Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction

by Nick Montfort

  Near the end of the 1980s, the first and as yet only major academic project dealing with interactive fiction began to come together at Carnegie Mellon University. This was Joe Bates's Oz Project, inspired in part by the work of Brenda Laurel on interactive drama. During the 1990s the project pursued the ideal of "highly interactive" experiences in which the interactor could influence what was happening at any point in time and in many ways, a different experience, one Oz researcher explained, from that of "other interactive media such as hypertext, where the interactor is given only a small number of fixed choices" (Kelso, Wayhrauch, and Bates 1992, 1). The Oz Project devised an architecture for such interactive drama systems, using a drama manager to coordinate different events. This was tested and refined in a live interactive theater experiment and in two different types of projects. One thread used real-time animation to present a graphical world that held inarticulate but amusing characters with underlying models of their emotional state: These creatures were the Woggles. It was this thread of research that has continued in the work of Bates's company Zoesis. The other series of projects was built in LISP and constituted interactive fiction in the sense used in this book. These included Lyotard, a simulated cat portrayed in text in a simulated world, and three text worlds built by Scott Neal Reilly: Robbery World, Office Politics, and The Playground. There was also impressive work done on a system called GLINDA for generation of surface text in interactive fiction from underlying knowledge representations. Using this system would enable an IF author to create a simulated world and control what types of descriptions were generated based on "knobs" that could alter grammatical or other features of the language (Kantrowitz 1990). While the results of the project's research are well documented in academic publications and reports, the systems and works themselves unfortunately have not been made publicly available.

  In The Playground the player character can trade baseball cards with Melvin and Sluggo using rather fluent English. The descriptions of what was happening and of the appearance of characters in the world may seem primitive, but each was the result of an underlying event in the world-there was essentially nothing "pre-written" in the text that appeared:

  PLAYER> Sluggo: How about Ted Williams and Hank Aaron for Willie Mays?

  You are speaking to Sluggo.

  Player's voice says "How about Ted Williams and Hank Aaron for Willie Mays?".

  Melvin whistles.

  Sluggo is now red.

  Sluggo is now scowling.

  Sluggo is now tense.

  Sluggo is speaking to you.

  Sluggo's voice says "You think you're cool with your fancy trades?

  No deal, dweeb!".

  PLAYER> Sluggo: Well, how about just Williams for Mays then?

  You are speaking to Sluggo.

  Player's voice says "Well, how about just Williams for Mays then?".

  Melvin whistles.

  Sluggo is now frowning.

  Sluggo is speaking angrily to you.

  Sluggo's voice says "Get out of here before I pound you, twerp!".

  The Oz Project had tapered to a close near the end of the 1990s, but it continued into 2002 in the work of CMU graduate student Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern. In 2003, they were completing a graphical interactive drama system called Fafade. Using an interface that looks like that of a first-person shooter but that replaces the gun with a cocktail glass, Fafade simulates an uncomfortable dinner visit, during which the couple that has invited the player character over stages a breakup (Mateas and Stern 2001). When finished, Fafade will realize several of the Oz Project's goals, demonstrate how well an Aristotelian concept of drama can be adapted to an interactive experience, and offer lessons for interactive fiction and other forms of new media; it promises to be a rare academic project that is also interesting as art and fun to interact with.

  "Since its invention in 1993, Inform has been used to design some hundreds of works of interactive fiction, in eight languages, reviewed in periodicals ranging in specialisation from XYZZYnews ... to The New York Times. It accounts for around ten thousand postings per year to Internet newsgroups," according to the creator of Inform, Graham Nelson (2001b, 1). With its object-oriented, procedural language that compiles to the cross-platform Zmachine format, Inform is responsible for much of interactive fiction's cur rent popularity. In late April 1993 Nelson completed the first version of this system. Whatever its technical merits, Inform offered a winning combination by creating "story files" in a venerated format-the same one used by the highly regarded Implementors of Infocom-and by being available for free, at a time when the premier development system,TADS, was offered as shareware. Released almost concurrently, and contributing greatly to Inform's success, was the text adventure that would become the most popular IF work of the early independent era: Nelson's sprawling Curses.

