These three sentences state six specific things about Adventure-when, where, and why it was developed, that it is a computerized version of Dungeons and Dragons, that its fictional locations are inspired by Tolkien, and that it is set in California. At least four of these six statements are clearly false, and the remaining two are misleading.
Adventure was not developed in the 1960s, but in 1975 and 1976; confusion on this point is extremely widespread, as is discussed in chapter 3. It was not developed at SAIL, but was originated by one programmer and author, Will Crowther, who worked at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With Crowther's permission, it was then augmented by another programmer and author, Don Woods, who used the SAIL computer at Stanford. It is misleading to call the work "an experimental game" developed by an artificial intelligence laboratory, since it was a program created originally by an individual for the enjoyment, as Crowther said, of "non-computer people"; while it was later expanded by another individual, it never existed as any sort of official academic project or experiment. (Confusion on this point is also frequent; a book on adventure game programming makes the same mistake, e.g., characterizing Adventure as "an exercise in problem solving, artificial intelligence, and simulation" as if it were created for research purposes (Vile 1984, viii).) Adventure was influenced by Dungeons and Dragons and it is often referred to as a "version" of that game (Crowther himself has called it that), but that characterization is at best very limiting. Crowther was an accomplished caver who said he created Adventure to be "a re-creation in fantasy of my caving, and also ... a game for the kids [his daughters], and perhaps [to have] some aspects of the Dungeons and Dragons I had been playing" (Peterson 1983, 188). The locations bear the names and detailed descriptions of specific portions of the Flint Mammoth Cave System, near the Bedquilt Entrance, in Kentucky, and were not fictional ones inspired by The Lord of the Rings; the influence of Tolkien on Adventure is real but often overstated. Needless to say, the Kentucky cave setting of Adventure is not situated beneath simulated California mountains.
Unfortunately, the single inaccurate reference to Adventure in a book that purports to map the future of electronic literature is typical. Jane Douglas's more recent The End (f Books-Or Books Without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives (2000) also mentions Adventure only in passing, defining the two types of"interactive narrative," hypertext and "image-based" works, so as to not even admit the existence of interactive fiction:
To distinguish between different kinds of interactive narratives, we will call text-based narratives like "Twelve Blue" and Stuart Moulthrop's Victor), Garden "hypertext fiction" and, following Janet Murray's lead, refer to image-based texts like The Last Express and Shannon Gilligan's Multimedia Murder series as "digital narratives." (6)
Douglas continues:
Digital narratives primarily follow the trajectory of Adventure, a work considered venerable only by the techies who first played it in the 1970s, cybergaming geeks, and the writers, theorists, and practitioners who deal with interactivity. Hypertext fiction, on the other hand, follows and furthers the trajectory of hallowed touchstones of print culture, especially the avant-garde novel. (6-7)
In this view, Adventure clearly has no literary ancestry. There is also a suggestion that it should not be considered venerable-although one would suspect that Douglas, who deals with interactivity, would actually be one of the people who venerate it.
But this is almost all that is said about Adventure and interactive fiction in the whole book, although Douglas (2000) later discusses at great length how a certain class of "cybergaming geeks," game-playing boys, are too obsessed with their "joysticks" (161-163). From the way Adventure is portrayed in this book-a book that offers to cover the whole topic of "interactive narratives"-one would be forced to falsely conclude that Adventure is "image-based." There is also the strong suggestion that it was written solely for male computer geeks, although Crowther has stated that his noncomputer-using daughters were the intended audience. But the main issue is that a whole category of work that is text-based and yet clearly is not hypertext in the accepted definition, a category that without doubt pertains to the study of "hypertext fiction" vis-a-vis "digital narratives" and to the overall issue of literature on the computer, was not only omitted but essentially defined out of existence. This oversight is hardly part of some conscious hypertextual plot to wipe out all consideration of interactive fiction. In fact, Douglas was one of the first professors to make the detailed study of interactive fiction part of a literature class.
Such inclusion of interactive fiction in the curriculum is, unfortunately, much less typical than is the omission of it from scholarship. Aarseth (1997) aptly describes the kind of reception interactive fiction often gets in the university: "Compared to all other literary formats, including hypertext novels, the adventure game's structure is too alien, too far removed from the genus of hegemonic literature to be recognized by any but a few xenophiles, who risk professional suspicion or ridicule" (109). Fortunately, some influential hypertext authors are now willing to recognize that interactive fiction is a valid and interesting form. Hopefully, others will also soon consider interactive fiction to be worthy of serious consideration, and that all the various forms of computer literature should be welcomed.
