Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction

by Nick Montfort

  Deadline included an interesting touch of metalepsis: A book within its world was supposedly a novelization of the interactive fiction work Deadline. One critic found the fatal effect of reading the ending of this book to be a sign that "the writers at Infocom seem afraid to be taken too seriously" (McGath 1984, 29); another identified it as "one of the more brutal types of metalepsis yet invented, or perhaps dyslepsis is a better word for it" (Aarseth 1997, 118).A sort of dyslepsis can also be seen in Suspended and can occur in non-interactive narrative also, as in Julio Cortazar's short story "Continuidad de los Parques" (Continuity of Parks). In the final reply of Deadline, after the interactor has figured out who committed the crime, another linear story is revealed, the "author's summary of the story." Interestingly, this text suggests that the interactor devise an independent summary first. This might be done so the interactor can see how close to the author's version he or she can get, but it might also suggest that the author's version of the story is not the only valid one. Solving the crime isn't the only possibility, of course: "The variety of possible outcomes is very impressive" (McGath 1984, 33).

  Deadline has a different sort of appeal than Zork and Adventure do. The player character in those earlier two works quests through a fantasy landscape, and the important story (however dull it might be) transpires during the interactive exchange; it was told when the potential narrative was actualized. In Deadline, the interactor is not a party to any of the important events-those events that Blank calls the "story," of which the previous conclusion is a summary. This entire story takes place before the first opportunity for the player character to act within Deadline's world. The detective simply uncovers that earlier, hidden story through exploration, interrogation, and investigation. Treasures are to be found in Zork, while secret events are the treasures of Deadline. This is a better reward for some, but it means that the interactor has control over only how this earlier story is discovered. In contrast, although the particular story elements of Zork might be uninteresting, the interactor can exercise some influence over what important episodes might occur and in what order. A very different work that nevertheless has the uncovering of previous events as its goal would later be seen in the independent era. This was the 1997 Babel by Ian Finley, a detective-free science fiction work.

  The Witness by Stu Galley was the next Infocom mystery, published in 1983. It was a more hard-boiled detective story, clearly influenced by pulp detective fiction and film noir. Lebling's Suspect followed, taking place at a costume ball. It began with the player character being framed for a murder. The interactor had to direct the player character to conduct an unofficial investigation in order to try to prove that someone else committed the crime. Suspect's debut was notable. It was unveiled at a party in a mansion during the 1984 Consumer Electronics Show, around the time of Infocom's greatest financial success. Despite the spectacular rollout, Suspect did little to revitalize the detective genre of interactive fiction.

  The two other works Infocom published with a "Mystery" label were Ballyhoo and Moonmist. These two had some similarities to the three early mysteries and are more akin to them than to some treasure-collecting Zorkstyle work.They were fairly different from Deadline, The Witness, and Suspect in many respects, however.

  Infocom published three spell-casting adventures, set in the Zork world. The first of these was Enchanter by Blank and Lebling, in 1983. Meretzky's Sorcerer was released the following year; it incorporated the sort of humor for which that author became known. Lebling's Spellbreaker was published the year after that. These three added spells to the Zork world. The player character is a Wizard, who grows in ability throughout the series and can cast an increasingly powerful array of spells-after locating the scrolls upon which they are written. This power was hinted at in the end of Zork II, when the player character gained the Wizard of Frobozz's magic wand and could go about casting spells. In the Enchanter trilogy, spell-casting becomes the usual way of solving problems and making progress.

  While the adventure-game puzzle in Zork and Adventure usually required the interactor to think about the way machines work, or to consider physics, or to imagine the interaction of different everyday objects, the spells of the new trilogy required a different kind of thinking. To solve an earlier puzzle, the interactor might think, "What object that I'm carrying or that I have found earlier will work to get me past this obstacle, given the usual way that objects work and the familiar laws of nature?" In Enchanter, this thinking had to be broadened to include very unusual, supernatural powers conferred on the player character by means of spells.

  Spellbreaker dealt most directly with the waning of magic in the Zork world, a situation much like the one in Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy, which Lebling has named as an inspiration for the Enchanter series (Masterson 1986).The work has several very difficult puzzles, deeply related to the themes of the works and its possible narratives. Spellbreaker is considered by aficionados to be one of Infocom's best.

  Beyond Zork by Brian Moriarty, published in 1987, incorporated elements from role-playing games, but also (as might be anticipated from Moriarty, the author of Trinity and Wishbringer) had a well-described IF world that was rich with interesting situations. The Dungeons and Dragons influence is certainly noticeable when beginning Beyond Zork, since the interactor is required to assign ability points to the player character before the main textual exchange even begins. Combat plays a small but noticeable part in Beyond Zork, as does the use of magic items. One interesting feature is seen in how the world itself is subtly reconfigured each time a new traversal is begun, although the same areas are present in each. Despite this randomness, mapping is unnecessary, since an on-screen map is implemented (in this alltext work) by use of a special font. The current room description is always visible beside this map, at the top of the screen.

