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Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction

Page 13

by Nick Montfort


  The first glimpse of Hades reveals "a desolation, with a pile of mangled corpses in one corner." Hades is hardly a vast, mythical wasteland if it is small enough to have a pile of corpses in the corner, as in this tongue-in-cheek description. Actual lifeless corpses should also not have much of a place in either the Greek Hades (in which they would be wandering around listlessly) or Dante's Hell (where they might more appropriately writhe beneath their punishments). The rest of The Inferno is summarized in Zork at the entrance as "Thousands of voices, lamenting some hideous fate," and within as "the sounds of thousands of lost souls weeping and moaning." (The command listen is not implemented.) One reviewer's reaction to the corresponding region of Zork I is typical: "Here I am in Hades. *yawn* Wonder if there's a gift shop around" (Stevens 1997).

  However, within the land of the dead is a room that didn't make it to the commercial Zork I. This area, except for the presence of severed heads and dead bodies, might fit in perfectly well at MIT:

  Tomb of the Unknown Implementer

  This is the Tomb of the Unknown Implementer. A hollow voice says: "That's not a bug, it's a feature!" In the north wall of the room is the Crypt of the Implementers. It is made of the finest marble, and apparently large enough for four headless corpses. The crypt is closed.

  Above the entrance is the cryptic inscription:

  "Feel Free."

  There are four heads here, mounted securely on poles.

  There is a large pile of empty Coke bottles here, evidently produced by the irnplementers during their long struggle to win totality.

  There is a gigantic pile of line-printer output here. Although the paper once contained useful information, almost nothing can be distinguished now.

  These signs of coding exertion (of no use to the adventurer) are situated in a place that is certainly not a direct reference to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, but rather to the Tomb of the Unknown Tool, a famously inaccessible area under MIT's Building 9. "Tomb" at MIT refers to, as one student publication explains, "an interesting, out-of-the way, unused spot" (Amonlirdviman 1996, 213). The heads are "securely mounted" because if they were removable the adventurer could carry them around and do things to them, thereby introducing unnecessary complexity to Zork's simulated world. The inscription punningly decorating the crypt was a common saying among the four creators (the spelling "Implementers" later being changed to "Implementors") in response to a suggestion that part of Zork be modified. It was a polite way of refusing, meaning "feel free to go ahead and make the change yourself if you like." For example, "How about you add an underwater area inside the reservoir that you can swim down into?" "Feel free."

  This vein of technical humor continues into the south wall of Zork's temple. There is a prayer upon it, "inscribed in an ancient script which is hardly remembered these days, much less understood. What little of it can be made out seems to be a philippic against small insects, absent-mindedness, and the picking up and dropping of small objects." The prayer begins with an attempt to protect not against literal "small insects," of course, but against programming errors, or bugs. As for absentmindedness, it might be something the Implementors need to guard against in creating Zork, or it might be a professorial malady that students should watch out for. Clearly the last philippic is making fun of the adventurer, whose essential actions seem to be picking up and dropping things.

  Zork has a purely numerical joke that may be the most elaborate in all interactive fiction-perhaps even in all computing. In the Clearing a command to count leaves brings the wry response "There are 69,105 leaves here." This reply presupposes a superhuman (and in fact computer-like) adventurer, able to count a tremendous number of objects in the thin slice of time represented by a move. Perhaps this prodigious ability to count is in keeping with the adventurer's autistic nature, as manifested in the emotional understatement and the fixation on objects that Aarseth (1997, 115-117) has pointed out. Whatever the case, the absurd, impossibly accurate count is funny, as is the "364.4 Smoots and one ear" measurement first marked on the Harvard Bridge in October 1958 by MIT students who had just finished measuring the bridge with Oliver Reed Smoot's supine body. The same sexual innuendo is insisted upon twice in the digits "69,105"-the "69" to the left of the comma is repeated to the right of the comma, since decimal 69 is octal 105, and (as is not true in general) hexadecimal 69 is also decimal 105. This number appears again in Infocom works The Witness by Stu Galley (the gun receipt is number 69105) and in Leather Goddesses of Phobos by Steven Meretzky (which has another pile of leaves). In works from the late 1990s, Adam Cadre's I-0 features 69,105 pieces of laundry in the trunk of car; Admiral Jota's in-joke Pass the Banana has a file size of 69,105 bytes. The number also is mentioned in Infocom's newsletter The New Zork Times and in the instructions to Douglas Adams's Bureaucracy, another Infocom work. But in case one's appetite for numeric allusion to mutual oral sex is not satisfied at the "Clearing," there is more in Zork along similar lines. The description of the "Studio" mentions that the "walls and floors are splattered with paints of 69 different colors."

