Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction

by Nick Montfort

  As Cadre (2001) put it, "Whatever people think about Photopia, it isn't about hacking apart trolls." People in the IF community have thought a great deal about Cadre's pseudonymous 1998 entry in the IF Competition, which won first place. Its short, differently colored segments can only be experienced in one order, and it's not clear at first why they're being experienced. First the player character is a drunken fraternity boy in the passenger seat, beside a similar character. In the next segment, the player character is a female astronaut exploring a red planet; the world is presented with a sort of warm, pedantic narration in which difficult terms are explained in parentheses. Cadre (2001) cites Christopher Priest (who writes for comics) and the influence of

  the "Priest plot": a type of storytelling in which not only is chronology mixed up, but at the beginning, you don't even really know what you're looking at as you read ... but gradually you piece together who the characters are, what the events you've just witnessed mean, and by the end of the story, you can't imagine it any other way-the details have been related in exactly the right order for maximum effect.

  What is unusual about Photopia is not that it has many IF worlds-although this is more noticeable here than in most previous works-but that it has no "frame" world. Instead, Photopia begins with the text "`Will you read me a story?"Read you a story? What fun would that be? I've got a better idea: Let's tell a story together."' Arrows and shifts of color (in interpreters that support color) signal the transition to a new IF world. In terms of its subject matter, Cadre has named Atom Egoyan's movie The Sweet Hereafter, with its babysitter protagonist, as the main influence on Photopia. (Alison, the girl who is the main character in Photopia, is always seen as a non-player character; she is never controlled by the interactor.) He noted that Robert C. O'Brien's A Report from Group 17 inspired his technique of presenting this main character from the perspective of those who adore her, making the reader more likely to care about her even when few events are related and when little descriptive text is provided. Specific characters and puzzles have their background in books, also; Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy is the basis for the puzzle in the sky blue segment, for example (Cadre 2001). Photopia has been translated to Spanish by an IF author who goes by the name Zak.

  Cadre, whose first novel Ready, Okay! was published in 2000, has some background in programming as well as writing, and a strong interest in comics and gaming. He attended a high school magnet program in computer science, coding some computer games (none of which were interactive fiction) early on. Adventure games are not even Cadre's favorites on the computer; he has confessed that his favorite computer game is the space exploration game Star Control II: "The sense of discovery and solitude in that experience was the closest I've ever come to being there," Cadre said of the predecessor, (2001). He said that in high school he spent almost every weekend playing non-computer strategy games-`Axis and Allies, Diplomacy, Fortress America, Supremacy, and infinite home-grown variants of Risk, with `Colony Risk' being most popular" (2001). Cadre named the graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons as his favorite book.

  In yet another very different Cadre work, Varicella (winner of the Best Game XYZZY Award in 1999) the single IF world is a palace that seems, at first, to be from the Renaissance. Slowly the interactor notices anachronistic elements here and there, and the nature of this IF world becomes increasingly clear. Primo Varicella, the player character, is a palace minister, scheming to gain the regency after the king's very recent demise. Uaricella introduced a great improvement over the (unfortunately influential) menubased system of conversation in Photopia. Varicella allowed the interactors not only to ask and tell characters about topics of their choice (as in the more conversationally capable Deadline and other Infocom detective stories) but also to specify a servile, cordial, or hostile tone.

  There are wonderful non-player characters to converse with, too, who invite conversation by their appearance and presentation, and there is also a need to converse with them in order to figure out the intricate challenges posed byVaricella's rivals.A companion, helper, and trickster figure who is first encountered in the palace asylum is a standout (Montfort and Moulthrop 2003), but even the minor non-player characters have much to offer.

