Rees (1995) wrote, "One idea I used, following Legend's `Gateway' and some Infocom games, was to split up long interactions over a number of turns, with some mechanism to keep the player sitting still while the interaction was going on." This kept the computer-generated replies shorter, and made them closer in size to the commands that the interactor could input, creating a more dialogic interaction than would have occurred had long "cut scenes" been used. In one case, the player character is physically trapped in a secret chamber with one of the dons,Wilderspin.As the interactor figures out how to escape, Christabel is a captive audience for what Wilderspin has to say. Escape also requires cooperation between the two, so the non-player character is important not only for the information he provides and as a character in a generated story, but also as part of the solution to a puzzle. While the puzzles are not always meaningful in the sense that a great riddle can be, they do constrain the interaction so that the potential narrative of Christminster is realized in pleasing ways, not only requiring that Christabel spend time near some of the non-player characters but also acting to withhold and divulge secrets in a way that keeps the interactor interested.
An important tradition in independent interactive fiction began when the first Interactive Fiction Competition was announced on rec.*.int-fiction and took place in 1995.This competition took place in the summer of 1995 and was run by G. Kevin Wilson, a.k.a. Whizzard, who is also author of Once and Future and founder of the SPAG Newsletter. Initially conceived of as a contest for Inform works, a TADS division was added for the first year. (The IF Competition, also called simply the Comp, became an annual affair and later allowed entries developed in any system, even entries written in generalpurpose programing languages.) Although the restrictions on development systems were part of the structure of the Comp, the famous "one rule" simply specified that "games must be finishable ... in two hours or less" (Wilson 1995).Works of this sort had been imagined and executed prior to the competition. These included examples for development systems and John Baker's John's Fire Witch, completed the previous January, which its author called "a snack-sized text adventure" (1995). But the Comp not only encouraged more people to get involved in authoring interactive fiction, it also encouraged them to experiment with smaller IF worlds (with fewer locations and objects) and sometimes with concepts that would have been too complex or too tedious to implement in more traditional interactive fiction, where the time required for a successful traversal might range from ten to forty hours. The first Comp had six Inform and six TADS entries.
The Inform winner was A Change in the Weather by Andrew Plotkin, which begins with a four-line poem in bold. The description of scenery at different times of day and from different perspectives gave this work a different texture than most previous interactive fiction. Interactors also appreciated and commented on the fox, a character who served as helper. The player character had to devise a way to return after a foray away from picnicking friends and into the wilderness. Many interactors noticed that the reply to score is not a report of the score but the phrase "That's not how life works." For some reason, not keeping score has been noted by literary critics as a literary feature of interactive fiction (Randall 1988, 187), although whether or not a work keeps score has nothing to do with whether or not it has puzzles or how literary it is. A work can have no puzzles and still keep score (e.g., based on how much of the world has been visited), or, as with A Change in the Weather, it can have puzzles but not report the score. The lack of a score in such a case simply obscures from the interactor how much progress has been made-an effect that may be desirable but is not, in and of itself, literary. A Change in the Weather is remarkable, rather, for its attempts to integrate the typical sorts of adventure-game puzzles with the description of landscape, the simulation of an animal character, and the emotional situation of the "adventurer" player character who has wandered away to spend the night in the woods.
Uncle Zebulon's Will by Magnus Olsson took top honors in the TADS category. The initial situation is very much like that of the 1986 Hollywood Hijinks by Dave Anderson and Liz The player character, favorite nephew of a recently departed eccentric, arrives at the mansion of his relative to explore it. (In Hollywood Hijinks, it is Aunt Hildegarde's, not Uncle Zebulon's, mansion.) The work didn't forge into new territory as A Change in the Weather did, but it was a well-implemented puzzle game with a fantasy IF world that conflated the everyday with the magical. Even an interactive fiction book, a la Deadline, was included. Although the work didn't take nearly as long to traverse as the average piece of interactive fiction from Infocom, it was implemented about as well as Infocom's works were, and its smaller number of challenges fit together to provide a satisfying experience. Olsson made the well-commented source code of Uncle Zebulon's Will available, helping numerous TADS programmers to understand the workings of that development system.
The Interactive Fiction Competition entered its eighth year in 2002. There were more than fifty entries in 2000 and again in 2001; in both years more than two hundred people judged the contest by interacting with the works for up to two hours each. Several judges played all of the works, and several even wrote reviews of all of them-a tradition that began with the first Comp. The Comp has become a major motivation for people to complete works in progress, and it is almost certainly the most important means of publicizing work, although longer works released at other times do garner some attention on the newsgroups. One sign of the importance of the competition metaphor over that of publication is that numerous themed "mini-comps" have taken place-often without voting, ranking, or prizes. The first of these to bear such a name was Lucain Paul Smith's The First Ever (and Maybe the Only) IF Mini-Competition, announced in May 1998. Marnie Parker's IF Art Show (originally called "The First Annual Text Art Show"), announced in March 1999, was another notable contest of this sort, although it was one where entries were ranked by a panel of judges.
