worlds apart, >INVENTORY

Letter to the Author: Dangerous Curves [misc]

[I beta-tested Dangerous Curves, a mystery game released in 2000. I didn’t review it, since reviewing a game I’ve beta-tested always seemed sketchy to me. However, I did write a long letter to its author, Irene Callaci. With her permission, I reprinted that letter on my website, and now I’m moving it here. Note that it includes SPOILERS. This letter is dated April 28, 2000.]

Dear Irene —

First of all, let me tell you about me and mystery games. The first mystery game I ever played was Infocom‘s Suspect, fondly bought for me as a birthday gift or something. I loved walking around the mansion, talking to the various characters, and searching all the furniture. I filled up notebooks with every utterance I could squeeze out of the characters, with lists organized by room of the items therein, with chronologies of what happened when. I waited in every single location for the entire duration of the game to see what happens. If I walked into that mansion today, I could probably navigate it entirely from memory.

The problem is this: I got absolutely nowhere at actually solving the murder. I couldn’t figure out what was significant in some places, but more importantly I just couldn’t figure out how to establish motive, method, or opportunity, let alone all three. I started to get more and more frustrated with the whole thing.

After a long, long time of this, I broke down and bought the Invisiclues. When I finally found the solution, I didn’t have a feeling of “Why didn’t I think of that?” Instead, I felt, “How in the hell was I supposed to think of that?” Since then, my track record with mysteries has been unimpressive. I did OK with Ballyhoo, but that was really more of a puzzlefest with a mystery plot tacked on at the beginning and end. I was hopeless with Deadline. I couldn’t get anywhere in Moonmist, though that may have been due more to the bugginess of the game than to my particular denseness. Even The Witness, which everybody on the IF newsgroups seems to think is a cakewalk, was totally impenetrable for me. I had only the vaguest suspicion who did it, and not the faintest clue how to prove it.

There haven’t been that many amateur attempts at mystery games, and what few there are I haven’t played, so I can’t say how well I’ve done in the post-Infocom world of mystery games. I will note, however, that I am an equally poor detective when I read mystery fiction. I basically never figure out who the murderer is ahead of the detective. Well, there was one period where I was reading a lot of Agatha Christie, and figured out that the murderer is always the least likely person. I was able to guess with a pretty good degree of accuracy using this method, but I still had to wait til the end of the book to find out just how the crime was committed.

Now let me tell you why Dangerous Curves is easily, far and away, my favorite mystery game of all time. I haven’t got this figured out exactly, but I think it has to do with the fact that the game steps outside of all the paradigms for mystery IF that I’ve seen up til now. In Infocom’s traditional mysteries, you had to establish motive, method, and opportunity. This was sometimes accomplished through the use of highly unlikely actions like TELL THE DETECTIVE ABOUT THE WEATHER, actions which required you to put together all the pieces in just the way a good mystery reader would do, and just the way that I completely suck at. I could never come up with these actions, and so I remained stuck forever, or until I looked at the hints, whichever came first. (You can probably guess what came first every time.)

Dangerous Curves doesn’t require this kind of reasoning. It allows for it, but doesn’t require it. With the help of devices like the full score listing, Frank Thibodeaux’s gentle prodding, and the anonymous tipster, I was able to put together all the pieces and, for the first time ever in a mystery IF game, feel like I was solving the crime. Let me tell you, this was a great feeling. I think one of DC’s great strengths is that while it allows for the kind of player that was great at Infocom’s mystery games, it also allows for players like me. None of the devices I listed above are required for a winning session with the game, but they sure helped me feel like I was having fun rather than banging my head against a wall. That kind of fun is a new experience for me in mystery games.

There are lots of other factors that added to my enjoyment of the game. One of the strongest of these was the outstanding writing. Even if I hadn’t been able to get anywhere in the game, I would have had a good time playing it, just because the writing was so much fun to read. It caught the perfect balance between noir and humor, similar to the balance achieved by Columbo back when it was a regular TV show. All of the historical details were just excellent, and most of the one-liners were actually funny, rather than coming off as lame pastiches of Raymond Chandler. There was also a very satisfying attention to the rhythms and musicality of language in many of the game’s longer passages. For example, from the opening text:

Her eyes watch yours as she fans the money out on the desktop. “I never mix business with pleasure. Do you?”

