Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction

by Nick Montfort

  PRISM is eventually allowed access to the Rockvils of 2061, 2071, and then 2081. In these visions of the city, the deterioration of the infrastructure, the increasing misery of the population, and the breakdown of Perry Simm's family become evident as increasingly harsh events play themselves out in the crumbling world. All this is accomplished by means of sparse descriptions of city locations that change very slightly. As is often the case in interactive fiction, a transcript can do little to suggest the power of an interaction with A Mind Forever Voyaging. As PRISM records the events that happen, it soon becomes clear that even with evidence of the Plan's danger, his scientist creator will not be able to stop the Plan from passing. The senator who is sponsoring this oppressive legislation decides that PRISM must be shut down to avoid negative publicity, and a black bag team of saboteurs enters the research facility where PRISM is housed. (This moment is reminiscent not only of an obvious incident in American history, but also of a moment in Suspended, when people enter the underground complex to fatally "replace" the player character with a backup planetary controller.) To solve the problem posed in the frame world requires a lateral leap of thinking; it requires, in fact, that PRISM become a sort of hacker and pirate broadcaster, achieving a victory through subversion of the media.

  A Mind Forever Voyaging, although innovative, was a science fiction work, placing it in an often deprecated genre. It was also the first Infocom work to be released with more demanding hardware requirements, making it available for a smaller number of computers and contributing to its poor commercial performance. It clearly is aligned with dystopian novels such as Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, and 1984, although of course the text that emerges from it does not, by itself, stack up against that found in any of these novels. Still, moments of true power occur in the experience of A Mind Forever Voyaging: when transformed places are first visited, for instance, and when increasingly shocking events occur unexpectedly. The way that events transpire in the generated narratives, in the context of an increasingly familiar but collapsing city, show that interactive fiction can be a serious form, delivering a compelling experience that turns on typed contributions from the interactor. Current IF author Adam Cadre (2001) identifies this work as "the one that got me hooked on IE" One reviewer (who has almost 200 computer game reviews posted on his Web page) calls A Mind Forever Voya,in,~ "a landmark title" that "never ceases to ... amaze and enthrall throughout, which makes the game's ending-possibly the best ever presented in a computer game-seem all the more magical and special." He concludes that A Mind Forever Voyaging is "the finest computer game ever written" (M. Murray 2001). It certainly ranks among the top computer games; in addition, it deserves to be called one of the preeminent works of computer literature.

  In 1986 two Infocom games came out that allowed the interactor to select the player character's gender. One was Leather Goddesses of Phobos, by Meretzky, which was as close as Infocom came to erotica. The work is better characterized as a bawdy space opera. The whole project originated as a running joke: Meretzky kept putting the title on the project board as if it were in development. Then, he was asked to actually develop a work with that title (Greenlee 1996).The interactor can set the computer-produced text to be "tame," "suggestive," or "lewd" (an interesting new type of control similar in some ways to the one type of control the interactor had over descriptive text so far-whether room descriptions are "superbrief," "brief," or "verbose"). But even in the last of these modes the text is hardly torrid, usually featuring little more than juvenile innuendo. By directing the player character to enter either the men's or the women's restroom at the very beginning of the game, the interactor makes another important selection, determining the gender of the player character. (Presumably the gender, or social role of male and female, and the sex, or biological nature of the character, are both determined in this way.)

  Leather Goddesses of Pliobos was a hit for Infocom, but it was not the first work of this sort. Chuck Benton's Softporn Adventure, for instance-the basis for Sierra's later Leisure Suit Larry-was released in 1984. Today there is a whole genre of adult interactive fiction (or AIF) created by individuals; gender and sex of all sorts play a prominent role in it. Some of this may be worth examining from a feminist or gender studies perspective-but, alas, vita brevis. Probably more interesting is the way gender (or rather, the ambiguity of gender) has been treated in an important work from the independent era, Graham Nelson's 1995 Jigsaw. Nelson (2002) discusses the response to the "most notorious feature" of that work, which involves a romance:

  not imposing genders on either of the main characters. I got angry mail from a few homophobic players who believed I was coercing them into the Forbidden Love of Another Man; equally, some gay women wrote to me to say how much they appreciated it. Actually I'd had no particular thought of the gay angle at all, and had simply wanted to have a romance where you could project whatever you liked onto your inamorata. Or inamoratum, I suppose.

  Moownist is the other 1986 Infocom work that allows gender selection. It provides a detective-like setup but without the murders of Deadline, The Witness, and Suspect. In that work, the player character stays overnight in a supposedly haunted house, discovering what is going on there. When the player character announces himself or herself at the gate, the title used can indicate that the player character is male (e.g., "Mister" or "Sir") or female (e.g., "Lady," "Countess"). Other titles not recognized by the work or not gender-specific (e.g., "Sister," "Professor," "Midshipman") will lead to other possible narratives in which the gender of the player character is consistently ducked; generated texts never mention it.

