The fame of Zork I eclipses its actual importance to interactive fiction. That game brought the more advanced elements in mainframe Zork to the home computer user, to be sure, and it became the basis of Infocom's commercial success.Yet Infocom's first release, when compared to its mainframe ancestor, features only slight improvements, whether considered in traditional terms of puzzlecraft and literary merit or seen in the context of world and riddle.
One important novelty was introduced in Zork I, however:The microcomputer work provides alternate ways to solve certain puzzles. The order in which puzzles were solved might have varied from session to session in the mainframe Zork and in Adventure, but this change provided a new way in which interactors could influence the generated narratives. Mike Dornbrook, who served as the game's main tester (he had never played the game on the mainframe and was appropriately naive) said he suggested several alternate solutions to Zork I puzzles that he found obscure; Blank and Lebling took some of his advice (Dorbrook 2000).
In Zork I, the Cyclops can be still be frightened away by shouting "Odysseus," but he can also be lulled to sleep with an offer of food.
Upon acquiring all of Zork Is nineteen treasures and placing them in the white house's trophy case, a passage to the Stone Barrow becomes accessible. The interactor can direct the player character into this area, the threshold of Zork II, to win.
Zork II is an important early example of an interactive fiction sequel. This is seldom discussed, no doubt because of how the Zork trilogy originated from fragments of a single mainframe work. Zork II had several noticeable elements not found in the mainframe Zork, though.There was a new antagonist, for instance: the Wizard of Frobozz. The description of the underground surroundings was also considerably enriched. The player character enters this new part of the underground complex through a long and welldescribed "corridor" of different areas, which serve only to introduce the world of this work. Zork II demonstrated that an effective work of interactive fiction could be both extended and improved upon in a sequel.
The Wizard of Frobozz is, as described in Zork II, a "strange little man in a long cloak ... wearing a high pointed hat embroidered with astrological signs. He has a long, stringy, and unkempt beard" This Wizard is Zork II's thief figure, coming and going before there is opportunity for input, so that the interactor cannot command the player character to speak with him or otherwise act on him. The Wizard simply appears, casts a spell by waving his wand and uttering a word beginning with the letter "F," cackles, and vanishes. Certain spells immobilize the player character. Some doom the player character (requiring the interactor to start over), while others such as "Fireproof" do not even particularly annoy. Sometimes the Wizard's spells fizzle and fail, frustrating him. Although the Wizard's repertoire of spells and amusing misfires were in some ways an improvement on the one-trick thief in Zork I, there was little hint of what might motivate the Wizard's actions. This antagonist of Zork II's potential narratives did incorporate some interesting new behaviors. The Wizard is hardly even a very good caricature, though, much less a character; he is as flat and static as a stock folkloric figure.
One of the puzzles in Zork II simply provides a riddle directly: "What is tall as a house, / round as a cup, / and all the king's horses / can't draw it up?" Not only is this a decent riddle, it is also tied in to another puzzle that lies beyond the area where the riddle is inscribed. Other parts of Zork II (taken from late additions to the mainframe Zork) allude to Alice in Wmderland: In the Tea Room, where an evidently mad group has set the table for tea, there are four cakes that seem to be labeled "eat me"; eating one of these allows passage through a rabbit hole to another room, where there is a pool of tears. Here, too, the player must be something of a scientist in order to solve the puzzle posed, trying to eat various cakes and observing the sometimes lethal effects so that the proper course of action can be figured out. Zork II also features a dragon who must be defeated to rescue a princess. The magic sword is not sufficient to dispatch the dragon, who must be defeated through cleverness.