  To return to hyperbolic literary comparisons for a moment, by developing both the most important tool for the creation of interactive fiction in the 1990s, Inform, and the most important and popular work of that decade, Curses, Nelson served as both Gutenberg and Cervantes for the new movement of IF authors and interactors. Of course, Inform largely reproduced what Infocom had developed, and Curses did not challenge the assumptions that Infocom's works had made in the way that some later independent pieces would. But Nelson (2002) is right to say that while "Inform may be ... a dog's breakfast in terms of its computer-science elements ... it contains genuine thought about how the model world and the parser ought to work." Inform's parser and libraries, which process language and contain much of the "default" behavior and many of the standard replies, make good attempts at tackling tricky problems like pronoun resolution and the disambiguation of commands.While Inform is not cutting-edge in terms of language understanding when compared to systems devised by academic researchers (Inform fails to work as well as the 1972 SHRDLU in some cases), this freely available system exceeds the in-house development systems of 1980s commercial companies in many ways.

  The New York Times named Nelson "one of the more ornately literate creators of interactive fiction.... The epigram from Jigsaw is from T. S. Eliot. And any player who manages to solve its problems will find untranslated Latin mottos and puzzles involving Proust and Lenin" (Rothstein 1998). Nelson, who lectures in pure mathematics in his official role at St Anne's College, Oxford, is also a poet and an editor of Oxford Poetry. Nelson (2001a) lists some of his recent publications: "`The Homology of Moduli Spaces over a Compact Riemann Surface as a Representation of the Mapping Class Group' . . . the editing of Louis MacNeice's previously unpublished play `Blacklegs' (1939) and an introduction to his translation of Euripides'' Hippolytus."' Nelson's literary tastes and his unusual perspective on language are both illuminated by his reply to an interview question about his favorite authors: "I greatly admire the poetry of Philip Larkin and Primo Levi, writers who have absolutely nothing in common except their initials" (1995b).

  Before Nelson began work on Inform, a group of programmers called the InfoTaskForce had already reverse-engineered the Z-machine format, and the ZIP interpreter, a free program that ran Infocom IF works, had also been developed by Mark Howell. Nelson-who said he had never intended to write a complete Z-machine compiler-began by trying to get a program to simply print "Hello World" (not the more appropriate West Coast test message, "Hello Sailor"). After succeeding, he went on to develop the compiler.At first Nelson called it zass, since it assembled Z-machine files, and he used what he called a small "silly test game" as he developed it (1995b). Using an Acorn Archimedes and programming in ANSI C, he quickly abandoned his small game to begin developing Curses, using that to put the in-progress compiler through its paces (Nelson 2002).

  Although never employed full-time as a game developer, by the time he started working on Inform and Curses Nelson had an extensive background as an interactor and as an IF author. A neighbor took Nelson to visit the Digital offices in Reading when he was about ten. There, he played Adventure. Nelson (2002) recalls, "I was entirely s
educed by it and in some sense it entered my imaginary world." When his father assembled the Acorn Atom computer from a kit a few years later, Nelson began to devise ways to program adventure games on it-no easy task, since it came with 2k of RAM, only expandable to 12k. He continues:

  My only really viable game for the Atom had no name, but my family members referred to it as "the Adventure of Igneous the Dwarf," after a mercurial character appearing therein. I can only remember elements of the design: there was a volcanic crater; there was an underground stream, which flowed over a key. (Nelson 2002)

  Prior to college, Nelson interacted with a handful of Infocom games (a rare experience in England) and wrote two BBC Micro text adventures, which a local company advertised in magazines and sold. He explained, "These were science fiction in style, and the treasures were hyper-high-tech alien gadgets. The more noteworthy was the second game, which ran on a pair of BBC Micros connected together by RS-232 cable, and in which the players alternated turns" (Nelson 2002). When studying mathematics at Cambridge, Nelson became acquainted with the Phoenix games (his login was GAN10) and even did some programming, attempting to get Tera, a multiplayer game, working.