A hypertext fiction (as it is most commonly defined and discussed) is a system of fictional interconnected texts traversed using links. An interconnected text is referred to by George Landow (1992) and others as a lexia, a term borrowed from Barthes (1974), who applied it differently as a block of signification or unit of reading that was empirically determined, during a reading. Sometimes "hypertext" is defined more broadly than this. In some hypertext works, the reader may annotate the text or interact differently. There is, however, nothing in the nature of the lexia or the link, those fundamental elements of hypertext, that allows the reader to type and contribute text or provides the computer with the means to parse or understand natural language. Such understanding, used to react to typed text from the interactor, is essential to interactive fiction as discussed here. Hypertext fiction also does not maintain an intermediate, programmatic representation of the narrated world, as interactive fiction does. Although a hypertext novel may have a setting and may present a map that offers access to lexias, the space of texts is not the same as a programmatically simulated space, such as the IF world.
There is of course nothing to prevent a work from having both the defining characteristics of interactive fiction and also having those of a hypertext fiction. Reagan Library by Stuart Moulthrop, with its linked lexia and a few elements of a programmatically simulated world, does in fact have certain qualities of each, although it does not accept natural language input. The Space Under the Window by Andrew Plotkin was built with an interactive fiction development system but is actually a hypertext work; it could have been extended to have IF aspects as well. The HTML TADS development system allows works that are interactive fiction and output HTML to be developed, although HTML is employed in such works currently only for its formatting abilities and to provide command shortcuts. Obviously, the particular elements of a combination hypertext fiction/interactive fiction work can be examined using the techniques and terminology used by critics of both forms, and will likely call for new critical approaches, or for the application of critical approaches that are general enough to treat both forms. What new things may happen when these elements combine in different ways promises to be very interesting indeed, but since interactive fiction itself has not yet been thoroughly discussed at all in any book a detailed investigation of such combinations will have to wait.
A narrative film can be appreciated and critically examined both narratologically and in terms of the photographic and directorial techniques employed in it. Some of these directorial techniques may be used in ways that do not bear on the story-for instance, in non-narrative segments of the film. Thus, although they are all part of the experience of the film, the quality and impact of
certain techniques may have little or nothing to do with the narrative per se. An IF work also has different elements, which are best illuminated by different sorts of analysis. Usually some of these are potential narrative elements: An interaction will result in a text that describes something about the IF world, and events will transpire to move a main character past obstacles along what could be seen as the arc of a plot. Often other characters will be depicted, too. IF works are often, among other things, games, with an optimal outcome that the interactor, acting as a player, tries to attain. The interactor can win such a game by solving puzzles. Although many IF works are games and do have puzzles, the game and puzzle elements involved can often be better understood in terms of a different concept, that of the riddle. Finally, an IF work is a computer program, with input, output, and internal representations that must be considered for critics and authors to fully comprehend the form. No doubt, interactive fiction can fruitfully be considered from other perspectives-a dramatic one, for instance, of the sort that Brenda Laurel has used to examine Zork and Star Raiders (Laurel 1986) and then has expanded to comment on all computer interaction (Laurel 1993).The earlier three aspects seem the best starting points, however, for a thorough analysis of works in this form in the context of their history. Thus this book considers works from the standpoint of the narratives they can generate, the way they function as riddles, and their nature as computer programs.
The narratives generated during an interaction are often more trivial and repetitive than even the bluntest folktale, but they can be essential to the experience of the interactor. Only through consideration of narrative aspects such as plot, episode, character, setting, atmosphere, and focalization-as they can be extended or applied to interactive fiction-can the interactive generation of narratives in this form be understood and improved upon. In examining this aspect, I rely on the usual tools for the formal analysis of stories (the narratology of Gerard Gennette, Gerald Prince, and others), with consideration of the nature of IF as potential narrative rather than narrative. It is the effect of the narrative in the process of being generated that is important, after all, not the quality of the text that is output when the session is over, and not the effect of any post hoc reading of that output text.
While it is assumed by most critics that IF works are games, few have gone on to consider the nature of"games" closely, or describe what sort of game IF works actually are. There has been little discussion of whether "game" and "puzzle" are truly essential to the form. Tension between game and narrative aspects of a work may explain certain problems inherent in the form, or these two aspects may be discernible elements of a unified work, as seen in some of the best examples of interactive fiction. Because it is misleading to categorize interactive fiction as only a game, the term IF works is used in this book to refer to specific computer programs that are interactive fiction. (Calling such a work an "interactive story" or "interactive narrative" has also been avoided here, because although those terms do have a meaningful interpretation, it is best to use a term that does not elide an IF work's nature as a potential narrative.) The qualities that pertain to the game and the puzzle, and particularly the most relevant associated form-the riddle-will be explored in depth. The riddle serves as the central figure for understanding the workings and poesis of interactive fiction within a tradition that is literary and also demands explicit engagement.