  The overall goal of Beyond Zork is, rather farcically, to acquire the powerful Coconut of Quendor. Nelson (2001) described its prologue as "Selfindulgent, self-parodying, slack, told in the past tense, uninteractive and basically dumb" (371).While this work brings in references to Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz alongside mention of earlier interactive fiction, such as Wishbringer and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it was not among the finest of Infocom's works in terms of its writing. Its IF world-the land of Quendor-is above ground, very expansive, and populated, quite unlike the Great Underground Empire. The overall plot is no masterpiece; one reviewer noted that "one does not learn anything about the whereabouts of the coconut until well into the game, and finding it at the end amounts to stumbling over it. What plot Beyond Zork has is often entertaining, but it hardly makes a coherent whole" (Stevens 1988). But despite these mediocre aspects, as an interesting program and at the level of interface, Beyond Zork made some progress.

  Steven Meretzky's Zork Zero, released in 1998, is far wackier than Blank and Lebling's Zork I-III. This work features graphics (some puzzles, such as a rebus puzzle, cannot be solved by looking only at the text) and a slick interface, but text remains central. Meretzky expands Blank and Lebling's sketchy historical notes regarding the origins of the Great Underground Empire to create a prequel that is consistent in many ways but different in tone. Zork Zero lacks grim elements such as earnest demonic summoning or mortal combat with underground denizens. The player character has inherited a valuable fragment of parchment from an ancestor. The original parchment owner (who is controlled by the interactor in an introductory segment) saw the wizard Megaboz slay Lord Dimwit Flathead and place a curse upon the land. In the main IF world, almost a century later, the curse's maturity date has arrived. The player character must race around, aided by the parchment, and gather a bunch of items (of course) in order to dispel the curse. Noninteractive texts like the parchment scrap are often important in interactive fiction-particularly if they hold needed instructions, since that gives them an affinity not only to magical spells but also to computer programs.The most interesting character that Zork Zero supplies is the jester, who i
s in some ways like the Wizard of Frobozz. The puzzles are many, but most are, as Duncan Stevens (1998) noted, "classic logic puzzles cribbed directly into the game." Infocom's last text-centered Zork work seemed, for the most part, to indicate the sterility of the treasure hunt format.

  Three graphical games that were also set in the Zork world were produced by Activision in the 1990s-extending the lifespan of the original Zork concept through twenty years of game development. These Activision games are Return to Zork (1993), Zork Nemesis (1996), and Zork Grand Inquisitor (1997).As a tie-in to the launch of the last of these,Activision commissioned original Zork creator Blank and Implementor Mike Berlyn to design an all-text interactive fiction, Zork: The Undiscovered Underground. The player character in this instance was a feeble parody of an adventurer who had only a plastic sword. Grues at a grue convention wandered around like businesspeople. Perhaps this was appropriate for this rare piece of interactive fiction that was funded by a software company in the late 1990s: Two of the most prominent IF authors of the 1980s had been asked, after all, to put together a little promotional gimmick for a graphical game.

  Interactive fiction had, before 1983, generally presupposed a single heroic character whom the interactor would control. Hence the player character had been, up to this point, the protagonist of all possible narratives of the interactive fiction work. In Berlyn's Suspended, released that year, this assumption was shattered-as were the central consciousness and perceptions of player character. As mentioned in the discussion of hypodiegesis in chapter 1, there is, supposedly, a protagonist of Suspended, who rests in a cylindrical chamber in semiconsciousness, charged with responsibility for managing the infrastructure of a planet from within a far-future underground complex. The interactor does, as before, control this one main character. In Suspended, however, the usual commands to effect action and motion are futile. The interactor instead types instructions to and senses the world through six robots, each with a different set of sensors and effectors. The player character's perceptions and abilities are therefore fragmented into those of six hypodiegetic player characters: only one robot can see in color, only one robot can hear, only one robot is well-equipped for lifting heavy items. To solve Suspended, the interactor must direct these robots to act, deploying the right one to handle each problem that arises.

  Berlyn was one of the few who came to Infocom early on from someplace other than MIT-it was Colorado, in his case. Berlyn describes his first encounter with interactive fiction as follows:

  I kind of tripped into it ... In 1979, I was writing novels and decided to purchase a personal computer to use for word processing. After six months, I discovered the original adventure game, Colossal Cave. I just thought, "Wow, this is really interesting. I should learn how these are done, because it's writing and computers and a lot of fun ..."

