Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction

by Nick Montfort

  The thief, who appears randomly to steal treasures the adventurer is holding, is certainly the most memorable character in Zork. This is attributed variously to the better writing associated with the thief or to his nature as an IF daemon or bot (Leonard 1998, 84). In fact the thief is important to the development of interactive fiction because he functions as a true villain, not simply an obstacle or opponent. It is his role in the interaction and in the potential narratives that result that makes the thief so effective.

  Phil Goetz (1994) writes that "Zork was ... the first adventure whose non-player characters had personality. The thief was a gentleman gone wrong, with good manners, a cynical sense of humour and the willingness to slit your throat in a moment." That the thief has a true personality may be an overstatement. Comparing the descriptive text that constitutes Adventure's pirate (a sort of proto-thief) with that of Zork's thief can provide some insight into the difference in personality. From Adventure:

  Out from the shadows behind you pounces a bearded pirate! "Har, bar," he chortles, "I'll just take all this booty and hide it away with me chest deep in the maze!" He snatches your treasure and vanishes into the gloom.

  There are faint rustling noises from the darkness behind you. As you turn toward them, the beam of your lamp falls across a bearded pirate. He is carrying a large chest. "Shiver me timbers!" he cries,"I've been spotted! I'd best hie meself off to the maze to hide me chest!"

  Here is a selection of many brief descriptive outputs regarding the thief from Zork:

  Someone carrying a large bag is casually leaning against one of the walls here. He does not speak, but it is clear from his aspect that the bag will be taken only over his dead body.

  Your opponent, determining discretion to be the better part of valor, decides to terminate this little contretemps. With a rueful nod of his head, he steps backward into the gloom and disappears.

  A `lean and hungry' gentleman just wandered through. Finding nothing of value, he left disgruntled.

  A seedy-looking individual with a large bag just wandered through the room. On the way, he quietly abstracted all valuables from the room and from your possession, mumbling something about, "Do unto others before ..."

  The other occupant just left carrying his large bag.You may not have noticed that he robbed you blind first.

  The thief, a man of good breeding, refrains from attacking a helpless opponent.

  The thief, forgetting his essentially genteel upbringing cuts your throat.

  The thief, who is essentially a pragmatist, dispatches you as a threat to his livelihood.

  Most of the thief's character is described apart from any encounter with him, in response to info:

  Of special note is a thief (always carrying a large bag) who likes to wander around in the dungeon (he has never been seen by the light of day). He likes to take things. Since he steals for pleasure rather than profit and is somewhat sadistic, he only takes things which you have seen. Although he prefers valuables, sometimes in his haste he may take something which is worthless. From time to time, he examines his take and discards objects which he doesn't like. He may occasionally stop in a room you are visiting, but more often he just wanders through and rips you off (he is a skilled pickpocket).

  Clearly, much more potential text is available to describe the thief than the pirate. The text by itself cannot tell the whole story of who the thief is and how he functions within Zork. Encounters with the thief will certainly tend to vary more than encounters with Adventure's pirate. Still, this text demonstrates that Goetz's conclusion-that the thief is really endowed with personality the pirate lacks is somewhat questionable. The thief is drawn from a stock Dungeons and Dragons player character class. The brief description of the startled pirate may be more original and humorous than any particular text associated with the thief. The pirate chortles and speaks with pithy but piratic diction that is a bit more pleasing than "Do unto others before ..." However, the thief is a noticeable improvement over the pirate for one important narrative reason: the thief can be killed by the adventurer-indeed, must be killed in order for the interactor to successfully traverse Zork.

  Writing about Adventure, Mary Ann Buckles (1985) noted that "[Vladimir] Propp believed villainy to be the most important function in the folktales he examined ... In my view, the lack of true villainy constitutes one of the main structural and ideational differences between folktales and Adventure" (107). She described a villain as "the symbolic representation of forces working to seemingly hinder, but actually promoting, the hero's or heroine's development" (107), adding,

  In Adventure ... I don't believe one can speak of villainy. The two types of figures who oppose the hero, dwarves and the pirate, are not capable of "evil." They do things that hinder and threaten the reader; they steal the reader's treasure and even "kill" the reader, although "death" is meaningless and not even always permanent in the game. But since Adventure's "villains" are not representations of anything else, neither parental figures nor psychological drives or impulses, their deeds are destructive without being "wicked.".. They are stick figures which have nothing to do with ethics, "good" or "evil," or aspects of personal development. (107-108)

  Buckles has one more complaint regarding the pirate: "when the pirate steals the reader's treasure in Adventure, the reader regains it by finding it. The triumph and revenge aspect [of the folktale] is missing entirely" (124).

  Whatever the general applicability of Propp's theories to interactive narrative may be, these points about why Adventure is structurally unsatisfying are grounded in important concerns, and they help explain the effectiveness of the thief. He can be read as a manifestation of meaningless greed-perhaps even the same greed that is driving the adventurer to loot the dungeon. (One of the sections of the dungeon is a bank that the adventurer must rob, and in the Gallery, where a lone painting is found, the initial description notes that "there is still one chance for you to be a vandal.") Seen this way, Zork's thief does begin to represent the villain Buckles finds lacking in Adventure. The most important feature of the thief is that he must be encountered and killed by the player character in a successful traversal of Zork. The adventurer can only prevail over the thief after significant experience has been acquired; a battle in which the adventurer is victorious ends with the demise of the thief and the recovery of the stolen treasures. The folktale revenge element lacking in Adventure is present in Zork.