Finally, since an IF work is a computer program with a world model and parser, it is important to consider its nature as software. A particular work may have been developed using an object-oriented methodology or using a functional programming language. Works of interactive fiction are marked by choices made early in development. Code reuse can explain why different IF works may produce similar replies that are inappropriate in some works and appropriate in others, for instance. It is also the reason many works could be developed quickly by companies in the 1980s, when such a number of works would otherwise have been far too difficult and costly for a small business to create. Additionally, a relationship between interaction with an IF work and computer programming (and the pleasures thereof) has been noted by both IF authors and theorists (Levy 1984, 141; Crowther 1994, 2-3), but the implications of this relationship for IF aesthetics and poetics have not yet been explored.
The best way to explain how one interacts with interactive fiction is by example. Contrived example transcripts appear in the documentation accompanying most IF works that were commercially published. Here, instead, is a transcript from an actual IF session with an enjoyable and illustrative work, Dan Schmidt's 1999 For a Change. As is the case with almost any discussion of the specifics of an IF work, reading this transcript (specifically, the last bit of it) will spoil some of the pleasure of interacting with For a Change later; this transcript describes how to solve one of several puzzles. Only those "spoilers" that are essential to the discussion have been included, however, as is the case elsewhere in the book.
Spoilers: To allow readers to skip sections of the book that contain such spoilers, passages that give away important information about a work are surrounded by boxes, like this.
The sun has gone. It must be brought.You have a rock.
F O R A C H A N G E
For A Change, v1.02
Dan Schmidt
Release 1 / Serial number 990930 / Inform v6.21 Library 6/9
Sweetness fills the shade of the High Wall to your east. Under this sweetness lies a small expanse of fod. A mobile releases mildly to the west; far in that direction a tower proudly plants itself, while the ground rises more slowly to the south and relaxes to the north.
Spread on the resting is a guidebook.
Sleep gradually departs from your eyes. A small stone has been insinuated into your hand.
This text contains the prologue, the description of the IF world given before there is any opportunity for the interactor to give a command. When actually running For a Change, a ">" prompt is printed after this text and the program waits for input. Text that was typed by the interactor during this session is printed in italics after this prompt.
>look at the stone
It is a small smooth stone, the size of a small gland, a size to roll between your fingertips, nothing more than a pebble.
>pick up the guidebook
Taken.
The interactor can command the player character to sense things in the IF world or to take some action that will affect that world. Commands to pick up objects are typical, as are commands to look at things. Notice that very little has been mentioned about the player character up to this point. All that has been stated is that this character has recently awakened and is supposed to bring the sun back to this world, presumably using the pebble that has been provided. The player character could be the "nameless adventurer" of Adventure, Zork, and many other text adventures, with gender, age, race, and personal history all left unspecified. But some later narration that is produced might reveal more information about who this character is.
>go west
The resting must first be departed.
>consult the guidebook about the resting
`The RESTING is a device made for that selfsame purpose.'
>stand up
The resting sighs at your departure.
>exarnine the resting
The resting sits on five wooden legs and slopes gradually.
The nature of the IF world is not always ordinary. Here, a piece of furniture is called a "resting" and a "mobile" (as one can guess from the description Under the High Wall, or one can learn by consulting the guidebook) is the term for a road. The resting also seems to be unusually expressive. The precedent, as Schmidt has explained, is the unusual book The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus.
>w
The land increases towards your head to the south, and decreases away from your feet to the north. Mobiles lead accordingly in both directions. The High Wall may also be approached to the east. A long walk to the west is a tower, dwarfi
ng your form, and dwarfed in turn by the wall.
It is clear, after a time, that all things are shaded, everywhere. Thus the Wall.
Inscribed on the brown grass is a toohnan.
The toolman jingles in the breeze.
The letter w is an abbreviation forgo west, one of several abbreviations commonly used by interactors and recognized by works. Commands to move in one of the compass directions can be abbreviated to the first letters of that direction, which is convenient, because moving around to different locations is done very frequently. The player character here has moved into a different area, also called a room. Even outdoor locations can be called "rooms" in interactive fiction; the term just refers to a discrete location of any sort where a different set of actions is possible than was before. The names of rooms, printed in bold in the original session, are set in a different typeface here.
>examine the toolman
The toolman is bright and misty. Thoughts and uses hang from his shoulders like birds.
>look up toolman in the guidebook
`The TOOLMAN is the grower and keeper of tools. He takes with a hand and likewise provides.'
Although the toolman's purpose may not yet be clear, seeing him "inscribed upon the grass," and yet like a living creature in some ways, can help the interactor understand more about the unusual nature of this IF world.
>s
The mobile from the north ends as the land's slope increases too greatly. Dirt glistens blue. To the south, amid the land, a way opens into darkness, while more ground lies to the east.
>s
Twisty Little Passages Page 3