Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction

by Nick Montfort

  The influence of interactive fiction on different sorts of computer games has already been discussed with reference to the graphical adventure game, of the sort that Sierra and LucasArts pioneered and that, in one fairly simple formulation, Robin and Rand Miller's Myst (1994), attained widespread popularity. But another type of computer game, the RPG or roleplaying game, also drew its inspiration from the first work of interactive fiction, Adventure. One very influential early RPG, Rogue, used letters and other characters to visually depict the map of a dungeon, through which the intrepid adventurer (represented by @') quests. To move, the player presses individual keys. Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman developed the game in 1980. In the 1980s it was ported to many different computers.

  Most of the existing adventure-type games had "canned" adventures-they were exactly the same every time you played, and of course the programmers had to invent all of the puzzles, and therefore would always know how to beat the game. We decided that with Rogue, the program itself should "build the dungeon", giving you a new adventure every time you played, and making it possible for even the creators to be surprised by the game. (Wichman 1997)

  This Adventure-inspired game in turn was an inspiration for computer roleplaying games, although not the only one. Richard Garriott, who created the popular Ultima series of computer RPGs at his company Origin (using the pseudonym Lord British) had programmed a similar sort of game using graphics on his Apple II in 1979, when he was in high school. For that game, called Akalabeth, Garriott drew inspiration from Dungeons and Dragons. Adventure was one of several predecessors to computer RPGs, however, which have (along with the ideas of the MUD and MOO) led to a successful new format, the MMORPG or Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, of which EverQuest and Ultima Online are examples.

  One sign of the pervasive influence of Adventure and interactive fiction is seen in the way it influenced the most talked-about information system of the 1990s. Tim Berners-Lee, who conceived of and originally implemented the World Wide Web, was inspired by interactive fiction in his work, as seen when he tested his earlier system, Enquire. Two of the original developers of the World Wide Web wrote that "Tim made bits of labyrinthine hyper-routes in Enquire that served no better purpose than to exploit the program's capacity for making them. `I made mazes of twisty little passages all alike,' he explains, `in honour of Adventure"' (Gillies and Cailliau 2000, 170). In his original proposal for the Web, Berners-Lee (1989) described the way Enquire worked in terms of Adventure: "In 1980, I wrote a program ... Enquire ... it allowed one to store snippets of information, and to link related pieces together in any way. To find information, one progressed via the links from one sheet to another, rather like in the old computer game `adventure."'

  Interactive fiction has been used extensively in education to teach students about computers and about language; interactors have encountered it in the middle-school classroom (e.g., Desilets 1999) and, as was already mentioned in chapter 4, it has been used for programming exercises at the university level. Interactive fiction has also served in less formal educational roles as an introduction to the computer. As a curator once commented in conversation, Adventure teaches two essential principles of computing: Try absolutely everything you can think of and save all the time. It has been the inspiration for some people to learn to program and to discover more about the workings of computers. Interactive fiction has also been used to aid in language learning, both in classroom contexts and independently by individuals. Graphical adventure games that do not accept natural language input have been developed especially for language learning; No Recuerdo by Douglas Morgenstern and Janet Murray is an early example. Begun in 1984, this interactive video work has the interactor play a journalist who interviews characters in Colombia, selecting choices from a list. Foreign-language interactive fiction works are particularly well suited to language learning since interactive fiction requires input in the language being learned as well as comprehension of the text that is presented. (If the text isn't really understood, puzzles cannot be solved.) Of course a program that accepts grammatically incorrect input is not as tolerable in a situation like this, since it could reinforce poor usage. Still, interactive fiction has obvious potential in this situation and in many sorts of educational situations related to language and computing. Perhaps it can also help students develop cognitive skills and aid in teaching about other sorts of subject matter that can be simulated in textually presented worlds. These computerized riddles should turn out to be helpful teachers in many new circumstances.

  Interactive fiction has influenced the incidents in and the style of at least one important work of hypertext fiction, Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden. An "interactive dream" sequence in this work-an IF-like experience that is the result of a university research project-is told in the second person, as is typical in interactive fiction. Adventure has also been an important part of a play; the 1990 PICK UP AX by Anthony Clarvoe is a period piece (set in the frenzied Silicon Valley of the early 1980s) in which one of the programmers, Keith, plays a work of interactive fiction like Adventure, complete with dwarves and axes. During the play he learns to turn his thinking about computing and his mastery of the game world into action in dealing with the other characters, suggesting that the experience of interactive fiction can have meaning beyond the computer's screen Jerz 2000b).

  In print fiction, Jayne Loader's 1989 short story "Wild America" twisted the typical text adventure in a different way:

  You are a thirty-year-old *auto* worker in *Detroit, Michigan*. Ten years ago you married a fellow worker.You now have two children. A year ago, your factory closed. Neither you nor your spouse were able to find other ernployment.Your unemployment insurance has run out. Although your savings are gone, you do not qualify for welfare. You've already sold your lakeside cabin. Now the bank is threatening to take away your house, the car dealership to repossess your car, and the furniture store to confiscate all your furniture, including the TV set. To top it off, your baby needs an operation!