  In both Infocom works the overall experience is similar whether one chooses a male or female player character-it is not really that different even if the "neuter" option is chosen in Moon mist. The same commands work to unlock the plot-controlling puzzles in both cases. There are only subtle differences in the differently gendered interactive experiences. These different experiences of the game and the treatment of gender in these works certainly invite a more extensive critique. The works seem to assert that gender is actually superficial, since the same sorts of events occur whatever gender is selected. The IF worlds that are set up (perhaps in a somewhat utopian mode) provide for men and women to have essentially equal sorts of experiences. Other interactive fiction might be created that provides a variety of experiences and makes a different sort of point. Still other questions remain: Why does the interactor in Leather Goddesses of Phobos get to choose what gender the player character is but not (due to the limited availability of potential paramours) the sexuality of the player character? Why can't gender and sex be determined independently, so that the player character might be a biological woman who performs the male gender, or vice versa? (For a work called Leather Goddesses of Phobos that is a racy space opera, these questions should not seem too distant or academic.) The ability to select a gender is significant not only because of the way it relates to the issue of gender, but because for the first time an interactor could choose not just what the player character would do, but who the player character actually would be, in a way that did affect the experience of the IF world and the generated texts. While selecting a character is a usual feature of computer role-playing games, this selection is seldom meaningful except inasmuch as it influences combat.

  Gender selection was possible in a few later Infocom works as well: Ballyhoo, Bureaucracy, and Beyond Zork. The two different interactive experiences varied even less in these works than in Leather Goddesses of Phobos and Moonmist. One Infocom work, the 1987 Plundered Hearts by Amy Briggs, has an explicitly female player character. This was Infocom's only interactive fiction in the historical fiction/romance category. Four Infocom works based on print literature had male player characters: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Sherlock: Riddle of the Crown Jewels, James Clavell's Shogun, and Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur. In addition, all three of the different characters commanded by the interactor in Border Zone are male, and the art
ificial intelligence Perry Simm/PRISM, the player character of A Mind Forever Voyaging, is gendered male. While Wishbringer's player character is always referred to as a "letter carrier," never a "postman," this character initially daydreams about rescuing a princess and seems, like the player character in Infidel, to be stereotypically male.

  Moonmist is distinguished in another way, besides being one of the earliest works of interactive fiction that allowed the interactor to select the player character's gender. Unfortunately for posterity, and for those who purchased and interacted with Moonmist when it was first released, Infocom chose not to include the descriptions of the world in the software at all. In order to figure out what the player character's surroundings are like, the interactor has to consult the manual, which has to be kept on hand during play and read alongside the computer text. This was done to make illegal copying of the game difficult-the nondigital manual would have to be copied, too, for the software to be of any use. This technique was one of many antipiracy "bundling" approaches used by Infocom, and certainly the most irksome one. In A Mind Forever Voyaging, a difficult-to-duplicate code wheel was included in the software package. The code determined on it is required to enter that work's simulation mode. Infidel, Starcross, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, and Trinity were three of the many Infocom works that came with partial maps that provided necessary information. Some of the items packaged in Infocom works were more of a carrot than a stick, included to entice buyers rather than to actually obstruct potential pirates. These "feelies" included a scratch-and-sniff card and 3-D comic in Leather Goddesses of Phobos, the aforementioned glow-in-the-dark stone of Wishbringer, and a Don't Panic button and "peril-sensitive" sunglasses included with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The original packages for Suspended and Starcross were based around a large injection-molded face and flying saucer. The packaged items that are required within the game, to be used as a printed key, are a clear detriment to the experience of interactive fiction, whatever commercial sense they made or seemed to make. As a result of these measures, interaction (already a cumbersome affair by virtue of the note taking and mapping required) has been made even less accessible to those with casual interest.

  The techniques employed by Infocom were far less intricate and oppressive than was standard in the computer gaming industry. On most platforms, Infocom's disks could be copied freely, whereas labyrinthine schemes to prevent disk duplication were routinely employed by other companies. These involved making alterations to the boot sector or employing special properties of home computer disk reading and writing to distinguish duplicated disks, even when the copying was done bit by bit. These schemes, euphemistically called copy protection, introduced additional incompatibilities to the software and made it difficult for legitimate users to back up their software. Because of the further problems this so-called "copy protection" introduced, when a legal, original disk with a home computer game can be found today it can be difficult to get it running on a modern platform or emulator. If any examples of heavily copy-protected computer games survive through another two decades for study and discussion, it will be thanks to the loose, widespread network of teenagers and college students who assiduously cracked these programs, allowing the crippled disks to run freely both on systems at the time and on compatible computers today.

  An Infocom work that has been mentioned among the literati-more frequently than others have been, at least-is Brian Moriarty's Trinity, published in 1987. It was based on Moriarty's first concept upon becoming an Implementor, which had been set aside because of its ambition and because a work for children (Wish bringer) seemed more commercially desirable. Trinity gets a place in academic discussions in part because, as Nelson (2001b) explains, "The game is bookish and purposeful-a research bibliography is suppliedand is obtrusively trying to be what today's critics most wish to find: literature" (354). Trinity is weighty while it is also fantastic; trying to be literature does not make it any less enjoyable an experience. Part of its literary texture comes from an interface element. Trinity incorporates pop-up boxes with short quotations throughout, of the sort A Mind Forever Voyaging used at the beginning of each of its three parts. These work to good effect, drawing connections between Trinity and texts of other sorts without being pedantic.

