"The Figured Wheel" certainly is about the composition of poetry and the creation of art in general, but it applies particularly well to the process Pinsky went through in ornamenting Mindwheel with different types of language, "toys and messages, jokes and zodiacs." The process of creating Mindwheel involved not only festooning the figurative wheel represented by the work's title but also literally placing messages and jokes on a wheel, a slim magnetic one known as a floppy disk. A simple reading of the poem alongside the IF work might reveal the poem to be a sophisticated statement about the fiztility of art and the essential human drive to create art despite that futility, while Mindwheel might be seen as simply an example of such lighthearted (and futile) literary creation in the harsh shadow of the Cold War. A more interesting reading would not only see Mindwheel as a riddle that has "The Figured Wheel" as its solution, but also recognize that the poem's puzzle is in certain ways solved by the work of interactive fiction. The player character of Mindwheel is supposed to pursue a relentless quest but cannot help assembling art during the process: filling in the blanks of poems as well as performing actions that uncover new phrases and poems, spaces and conversations. Is Mindwheel a trivial game of no consequence next to "The Figured Wheel"? Consider a few of the assumptions that Mindwheel is founded upon: that the consciousness of individuals with unique minds persists after death as spaces of words that one can visit; that the solution to crisis comes in deep understanding of our past and our early origins; that fathoming a system of words can unlock new worlds. It may be easy to be distracted by the gibbering reptiles flying past, and by the way the program was sold on the shelf alongside entertainment software, but the structures and language of this work have much to offer besides whimsical amusement, and there has only been enough space here to begin a discussion of Mindwheel.
It was in 1986, only two years after Mindwheel made its fairly successful debut and a year after Hitchhiker's was launched to record sales, that another interactive fiction work with similar origins-one created by a successful print writer, working with programmers-hit the shelves. This one, Amnesia, was by Thomas Disch, the author of the novels 334, Camp Concentration, and The Genocides; he worked on it with programmer Kevin Bentley of the Cognetics Corporation. Disch was known mainly for his science fiction, although by that point he had gained a reputation as a book critic and had published four books of poetry as well as novels of other sorts. (His 1984 novel published just before Amnesia was The Businessman: A Tale (fTerror) While Pinsky chose a science fiction IF world, Disch gave his work the IF world of present-day New York City. Pinsky remained enthusiastic about the computer as a medium for literature; while he authored no other interactive fiction in the next decade and a half, he did become poetry editor of the online magazine Slate and he wrote about the possibilities of interactive fiction in The NewY)rk Times Book Review. In contrast, Disch (1990), who was initially quite excited about the new form and wrote a much earlier piece for The New York Times Book Review extolling the virtues of these "Youdunits," had quite different feelings about interactive fiction in later years, as he explained: "When I was working on Amnesia, I realized it was an art form unto itself; I saw visions of sugarplums dancing in my head. Now, all that is but a handful of ashes ... Amnesia has been one of the quickest disillusionments of my life" (118).
Amnesia was not successful after it went on sale, and although some reviewers have found things to like about it, general opinion has not been favorable. Still, Disch's abilities as a writer and his enthusiasm about interactive fiction led to some notable accomplishments. The initial situation finds the player character waking up in a hotel room, with no idea of who or where he is. The conceit of having the player character wake up without any memory whatsoever positions the interactor and player character on the same level of awareness. Although this is a hackneyed premise in interactive fiction today-a similar idea had already been floated at Infocom, and in fact a graphical adventure with the same premise, Dejd Vu: The Nightmare Comes True, had been released in 1985 (Adler 1996)-Disch played the premise to the hilt, probably better than had been done before or has been done since. An interesting play with the interactor's input can be seen when the player character first stands up from bed:
The mirror over the dresser is angled so you can't see yourself from where you stand. So you decide to take a simple test, closing your eyes and taking an inventory of how you think you OUGHT to look. Your hair-is it light or dark?
light
Is it long or short?
short
Do you have a beard? Or a mustache? Or neither? Or both?
beard
What is the color of your eyes?
green
You could hardly be more completely mistaken! For when you look into the mirror, the stranger you see there has long black hair. He has a mustache but no beard. And his eyes are emphatically blue.
Starting over a few times and trying different inputs quickly reveals that however the interactor replies, the player character is always almost "completely mistaken." This is a compelling and literary use of the concept of computerized customization that has long been employed in different types of computer gaming to allow the player character to be specified.
This ability was particularly evident in role-playing games and appeared to some extent in interactive fiction, where the name or gender might be chosen. Instead of providing the interactor with control over what the player character looks like, however, any attempt to specify this in Amnesia is disrupted; a similar level of dissonance rather than customization is always provided.Yet Amnesia also offered a clever type of customization in another way: The player character would find a computer in the hotel room with him, which would always be the same type of computer that the interactor was using to run Amnesia. This IF work was also not lacking in terms of how it was implemented technically. It boasted a capable parser and a vocabulary of around 1,700 words, as well as an IF world that had a location for almost every Manhattan intersection. Of the approximately 4,000 different locations, few were described except for a bare reference to the street names.
