Temple of Kaos by Peter Gambles [Comp03]

IFDB page: Temple of Kaos
Final placement: 15th place (of 30) in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition

Much to my dismay, Temple Of Kaos has nothing to do with Maxwell Smart or Agent 99. I mean, sure, getting permission from whoever owns the rights to the show would probably be an insurmountable hurdle, but legal problems aside, wouldn’t Get Smart make a fantastic IF milieu? The Shoe Phone, the Cone Of Silence… I can just picture it. This Temple of KAOS, however, isn’t the stronghold of a nefarious organization of evil spies whose efforts must be thwarted by the agents of CONTROL, but rather a bizarre otherworld, where rules of time, space, and spelling (it’s called KAOS for no discernible reason) don’t apply.

Basically, the two salient features of this game are its disregard for making sense, and its propensity to express itself in verse, sometimes free, sometimes blank, and usually with end rhymes. As such, it’s a highly experimental game, and while I think both of the experiments fail in this instance, they illuminate some remarkable territory along the way.

Let’s tackle the nonsensical part first. In the ABOUT text, the author states that part of his intention with the game is to “interfere, out of sheer mischief, with some of the normal perceptions / causal relationships of IF space-time.” Mission accomplished, and in some parts of the game, the technique works well. The first section in particular contains a puzzle which utterly confounds standard expectations of how the world ought to work, but it’s possible to figure out the alternate system of reality at work in the puzzle, and thereby defeat it. The process of doing so is really fun, reminiscent of the flavor of The Gostak or For A Change. More specifically, the reason the puzzle works is that even though the PC’s actions don’t produce the expected results, they do produce some results, and from these results it’s possible to deduce what’s really going on. The same can’t be said of most of the other puzzles in the game.

Even for IF set in a much more mundane universe, feedback design is one of the toughest parts of puzzle creation — you don’t want to be so obvious that the puzzle becomes a non-puzzle, but your feedback also mustn’t be so obscure (or nonexistent) as to leave the player shaking her head in confusion even when the solution is revealed. Most of the puzzles in TOK err on the latter side of this line. I think that for every puzzle after the first one, I looked at the hints, and for most of them even the hints were insufficient. (Thankfully, the author provided a walkthrough.)

For some puzzles, the solution made a tortured kind of sense once I’d looked it up, but for many, I found myself just following the walkthrough’s instructions with a shrug. Sufficient feedback is very important in any IF puzzle, but in a world where the normal rules don’t apply, feedback becomes utterly crucial — how are we supposed to figure out the rules without the ability to gather any evidence about them? TOK usually (though not always) fails to provide enough feedback to make its puzzles solvable, which takes a lot of the fun out of playing.

What does provide some fun is the game’s tendency to present its room and object descriptions in a shaky kind of poetry. For instance, the first room description:

In the North Chamber

Chamber of the north, so empty, still, all noise grates
Black as night the chest your thought awaits.
The other chamber southward lies
Cloaked in mystery's disguise.

Most, but not all, of the game’s verse rhymes like this — sometimes the lines lack rhyme or even consistent meter. Moreover, there’s a fair bit of prose mixed in, as conversation, library responses, or descriptions of action, and the presence of these rather ordinary bits of writing juxtaposed with the more elevated verses tends to drain the effectiveness of each. The other problem with the poetry is reminiscent of what happened in Graham Nelson‘s final game, The Tempest. That is, it’s tough enough to craft IF prose that communicates clearly and concisely, and that also provides enough information to the player, but to do so in verse is much, much harder. TOK‘s poetry isn’t at as great a disadvantage as The Tempest, which forced itself to use prewritten lines as room and object descriptions, but it can still be rather opaque.

Usually the lines aren’t pure gibberish, and they sometimes even manage to pack a few clues in, but nevertheless it does take some time to translate, for instance, “Black as night the chest your thought awaits” into “There’s a black chest here.” The poetry technique is ill-chosen in combination with the game’s nonsensical laws of time, space, and causality, since either one by itself is confusing enough but together they can be utterly impenetrable. However, TOK does give some glimpses of how compelling an IF game in pure verse could be, and of how fascinating it might be to play in a universe with a completely different set of basic rules. Play it for these glimpses, but don’t be afraid to reach for the walkthrough.