Gathering treasure is an important part of Zork II, but assembling the booty in a trophy case is not the ultimate goal. In order to win, the interactor must have the player character supply these treasures to a powerful demon. This demon (like the robot) will do the adventurer a critical service-after he is propitiated. From the standpoint of the adventurer, Zork II adds a new and innovative motivation to the usual drive to plunder: Satanism. Such demonic elements were also found in Zork: The Malifestro Quest, a spin-off book for children that used a format similar to those of Choose Your Own Adventure books. A Cape Cod newspaper, The Register, reported a denunciation of this book in its 16 May 1995 issue. Jan Leary, the mother of one of this book's readers, called for the book to be removed from the school library and school book fairs. "Such reading promotes demonic worship," Leary said, "and glorifies violence for school children" (qtd. in Infocom, Inc. 1985).The more detailed and interactive Satanic experience of Zork II, in which the player character must summon a demon, enlist him to service, and (essentially) instruct him to murder someone, would no doubt have raised even more severe concerns-if it had even been noticed by parents. Text adventures were inaccessible, however, to those not adept at puzzle solving and not fluent in the dialect of English their parsers understood. This marginalized the form, but it also may have helped it elude strict parental control. By being esoteric, interactive fiction was less likely to be noticed by those who would suppress free expression. It was still noticed by some, though, who seized on any mention of magic (e.g., in the packaging or in advertisements) as proof that, as Steven Meretzky (2002) said, "Infocom was actually the Great Satan."
Zork II contains the Oddly-Angled Room, a particularly confounding pseudomaze. In order to get through it, the player character must move through the rooms in a diamond pattern, as if playing baseball. This puzzle has been rightly decried as involving a confusing intrusion of contemporary culture into a subterranean fantasy world. Similar complaints are not often made about the anachronistic placement of contemporary machinery, engineering, electrical devices (e.g., the brass lantern) and even a robot in different parts of Zork I-III. That sort of juxtaposition appealed to most of the interactors who played the games in the trilogy early on-anyone who used a computer in the early 1980s was necessarily fascinated with technology and was often amused to see it placed in a fantasy context. Since recent technologies are distributed throughout the IF world and cleverly incorporated into puzzles, they help to create a distinctive atmosphere. The baseball pseudomaze is different in that it relies on rules that are not a part of physics, engineering, or logic. The puzzle also points out how Infocom's works, although often set in other countries or in alternate or future worlds, were created in the context of the United States, with American assumptions. A puzzle about baseball is hardly the only case in which American cultural assumptions can be seen to underlie the IF world and its structures and potential narratives; it is only one of the more obvious and easily explained.
The shadowy, misty warrens of Zork III are something of a contrast to the worlds of the earlier Zork works, although a similar blend of technology, fantasy, and swordplay is seen in this final installment, and some of the same Great Underground Empire figures are mentioned. Part of the bleak landscape has hills, an ocean, a lake, and a massive cliff, all of which seem to have been casually transported underground. A "hello, sailor" puzzle refers to something amusing (a prostitutes' greeting and classic computer test message, first referred to in a holy book in Zork I), but most of the game lacks such humor. The player character in Zork III must overcome the puzzles presented and confront the Dungeon Master, an entity familiar from Dungeons and Dragons, as mentioned in chapter 3.
A few signs of life are present in the desolate dungeon. Beside a lush, sunlit cliff, the player character encounters a man who is somewhat reminiscent of the thief in Zork I. A frail old man is found sleeping in one room.
Extensive conversation is not possi
ble with these figures-who turn out to be the same protean individual-but the interaction required to make progress does go beyond the troll slaughtering and thief slaughtering of Zork I.
Locations like the Crystal Grotto add color to the otherwise dim subterranean setting. More dominant in Zork III are the several areas that consti tute the Land of Shadow, "a land of dark shadows and shallow hills, which stretch out in all directions." Puzzles in Zork III are few but intricate, as is suggested by the top score of 7 points.
One of Zork III's challenges, the Royal Puzzle, is often singled out as Infocom's hardest. Typical room descriptions are not used, as seen when the player character first enters the puzzle:
The architecture of this region is getting complex, so that further descriptions will be diagrams of the immediate vicinity in a 3 x 3 grid. The walls here are rock, but of two different types-sandstone and marble. The following notations will be used:
To solve the puzzle (without recourse to a walkthrough), the interactor has to map the area, discovering which portions of the puzzle will shift about and which are fixed in place. As soon as the player character drops into the maze, this adventurer is trapped, and pushing the wrong block the wrong way can make it impossible to get out. Beneath one of the puzzle's great blocks is the prize, a book. Two other blocks have ladders affixed to their sides. One of these can, after some shifting about of the blocks, be moved into place beneath the original entryway to allow the player character to escape the puzzle.