As an interactive experience, Amnesia quickly runs into difficulties. The single path out of the hotel is laid on rails, with no alternative to the series of incidents Disch plotted out. Rather than allowing numerous different sorts of experiences and possible manipulations of the environment interspersed throughout the world of Amnesia, the work offers several major events, organized like cut-scenes with few options for variation, in a work that is otherwise open to many unimportant possibilities. One of these segments, in the hotel, consists of a dream in which the player character finds himself in a Texas jail, forced to beg for a meal by finding the correct two words to say. Later, appropriately, the player character is the groom in what is essentially a shotgun wedding. (The gun involved is actually a pistol.) Once out of the hotel and set free in NewYork City while wearing his white tuxedo but having discovered he is a wanted man, the player character can barely walk the distance of a few subway stops before keeling over dead from hunger, a difficulty that requires the interactor to constantly restore an earlier saved position in order to puzzle this out and get anywhere. As if these constraints on the interaction weren't annoying enough, the copy-protection scheme of Amnesia also constantly intrudes, requiring the interactor to locate crossstreets based on addresses. Perhaps such a design makes a point about the illusion of freedom in early interactive fiction.
Certainly, a tuxedo-clad player character in danger of starvation (and eventually reduced to squeegeeing windows and sleeping in a tenement, if the narrative is to progress at all) does provide an interesting social commentary, as other events in a traversal of Amnesia do.
But the gears of Amnesia's text-machine are simply too sticky to make the overall experience of solving this Youdunit at all enjoyable, however transforming certain moments might be.
Disch (1990) dismissed those who were disappointed with Amnesia as wanting "trivial pursuits" and being unint
erested in "reading and imaginative skills," and he decided that "trying to superimpose over this structure a dramatic conception other than a puzzle was apparently too much for the audience" (118). Whether he was right or not, Amnesia principally offered the interactors of the mid-1980s not a new type of interactive literary joy but a sort of textual torture device. It did include a collection of powerful cut scenes and an overall framework that would have been much more compelling, if the experience of it were less of a struggle.
Stephen Granade (1999b) writes that "Level 9 was one of the foremost British adventure game companies.... It was a family company which was started by Pete Austin and eventually employed Pete's two brothers, his sister, and his father." The company's first products were utilities and video games. The brothers-Pete, Nick, and Mike-started off in interactive fiction by publishing a knock-off of Adventure for the BBC Micro Model B and the Sinclair Spectrum in 1983. This was a feat, since the BBC Micro Model B had only 32k of memory, but Level 9's Colossal Cave, using text compression and a highly efficient programming language Mike Austin developed, a-code, actually managed to provide more rooms than the original had. The Austin brothers followed that success with two other works that year: the puzzle melange Adventure Quest and the science fiction Snowball. The latter work is famous for having more than 7,000 rooms-6,800 of them part of a simple, color-coded maze. (The company boasted how many rooms their other works had, too; one writer noted that "`over 200 locations' would become a familiar quote on the Level 9 packaging" (Hewison 1992).) It also had a player character named Kim Kimberly, who might be imagined as either male or female. The company later brought in other authors and began adding graphics to every room in its works.
Level 9 ended up issuing twenty interactive fiction titles, more than any other company save Infocom (Schmidt and Schulz 1999). The company became, as Hewison (1992) put it, "the undisputed kings of adventure games in the U.K."The works it published were recently called "the most advanced adventure games ever available on tape" (Schmidt and Schulz 1999). The appeal of more rooms and the push for a larger vocabulary relates to concerns of the software market of the time. While other computer games in the 1980s could suggest what gameplay was like visually, with screenshots depicting the game in action, interactive fiction works could at best show an illustrated text. Moreover, interactive fiction was considered to be worthwhile only until the interactor won; it was not genuinely thought (regardless of Marc Blank's comments on the matter) that it would be replayed as other computer games might be. Thus the appeal to objective criteria was one way to advertise that a work of interactive fiction was both pleasing to experience and sizeable enough to provide many hours of interaction along the way to victory. There are connections to hacker and troubadour traditions, too; being able to simulate an IF world with thousands of rooms in a tiny program was an impressive feat.
As the business of interactive fiction in general went bust in the late 1980s, Level 9 managed to hang on for a while, finally succumbing in 1991. By then the company had made its mark on the form. Pete Austin's The Knight Orc is one well-loved work brought out by Sinclair, a cleverly twisted text-andgraphics piece that serves as an example of some of Level 9's innovations. The player character in the 1987 The Knight Orc is the orc Grindleguts, who, while drunk, was selected by his ill-intentioned companions to represent his vile race at a tournament.The initial situation finds him waking up while tied to a horse as a knight is about to charge him. After enduring defeat, Grindleguts must seek a long enough rope to escape from the clean, well-lighted realm in which he's trapped, completing a comic treasure hunt to finish the first of the work's three parts. Many non-player characters wander about aimlessly, without any essential function in the generated narratives, but they are described in such a bilious way, and wander with enough personality, as to provide amusement. The evil player character made The Knight Orc, as one IF author wrote, "one of the first games to give voice to a villain" (Sherwin 1999), although this player character was certainly not as nuanced and did not unfold in as interesting a way as in Amnesia. But that was not the point; Grindleguts and his quest worked instead to turn the conventions of sword-and-sorcery fantasy on their heads. One character, the Prophet, departed from the usual image of the fantasy cleric by being "a sweaty paedophile, quite happy to swarm on about the meek inheriting the Earth, turning the other cheek and the love of you know who ... Until you mention liberation theology, disarmament, or anyone other than male humans becoming ministers."