  You may now begin your adventure. I will be your eyes and hands. Direct inc with commands of one or two words. If you need help type HELP To see how you're doing type SCORE.

  Although one critic finds that Loader's story is an attack on the lack of interactivity in interactive fiction (Sloane 2000), this reading is at best questionable. The story, presenting a doomed interactor who can do nothing to escape fate, certainly does comment on this lack of freedom, as many interactive fiction works themselves do. As one scholar has written in a note on the Web, "It would almost seem superfluous to point out that Loader is using this image of the illusion of agency in interactive fiction as an allegory for the illusion of freedom offered by capitalist America-an ethical engagement not with a literary form, but with a political system and the ethics of claims of `equal opportunity' and freedom for all" (Edelmann 2000). Here, then, is another example of how the form of interactive fiction has already been used effectively as a figure outside interactive fiction itself, in a short story.

  Interactive fiction's influence is felt in numerous other books. One is the memoir Extra Life: Coming of Age in Cyberspace by David Bennahum (1998). That book's chapter 6, "Dungeon," is structured as a commentary on a transcript of interaction with Zork (specifically, with the freely available FORTRAN version called Dungeon). Bennahum uses that chapter not as a framework for a social commentary unrelated to computing, as Loader did, but to discuss his experience as an interactor and to describe the way the computer created a separate space for him, apart from the outside social world he lived in. The memoir's final chapter is titled "Beyond Zork."

  Even more interesting is the way the experience of interactive fiction is woven by Richard Powers into his novel Plowing the Dark, which deals with virtual reality as it is being implemented by a sprawling company in a space called the Cavern. There are several allusions and formal connections to interactive fiction, which is important throughout as an early virtual reality development using text a
nd is deeply related to the book's central questions and themes. The form makes its most obvious appearance in chapter 16, which begins with the first diegetic text from Adventure: "You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building." This sentence comes to JackdawAcquerelli as a message on his computer. He remembers his first encounter with Adventure as an eleven-year-old, having been brought to an office to interact with it (much as Graham Nelson was) and finding himself "at the base camp of pure possibility" (Powers 2001, 105); there, he found Adventure to be "nothing less than the transcendental Lego set of the human soul, its pieces infinite in both number and variety" (106).Then came his disappointment at how little was actually simulated, although that gave way to "challenge. Another hour, and challenge became obsession" (107). He recalls how his obsession with textual interactive fiction continued, how disappointed he was at the arrival of graphical works, and how this passion led him to the work he does now. The grown-up Jackdaw plays Adventure with and for a remote audience, but mostly he plays at remembering it with others. Those on the system type fragments back and forth until they confess in a flurry of messages, at the end of the chapter, that none of them ever made it to the end of Adventure.

  The previous examples should suffice to show that interactive fiction can and already does have some meaning in computer literature and in other literary arts, and that it does not exist apart from our culture as a mere curiosity.

  "We are standing at the beginning of a new fusion of technology and literature" (185), wrote Gary McGath in 1984, continuing with pages of predictions about what interactive fiction would be like in years to come-almost all of them wrong. Increased realism, one improvement McGath thought interactors would see, is not a notable feature of later commercial or independent works; nor has the turn-based system of interaction been discarded as McGath said it might be. In some ways recent efforts have improved upon the simulation of characters and the range of alternatives; interestingly, the best work in these two areas was done after the commercial era ended. A decade later another author naively predicted, based on the direction of research at the Oz Project, that interactive fiction would become more "highly interactive," interruptable at any point or else asynchronous and no longer based on turns. This author also mistakenly believed that graphical adventure games might seek ways to integrate the richness of textual communication into the experience. (In fact, such ideas might be borne out in Facade, which is in many ways the culmination of the Oz Project.) But given how foolish these particular predictions (Montfort 1995) now look when considering the mass of work that has recently been done in the form, this author is not about to continue in the same vein in this book.

  Speculation about what sort of interactive fiction will be created in years to come not only is usually unproductive, but can also be counterproductive. To blithely mention the riddle of a hypothetical IF work effectively ruins the work for any future interactors who read such a prognostication. The supposedly hypothetical work that is so ruined may in fact already be in development, and babbling about what form a future work might take would be the most painful sort of spoiler for an author who is already trying to realize that work. The only real indicators of the future of interactive fiction will be new works from IF authors. Still, there are questions about the future of interactive fiction that are worth pondering. Among them is the matter of whether IF will be seen only as a pleasant and addictive hobby or also as a meaningful art just "fin" or perhaps "spiritually uplifting" as well, to use Marc Blank's terms (Dyer 1984). There is also the broader question of whether, in the future, the computer will be seen by the general reading populace as a form of potential literature or as one that is capable of providing the sorts of experiences that literary readers value.