  One difficulty in the conception of Varicella is that the player character's level of knowledge is so much greater than that of the controlling interactor: This character is supposed to know everything about his rivals and about the palace itself, while the interactor knows nothing at first. Cadre handles this challenging gap in knowledge quite deftly, turning it to some advantage by loading each text that is generated with something that hints at the nature of the IF world or of the player character, who is greatly concerned with outward appearances. In Varicella, even trying to go in a direction where there is no exit is amusing: "You walk into a solid wall. How unseemly!" While Varicella proves quite difficult to traverse successfully, even finding new ways to wander around and get killed can be a joy-not just because it amuses, as the player character's death frequently did in certain graphical adventure games, but because it adds to the interactor's under standing of the world. Primo Varicella can be commanded to kill, or try to kill, anyone-he is that sort of guy just as Tracy Valencia can be made to remove her clothes on the side of the road, if that's what the interactor types.

  Cadre has also released numerous smaller IF works, including Shrapnel (set in a house that seems, at first, to be the one from Zork), 9:05 (set in another house), and TextFire Golf (referring to the TextFire hoax) as well as more recent multimedia pieces.

  Besides exploring smaller worlds and works that have shorter successful traversal times than were seen in commercial and early academic works, authors have also taken on a broader range of themes and subjects, worked in new genres, developed certain aspects (like non-player characters) much more thoroughly, and attempted new sorts of formal innovation. This last look at some of the most recent efforts of independent IF creators includes work that-while it is too early to see its influence on the development of the form over the long term-demonstrates the vitality of interactive fiction today.

  By taking interactive fiction to one extreme, it is possible to create a work that allows for at most one command from the interactor during any traversal; in such a work, the first reply is also the final reply. This seems to have been done first by Sam Barlow, whose Aisle (released in 1999) places the player character in a supermarket. Almost any command is properly handled, but after the reply to that command is generated nothing farther can be narrated; the world reverts to the initial situation. There is nothing to solve, but many interesting texts wait to be revealed. Not only can different replies result in radically different courses for the brief generated narrative, they can also reveal that the initial situation is actually different depending upon the command provided. The loop cannot be interrupted, as a similar loop is in the movie Groundhog Day; in that movie, the main character eventually escapes from the longer repeating circumstance, which always begins with the same suppositions. While interactors found Barlow's approach fascinating (and certainly worth the slight effort and commitment of time that was involved in interacting with Aisle a few times), it seemed that Aisle had exhausted this "one command only" format of interactive fiction. Then, in 2000, Andrew Pontius released Rematch, a puzzle-based one-move work of interactive fiction. It required the interactor to figure out, over several onemove traversals that ended with the player character's (or his friends') death, what one complex action would work to save the group from its seemingly unlikely but imminent fate.

  Another recent direction for interactive fiction has involved new sorts of parody.Today's IF community considers the canonical IF parody to be by C. E. Forman. He entered Mystery Science Theater 3000 Presents "Detective" in the first IF Competition in 1995. This lampooned Matt Barringer's buggy and bizarre 1993 Detective, a la Mystery Science Theater. There had been earlier parodies, such as David Malmberg's 1988 Pork 1: The Great UndcrEround Sewer System (a
Zork I parody done in AGT) and the 1986 work The BoQ~it by Fergus McNeill and Judith Child, a commercial piece of software developed in The Quill that specifically parodied the interactive fiction The Hobbit from Melbourne House. More complex parodical projects took shape in the late 1990s, when a whole fake interactive fiction company was formed. On 1 April 1998, the "TextFire 12-Pack" appeared in the /games/demos directory of the Interactive Fiction Archive. In the twelve short IF works (developed in Inform, TADS, and Hugo), which purported to offer previews of upcoming commercial interactive fiction, typing about would elicit short and funny bios of the purported authors.The readme file that came in the pack promised that TextFire would have a booth at the upcoming First Annual Festival of Interactive Fiction. After great discussion and speculation on the newsgroups, the parties responsible for the hoax were finally revealed (Britton 1998). Although the works themselveswhich include Revenge of the Killer Surf Nazi Robot Babes from Hell, Zu'zwang: The Interactive Life of a Chess Piece, and Verb!-are tiny and offer only brief amusement, the project, however loose a collaboration it was, was still the first large-scale collaboration of authors from the independent era. A similar large-scale parody was released on 1 January 2001: the Interactive Fiction Arcade, with sixteen works that provided textual versions of arcade favorites. But the April Fools Day offering found in the 1999 archive was a Coke Is It!, a conflation of segments from many other interactive fiction works by independents, augmented so as to amusingly incorporate product placement.