At the end of the first part, the character sees that this fantasy world is an illusion. In the second and third parts of The Knight Ore, raising and lowering a visor would move the player character between two different worldsa similar situation as with Level 9's sequels to Snowball: Return to Eden and The Worm in Paradise.
Just as Infocom games came packaged with "feelies" and Mindwheel shipped with a hardcover book, The Knight Orc included a novella by Peter McBride: The Sign of the Orc. While The Knight Ore was a hit, not all fans of Level 9 enjoyed it; one reviewer found it the first of Level 9's more formulaic efforts, "lacking the atmosphere and puzzles of [its] earlier games" (Hewison 1992). Other works written in the same development system, which was dubbed KAOS, followed. These included the "Ingrid Trilogy" that began with Gnome Ranger, the Time and Magik trilogy, Lancelot, and Level 9's final KAOS title, the afterlife detective story Scapeghost, published in 1989.
In 1985 an intriguing new work of interactive fiction was published in England, one of the first to run on the new 16-bit Spectrum Sinclair QL. It was The Pawn, written by Rob Steggles and based on ideas from several people at a new company, Magnetic Scrolls, a company chartered to create interactive fiction and aiming to be England's answer to Infocom. The Pawn featured a player character who had to seek freedom in a fantasy world while fettered by a silver bracelet and subject to events that were ordained from above. Although at times cruel to the interactor with its intricate requirements for puzzle solving, the parser was quite advanced and the work was both enjoyable and impressive. The company followed the original release with a version for the Atari ST; this and subsequent ports of The Pawn were published and distributed by another U.K. company, Rainbird. It was this company that convinced the Magnetic Scrolls founders, Anita Sinclair and Ken Gordon, to add graphics, using the art of Geoff Quilley. The text-andgraphics format became standard for the relatively few but memorable offerings this company brought out in the coming years, with the visual art functioning "more like illustrations than exact pictures of a room or scene" (Granade 2001b).This was a convenient approach since it meant that changes in the implementation of the IF world during the development process were less likely to require revisions in the associated graphics; the graphics were also not required for interaction. As with the Synapse and Level 9 publications, a novella (used in the copy protection scheme) was included with The Pawn. Programming of this first work was done by Hugh Steers and cofounder Gordon.
Before the company closed down in 1992-suffering from the decline of interactive fiction's popularity on software shelves-it published several renowned works and made several technological improvements. Interactors could use "go to" to specify a location and the player character would go there by following the shortest path. This was an interesting attempt (although not an entirely original one, since Suspended among other IF works had done something similar) to make mapping unnecessary. The company boasted that its parser could correctly handle the (syntactically uninteresting) input plant the plant in the plant pot, making sense of the same word being used as verb, adjective, and noun. But if the system was more advanced than Infocom's, this still did not allow a great deal more subtlety to be brought to the textual interaction. The capable parser did allow Magnetic Scrolls to surpass some of its competitors who had started out producing works for 8-bit computers, such as Level 9.
One well-received Magnetic Scrolls production was the 1987 fantasy The Guild of Thieves, also written by Steggles and with illustrations by Quille
y. It featured a treasure hunt on an island, in which the player character was trying to acquire the loot necessary to join the eponymous guild. The following year saw the release of a work with a contemporary London IF world, Corruption, by Steggles and Steers and with illustrations by Alan Hunnisett and Richard Selby. The cover art of the U.S. package featured a stylized gunman clutching a briefcase; the player character was a BMWdriving suit. Like many Magnetic Scrolls works, this one is exacting. To traverse the work successfully requires that the player character be in several particular places at precisely the right time. Although those at Magnetic Scrolls were familiar with early U.S. interactive fiction works such as Adventure and Zork (Granade 2001b), the tendency toward such demanding and sometimes even cruel requirements can likely be attributed to earlier interactive fiction published in the United Kingdom, such as the Phoenix games that were made available commercially by Topologika. A different conflation of influences could be seen in Fish!, a work by multiple authors that has been called "something like bits of Leather Goddesses, Station fall, Lnrkinc,, Horror, Border Zone, and The Pawn, all rolled into one, with a bit of Monty Python thrown in for good measure" (Campbell 1988). The player character is a multidimensional agent incarnated, initially, in the form of a fish-and enjoying a relaxing vacation. The vacation does not last long; the player character must enter several different IF worlds in a pun-laden sort of wild fish chase.
Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction Page 22