  Interactive fiction is certainly alive and well, but the reason most interactive fiction is created today can be summed up as to amuse the initiated. Looking to the Interactive Fiction Competition as the main context for publication of interactive fiction today, one easily sees that IF works are written for a small group of people already familiar with the form, and the main, if not only, concern is whether that group quickly finds such works enjoyable. Having entered the Interactive Fiction Competition, I do not at all seek to place myself above such a motive. Nor is this motivation somehow an impure or base one. A poet might similarly write an occasional poem to amuse friends or family; this is part of the life of poetry. However, such a purpose hardly defines the limit of poetry.

  Ultimately, the most profound impulse to create any art (including interactive fiction) may simply be irrational. It may be a compulsion to decorate the terrifying, as seen in the ornamenting of the destructive machine portrayed in Robert Pinsky's poem "The Figured Wheel." Adam Cadre met the absurdity of the question "Why do you write interactive fiction?" with an amusing answer on rec.arts.int-fiction: "To impress Jodie Foster." Perhaps the desire to write interactive fiction at the turn of the century is, as this reference to John Hinckley's motivation suggests, pathological. The impulse to create interactive fiction already is, and will likely continue to be, as broad and difficult to establish as is the motivation for creating any art, in however usual or unusual a form, however popular or obscure it may be. But certainly it can exceed the narrow type of motivation described earlier. IF works have already shown wonder; in the fixture they might continue to be created because of metaphysical or political concerns, to explore the relationship between people and computers or between people and texts, to describe utopian as well as dystopian worlds, and to express or challenge cultural notions.

  Discussion on rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction sometimes turns to matters of money and to questions of whether or not interactive fiction can be viable in the marketplace again. Few people who consider the topic seriously think that it can be, and there are many people in the IF community who would prefer, regardless of its commercial potential, that the form remain on the margins. Some authors and interactors would rather have interactive fiction be a hobby for a group of enthusiasts. They see that wider popularity and interest from other sectors (commercial or academic) risks dissolving or weakening the current community.

  Commercial interactive fiction in the future would have to take a very different shape than it did in the 1980s. If interactive fiction did somehow become more widespread as a result of such a commercial venture, this might change the nature of today's community, since the somewhat esoteric nature of interactive fiction is part of what defines this group. However, the future of interactive fiction in our culture is not limited to only two options-a commercial boom or the continued existence of only a single group of fans calling itself"the IF community." There is another possibility for more widespread appreciation of the form, which would neither require a miraculous business breakthrough nor dissipate the group of interactors and authors involved with interactive fiction today. New sorts of interactors might come to appreciate the form and to author works in it through a route other than physical or virtual software stores.

  Already, different language communities are creating interactive fiction. There is also a community of blind interactors that is essentially separate from the group calling itself"the IF community" and that has its own online journal. There is another group of people who create and enjoy adult interactive fiction (AIF), which depicts sexual activity. The concept of the IF community as it is so often mentioned is in fact a myth; although such a group exists, it is one of several with an interest in interactive fiction. For academics and parties interested in literature to join in appreciating the form, and even authoring works, could easily add to the diversity of interactive fiction works available rather than simply ruining this one existing community.

  Despite the fixation on commerce that Americans exhibit, other signs of success besides market share exist, even within our culture. Poetry is a good example of an art that is relevant to the everyday lives ofAmericans but has never been economically sustaining in this country, even for poets who are highly
esteemed. Like poetry, interactive fiction does not need to be lucrative to become a form that helps us gain new realizations about our world, a form that is relevant to our lives. However, interactive fiction can benefit from institutional and cultural respect if it is to be a part of culture in the way that poetry is.

  This author is one of several people working to bring legitimacy to the concept of computer literature, also called electronic literature-which includes interactive fiction and other forms based on the computer's ability to present different media according to rules and user input. Today, it is easy to go into many public libraries and use a computer to look up a phone number or consult a street map on the Web. It is also easy to pull a novel off the shelf at such a library, sit down, and start reading it. But many of the places that are most congenial to reading, such as the library, are not well suited for the experience of interactive fiction and other types of computer literature. Nor are librarians or booksellers prepared to advise readers about how to find works of computer literature that they might enjoy. There are other reasons that computer literature is a difficult concept for people to accept. A cultural bias against the computer as a literary medium exists; most people experience the computer as either a workplace fixture or a device for less cerebral entertainment in the form of video games. (Such games have their own interesting textures that are too often dismissed, and the way in which they structure the actions of one or more players is a woefully overlooked topic. Still, it is certainly the case that common preconceptions about what a computer game is and the common way in which such games are dismissed make it harder to accept the idea of computer literature.) Finally, there are a handful of purportedly anti-technology readers and critics who employ the machinery of the manual typewriter to denounce the computer. Such fetishists of gears and rollers can hardly be taken seriously, and the only popular trend they represent is a general fear-not of technology, obviouslybut of the replacement of their familiar technologies (books as well as typewriters) with unfamiliar ones. Interactive fiction is hardly out to displace or replace the book in some simplistic way, and arguments assuming that it is will soon be seen as obsolete. What is more troubling is that many people who are capable computer users and who also enjoy literature have never even imagined that something like interactive fiction could be part of their literary and computing life.