  Plenty of additional MIT-specific and computing references are to be found in Zork. Descending from the Dome Room to the Torch Room, the adventurer sees this: "Above you is a large dome painted with scenes depicting elvish hacking rites." "Hacking" at MIT refers to the exploration of restricted areas of campus and to the perpetration of extremely clever pranks, some of which are in fact ritualized. Although "dome" meant something else inside a cave, one of the most prominent sites for hacking has been MIT's Great Dome, which has had a phone booth and a model police car placed atop it (Haverson and Fulton-Pearson 1996; Leibowitz 1990). This makes it particularly appropriate for these frescos to appear in a "large dome."

  There were also jabs at the large evil computer company of the day, IBM, found in the Machine Room and the Maintenance Room: "Along one wall of the room are three buttons which are, respectively, round, triangular, and square. Naturally, above the buttons are instructions written in EBCDIC." These indecipherable instructions are encoded in IBM's proprietary character code, a rival to ASCII. Other technically funny possible outputs of Zork include "Why, only last week I patched a running RSX system and it survived for over thirty seconds," and, on an unfortunate occasion, "According to Prof. TAA [Timothy A. Anderson] of MIT Tech, the rapidly changing magnetic fields in the room are so intense as to cause you to be electrocuted. I really don't know, but in any event, something has killed you." Engravings are seen to read "This space intentionally left blank," the same notice found on blank pages at the end of engineering and science textbooks, and possibly a reference to one of the Implementors as well.

  Technology plays an important part in the world of Zork, which sports Flood Control Dam #3, a flashy public works project built for no discernible reason, as the Guide Book explains:

  Flood control dam #3 (FCD #3) was constructed in year 783 of the Great Underground Empire to harness the destructive power of the Frigid River. This work was supported by a grant of 37 million zorkmids from the central bureaucracy and your own omnipotent local tyrant Lord Dimwit Flathead the Excessive. This impressive structure is composed of 3.7 cubic feet of concrete, is 256 feet tall at the center, and 193 feet wide at the top....

  The construction of FCD #3 took 112 days from ground breaking to the dedication. It required a work force of 384 slaves, 34 slave drivers, 12 engineers, 2 turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree. The work was managed by a command team composed of 234 bureaucrats, 2347 secretaries (at least two of whom could type), 12,256 paper shufflers, 52,469 rubber stampers, 245,193 red tape processors, and nearly one million dead trees.

  FCD #3 is a concrete symbol of engineering as worshipped by the public, similar in this way to the impressive Hoover Dam. It is also amusingly useless, almost certainly incorrectly documented (it would take rather magical engineering practices to build a 256-foot-tall dam using nothing but 3.7 cubic feet of concrete), and apparently produced with an inefficiency more monumental than
the dam itself. Zork's technical humor is an achievement not just because it is funny, but also because it delivers things like this effective parody of bumbling publicly funded technology projects. Although Zork was created more efficiently than was FCD #3, it did run on the spare time of computers purchased with, and was programmed by individuals who were supported by, Department of Defense money. It was in some ways an example of an amusingly useless public works project itself; the tongue-in-cheek tone of Zork seems to encode an awareness of this.