Not often. Not lately. “Not me,” you assure her. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Now that’s just a really well-written passage. Not only is it funny, and not only does it tell us a great deal about the character in a very few words, but it also rings with a great rhythm, like a good swing song, a rhythm that would make it enjoyable to read even if it made no sense at all.

Coming in close behind the writing is the game’s remarkable technical sophistication and depth of implementation. I loved knowing that I could go to the Wednesday mass and watch the churchgoers, reading lots of great text that had nothing at all to do with solving the case. It was just there to make the fictional world feel more real, and it worked beautifully. When I wrote one of these detailed responses to Suzanne after testing Worlds Apart, I told her that the source of that game’s power to immerse players came from the combination of two factors: range of interaction and rich detail. DC employs this same potent combo, and it works just as well. The more actions that got a non-default response from the parser, the more places I could go, the more people I could meet, the more things I could ask them about, and the more syntactical combinations that the parser understood, the more deeply immersed I felt in Dangerous Curves‘ Los Angeles.

A little more about that last item: I was just astonished at how much work you’d put into the parser for DC. At least two or three times per session, I would try something non-standard and find to my surprise that the parser understood it. This is the kind of improvement, I know from experience, that takes a huge amount of time and energy, but you can never be sure how many people will even find it, let alone use it, benefit from it, or comment on it. Well, I just want to tell you that I found it, and I loved it. The same goes for all the other technical feats you accomplished to make life easier for the player: the status line compass rose, the convenient handling of opening/closing and locking doors, the money that worked so well I hardly needed to worry about it at all. You took a lot of the tedious details of IF off my hands so that I could spend more time enjoying the story and the writing. Great move. In fact, during the next game I played after DC, I found myself grumbling, “Where’s my compass rose?” Your game was so good, it spoiled me!

I know we all like positive feedback, and there’s certainly plenty to give, but I do want to make this review a little more useful to you than just simple egofood, so I’ll briefly touch on a few of the game’s weaker points. I found that some actions were insufficiently clued, or at least they wouldn’t have ever occurred to me without the anonymous tipster. One example of this is giving the donut to the cop. Because so many locations in the game are implemented as one-room spots, even though they might realistically have other places to explore (for example, the Tribune, the library, or Rosie’s), I wasn’t expecting that I would be able to actually visit prisoners in the police station.

Moreover, though I could easily come up with the idea of giving the donut to the cop once I knew he wanted something, I wouldn’t have otherwise expected to be able to take it out of Rosie’s, since so many other things at Lenny’s and Rosie’s are forced to stay inside their respective locations. Of course, it’s logical that I could walk out with a donut as opposed to a beer or a blue plate special, but I sort of lumped it in with everything else. Another action I wouldn’t have come up with on my own was to get the bank teller drunk. I never saw any indication from him that he had anything worthwhile to say, nor much evidence that he was the kind of vulnerable lush who could be easily plied with alcohol to spill his secrets. Considering how little room you have left, I’m not sure what you could do to remedy these problems, and because you have the anonymous tipster in there, they’re not significant problems anyway, but I thought I’d just let you know about my experience.

The other problem is one that I’m not sure how you could solve no matter how much room you had, which is that the characters were so well-drawn that I frequently found myself straining against the interface because I wanted to tell them more. It’s really frustrating to have to try TELL JESSICA ABOUT CARLOTTA when what I really want to say is “I broke into a real estate office and learned that the Mayor’s wife owns a huge amount of property along the proposed highway site, and that’s why Vickstrom was so hot on the freeway project, and no doubt why he had your husband killed.” Unfortunately, the solution to this problem is outside of the current grasp of IF in general, not just Dangerous Curves. The fact that your game made me feel the absence of such an interface that keenly is a great credit to your writing and characterization skills, not to mention the depth of immersion you achieve in your fictional world.

Playing Dangerous Curves has been one of my favorite IF experiences in a long, long time. Thank you for that, and for the correspondence, which I’ve also enjoyed very much. Good luck with your game and your life, and keep in touch.

Letter to the Author: Worlds Apart [misc]

[I beta-tested Worlds Apart, a fantasy game released in 1999. I didn’t review it, since reviewing a game I’ve beta-tested always seemed sketchy to me. However, I did write a long letter to its author, Suzanne Britton. With her permission, I reprinted that letter on my website, and now I’m moving it here. Note that it includes SPOILERS. This letter is dated May 19, 1999.]

