Bitwise

by David Auerbach

  As a software engineer, I’m terrified by the complexity that Adams describes. Every programming instinct insists that systems be kept as simple and contained as possible, with interactions carefully delineated and constrained. I want to keep the whole system in my mind at once. I want there to be as few manually specified special cases as possible. I want things to be clean. But Adams’s intent to simulate the world in as much complexity as possible runs straight up against that instinct. “Every gear you can think of” is never going to be all of them. There will always be holes, more than a single human can cope with. Little elisions add up over time, and eventually they do matter. The seams start to show.

  Computer scientist Alan Perlis wrote, “Every program is a part of some other program and rarely fits.” In other words, when folk taxonomies are elaborated and combined beyond their initial scope, they show their seams and begin to split open. This need not require contact with the real world; the simple interaction of independent taxonomies can produce new conflicts that would never have arisen independently. In the DSM’s case, the conflict between the competing demands on the DSM caused its directors to retreat from external requirements into confused and isolated rhetoric. Yet without the mathematical demands of computers to keep them honest, they only made their classification more private and inaccessible and arbitrary. Software engineers, however, control the computational meta-system by which the entire world is being quantified. Psychiatrists try to carve nature at the joints, but software engineers go beyond that. We carve the whole world at its joints, and we create tools that enable everybody to do the same. And then we program computers to do it for us. Computers increasingly assist us in role-playing ourselves.

  Frances Allen conceived of the DSM as “a guidebook, not a bible—a collection of temporarily useful diagnostic constructs, not a catalog of ‘real’ diseases.” And Dungeon Masters “use the rules only to help the players suspend their disbelief and to suggest new, better dramatic possibilities for your story.” Such guidelines provide a precedent-guided restriction on complete arbitrariness, but allow for creative variation. Such modeling is a heuristic and humanist art, one that computers do not yet practice well, if at all. In Dwarf Fortress, by contrast, the rules are binding, not suggestive. As computers increasingly take over the role of referees from humans and tighten the enforcement of folk ontologies, what happens to our personae? Whether as doctor or Dungeon Master, computers do things differently. Computers make it much harder to revise the rules. And as systems reach and surpass the complexity of Dwarf Fortress, they increasingly become undebuggable, evolving unforeseen bugs on their own.

  The first company to confront this dilemma was Google. I was there when they did.

  *1 I did think it was delightful that D&D made use of Platonic solids for its dice rolls: the D4 tetrahedron, the D6 cube, the D8 octahedron, the D12 dodecahedron, and the D20 icosahedron. I recall the D12 being the wallflower, especially given the incredibly frequent use of the D10, a non-Platonic ten-sided die with kite-shaped sides. (It is far more ungainly than the Platonic solids.) Two D10s were handy for making rolls against 100-entry tables, of which D&D had many.

  *2 Or not. Gygax’s infamous 1975 adventure Tomb of Horrors was intentionally designed to kill off characters who had gotten too big for their britches—including that of Gygax’s own son Ernie.

  *3 The tropes of D&D, its Tolkienized antecedents, and its many offshoots have spread through computer games far and wide, while those of almost no other genre, whether highbrow literature or lowbrow pulp mystery, have. The high-fantasy source material of Dungeons & Dragons, based in the pulps of Robert E. Howard’s Conan, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s whimsical fantasies, and above all J. R. R. Tolkien’s medieval fantasy cosmos (where cultural detail was more important than plot or character) proved uniquely suited to gaming and then to computation. The combination of physical combat, arbitrary and easily contrived magic, imaginary landscapes, and elaborate taxonomies of trait, skill, and race all contributed to making high fantasy the default interactive world of the computer. By focusing on environment and mechanics over human relationships and politics, Tolkien et al. unwittingly set the stage for computer-facilitated worldbuilding. In no other genre is it so easy to see how the rolling of dice—the generation of random numbers—could become the core mechanic of gaming.

  *4 Game historian Jon Peterson briefly alludes to theosophy as a possible precursor to such syncretism. Peterson gives great support to the notion that Gygax, in presiding over the yoking of Tolkienesque fantasy mythology to military wargaming mechanics, is responsible for initiating a cultural empire akin to Walt Disney’s (who had analogously yoked children’s entertainment and fairy tales to animation), though Gygax’s comparative lack of ruthlessness prevented him from retaining control over its development.

  *5 The downsides of Gygax’s more-is-more approach are evident in his little-known three-dimensional chess variant Dragonchess, which plays out on three levels, each of which is an oversized chessboard, and gives each player forty-two pieces instead of the usual sixteen, all with complicated and seemingly arbitrary rules for moving. All of Gygax’s creations possess too much of a muchness.

  *6 Gygax’s own torn loyalty between quantified constraints and creative freedom is evident in two infamous quotes, “A DM only rolls the dice because of the noise they make,” and “The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don’t need any rules.” Peterson also quotes Chuck Ulrich’s creation of the officious, bull-headed race of “gygacks,” who “will insist upon everything being done their way, although they will insist that they favor individuality and diversity.”