In general, mini-comps have functioned more like theme issues of a journal than like contests. Another sort of contest was inaugurated in October 1998 by David Cornelson, who had authors on ifMUD (a virtual environment for socializing among those in the IF community) engage in "SpeedlE" Participants created very small IF works within a time limit of one hour (the time limit later became two hours) based on a selection of unusual topics, characters, and items that were volunteered online. The results were uploaded for the "competitors," and anyone else, to enjoy. SpeedlF, occurring irregularly and often decided upon spontaneously, has also become a tradition. Although the focus on competition as a metaphor-even in noncompetitive events-may seem unusual, the many sorts of competitions that have transpired in recent years (including some for interactive fiction in other languages) have had clear benefits for the community. The Comp itself has functioned as a means of publicity for the IF community and an excuse not only for authors to experiment with works that have smaller IF worlds, but also for interactors to review a slew of different entries and evaluate which approaches and techniques are most effective.
Andrew Plotkin, usually referred to on rec.*.int-fiction by his login name, zarf, is legendary in the IF community not only for creating some of the most enjoyable recent interactive fiction works but also for devising IF interpreters, the Glk interface standard, and the multimedia-capable IF virtual machine Glulx-among other innovations. Plotkin, a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University who works for Red Hat in Pittsburgh, has kept up his pace of innovation since winning the Inform division of the first Interactive Fiction Competition. One measure of his fame is that the winner of the 2000 Best Game XYZZY Award (given, based on a popular vote, by Eileen Mullin's IF newsletter XYZZYnews) was a tribute to him based on the movie Being John Malkovich; written by J. Robinson Wheeler, this IF work was titled Being Andrew Plotkin. In the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition, voters even ranked that amusing send-up significantly higher than Shade, a pseudonymous entry by Plotkin himself.
This section focuses on Plotkin's 1998 Spider and Web and
his 2000 Shade, but first provides a short description of his other IF works to give some idea of his eclectic range. In 1996, the year after A Change in the Weather, Plotkin released two quite different works. One was So Far, which won the Best Game XYZZY Award and three other XYZZYs. After a tedious start at the theater, the elaborate So Far shifts through bizarre landscapes; these IF worlds work in unusual ways. Reviewers in the IF community have called them surreal or referred to the style as magical realism, but the more ancient precedent here, and the more appropriate figure, is the literary riddle. The workings of the IF world and the themes of So Far must be enacted, as in solving such riddles, for the interactor to make progress. Plotkin's other IF work released that year was Lists and Lists, an interpreter and tutorial for Scheme, a LISP-like programming language. This was created in Inform and did simulate a world, although vestigially; thus it was, formally, interactive fiction, although perhaps closer to SHRDLU than Adventure in terms of how thrilling it seemed to the average interactor. His 1999 Hunter, in Darkness garnered two XYZZYs; it offers a tensely narrated experience based on Gregory Yob's Hunt the Wumpus, an ancestor of interactive fiction.Among Plotkin's prodigious non-IF programming output, two works are worth mentioning. One, written in Inform, often is lumped in with interactive fiction but is actually a hypertext work, in that lexias appear in response to a word from the current lexia being typed; a world is not simulated and represented in text as with IF works. This is the short The Space Under the Window (1997), written as part of Kristin Looney's conceptual art piece. In March 1997, Looney called for people to create works of art with the title The Space Under the Window. As of 1999, Plotkin's was one of twenty-seven works that were created and submitted (Looney 1999). In a different region of new media space is Plotkin's 1993 System's Twilight, a graphical Macintosh game, originally released as shareware and now available for free. This is a difficult puzzle game, but set in a curious world and incorporating some text in the form of dialogue. A small iconic character encounters other icon-like creatures in this game and has conversations with them that frame the puzzle-solving activities.
Critics complained during the commercial era that "most interactive fiction today does not adopt the metafictional form of the infinite, hall-ofmirrors story but rather the tactics of the detective, spy, or adventure novel-an extremely complex puzzle whose specific key the reader may have great difficulty finding but which is, in principle, solvable" (Niesz and Holland 1984, 121). Spider and Web is metafiction and a spy thriller. It begins in an alley: A tourist to this country (the player character) is standing by a featureless door. It quickly becomes clear that this IF world is a memory, or more precisely, is being presented mentally as a sort of reconstructed memory. The player character is actually a spy who has apparently slipped inside a secret enemy intelligence complex, for this character comes out of this first, hypodiegetic world very quickly, fettered and faced by an interrogator who has been forcing the player character to interactively revisit the break-in. Only yes and no can be said (usefully) in this IF world in which the interrogation takes place-at least until the moment when the interactor solves the work's most exquisite puzzle, using knowledge gained from the other IF worlds.