The elvish sword of the previous Zork works is found early on wedged into a stone in a throwaway reference to Arthurian legend. When the player character later encounters a hooded figure in Zork III's Land of Shadow, the sword magically appears in hand. After typing "kill figure with sword" again and again, the interactor will (eventually) be able to have the player character defeat this figure. Then, on removing the hood, a moment reminiscent of the 1980 The Empire Strikes Back (when Luke encounters Darth Vader's figure on Dagobah) is played out: "You slowly remove the hood from your badly wounded opponent and recoil in horror at the sight of your own face, weary and wounded. A faint smile comes to the lips and then the face starts to change, very slowly, into that of an old, wizened person. The image fades and with it the body of your hooded opponent." The misty setting of this duel even recalls the thick atmosphere of the planet Dagobah, although the caverns of Zork III are mostly lifeless, in contrast to the teeming Dagobah jungle. (This correspondence was noted by a reviewer who wondered "whether George Lucas played this game before creating Return (f the Jedi" (McGath 1984, 32).) In this part of the Great Underground Empire, noYoda figure is on hand to explain the significance of the player character's vision.
In one somewhat dramatic moment in Zork III, Blank and Lebling poked fun at the strict input requirements placed on users by computers, and in particular the Infocom parser's inability to understand typed input that would be clear to a human but might differ by a single character from what the computer would accept. When the player character is near the end of his or her quest and has encountered the Dungeon Master at a door deep within the complex, the old figure says:
"When you feel you are ready, go to the secret door and `SAY "FROTZ OZMOO"'! Go, now!" He starts to leave but turns back briefly and wags his finger in warning. "Do not forget the double quotes!"
In winning Zork III, the adventurer fulfills this prophetic encounter by entering the Treasury of Zork, store of the greatest treasures of the land, and becoming the Great Underground Empire's Dungeon Master:
"Long have I waited for one capable of releasing me from my burden!" He taps you lightly on the head with his staff, mumbling a few well-chosen spells, and you feel yourself changing, growing older and more stooped. For a moment there are two identical mages standing among the treasure, then your counterpart dissolves into a mist and disappears, a sardonic grin on his face.
The final reply is a happy one for the player character, however, who begins "to feel the vast powers and lore ... and thirst for an opportunity to use them."
A set of special inputs, beginning with Zork I and based on some special inputs that were useful in the mainframe Zork, were implemented in almost all of Infocom's works. Some are directives, some commands. Many of these special inputs (among them, quit and inventory, discussed in chapter 1) were found in similar form in Adventure and in other earlier interactive fiction, and many were adopted by other companies. Since Infocom's works were the best known of this era, it is worth listing (with some explanation, in brackets) the company's description of what some of special inputs do in their works. These appear in table 5.2.
In later Infocom works two additional special inputs were supported: oops (to allow a one-word typo to be corrected without the interactor having to type the whole line over again) and undo (to make it as if the previous command had not been issued).
Deadline, by Marc Blank, is a detective mystery, significant in that it broke from the Dungeons and Dragons-style worlds of Adventure, Zork, Haunt, and the early works from Scott Adams's Adventure International. By departing from fantasy and offering a set of characters with whom the player character could converse, Deadline attracted some new sorts of attention, such as a mention in The New York Times Book Review (Rothstein 1983). Much later it would be the main work discussed in the adventure-game chapter of Cybertext (Aarseth 1997).
TABLE 5.2
The special inputs supported by Zork I, most of which are extradiegetic, help to explain a good deal about the way an interactor actually experienced interactive fiction
AGAIN
ZORK will respond as if you had repeated your previous sentence. [Particularly useful in combat situations, which require the interactor to simply type kill opponent with sword over and over.] ...
DIAGNOSE
ZORK gives you a medical report of your physical condition.... [Used to assess the damage from combat and, in Planetfall, from illness. diagnose did not play an important role in later Infocom works.]