  Trinity is divided into segments; the introductory one is set in the Kensington Gardens at the end of the Cold War. A nuclear missile is on its way while the player character is there on vacation, taking a stroll. A series of sometimes fanciful and sometimes sensible actions-which work well to set up the logic of Trinity's world-takes the player character to another, more fantastic landscape. From here there is access to the other segments of Trinity, in which the player character must cause various nuclear tests to fail in order to reverse the course of history. Part of this work's power comes from, as one critic has written, "its juxtaposition of bizarre fantasy and depressing history. In Trinity, Alice in Wonderland collocates with the nuclear holocaust" (Randall 1988, 188).

  The more serious and immediate theme of Trinity, in contrast to those fantasy works that are not juxtaposed with history in this way, is an important aspect, as is the treatment of this theme in effective ways that employ literary techniques. It is meaningful here, however, to simply look at this work as an example of how far interactive fiction had come in terms of the texts that could result from very ordinary sorts of interaction. Figure 5.1 compares texts from Zork I and Trinity.

  The two bits of landscape description and interaction shown there are telling. Rather grating adjectives like "marvelous" and an inability to refer to basic elements of the surroundings are seen in Blank and Lebling's Zork I. (Their IF works had improved by this time as well, of course.) A decade later in Trinity, although the text is still slightly ponderous with adjectives, a more sophisticated use of personification and metaphor is visible, along with a detailed narration of how the landscape actually comes into view for the gazing player character. The language understanding capabilities of interactive fiction were more advanced by this time, this having been achieved mainly by simple expansion of the vocabulary rather than with parser improvements. Nelson (1995) gives one example: "there is a charming statue of a carefree little boy playing a set of pan pipes. This can be called the `charming' or `peter" statue' `sculpture"pan"boy"pipe' or `pipes'. Objects often have more than 10 nouns attached."The original Zork I had a 600-word vocabulary. Trinity could understand 2,120 different words. The clarity of Trinity was not the only possibility for advances in interactive fiction. Complicating communication could also be effective, as another Infocom work released in the same year revealed.

  FIGURE 5 . 1

  A short transcript from Zork I compared to one from Trinity.

  Jeff O'Neill's Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It, published in 1987, introduced an unusual command format. Progressing through that work requires the interactor to offer punning cliches or other forms of wordplay, often in a way that is only very loosely related to any immediate goal. By solving verbal puzzles, the interactor can allow the player character to rescue the troubled town of Punster. In Nord and Bert, the usual adventuring actions are greatly diminished in importance. Puns dominate the puzzles, which occur in eight independent segments, each its own world. Compass directions are not required to move the player character about in Nord and Bert. Instead, the status line always indicates where the player character can go, just as the exits are shown on-screen in Scott Adams games. The interactor can type English input such as go to the barn rather than e or east. This more topological, landmark-based way of navigating was available in some respects in Adventure, in which the name of a visited location could be typed in order to move the player character to that location. This ability had not been provided in earlier Infocom games, however-except in Suspended with its multirobot complexities and board game-style map-and the early Adventure did not even recognize a simple, full English sentence such as go to the barn. Because of the improved movement scheme, mapmaking is not n
ecessary, or at all useful, in Nord and Bert.

  In one segment, Act the Part, the interactor must type replies to complete a comedy routine: "Bob says, `Hey Sammy, what is this fly doing in my soup?' / >Swimming. / The crowd eats it up."The replies to commands in this segment are often consistent with the comedy framework, as when a woman described as "a lady" enters the room: ">Examine the lady. / That's no lady, that is your wife." Another segment, Play jacks, has the player character manipulate a device, the "Jack of all Traits." This contraption takes on different properties as things are done to it. It becomes several different objects, all of which contain the name or sound "jack," and all of which must be used in some way during that segment of the work. Spoonerisms are required in the Shake a Tower segment.

  In the segment Visit The Manor Of Speaking, the replies are sometimes in the first person, answering the command take the bottle with "You can go ahead and have that old thing anyway. It was here before I moved in." The interactor must intersperse adventure-game commands with more conversational exchanges in order to progress through this segment.

  In solving puzzles, the interactor is limited to filling in fixed phrases almost exactly, and almost every phrase anticipated by the author must be supplied in order to win. The required actions are not always obvious and have little to do with the usual adventure-game reasoning. During the Eat Your Words segment, for instance, the player character encounters an inattentive waitress who must be dealt with harshly. Examining her reveals that she has a chip on her shoulder. The correct phrase to supply is knock the chip o_ f her shoulder, which brings this text: "`Come on, knock it ofl?' the waitress says defiantly, and the chip goes flying off into the air...." This earns the interactor a point. The similarly clever response brush off the waitress is not recognized, as the work's vocabulary does not include the word "brush." Fortunately, a hint system is included within the program itself for occasions when filling in the blank is more difficult than this, such as when a cliche completely unknown to the interactor is required.