held back, would the feeling disappear if we decided that we no longer wanted whatever lay on the other side of the barrier? For that matter, can a constraint even exist without a corresponding desire to define it as such? In this game, the question is moot — there’s no way of changing the characters’ desires — but I really like it that the experience of playing made me think about such a philosophical issue in my own life.

It helps a lot that Constraints is quite exquisitely implemented. It’s clear that this game has been tested thoroughly — not only did I find no bugs, but several times throughout the game, I had the exciting experience of trying a fairly unusual action, and seeing that the game anticipated it and handled it expertly. The game uses the z-machine’s color capabilities quite nicely (thereby giving me another reason to be thankful to David Kinder for the new WinFrotz 2002 interpreter), and in another section commits an impressive (though not quite unprecedented) z-machine abuse.

For the most part, the writing hews to the same high standard, though there are several instances of rather strange word choices. I’m not sure whether these were simply typos, or whether they indicate that perhaps English isn’t the author’s first language. If the latter is true, then Constraints is to be commended all the more for the level of mastery it does attain. Despite all this, I can’t quite bring myself to rate the game a 10. Even though it was thought-provoking and nicely crafted, in the end I didn’t find it terribly enjoyable; I don’t really like being constrained. Nevertheless, this is an excellent work of IF, and a fascinating metatreatise on “puzzleless” IF in general.

Rating: 9.3