  The most significant work in creating non-player characters that function in new and effective ways has been done by a classics Ph.D. candidate who uses the pseudonym Emily Short in the IF community. Short, who is editing a forthcoming book of essays from the IF community on craft, history, and theory, has released works with intriguing and puzzling IF worlds, including her 2000 Metamorphoses and her 2002 Savoir Faire. Authors and players have shown the most interest, however, in her implementation of interactive conversations. Her Galatea, which won Best of Show in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Art Show, featured a living statue. The player character, who approaches this eponymous statue in a museum, can take a few of the typical adventure-game actions and can also converse with Galatea by asking or telling her about certain topic words. While the language that can be understood by the work is very limited, Galatea implemented a complex discourse model and an emotional model, with variables for Galatea's mood, her sympathy with the player character, and the amount of tension. Depending upon what topics had already been discussed and what the current topic and emotional levels were, a wide range of different conversations, leading to very different conclusions, could ensue.

  If taken to their conclusions they can in these different cases reveal different, even contradictory assumptions that the IF world was founded upon. In one final reply, Galatea would be seen to be a fake, in others, a magical or mythological being, and in yet others she would seem to be an artificial intelligence on display in a technology (not an art) exhibit.

  Galatea essentially provides a chatterbot with a more sophisticated architecture for behavior than had been seen in IF before; the statue's presence in an IF world is not very important to the work and the interaction. But Galatea does begin to unite new sorts of discourse and emotional modeling with the usual sorts of world modeling; that such an impressive chatterbot was implemented as a non-player character in interactive fiction, rather than as a standalone system, is a good sign for the form.

  Short introduced a new conversation system in her 2001 Best (f Three. In that work, the potential conversation was also well implemented, but the situation of the player character was less than compelling and provided the interactor with too little motivation-a difficulty in the puzzleless Galatea as well, although one that some interactors worked around by devising a challenge for themselves and attempting to find every possible final reply.

  Another IF author who has released impressive works recently is Jon Ingold, a recent graduate of Cambridge University. His 1999 My Angel used a "NOVEL mode" in which new text produced by the computer would appear as normal prose sentences would, sometimes being added to the end of the current paragraph and sometimes to the beginning of a new paragraph. The interactor's input is not incorporated into this text. The result is a generated text that looks much like a passage from literary fiction.The player character communicates with a strange presence in this generated story; flashbacks are employed at times.

  In Ingold's 2001 All Roads, winner of that year's Interactive Fiction Competition, the player character seems to be some sort of entity who shifts between the minds of different people in Renaissance Italy, controlling them; from the beginning, though, as this character's "host" waits on the gallows, about to be hanged, it is not clear to either the interactor or the player character exactly what is going on.

  While Ingold (1999) has said he seeks "puzzles that ... integrate well into the story" and while he does manage to devise such puzzles, his works, for all their innovation in structure and interface, do not yet bring puzzles together with the process of generating narratives as powerfully as in the riddle-like works of Plotkin. Nor are the generated prose and the possible narratives exceptional when considered as a whole, although some of the descriptive text in All Roads creates compelling images of light and shadow. Ingold's main contribution so far has been in his greater sensitivity to the levels of the interactor's and player character's awareness, as seen in the way he provides for a confused player character whose thoughts clarify as the interactor traverses My Angel, and in the way he provides for the interactor's level of awareness, at crucial times, to exceed that of one of the player characters in All Roads, as this understanding gradually rises to the level of the work's mastermind. Fortunately, in neither case do these structural clarifications, satisfying as they may be on certain levels, completely answer the deeper, complex questions raised by these two IF worlds.