  Finally, the thief promotes the development of the adventurer in two ways: by serving as an incentive to explore more of the dungeon and improve in rank, and by unwittingly assisting the adventurer in gaining access to a treasure.

  Specifically, the thief has to be "given" the jewel-encrusted egg that is found above ground, in a nest that is found up a tree outside the house. Since the egg can be taken directly to the trophy case with no chance of the thief stealing it, the interactor must choose to direct the adventurer below ground to either give the egg to the thief or have him steal it. After doing this, and then dispatching the thief in combat, the adventurer will find that the thief has carefully opened the egg, revealing another treasure.

  These aspects of the thief make him a complex figure in comparison to Adventure's simple and small menagerie; he is both a helper and a villain. His role in the experience of Zork from start to successful finish, rather than his turn-to-turn behavior, is likely the reason that, in a letter to XYZZY News in which he reports a Zork I bug, one interactor wrote, "I always hated the stupid thief. Killing that lean-and-hungry not-so-gentleman with his own stolen stiletto is one of the more satisfying things I've ever done with my computer" (Gildemeister 1996).

  Most of the opponents who deal with the adventurer violently and have the potential to kill the adventurer (i.e., the troll and the thief) must be killed to win Zork.An exception is the violent and potentially fatal cyclops, who is too mighty for the adventurer to dispatch but who can be dealt with conclusively in another way. (That the cyclops is dispatched non-fatally is consistent
with the archetypical adventurer, Odysseus, escaping from Polyphemus without killing him.) The one opponent who never inflicts actual physical harm on the adventurer is the Wumpus-rejected vampire bat. To enter his lair without getting a one-way flight into the coal mine, the adventurer must use a nonviolent tactic, bringing an object that causes the bat to cower. The ways of dealing with opponents in Zork are therefore more consistent and systematic than they are in Adventure. In that IF work, a dragon who does not necessarily harm the adventurer must be killed-in a way that amuses but fails to even have literal meaning.

  Other memorable characters in interactive fiction relied on the thief's success as a character who plays an essential role in the potential narrative. Not all of them were villains: Floyd in Steven Meretzky's 1983 Planetfall (from Infocom) had an important role as companion and helper.

  Although successful, Zork was a very early and rough effort in the history of interactive fiction. The initial simple quest (accumulate all the treasures) saw an endgame added to it after 1977, incorporating an interesting twist that was absent from its contemporary IF works. As important as it was in the history of interactive fiction, Zork is not a masterwork by today's standards. MIT's answer to Adventure led interactive fiction onto a more satisfying course, however, making many advances by improving interactive fiction as an artifact that comments on technical culture, as world model and parser, and as a machine for interactively generating satisfying narratives.

  Many college campuses in the United States were one-hit wonders when it came to Adventure follow-ups. Students from MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, did go on to found Infocom. Another exception to the rule could be seen in Cambridge, England. Programmers there produced a massive work of interactive fiction that grew to dwarf Adventure and Zork and also devised a development system that helped others produce IF works throughout the 1980s. Shortly after Adventure and Zork made their way across the puddle, programmers at Essex University in England took off from interactive fiction in a different direction, creating the MUD, or Multiple User Dungeon, discussed in chapter 8. According to Nelson (1999b),

  The central computer of Cambridge University, England, an IBM mainframe usually called "Phoenix" after its operating system, was one of those to receive "Advent" (a.k.a. "Colossal Cave") and "Zork" (a.k.a. "Dungeon") in the late 1970s. Two graduate students,Jon Thackray and David Seal, began a game called "Acheton" in 1978-9: with the aid of Jonathan Partington it expanded for another two years. Possibly the first game written outside America, by 1981 it seems likely that it was also the largest in the world (it has 403 locations). "Acheton" was written with a game assembler contemporary with Infocom's proprietory "ZIL': unlike ZIL, Seal and Thackray's game assembler was available for public use, the public in question being all users of Phoenix c. 1980-95.

  Acheton, like Adventure and Zork, features an outdoor area, underground area, and endgame part of the world-even a last lousy point is included-but it is, as one recent reviewer wrote, "quite a bit tougher and more cruel" than its American predecessors (Russotto 2000).The player character is frequently killed without warning, as when walking around, picking up a treasure, or closing an empty safe. There are numerous mazes. As Russotto recently put it, "When the player is tempted to write a Java program to discover a Hamiltonian path through a maze, the maze is perhaps a bit too difficult." While a non-programmer like Tracy Kidder could get the hang of Adventure, Acheton was clearly esoteric.

  This extremely difficult challenge was appreciated, though, because Acheton effectively inspired programmers in Cambridge to create other works of interactive fiction using its development system. Fourteen such works were introduced (Meier and Persson 2001; Nelson 1999b), as shown in table 4.1.