  The structural innovations in Zork's world also reflect a technological subculture. To prevail the adventurer must use vehicles, riding in a balloon and a boat. This player character also must command a robot in order to get through one section of the work. Reading Zork against MIT makes it easier to see how the literary transformation of technology is accomplished in the work. The puzzles that offered riddle-like systems, called "problems" by the Implementors, often involve recognizing various technological artifacts, real and imagined, for what they are. In many cases, once the technology is recognized, the way in which objects are supposed to be used becomes obvious. A clear example is provided in the coal mine section of Zork's IF world.

  Here, the player character finds a machine that might, in another place, be used for doing laundry; a tiny slot is noticable in the top of it. What this machine does, and how to turn it on, is unclear. The solution is to put some coal found nearby into the machine, and then turn the machine on using the screwdriver. This results in the coal being compressed with great force. (The switch is described as having the right dimensions to be turned with a screwdriver of the appropriate type-of course, a flathead screwdriver. One of these can be found near FCD #3.) To figure out how to turn on the machine, one need only recognize which ordinary tool is needed, based on a literal description. To figure out what the machine does, the interactor can act as scientist and put anything inside, then observe the results. Despite the absurdity of an underground flood control dam, many of the technologies found in the Great Underground Empire have purposes, and one could imagine why they might have been placed there by previous occupants of the realm. Understanding that useful machinery is found in this IF world, and using the process of experimentation and observation in order to learn what this machinery does, allows the player character to prevail in a way that is consistent with the overall scheme of Zork. The diamond-making machine is not a profound riddle, but it was a step toward systematic IF worlds of greater power.

  Zork was not the last piece of interactive fiction to comment on MIT. Later, Zork Implementor Dave Lebling, working for Infocom, wrote an IF work that referred to MIT more directly. His 1987 The Lurking Horror was a Lovecraftian horror story set at the fictitious George Underwood Edwards Institute ofTechnology, or GUE Tech, which was laid out much like the MIT campus. MIT's Green Building was there with its meteorology dome on top, but it was called the Brown Building. (The actual Green Building is, in fact, brown.) Many other features were lifted from MIT, including an infinite corridor and an inaccessible "tomb."As independent IF authorship began to hit its stride, one of many IF works set on the authors' own campus was GC: A Thrashing Parity Bit (?f the Mind, written by Carl de Marcken, Dave Baggett, and Pearl Tsai for the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Olympics in January 1993. Excruciatingly difficult, it featured Marvin Minsky and other campus luminaries wandering about in the Acme Institute, an MIT-like place filled with computer science and Al references as well as inside jokes. Zork clearly influenced not only MIT-referential IF works like The Lurking Horror and GC, but all other interactive fiction that draws a connection between the simulated world, full of devious puzzles and fantastic elements, and our own contemporary and more mundane reality.

  One might question whether Zork's technical advances were actually so striking and of real importance to the interactor and to the development of interactive fiction. Certainly the Implementors did not think they were staggering; in reply to help, Zork stated, "You are dealing with a fairly stupid parser" Anderson (1985b) wrote that the early work was "in some ways ... better than the classic Adventure at this time, but mostly it was the next game to come along, and it wasn't even the only contender" (4). But Zork did sport several advances that were used to good effect. These were in both essential components: the parser, which translates player-typed text into actions, and the world model, which simulates a narrative and puzzle-filled world to the degree required for an enjoyable interaction.

  The parser, "fairly stupid" as it might be, was a substantial upgrade from that of Adventure, which only accepts commands of one or two words. When there was only one appropriate object for a requested action, the parser would assume the interactor wished to use that object; otherwise, it would ask a question to disambiguate the command (Lebling, Blank, and Anderson 1979).This worked particularly well in the case of actions like digging, which required tools. When a command was issued to dig with an inappropriate tool (e.g., diq in the sand with the screwdriver), the parser would generate a reply of the form "Digging with the screwdriver is slow and tedious." Since "the hands" were designated as tools, the parser, upon receiving the simple command diq, would assume-in the absence of any other tool-that "the hands" were to be used. It would then generate a response that-although unanticipated-was particularly apt and pleasing to the Implementors: "Digging with the hands is slow and tedious" (Anderson 2001). The parser folded prepositions into the different supported actions, so that "look at" and "look under" were considered as if they were separate verbs and were translated into different actions (Lebling, Blank, and Anderson 1979). Direct and indirect objects were recognized, and some verbs were allowed to take multiple direct objects.