Dear Suzanne —

In an earlier conversation, I referred to the style of Worlds Apart as “High Fantasy.” That’s not quite right; I was reaching for a term, and the one I came up with is inadequate because the fact is that WA doesn’t perfectly fit genre conventions. In fact, it comes closer to one of those grand, sweeping alternate-world SF stories, right down to the richly detailed biology, geography, and sociology of the invented planets. But it feels like fantasy. Orson Scott Card once wrote that the essential difference between fantasy and science fiction is that “fantasy has trees, science fiction has rivets.” Worlds Apart definitely has trees.

Moreover, it has telepathy, which certainly leaves it out of the “hard SF” category. It presents itself in a somewhat formal, elevated tone — no slangy streetwise speakers or clever cyberpunk cant to be found anywhere — and the concerns of the narrator are definitely emotional concerns. Despite the fact that this is IF, she’s not solving some Asimovian logic problem or saving the universe with a sparkling piece of technology. She’s not conquering a new frontier or establishing a planetary Empire; she’s not fighting insectoid invaders or solving virtual-reality mysteries. Instead, her frontier is inside herself. Her explorations, and her triumphs, feel more like poetry than adventure yarn. The “magical” items in the story have a strong metaphoric quality, and her encounters (especially with Saal) vibrate with mythic resonances. Small wonder that when the lazy librarian inside my brain reached for a shelf to put this on, it was closer to the Fantasy section than it was to SF.

But it is SF, albeit “soft” SF, where psychic powers and dragons can mix with other planets and evolved humans. The amount of world-building that WA displays is breathtaking. I know you’ve mentioned (and I’ve read on your web page) that for you, the Higher World is not exactly a product of the imagination. It’s been your companion through life and its visions are delivered to you rather than being crafted by you. But whatever its source, the level of detail in Worlds Apart was very impressive to me as a reader. It spoke of a careful, meticulous, thoughtful working-out of all the various aspects of an alternate world, even if that’s not exactly where it came from.

I spent a few years of my life studying literary theory, and I walked away from it believing that what the author intended for a work, and how exactly that work was created, is less important than the messages that the work itself delivers. What WA delivers is a kind of escape, a journey into a universe where my gills allow me to stay underwater indefinitely, where I can ride on dragonsback to the moon, and where I can reach out with my sixth sense to find out what other people are really feeling. Whether this world is really real to you or just made-up is immaterial to me, because you give me so many details and present the setting with such confidence that it feels real to me too, even though I’ve never had a vision in my life.

The fact that Worlds Apart is IF adds greatly to this sense of immersion. I think you’ve discovered (or deepened, anyway) a very potent combination: rich detail and interaction. In static fiction, a vivid setting greatly enhances a reader’s suspension of disbelief, and in IF the ability to command a character and actually explore this setting reinforces the escapist impulse from another direction. By combining these two to such a high degree, you’ve created a work that is very immersive indeed.

This combination is all the more precious for being so rare. Both world-building and the implementation of meaningful interaction are incredibly time-consuming pastimes. The fact that Worlds Apart has so much of both makes it a very special story. I really enjoyed testing it, and hope that my own work can live up to its high standard. My aims are somewhat different, but you have definitely set the bar for detail and richness.

I will probably take you up on your offer to betatest LASH, but it will be awhile. After testing Worlds Apart I was moved to play LASH in the same (testing) mindset, and in the process I found any number of things that I now want to improve or change. I think that the experience of testing Worlds Apart has not only made me a better tester, but a better author as well. Thanks for giving me that experience. Best of luck with the game, and in your life as well. Keep in touch.

Trading Punches by Mike Snyder as Sidney Merk [Comp04]

IFDB page: Trading Punches
Final placement: 10th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

Trading Punches is a lovely piece of work, with a good story and a fine design. It’s also got some flaws, so let me tackle those first, and then I’ll move on to the loveliness. The first problem I had with the game may be more just an idiosyncratic reaction: I found much of its prose rough going. It’s not that the writing was error-laden or terribly awkward — it’s just that I kept finding myself wanting to skim over it, and having to concentrate to actually read it. The problem was most severe in long room descriptions and infodumps, of which the game has many. I’m not sure whether the prose was just too dense for me, or whether it was some question of style, or what. I know that’s an unhelpful reaction, but it was my reaction nonetheless.