  I set about teaching myself how to program computers ... In about six months, I'd written a game, and my wife and I started a software publishing company, called Sentient Software. (qtd. in Katz 1996, 153)

  Through Sentient, Berlyn published the science fictional work Oo-topos (written with his wife, Muffy Berlyn) and then his Cybowg, both in 1981. The player character in this latter work was in need of repair. scan replaced the familiar look command. The text was in the first person, with the "I" of the generated text representing the cyborg's computer component. Other possible commands to this computer side included opinion, to ask for advice. When conversing with another character, the interactor would select responses from a menu rather than typing them in. Although Cyborg's parser was not as capable as Infocom's, it worked well. Three years after its release one reviewer called it, even in comparison to Infocom's works, "one of the best-written adventures available" (McGath 1984, 74).

  In Suspended Berlyn broke that damaged cyborg even more severelyinto six robots controlled by a motionless human. Even figuring out what exactly the objects were in different parts of the complex made for a riddle for the interactor. Here are two descriptions of the same area, by different robots:

  Internal map reference-Gamma Repair

  Oh, to reach the end of one's previous existence, to travel the roadways of life when they are most needed, only to end up here, reborn.

  The glider is not in motion.

  In the room with me is Waldo.

  A cage to hold our ancestry sits on the floor, meek and timid, yet unwilling to openly share.

  Internal map reference-Gammna Repair

  I have reached the south end of this area.The walkway ends here. The walkway is not in motion.

  In the room with me is Poet.

  A large object sits before me. Sonar indicates it is hollow, but not empty.

  As intriguing as the different sensory perspectives and capabilities were, and as effective as the incorporation of board game and simulation elements was, Suspended suffered in terms of its possible narratives. It was essentially a sort of complex system toy, like SimCity, with a few interesting events that could transpire. McGath (1984) noted that certain final replies, "the messages you get for finishing ... with a mediocre score [...] are unnecessarily insulting, considering that you have just saved the world" (36).The extreme difficulty of Suspended caused much of the interactor's focus to be on thinking about how to manipulate variables and about the layout of the world and the position of the robots. (A map and six robot tokens were included in the package to help the interactor deal with this aspect of the game.) Once every robot had visited every possible area and the world was fully explored, different sensory perspectives did little to enhance the original sense of strange ness and wonder.While the robots had different ways of describing the world (sometimes, as with Poet, fanciful ones) and could do different things to act within it, these essentially emotionless and correctly functioning beings only hinted at the possibility of a more interesting and multiple subjectivity in interactive fiction. Nevertheless, Suspended was a trailblazing work that too few have tried to follow.

  A similarly hard science fiction work, Lebling's Starcross was released in 1982. Starcross was Infocom's first science fiction work. (Zork I-111 had a few clearly science fiction elements, but these were installed in a fantasy framework.) Starcross brought the space-traveling player character onto a large and fairly desolate alien vessel. The work, which was most directly influenced by Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, was fall of puzzles requiring logical and mathematical reasoning.

  The only Infocom work to follow the example of Suspended by providing multiple characters, all under the control of the interactor at once, was Journey: The Quest Begins. This very late work by Marc Blank, published in 1989, included graphics and a well-designed interface but did not accept natural language input and so was not, strictly speaking, interactive fiction as discussed in this book. It was touted as a role-playing game. The group under control-a party of adventurers a la Dungeons and Dragons-was less original in concept than was the group in Suspended, but the characters themselves were less robotic, as one might expect from their being human and from the later date of this title.

  Infidel (1983) took on some interesting social and political issues, offering the first strong critique of traditional adventuring goals. It was at one point called "the most literary of Infocom's adventures to date" (McGath 1984, 41), but those interested in the literary qualities of early interactive fiction have preferred to look at Deadline. In form, Infidel is a typical, puzzle-filled adventure, set in a pyramid that the archaeologically inclined player character is supposed to loot. This nameless character awakens alone in the Egyptian desert, abandoned by the hired dig team. They have left in anger, a note explains, "after what you said of our rites." Most supplies are gone, although the note explains that the crew intended to leave enough for the player character to make it back to civilization alive. To successfully traverse the work, the interactor must figure out how to locate the pyramid, get inside it, and explore it. In the pyramid the interactor must have the player character avoid traps, must decipher "hier
oglyphs" (which are analphabetic ASCII characters), and must have the player character manipulate parts of the structure to allow access to its deeper reaches. Infidel was created by Suspended author Mike Berlyn and Patricia Fogleman.

  The highly successful film Raiders of the Lost Ark came out two years before Infidel did, and it was clearly a strong influence. One puzzle requires the player character to knock over a heavy statue, as Indiana Jones did in the film. Descending doors of stone and a weight-sensitive, treasure-bearing altar evoke the opening sequence of Raiders.