  *7 Echoing Rameau’s Nephew, Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life posits that social environments depend on preexisting specifications of social roles. “When an individual or performer plays the same part to the same audience on different occasions, a social relationship is likely to arise. Defining social role as the enactment of rights and duties attached to a given status, we can say that a social role will involve one or more parts and that each of these different parts may be presented by the performer on a series of occasions to the same kinds of audience or to an audience of the same persons.”

  *8 Of course, the creation of such a deep world requires great programming effort, and I’m not aware of any computer RPGs that have bothered to model the socioeconomic reality of prostitution.

  *9 As of 2016, he claims the game is 42 percent complete.

  *10 The player chronicled his year in the style of Deadwood’s Al Swearingen: “To begin with, all of our fucking workshops and trade goods are sitting outside in the fucking rain. One of the previous Overseers must have been some sort of shallow-dwelling skygazer because having our production out here is just inhumane to the poor hoopleheads who have to stand out there. I almost went fucking crazy having to be under the goddamn open sky for the whole trip out here, instead of in a nice safe cavern, and some of these poor bastards have been working out in the open for four years now. Four years standing out in the rain, or even worse, under that horrifying yawning expanse of blue open sky.”

  *11 Law is not yet an explicit system in Dwarf Fortress, but it is on the to-do list. Adams: “Do we do law, property, status, customs, economics, boats? Which of those comes first? Because they influence each other so much, law influences economics, economics influences law.”

  INTERLUDE:

  ADVENTURES WITH TEXT

  Pico and Sepulveda

  Where nobody’s dreams come true

  —EDDIE MAXWELL

  HUMANS CAN FINESSE the gaps in their world models that computers cannot—with language. We inherit our language from our surrounding environments, and how we speak reflects the virtues and faults of the immediate culture around us. I grew up in the remote suburbs of Los Angeles in as close to a cultural void as could exist at the time. The limits of my wor
ld were local, hardly reaching beyond the space of a few dozen miles in any direction. Malls, bookstores, video rental places, and a small library. Separated from any sort of organic heritage or legacy, my family resided in a town that was crafted and manicured to evoke no one specific culture. Aside from the looming, monumental presence of the Pacific Ocean, I lived in a blank canvas on which no one was painting. I subsisted on UHF’s television flotsam and whatever I found at the local library and B. Dalton Bookseller.

  This was before the web. Culture as such reached me only through older media: books, movies, television, comics. Bookstores, libraries, and video rental stores were the only points of connection to worlds unlike my own. Computers were a part of my life, but there was little art in them. I remember Balance of Power, Logo, and the diabolical Robot Odyssey, the last being possibly the hardest computer game of its era. Such computer creations exercised my mind and spurred my curiosity, but they rarely imprinted themselves on my heart as many books and movies did. But there were a few programs that did. Trinity was one of them. Like Balance of Power, Trinity was a product of the nuclear fear of the Cold War, but where Balance of Power is strategic, Trinity is literary.

  The Gadget, the fission bomb that exploded during the Trinity test in 1945 (US DOD)

  Author Brian Moriarty named Trinity after the site of the first atomic weapon test on July 16, 1945. The spirit of Lewis Carroll hangs over this 1986 text adventure, the caterpillar’s mushroom transformed into the nuclear mushrooms that haunted the Cold War generations. Trinity was my introduction to the nuclear arms race. It opens with an atomic holocaust and the end of the world, then sends you back in time to the original Trinity test site in 1945 to stop it, via a fantasy looking-glass world connecting all nuclear detonations. I cannot quote you much from Ultima or Might and Magic, but I can tell you of the words I learned from Infocom games (“newel,” “palimpsest,” “affidavit”), as well as lines like the mantra of Trinity: “All prams lead to the Kensington Gardens.”*1 Trinity still haunts me.

  Zork, published in 1980, was Infocom’s first game, authored by Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, Bruce Daniels, and Tim Anderson. This illustration by Laurence Jenkins contains every location in Zork.

  Players control text adventures through imperative commands. The game provides you with a description of a setting and situation, and you issue an instruction for what you want your player character to do. By convention, the game speaks to the player in the second person and present tense. In the imaginary transcript below, the player’s commands are the lines beginning with an angle bracket in bold type, the computer’s output in regular type.

  THROUGH THE KLEIN BOTTLE

  An interactive nostalgia trip

  Release 1 / Serial number 170221

  You find yourself in a strangely familiar unfamiliar place.

  Sculpture Garden

  You are standing before the grandest sculpture in an intimate yet sweeping garden. The sculpture arches over your head, tangling itself into twisted shapes somewhere between Calder and Tinguely. The metalwork curves so much that it is difficult to tell where the inside ends and the outside begins.