  The world model was enhanced to implement actors, who could perform actions in much the sane way that the adventurer could, and could also be commanded by the interactor. The robot, who lacked many of the adventurer's abilities but who could be commanded to solve a puzzle, was the first actor implemented. Although not the most charming character in interactive fiction (in contrast to the robot Floyd from Planet fall, who is certainly ranked among the most engaging characters in the form), the robot is an interesting part of the world of Zork. The robot is a technological artifact, almost free of personality. The best pre-robotic entity to compare it to might be the golem of Jewish folklore. (There is no hint of the more sinister proto-robot, Frankenstein's monster.) When the robot is able to accomplish some task, it emits a "Whirr, buzz, click!," while all of its other utterances are what might be termed polite refusals. After the player character had asked the robot to read something, for instance, it would reply "My vision is not sufficiently acute to do that." If commanded to eat, it somehow speaks the reply "I am sorry but that is difficult for a being with no mouth." This robot, although an uninteresting conversational partner, did first allow the player character to direct another entity to accomplish tasks on his or her behalf. This opened up new possibilities for puzzles, and also brought on interesting narrative implications, to be explored later in works like Planetfall.

  Vehicles were another new part of the world. They were implemented as if they were mobile rooms, contained in the top-level rooms of the dungeon (Lebling, Blank, and Anderson 1979). The boat and the balloon were the vehicles placed in Zork. By constraining them to linear paths, in order to avoid unusual situations that might rupture other parts of the world model or require inordinate amounts of new programming, the Implementors provided novel but carefully directed experiences of travel. Other aspects of the simulated world improved upon the Adventure universe:

  Containment: Objects may have contents. Bottles can contain water and be open or closed. Some objects are transparent. Some objects must be unlocked before they can be opened. The capacity of an object is limited. (For example, a paper bag won't hold as much as a bucket.)

  Weight: Objects have weight.A solid gold coffin weighs a lot more than a newspaper. The amount a player can carry depends on the total number of objects carried and on the total weight
of the objects and their contents.

  Position: An object may be in, on, or under another object. (Lebling, Blank, and Anderson 1979)

  Perhaps as important as these planned-out improvements were the ad hoc changes made by the implementors in response to email requests and based on their surveillance of other users' sessions. As Anderson (2001) said, "We spied on people playing Zork. This was ITS.You could see all the output from a terminal. We would `watch' people this way." ITS was MIT's Incompatible Timesharing System, an intentionally insecure operating system made to facilitate group work. When the Implementors got a reasonable request or spied someone floundering due to what seemed like a parser failure, they would tweak Zork.

  Had interactive fiction only accepted two-word inputs instead of being pushed by the Zork parser advances toward accepting text that is more like normal English, there is little chance that the appeal of interactive fiction would have lasted beyond the era of command-line home computing. Pointing and clicking would simply be good enough when compared to a verb-noun command. Instead, Zork took the first step toward a more symmetrical interaction between interactor and IF work, an exchange more like English conversation-one that cannot be easily replaced with mouse clicks (Montfort 2000). Improvements in the world model also paved the way for many interesting IF works. Michael Berlyn's 1983 Suspended (published by Infocom), for instance, used the "actor" enhancement to provide a fragmented sort of player character, whose senses were divided between different robots that could be commanded. Infocom also brought out, in 1985, Steven Meretzky's A Mind Forever hoyaging, which simulated an enormous city; some of the sense of scale was given by using vehicles of the sort developed in Zork and implementing a subway system. Hundreds of later works used containment and position to achieve a richer and more detailed world. While Zork made important progress as potential literature, its improvements to interactive fiction's technical infrastructure were definitely of value as well.

 

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