  Other recent developments have included development systems themselves. Andrew Plotkin's Glulx offers a way around the harsh memory limits of the Z-machine. Instead of compiling Inform programs to Z-machine targets, programmers can compile Inform to Plotkin's cross-platform Glulx virtual machine, which allows files to be up to 4 gigabytes and providesusing Plotkin's Glk interface standard and his Blorb standard for packaging multimedia resources-the ability for programmers to integrate nontextual media elements. Meanwhile, a similarly expanded version 3 ofTADS (called T3) neared completion in 2002. The virtual machine for that system was completed in 2001, with ports to several platforms being made early the next year. There is also further development of systems that have smaller followings than TADS or Inform but have seen recent use: the shareware system ADRIFT by Campbell Wild, which runs on Windows and is popular with non-programmers, and the more capable cross-platform multimedia system Hugo by Kent Tessman. New interpreters for many of the existing formats are also being developed and released: 2002 saw the release of new Z-machine interpreters Zoom (for several platforms) and Windows Frotz, for instance.

  Efforts have also been made to offer IF works to interactors outside the IF community. They include hosting IF readings and in other ways bringing interactive fiction to the attention of the computer literature community, activities in which this author has often been involved. (The readings involving interactive fiction have included the Boston Ti Party, the readings in New York City sponsored by Wiresight, and a reading at UCLA sponsored by the Electronic Literature Organization.) David Cornelson has started the IF Library, a Web site and small press offering manuals to aid IF authors. While About.com shut down its IF site, which had been run by Stephen Granade, that author continues to offer Web resources to the community at his new site, Brass Lantern.

  Rumors of the death of interactive fiction have been greatly exaggerated. Although it is easy to find unimaginative recent works of interactive fiction, it is hard not to notice the formal, thematic, computational, and literary innovation that is happening today and that promises to continue.


  Throughout this book several connections between interactive fiction and its cultural context have been discussed. This final chapter seeks to explain in a bit more depth how interactive fiction has influenced other aspects of computing and other sorts of cultural production. The chapter closes with some predictions regarding the future of interactive fiction-not in terms of what the shape of individual works will be like or even what sorts of creative trends will predominate, but concerning, rather, the place the form might occupy within computing and literature.

  MUDS and MOOS, online social spaces that simulate worlds just as interactive fiction does but that involve multiple characters controlled by different people, have recently received some attention from scholars. These systems are direct descendants of interactive fiction. Specifically, the "D" in "MUD" stands for Zork. MUDs are sometimes euphemistically called "Multiple User Dimensions" or "Multiple User Domains," but as everyone who has been involved with these environments for a while knows, the acronym actually stands for "Multiple User Dungeons," as it did when the first MUD was developed by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at England's Essex University in 1979.As Bartle explains, "The `D' does stand for 'Dungeon',but not because the original MUD (which I co-wrote) had a dungeon in it; rather it was because there was a hacked-up version of Zork doing the rounds at the time, which bore the name `Dungeon"' (qtd. in Smith and Cowan 1999). These environments were similar to works of interactive fiction, but multiple interactors could log on at the same time and interact with one another. The nature of the experience changed dramatically as a result, and interacting with others, rather than interacting directly with the simulated world, became the really important aspect of most MUDs. The advent of MOOs (with MOO standing for "MUD Object Oriented") brought a powerful new paradigm to this virtual space, making it easier for many MUD users to create new objects on MUDs and to carve out their own virtual spaces. Although the presence of multiple interactors makes many things about the MUD or MOO experience different from the experience of an IF work, those systems have many affinities with IF works. Studies of one of these types of systems will surely yield results about textual and interactive properties that will apply to the other.