One definite problem with the style is that the game goes way overboard on a particular gimmick for making things sound SFnal: word-mating. Thus, the PC wanders around a landscape of “mossgrass” and “elmpines”, watching the “peacrows” and then later drinking some “brandyrum” and “whiskeygin”. Yeesh! A little of this strategy goes a long way, and Trading Punches had way more than a little; it sounded pretty silly in short order. Finally, though the game was obviously tested, a few significant bugs made it into this version. For one thing, certain commands, like “score”, draw no response at all from the game. Even more seriously, there’s a class of locations with one exit that consistently thrusts the player into a formless void from which there is no escape. At first, I thought this effect might be intentional, but further experimentation demonstrated that it’s almost certainly accidental.

So yes, Trading Punches has some problems, but I still ended my play session feeling very happy with it. Why? Well, for starters, I enjoyed the story quite a bit, and aside from the excessive word-mating, the setting felt nicely realized as well. In general, the plot and the game-world felt reminiscent of the work of Orson Scott Card, which I like very much. I don’t know if the author of Trading Punches is familiar with Card, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that influence on this game. It’s got plenty of Card’s hallmarks: bitter rivalry within a family, affecting the larger world and universe on a grand scale; a gifted protagonist with a strong moral center who has a significant impact by helping (or trying to help) others; and strong familial bonds offsetting the deep familial schisms elsewhere.

The aliens in the game feel original and well-imagined, and lend themselves to symbolic use as well. I also appreciated the design of the game — its central story of sibling rivalry is told through chapters that don’t hammer the point too hard, but still make it quite clear how the enmity grows between the two brothers. By skipping forward in time to the most important incidents in their relationship, the game develops the character of both the PC and his brother quite satisfyingly. Situating the chapters within a frame story works very well to knit the disparate pieces, and the game does an excellent job of weaving revelations about the frame story into the content of the chapters and vice versa. Unfortunately, two hours wasn’t quite enough time for me to get through it, partly because of my denseness around one of the puzzles. However, a glance at the walkthrough shows that I was most of the way through, and I felt regret at having to stop the game and write this review, which is clear evidence that the story had me hooked.

Even aside from the story and the design (and its bugs and prose tics notwithstanding), Trading Punches boasts an impressive amount of craft. Especially noteworthy are the game’s cool multimedia components. Each chapter (and each return to the frame story) begins with a full-screen graphic. These graphics are quite lovely, and do an excellent job of establishing the landscape. I found this especially helpful as I struggled with the dense prose’s attempts at scene-setting. The illustrations look as though they were created in some kind of graphics rendering software, and consequently have a bit of a Myst-like feel to them, which is a good thing.

Also effective is the game’s music, a synthesized soundtrack which loops constantly in the background. The music is generally quite effective at enhancing the mood of a particular scene, though some of the musical pieces don’t have enough melody or complexity to withstand the constant looping. No matter how good an eight-bar tune is, it’s bound to get a little grating on the hundredth repetition. The game itself is quite solid, too — it’s clear that a whole lot of effort went into this project. Aside from the few bugs I mentioned in the first paragraph, I found the code pleasantly error-free, and the same goes for the writing. The puzzles worked well for me, and the game did an excellent job of providing cues to help me know what I ought to try next. One item in particular was not only quite well-implemented, but also provided an excellent emotional through-line for the story.

Trading Punches still has a few details to clean up, and the word-mating has to go, but I’d recommend it without hesitation, especially to fans of dramatic fantasy games like Worlds Apart.

Rating: 9.2

Out of the Study by Anssi Raisanen [Comp02]

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

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

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


> x family

The professor is standing in the photo with his wife and five

children.
> x children

The photo is really rather old as the children in it are still very

young. You know that none of them lives at home anymore. On the left

there are twin boys, looking to be of the age at which they have just

started going to school. In the middle, the youngest child, just a

baby, is sitting in her mother's lap. It seems to be hardly one year

old: you cannot tell if it's a boy or a girl, even from the clothes.

[...]
> x baby

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

overall.

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

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

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

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

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

> x torn [You must supply a noun.]

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

> read books There is nothing written on the books.

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

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

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

Rating: 7.0

Unnkulia X by Valentine Kopteltsev [Comp00]

IFDB page: Unnkulia X
Final placement: 27th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

In the beginning, there was the 1995 IF competition. This competition had but One Rule: all entries must be winnable in two hours or less. The competition has gotten grander and more complex since then, but it has remained a competition for short games, not Curses-length epics. Somewhere along the way, though, the One Rule got mutated a little. I quote from this year’s rules: “Judges must base their judgement of each game on at most the first two hours of play… Authors may write a game of any length they desire, but should keep this rule in mind when determining the length of their entry.” This rule has been in this form, more or less, since 1998. Still, the competition has remained oriented towards short games.