  Corrugated steps rise up into the sculpture to the north and south.

  A baby grand piano stands between the two entrances. Its lid is unusual. A folded paper card sits on the keys. The words Felix Klein 1849–1925 are engraved on the piano.

  > who am I?

  You are David Auerbach, or at least you were the last time you checked.

  > how old am I?

  Your age is strangely indeterminate. You don’t feel like a child, as you appear to possess the memory of decades behind you, but simultaneously you look at yourself and see the gangly limbs and stiff clothes of your twelve-year-old self. The strangeness of the environs makes it that much harder to locate yourself.

  > read the card

  You take the card from the keys and unfold it. “Please play Bach’s musette,” it reads. As if on cue, the simple melody of the piece rings out on chimes from somewhere inside the sculpture.

  > play musette on piano

  You haven’t played it in over twenty years, but the finger movements come back to you immediately. You begin to play, but recoil from the dissonance. The piece is all wrong. Or rather, the piano is all wrong. The keys are reversed, so the lowest notes are at the right end of the keyboard and the highest at the left.

  > play musette reversed on piano

  You try to flip your finger movements to match the inverted layout of the keys, but it’s no good. Your muscle memory does not admit to such geometrical transformations.

  > kill me

  You’re indispensable.*2

  > examine the piano

  It’s backward, for one. Also, the lid is not flat, but instead takes the form of an impossibly curving piece of wood in a vague jug shape. The prop stick appears to warp straight through the lid, making it difficult to tell where the outside of the “jug” ends and the inside begins.

  The words Felix Klein 1849–1925 are engraved on the piano.

  > go north

  You ascend the north side of the sculpture.

  North Sculpture

  The “floor” of the sculpture curves up and around so as to make you dizzy. Your footsteps do not seem to be taking you in the direction you think they should be.

  You feel certain you have been here before.

  > go up

  The floor twists alarmingly as you continue your ascent.

  Top of Sculpture

  The metalwork clears a bit here, yet the arc of the structure is as tangled and incoherent as ever. You feel all turned around.

  The tunnel of the sculpture curves down to the north and south.

  Your sense of direction is very confused, but your mind has snapped into focus. You are in the Klein bottle from Trinity. It is the four-dimensional analogue to the Möbius strip. Where the Möbius strip turns its two sides into one by twisting into the third dimension, the Klein bottle turns two surfaces, inside and outside, into one single surface by twisting into the fourth dimension. In Trinity, it was a large topiary that formed the Klein bottle rather than a metal sculpture, but the shape is the same.

  > remember trinity

  You think back to Brian Moriarty’s 1986 text adventure Trinity, a haunting game about nuclear Armageddon. It’s imprinted on you indelibly. You remember the frightening moment of meeting the old Japanese woman in Kensington Gardens at the beginning of the game, just before World War III starts and the world ends.

  You begin to approach the old woman, but stop in your tracks. Her face is wrong. You look a little closer and shudder to yourself. The entire left side of her head is scarred with deep red lesions, twisting her oriental features into a hideous mask. She must have been in an accident or something.

  The one-sided Klein bottle. Since it does not actually intersect itself, it cannot be realized in three dimensions. Four dimensions are required.

  Your character will later travel back in time to Nagasaki and meet her as a child just before the bomb hits. It was a devastating game. It provided a new emotional venue, a new context for you to experience a half-mimetic, half-fantastic world as a shadowy player-character whom you inhabited.

  > go south

  South Sculpture

  The “floor” of the sculpture curves up and around so as to make you dizzy. Your footsteps do not seem to be taking you in the direction you think they should be.

  > go down

  The floor twists alarmingly as you descend.

  Sculpture Garden

  You are standing before the grandest sculpture in the garden. It arches over your head, tangling itself into twisted shapes somewhere between Calder and Tinguely. The metalwork curves so much that it is difficult to tell where the inside ends and the outside begins.

  Corrugated steps curve up into the sculpture to the north and
south.

  A baby grand piano stands between the two entrances. Its lid is unusual. The words 5291–9481 nielK xileF are engraved on the piano.

  > examine the piano

  The lid is as confusing as before, but the piano is now forward. By walking through the surface of the Klein bottle you have effected a mirror-reversal on yourself. But as far as you’re concerned, you have mirror-reflected the world.

  > play musette on piano

  You warily touch the keys, but find them to be properly oriented now. The charming melody of the musette, still so familiar to you, plays out on the piano easily.

  The simple melody resonates against the metal sculpture. Each note seems to echo a resonance frequency deep within the sculpture, until the entire structure is vibrating uneasily above and around you. As you finish the piece, some of the girders are visibly undulating, and the screams of metal against metal set your teeth on edge. Then with a huge clamor, the structure collapses all around you, miraculously leaving you unscathed, but hitting the ground with the titanic force of a building being demolished.