LOOK
ZORK describes your surroundings in detail.... [Often used after the room description has scrolled off the top of the screen.]
RESTART
This ... starts the game over from the beginning. [The interactor was expected to run into dead ends frequently, and need to restart.]
RESTORE
Restores a game position you saved ...
SAVE
Saves a game position ... [Saving and restoring are critical to most puzzle-solving. Trying a variety of actions, including some that are likely to kill the player character, is usually necessary.]
SCORE
ZORK shows your current score with the number of moves you have made, and your rank.... [Some sort of scoring is used in most interactive fiction, even when the game aspect of the work is not predominant. The score often the only indicator of how far the player character has progressed through to possible narratives or through the world.]
SCRIPT
... commands your printer to begin printing a transcript of your game session. [Useful for offline study of tricky problems, this directive also allows those who have won a game to print out the final reply as proof of their victory.] ...
UNSCRIPT
This command stops your printer from printing. [To distinguish those inputs that influence the IF world from those that do not, this is considered a directive in this book, not a command.]
VERSION
ZORK responds by showing you the release number and serial number of your copy of the game.
WAIT
This command causes time in the game to pass. Normally, between moves, no time is passing as far as ZORK is concerned ... For example, if you encounter an alien being, you could WAIT and see what it will do.
Source: Infocom 1981, 7.
Note: quit and inventory, already discussed, are omitted from this list.
Reviewer Edward Rothstein described some important ways in which Deadline differed from video games and offered the first bit of credibility to the eme
rging interactive fiction form:
I am not some forensic Pac-Man, proceeding through a pre-existent maze. From my arrival at the Robner mansion, I am a character whose actions affect the world I enter. I arrest a suspect only to find that the grand jury isn't convinced by my evidence. I follow a suspect too obviously, and he just retires to his room. My questions can lead to a second murder-and my carelessness to my own. But there is a unique solution. And to find it, I must often start the case over, re-experience it from different perspectives. The average complete investigation lasts 20 hours; I have spent many more exploring the program's intricate universe. Deadline, in fact, is more like a genre of fiction than a game.
Rothstein pointed out that Infocom's works made use of the power found in mythology and folklore; he compared the resourceful adventurer in Zork and the clever detective in Deadline to Odysseus. He also mentioned that Deadline's limited vocabulary makes interaction less natural than one might hope for.
Cybertext provides a detailed discussion of the nature of adventuregame interaction. One of the many interesting points made with respect to Deadline is that the interactor, who is ignorant of the proper outcome and of what he or she is supposed to do, is not really a "wreader" with authorial power. Instead, the interactor is the target of authorial intrigue. This is a kinder interpretation than, but similar to, one made in the parodical Web periodical Suck.com. An article there suggested that the interactor is usually in the same situation as the protagonist of Christopher Durang's The Actor's Nightmare-thrust upon the stage without any warning, and without having had time to learn lines (Internick 1997).
Aarseth (1997) finds that some of the replies Deadline provides are "pure nonsense" and gives the example of the reply to the command "fingerprint me": "Upon looking over and dusting the me you notice there are no good fingerprints to be found" (116). Actually the response, although unhelpful in the context of trying to win, is sensible, amusing, and perfectly apropos. Aarseth no doubt wanted his detective player character to perform an odd behavior: to stop, ink his hands, and record his own fingerprints on paper in the middle of an investigation. For the work to parse his command differently and come up with an even more odd interpretation was not nonsense, but felicity. Interactors have been encouraged to have fun by prodding the parser in similarly unusual ways. One computer gaming magazine carried this suggestion: "After you've given up for the night trying to find out who the murderer is in Deadline or The Witness, have some fun with the computer. Tell it a joke. Insult it. Type in a sentence which makes no sense" (Gutman 1984).This sort of subversive interaction is not particularly uncommon in any sort of gaming or play situation, since children often use toys for purposes that are different from or even contrary to those intended by toy manufacturers. In interactive fiction, this subversive typing is an interesting way to interact. The interactor is engaged with the work and enjoys the text responses that are provided, but seems to be ignoring the overriding purposes for which the work was created.
Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction Page 16