There are some obvious reasons for this. For one thing, it takes less time to write a short game. The more objects, locations, NPCs, plot points, and such you cram into your game, the more work your game will be to produce, at least if you want to maintain a reasonable level of quality. I would argue, however, that there are other reasons to keep long games out of the competition. From a judging standpoint, I don’t feel comfortable evaluating a game unless I’m reasonably confident that I’ve seen most or all of it. If A Mind Forever Voyaging, for instance, were to be entered in an IF competition, I know for certain that I wouldn’t have an accurate picture of it after only 2 hours of play. I felt differently about Zork III before and after the Royal Puzzle. I could go on, but you get the idea. Consequently, the ratings given to a large game don’t really reflect the game as a whole, just its beginning sections. Also, it’s really comparing apples to oranges to put something like Worlds Apart up against something like, say, Winter Wonderland. Even if two games have a similar tone, or similar puzzles, or a whole raft of other similarities, length does matter. Ahem.

Nowadays though, the competition has become, to use a worn-out but apt phrase, a victim of its own success. Authors enter anything they write into the competition just because it’s so high-profile and receives so much ink (or electrons, or whatever.) They figure that even in the worst case, they’ll get a whole bunch of people playing and writing about their game, so why not enter it? I feel a rant coming on about this. The first part of my rant is directed at authors. Look, people, entering a game that is too long (or too buggy, or too poorly proofread, or otherwise inappropriate for the competition) is an abuse of the judges’ time. The feedback and recognition you get this way are ill-gotten.

Moreover, I would contend that especially in the case of overlong games, you’re not really benefiting that much, because whatever recognition and feedback you get are only based on the first two hours, not your game as a whole. You created an entire game, but if it’s just one of fifty entries, and it’s quickly apparent that two hours ain’t gonna cover it, not by a long stretch, how many of those players do you think will return to your game? How many people will see and give you feedback about the other three-fourths of the game that they didn’t get to during the comp? How much are you really benefiting from all that comp attention?

And while I’m on the topic, let’s move to the second part of my rant, which is directed to the community at large. Listen, I love the competition. It’s one of my favorite things about the IF community. But let’s face the problems that it has. The magnetism of the competition, the idea that it’s the best place for every game, is something we all need to work harder to address. Do your part. Release a long game (or a short one) outside of the competition. Write a review of a non-comp game for SPAG or XYZZYNews. Participate in things like the IF Review Conspiracy and the IF Book Club. Most importantly, post post POST about non-comp games. Make a commitment to post a reaction to any non-comp game you play. It doesn’t have to be a review. It doesn’t have to be thorough. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be smart. It just has to be done, because if it doesn’t get done, the authors who don’t abuse the competition will end up losing out, and that’s not right. So please — do it. Your efforts will benefit yourself and everybody else in the IF community.

Just to be democratic, the third part of my rant is addressed to myself, and people like me, people who write long, thorough reviews of every comp game. We are part of the problem. I recognize that consistency is important to us, and that’s why we devote more or less the same amount of space to each comp game. However, there can and should be limits. Don’t even play games that have catastrophic bugs, let alone review them. Any attention those games get contributes to the perception that it’s better to release a buggy game in the comp than a polished game in the Spring. We must work to prove that this perception is fallacious and untrue. As for overlong games, review them if you feel you must, but don’t feel obligated to spend much of the review talking about the game itself — spend it instead on some adjacent topic like the problem of inappropriate games in the competition.

I mean, for god’s sake, Unnkulia X is 865K! The thing is only 45K smaller than Once and Future! It’s freaking huge! Yes, it’s fairly well done, implemented with care and only a few lapses in English. (There’s a lot of unfamiliar diction, which I assume is attributable to the author’s first language being something other than English, but most of these alien word choices are rather refreshing instead of jarring.) Of course, I only got 60 points out of 300 after two hours, so these assessments are based on what I have to assume is the first fifth or so of the game. If it were the whole game, I’d probably give it about a 9. Considering it’s a fifth of the game, I think that works out to about a…

Rating: 1.8