  Nelson's most famous piece of interactive fiction- and likely the most well known IF work since the demise of Infocom-is the first fruit of Inform, the 1993 Curses. This large, complex, and difficult adventure is set in an English country home and in certain other spaces that are linked in fantastic ways to it. Nelson (2002) said he "consciously wrote it in an Infocomesque spirit, aiming at the same epigrammatic style of wit." Richard Tucker and Gareth Rees were the principal early testers of Curses, which was made public beginning with release 7. This first version was about half the size of the final 1995 release, number 16 (Nelson 1995b), because Curses became, as Nelson (2002) put it, "an interactive sort of event, in that many players in the early months became dedicated play-testers, and the game slightly expanded with each release, often incorporating their suggestions."The magically numbered release 7 of Curses did a great deal to build momentum for Inform. Potential authors could clearly see what wonders could be accomplished in the language. Nelson (2002) calls it "the ultimate proof of concept: an indisputably Infocom-sized and -style work, composed using Inform."

  "A hinged trapdoor in the floor stands open, and light streams in from below." This is the last bit of prologue in Curses, the part of the initial room description that comes just before the prompt for input. This text recalls the most famous visual art from Infocom, the Zork trilogy logo with its open trapdoor, light streaming from it. But here the player character starts off on the darker side of the trapdoor, and in the attic rather than in Zork I's cellar. Nelson is right to note that Curses "is unusual among games of its period in having a main character with ... a family, an imminent holiday, etc.... and in being in some sense rooted in real-world concerns rather than simply collecting gold from dungeons" (2002); it is also unusual to present the player character going on a real adventure in that character's own house-not an anonymous house in the woods of Zork, not a Mystery House, and not a relative's bizarre mansion. It was not just the inclusion of numerous witty epigraphs (in the style of Trinity) and the overt references to T. S. Eliot that gave Curses its literary texture. This different type of IF world also allowed new resonances to arise from brief phrases. Gaston Bachelard (1994) noted, with reference to poetry, that the "virtues of shelter are so simple, so deeply rooted in our unconscious, that they may be recaptured through mere mention, rather than through minute description" (12). Such mention works to similar effect in Curses, and here, as Bachelard writes of the image of the house in poetry, "the house image would appear to have become the topography of our intimate being" (xxxvi), with the IF world encoding the family history of the player character and giving clues not just to the solution of puzzles but also to this character's tendencies and personality.

  Nelson has continued to improve Inform over the years and has also offered other IF works, the most significant of which is his intricate 1995 Jigsaw, a millennial fantasy that recalls Trinity in its opening sequence and in its structure. That was also the first work in the Z-machine version 8 format he developed; this expanded the file size for an all-text work to 512k, allowing later sizable projects to take shape. Nelson entered a Zork-like romp in the 1996 Interactive Fiction Competition, using the pseudonym "Angela M. Horns," an anagram of his name. That piece-which won first place-originated when Activision contacted Nelson about using Inform to write what would eventually become Zork: The Undiscovered Underground. Nelson (2002) said he wrote the first version of his The Meteor, the Stone, and the Long Glass of Sherbert "as a lure for them." He also created the impressive Tempest, an adaptation of the play, presented in verse and using the original text, along with replies that Nelson wrote. This was entered in the 1997 Interactive Fiction Competition under the name "William Shakespeare" and did not fare well, ending up in twenty-fifth place. (Many intriguing but unusual competition entries have suffered similar fates.) Aside from his work as developer of Inform and author of interactive fiction, Nelson has also made a great contribution with his Inform Designer's Manual, known in its current edition as the DM4 (Nelson 2001b). Disguised as a manual for the Inform languageand fulfilling that overt role very well-this book, originally published online in September 1994, also contains an excellent summary history of the form, advice on the design (not just the programming) of interactive fiction, and commentary on many specific works. It has been widely read, even by those who do not program in Inform.