Progressing through the interrogation, without any of the player character's knowledge, does have certain pleasures, but the bizarre situation of the interactor being given hints by the player character's interrogator usually runs aground before the interrogation ends. The interrogation does help in some ways to enrich the IF world and provides insight into the character of the interrogator, but it is sometimes too evident that it mainly exists to set up the work's major puzzle, which leaves the player character free (or at least more free than before) to explore the frame IF world and to seek escape from the complex. The hypodiegetic worlds that the interrogation device forces the player to enter, it becomes apparent, may not reflect the past accurately-in fact, cannot all reflect the past accurately yet they do provide needed information and experience to allow the interactor to puzzle through to a successful traversal of the work.
The way that texts are presented, with some unusual exhortations in italics, suggests an interesting new voice that is speaking in order to control the hyponarrative being generated by the player character's simulated, and supposedly remembered, actions. As a genre piece, Spider and Web also works well, even if too much is left generic at times in the attempt to create a sense of enigma. It presents a sort of Cold War in a deep freeze, with the only battles being fought by people like the player character, equipped with nonmetal high-tech gadgets and perhaps uncertain (as the interrogator seems to be) about why they are continuing to wage this conflict. The "best" final replies that are possible are satisfying, in terms of completing the game, but they are also intriguing and provoke farther thought about what exactly may have happened in the end and about what the implications of the player character's actions have been for this IF world.
Although Plotkin is master of the devious puzzle, his finest work may be the short piece Shade, which essentially is puzzleless. Certain tasks must be done to traverse the work, and it's possible to have trouble figuring out what those are, but there may not be anything to do that is non-obvious in the sense of a literary riddle, and so the work could be considered as puzzleless (Montfort 2002b). But Shade is a riddle of highest order, with one IF world leaking into another in a terrifying way.
The player character begins on a futon, in this character's own apartment: a single room, with a closet and with nooks that house a bathroom and kitchen. The shade is down, and it is not yet dawn. Here again is the sort of intimate space that Nelson presented so well in Curses, but at the opposite extreme in terms of its size and in terms of how much family history it encodes. The player character is about to leave for a sort of vacation, as in Curses, but, as having the player character putter around the apartment reveals, the destination this time is the DeathValley Om, a Burning-Man-like festival that features constant chanting. While waiting for a taxi, first thirst, and then not knowing where the plane tickets are, compels some quotidian actions. The apartment contains a primitive computer, on whose screen the player character can see the "you-have-died message" from an interactive fiction version of Adam Cadre's novel Ready, Okay!
But as the interactor undertakes ordinary tasks, sand begins cropping up in unusual places. First there's a bit on the floor; finding the vacuum cleaner doesn't help, however, because it seems broken and fall of sand. Eventually, as the sun rises, the player character, simply by undertaking similar, ordinary actions, turns maniacal and frees sand from every unlikely location, transforming the apartment into part of the desert. The prologue began with the player character groggy in predawn; by now it seems evident that the apartment was experienced only in a delirium and was as false as the memories "recalled" under interrogation in Spider and Web. The friendly space of the apartment has, in the course of ordinary actions, been transformed into a lethal waste. Plotkin has made the one-room game in the apartment, often an occasion for wacky puzzles involving household objects, into an instrument of existential terror.
Writer and teacher Adam Cadre had played some interactive fiction when he was young, but what made him interested in actually writing and programming interactive fiction himself in the late 1990s was Plotkin's A Change in the Weather. This short and introspective work seemed to indicate that interactive fiction could take a different path. Still, Cadre said of A Change in the Weather that he "didn't actually like it much," finding something lacking in Plotkin's "left-brained lyricism" as it was expressed in that work, where the interactor had to figure out how to assemble a bridge. He went on to traverse Nelson's Curses and Jigsaw and Gareth Rees's Christminster in quick succession. "I concluded that all IF was written by British mathematics professors," said Cadre (2001), a native of California who graduated from Berkeley, "so I wanted to do something trashy and quintessentially American."
That's what he did in his first IF work, 1-0 (Interstate Zero), which won the Bes
t Game XYZZY Award in 1997. It was set in the desert, on the quintessentially American open road, in the fictitious Western state of Dorado. The player character is the succulently named college student Tracy Valencia; the initial situation finds her stuck in the desert heat, her car having broken down on her way home near the end of her first semester. (This places Tracy directly between two stereotypical IF environments: the college campus and one's own house.) Volker Blasius added an illustrative (and unofficial) subtitle when the work was added to the Interactive Fiction Archive; it is listed there as I-0: Jailbait on the Interstate. Cadre (2001) believes that most of what is compelling about I-0 is its nature as a sort of text-based "virtual reality," an interesting simulation that has little to do with solving puzzles or discovering alternate plot progressions and more to do with simply offering the situation "you're a cute chick. What do you want to do?" Indeed, numerous possibilities for action, some of which would normally be met with a computer-generated polite refusal, are available. One can choose to have Tracy hitchhike or walk in search of help, for instance, but the interactor can also have her remove her clothes. While Cadre was working on a larger, darkly comedic work after I-0 came out, his next release would be not be remembered for its humor or for this sort of "anything goes" capability.
Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction Page 25