Rating: 6.5

A Night Guest by Valentine Kopteltsev as Dr. Inkalot [Comp01]

IFDB page: A Night Guest
Final placement: 16th place (of 51) in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition

Here’s a new approach to interactive poetry: write the poem in advance, and then create the game as a sort of adaptation of the poem. I’m reading lots of Dickinson these days, and that’s what I tend to think of when I think about poetry — short, rather abstract verses, capturing an image or making an observation in compact, dense language. This sort of poem would be ill suited to the adaptation approach, but there are other poetic traditions, one of which is the grand narrative poem, as practiced by Renaissance poets like Spenser, as well as Pope, Tennyson, and more modern versifiers such as, well, Dr. Seuss. This sort of poem tells a story, and presumably that story can be adapted to an interactive form using the same techniques one might use to adapt a prose story.

Of course, the danger of adapting any story is that it’s difficult to inject interactivity into an already extant plot structure, since plots are full of dependencies that are weakened every time a choice is given to the player. Consequently, the temptation is to give the interactive form nearly as rigid a structure as the non-interactive one, and that’s certainly what happens here. Because the game has the poem preconceived, the player has no choice but to follow its path. Consequently, what passes for interactivity is a series of one-choice nodes, where the player keeps trying various things until she hits upon what the game wants her to type. When the magic command is found, the game rewards the player by displaying the next section of verse.

The verse itself is more or less doggerel, a mock epic in Seussian meter, though without the nonsense words or moral messages we tend to associate with Dr. Seuss. The story it tells is a brief one, almost like a fable, except that its rogue hero is never redeemed, and the moral is muddy at best. Still, not every poem needs to be sublime, nor every story uplifting, and the poem (as a poem) had its pleasures. There were some rather clever rhymes, and some nice bits of characterization. The meter mostly kept a pleasant, singsong pace, though there were times it stumbled quite badly, usually on the last line of a stanza.

The illustrations, similarly, were not of the highest quality but some of the better ones definitely made a positive contribution towards enhancing the game’s mood. One well-used feature was the way the game changed to centered text and a monospace font when displaying the poem, but stuck with left-aligned proportional text for the actual interaction. This formatting choice set off the poem nicely, though it did emphasize the schism between poem and game, thus making it plain just how much the latter was grafted onto the former.

That’s basically the problem with A Night Guest. It’s an amusing poem (what there is of it, anyway — the whole thing is quite short), but it’s very clear that the game was built around the poem rather than vice versa. Thus, it feels rather like reading a book that forces you to say a magic word before you can turn the page. The “puzzles” (really just figuring out how to respond to the game’s cues) don’t add much, and I was left with the feeling that the whole thing would have been much more pleasant had it been just an illustrated chapbook rather than a narrative poem pretending to be interactive. Of course, I recognize how amazingly difficult it would be to create a game that actually expressed itself in verse but was a game first and foremost. No doubt that’s why it hasn’t been done yet.

Rating: 5.3

Threading The Labyrinth by Kevin Doughty [Comp00]

IFDB page: Threading The Labyrinth
Final placement: 40th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

I’m a big fan of poetry, and I’m (obviously) a big fan of interactive fiction, but it seems to me that interactive poetry is a pretty challenging genre. Andrew Plotkin probably came as close as anybody ever has with his experimental work The Space Under The Window. That work threw most IF conventions out the window, asking the player instead to “type the names of objects (or attributes or aspects of objects) that you see in the narrative” at the prompt. Some words it wouldn’t respond to at all, some words might take you back to a previous node, and some words would reveal new information to you. Threading The Labyrinth takes a similar approach, with two changes: it offers some kind of response for every in-context word you type (in-context meaning words that the game has printed in bold text), but has very few words which open up the context further. For example, you might type the word “and” — the game will respond, “Both conditions expressed are simultaneously true,” but you’ll still be at the same game node, since no more bold text has printed. As a result, TTL ends up feeling like more of an interactive close reading. Like a close reading, it can yield interesting insight, though that insight is limited by the fact that it’s close reading its own text, and that it offers so little text to examine — just a few sentences and fragments, really.

For what we do get, I’d venture to say that the primary theme is an interrogation of interactivity. Both in its content and its form, TTL is interested in exploring how we interact with that which is outside of us, and what new dynamics and artifacts get created in the process. This is an intriguing theme in and of itself, and it lends itself readily to TTL‘s format. The game’s use of imagery from Greek myth isn’t entirely successful — its dominant image of the thread, for example, has an obvious connection to the idea of “UNDO” in modern IF, but the game doesn’t do anything with this connection. On the other hand, TTL does have some nice moments. I particularly liked its differentiation between mazes and labyrinths, and its revisitation of that image in the “They” section.

Too bad there just isn’t that much here. I finished the whole thing and (I think) read all the text available in about 10 minutes. What’s there is pretty cool, while it lasts. It doesn’t take long to play, so why not check it out? I get the impression that if you leave the game thinking about the nature of interaction, it will have achieved its goal.

Rating: 6.0