  Although, as already mentioned, another similar development system, F, was created at the University ofWaterloo in Canada, that one did not see such wide use. By creating a free development system, even one for a small, local group of programmers, Seal and Thackray helped lay the groundwork for the broader authorship of interactive fiction by individuals. In the 1990s, after commercial interactive fiction had foundered, the rise of this type of development would become central to continued progress in the form, as described in chapter 7. The most important contribution to independently authored interactive fiction in the 1990s was almost certainly Graham Nelson's development of Inform and his authorship of Curses. (Nelson (1999a) notes that Jonathan Partington, who was involved in authoring seven of the fifteen works listed here and was the most active Cambridge IF developer, was "by a curious coincidence" his topology tutor at Cambridge; Nelson was also a Phoenix user.) But before the era of individual authorship outside of academia, a commercial heyday would occur. Just as Zork saw commercial distribution to home computer users by Infocom, many of the previously mentioned works were ported to microcomputers and distributed by one of many companies in the United Kingdom involved with the development and publication of interactive fiction-a company that, in another interesting mathematical tie-in, was named Topologika. The next chapter chronicles the shift of interactive fiction development to places outside the university and the rise of commercial interactive fiction.

  TABLE 4.1

  Interactive fiction works developed at Cambridge in the Acheron system, with the authors' names and login names (frequently used in speech by Phoenix users) where these were available

  Acheron, Jon Thackray, David Seal, and Jonathan R. Partington (JGT1, DJS6, JRP1)

  Murdac, Jon Thackray and Jonathan R. Partington (JGT1 and JRP1)

  Avon, Jon Thackray and Jonathan R. Partington (JGT1 and JRP1)

  BrandX, Jonathan Mestel and Peter Killworth (AJM8 and PDK1), 1979

  Hamil, Johnathan R. Partington (JRP1), 1980

  Quondam, Rod Underwood (RU10), 1980

  Hezarin, Steve Tinney, Alex Ship, and Jon Thackray, 1980

  Xeno, Jonathan Mestel (AJM8)

  Fyleet, Jonathan R. Partington (JRP1), 1985

  Crobe, Jonathan R. Partington (JRP1), 1986

  Sangraal, Jonathan Partington (JRP1), 1987

  Nidus, Adam Atkinson (AJFA1), 1987

  Parc, (JR26)

  Xerb, Andrew Lipson

  Spycatcher, Jonathan R. Partington (JRP1)

  Note: The commercial release of BrandX was called Philosopher's Quest. Some dates are unknown, but the list is sorted into an approximately chronological order; Spycatcher was the last Phoenix game, around 1988-1989.

  Adventure is considered the great original epic of interactive fiction. Infocom's works call for a grandiose comparison made on a slightly different metaphorical ground. Whoever the "Shakespeare" playwright actually was-common or noble, working largely alone or in close collaboration with a theater company-Shakespeare wrote, remarkably, not just the greatest English-language play, by critical consensus, but almost all of the greatest English-language plays. Similarly, the interactive fiction creators at Infocom devised practically all of the best-loved IF works in the history of the form. They certainly produced the favorites of the commercial era. Infocom's achievements were not surpassed, and the technical and thematic territory the company explored was not substantially extended, until independent interactive fiction authors started working in new ways in the 1990s. Infocom's development of interactive fiction as potential narrative and its refinement of the adventure-game puzzle far surpassed what was being done by any other company, including those that created graphical games. A critic writing in the commercial era said that for the text adventure category, "Infocom is considered by many clearly to be the industry leader" (McGath 1984, 27). Another author and critic of hypertext fiction has noted, more recently, that the company's more advanced text-based works "brought considerable sophistication and nuance to the form" (Moulthrop 1999).

  The narrative aspects of the form were touted by Infocom. The term "interactive fiction" appeared on all its software packages and the company sometimes referred to its works as "stories." (Nevertheless, its works are usually called "Infocom games" by all who di
scuss them.) Infocom became the first company-in fact, the first entity of any sort-to openly declare that the text adventure had a literary aspect worth developing. At the same time, its works, with the exception of A Mind Forever Voyaging, were riddled with puzzles. In a 1984 issue of the company's newsletter, then called The New Zork Times, the company confirmed the central place of problem solving in its works, naming puzzles as the essential feature that distinguishes interactive fiction from a printed text:

  Although our games are interactive fiction, they are more than just stories: they are also a series of puzzles. It is these puzzles that transform our text from an hour's worth of reading to many, many hours' worth of thinking.... The value of our games is that they will provide many hours of stimulating mental exercise. (Infocom, Inc. 1984)

  The company's stated belief in the centrality of problem solving should explain-if the nature of the market was not explanation enough-why Infocom did not focus on creating what might more easily be seen as artistic and literary works that favored exploration, communication with characters, or alternate plot progressions.Yet Infocom did make some progress along these lines, and advanced the state of the literary art by coupling the textually described worlds and situations with carefully crafted puzzles in ways that great riddlers might, in provocative and affecting ways.