  Many IF authors felt the impulse to model an unusual space (the cave of Adventure or a fantasy landscape), but there seemed to be an almost equally strong impulse to simulate the familiar in an IF world. (Sometimes, of course, both could be accomplished in an interesting and literary transformation of the everyday.) IF creators have sought the inspiration for their worlds in their own apartment or house, and several have looked to their own college campus. As described in the discussion of the influence of MIT on Zork in chapter 4, this impulse led to two MIT-influenced works, The Lurking Horror and GC: A Thrashing Parity Bit of the Mind. These two examples show how broad the spectrum of college interactive fiction was: The former was sold as entertainment software and created for those who had no knowledge of MIT at all, while the latter was so laden with in-jokes as to prove completely inscrutable to those who hadn't attended MIT, and perhaps even difficult to understand for those at MIT who were not affiliated with the Al Lab. In between these two extremes was the TADS work Save Princeton by Jacob Weinstein and Karine Schaefer, released in 1991. Full of in-jokes and self-reference, its humor was also enjoyed by some outside Princeton. Later, in 1995, James T. Reese's IVeritas, a scavenger hunt set at Harvard, was released, as was Neil deMause's Mac Wesleyan. There had also been some earlier interactive fiction (from the 1980s) with IF worlds that were generic colleges or universities.

  The highest achievement in this college genre of interactive fiction is Gareth Rees's Christminster, an early Inform work that was released in 1995. It is set at the fictional Biblioll College. Christ's College, Cambridge, is the model for how this IF world is laid out (Rees 2002), and images of the Christ's College great gate and clock tower decorate Rees's ChristminsterWeb pages (Rees 2001).The background of Christminster's college is drawn from the history of Balliol College, Oxford. Rees (2002) explained that "other Oxford and Cambridge colleges contributed miscellaneous features." The player character, Christabel, is visiting her brother Malcolm on campus. The initial situation finds her at the gate, which on this Sunday is shut, presenting the first challenge.

  After solving a series of puzzles that involve getting one non-player character to distract another non-player character, and that then get more convoluted, Christabel gains entrance to the college. There, she discovers that Malcolm is missing and that an alchemical intrigue is afoot. Sinister dons seeking the elixir of life have abducted Malcolm; Christabel must seek him as she solves puzzles that involve gaining access to the library,
rewiring telephones, solving ciphers, and, near the final stages, acting properly at a particularly difficult dinner.

  The conflation of the detective-style intrigue found in Deadline and The Witness with the college setting was one special feature of Christminster. Another could be seen in the numerous non-player characters who are essential to progress through the work. Epigraphs of the sort seen in Trinity, A Mind Forever Voyaging, and Curses introduce the different stages of Christminster; in this work they are taken from alchemical lore.

  In newsgroup discussion in the years following Christminster's release, much was made of the fact that the player character in this work is female. What is more interesting is that she is an outsider; being female (when venturing into an all-male college) is only one way in which she doesn't fit in. Christabel has a map of the college-rendered on screen with ASCII characters, thus making Christminster easier to handle without pencil-and-paper mapping-as is appropriate for a visitor; her lack of knowledge about the layout, history, and workings of the college aligns with the interactor's initial ignorance of these things. While the interactor may not inherently share Christabel's wish to find Malcolm, who cannot be encountered for quite a while, the general curiosity about the IF world, and the secrets hidden therein, which is evoked as obstacles are overcome and new non-player characters are encountered, is enough to compel interaction. The non-player characters-ranging from a busker and policeman in the initial sequence to several dons, some rather bumbling and others more malicious, work remarkably well. Here again, neither reading a transcript in which these characters appear nor looking at the appropriate parts of the source code (which is publicly available) is extremely impressive, although the non-player char acters are programmed very capably and the writing works well. The real achievement is in how the non-player characters are integrated into the workings of the puzzles and how they work to convey necessary information while managing to unobtrusively give a sense of their personality and their existence as people in this particular IF world.