Up to now "IF world" has been used as if there were a single world for each IF work. Actually, there may be many worlds in a given IF work, just as there may be several stories told in a single text. (E.g., the "frame story" of the 1001 Nights is diegetic, while the stories Scheherazade tells are hypodiegetic.) IF worlds, like the stories in a text, may be linked in certain ways. In Steven Meretzky's 1985 A Mind Forever Voyaging, discussed in more detail in chapter 5, there are six simulated future worlds in which Perry Simm is the player character; these occur in a framework in which PRISM, a sentient computer, is the player character. The world with PRISM is diegetic, while the worlds with Perry Simm are hypodiegetic. Commands that refer to action in such a world can be called hypodiegetic commands. In A Mind Forever Voyaging, a hypodiegetic world can be reached by putting the player character into Simulation Mode, one of several modes that are available. As Perry Simm, the player character then walks around a simulated version of the city Rockvil. Typing north in this mode provides a hypodiegetic command (it is an instruction for the simulated human being Perry Simm to go north), while record on is a command of the usual sort (it is an instruction for the computer PRISM, in the frame world, to begin recording what Perry Simm is seeing).
Michael Berlyn's 1983 Suspended, also discussed further in chapter 5, presents an interesting case in which the player character is in partial suspended animation in a cylinder, and only a few commands (e.g., wait) refer directly to actions of the PC. Most commands are hypodiegetic commands issued to robots, who, although they are described by the generated narratives as being in the same physical space, an underground complex, are really in a different IF world. The robots, unlike the immobile human player character, can be told to go to different parts of the complex, can sense things, and can manipulate the environment to effect repairs. They exist and act in the IF world of this underground complex. The human "controller," fixed in the canister in the middle of a large room in the complex and unable to take any physical action at all, is most clearly seen as being part of a different (but linked) IF world. Rather than seeing the robots (who are under the complete command of the interactor) as non-player characters, it makes sense to see them as player characters in a hypodiegetic world, similar to Perry Simm in one of the simulated futures of Rockvil. That the top-level world can be breached by a robot in the second-level world, who can be commanded to open the cylinder, ripping wires from and killing the player character in the frame world, can be seen as an instance of fatal metalepsis (Genette 1980, 234237), a transgression between different levels of story or between story and narration.
One clear and memorable instance of metalepsis, early on in the history of the form, is in Steven Meretzky's 1983 Planetfall. The robot Floyd (within the IF world) comments amusingly on the use of the save directive, which is extradiegetic and which Floyd should not know about. In Planetfall, the awareness of metalepsis allowed humorous use of it; the unintentional metalepsis shown in the Zork session text is, instead, awkward.
Understanding the basics of diegesis, hypodiegesis, and extradiegesis allows one to make more sense of the seeming polyphony of voices in which statements are made in the computer-generated text of interactive fiction. According to Nelson (2001b), "There are at least three identities involved in play: the person typing and reading ('player'), the main character within the story ('protagonist'), and the voice speaking about what this character sees and feels ('narrator')" (368). Nelson states that this narrator speaks the prologue, but notes that "in some games it might be said that the parser, who asks questions like `Which do you mean ... ?' and in some games speaks only in square brackets, is a fourth character, quite different from the narrator" (373). These different speakers in the computergenerated text are what have led others to identify the narrative voice not "as a singular speaker but, rather, as a composite, mechanical chorus coming from both inside and outside the intrigue envelope" (Aarseth 1997, 120).
Just as a work of interactive fiction can have many worlds, it can have many different narrators-which need not all correspond neatly to each of the worlds. For instance, at different times, different narrators might report the events that transpire in a single world. The voice of the parser (and of other parts of the program, such as those responsible for the ability to save and restore a particular situation) is extranarrative, and need not correspond to any of these narrators. Similarly, the voice that reports on hypodiegetic events (those that happen in a world within the main IF world) is hyponarrative. The numerous voices evident in even a simple work of interactive fiction are not an undifferentiated confusion or chorus, but typically correspond to different functions in interactive fiction that can be separated. Even in those cases where different voices are confused (as with the earlier example from Zork) the particular voices which are being confused, intentionally or unintentionally, can be identified.
The state of the IF world after the prologue and the other initial output, when the first opportunity to enter a command is presented, is the initial situation. The initial situation refers to the state of the IF world, not to how that state is described. A work of interactive fiction may begin immediately with a prompt, describing nothing about the IF world. Jon Ingold's 2001 All Roads begins with a quotation and a menu but does not state anything about the IF world or the player character's situation. Thus, it has a null prologue, as does the 1998 Bad Machine by Dan Shiovitz. Nevertheless, like all IF works, these have an initial situation-this situation is simply not described before the first prompt for input. As commands are provided by the interactor, the replies reveal what this initial situation was.
The final reply is that reply after which the narration of events in the IF world cannot be continued.The state of the world at this point is a final situation, which might be a state of victory or a state in which the player character is dead, for instance. After the final reply either the program terminates or the only option is to input a directive, such as quit, restore, and restart-none of which allow the current narration to continue.A final reply is not required for a work to be interactive fiction, and some works, by design, do not produce a final reply. An unfinished or bug-ridden work might also not produce a final reply at all; it might instead, unintentionally, only manage to produce a final report that is an extradiegetic error message, explaining what caused the program to crash.
A series of exchanges that are part of the same narration, and that are presented along with all the embedded directives and reports, constitutes a course. The earlier excerpt from a Zork session text describes a course, for instance, as does the transcript from For a Change. Typing restore and restoring an earlier situation brings one to the end of an earlier course, where the save directive had been issued. This allows a single course to extend across several sessions. A course can also extend across several interactions.
Can the same situation recur within a course? This depends on the nature of the IF world. In a world in which time always progresses, one cannot return to the same situation within a course; it will be later, so at least one aspect of the situation will have changed. But if time does not exist or if its laws are different, it may be possible. In fact, it is only impossible for a situation to occur twice in a course if an irreversible event occurs after every command. The progression of time is a special case of this. Note that keeping count of how many "moves" have been made may or may not pertain to the IF world. If events always occur in the IF world after a certain number of moves have been made, this is relevant to that IF world, but the number of moves made may just be provided (in a report) for the interactor's information. The interactor, of course, may not be stepping in the same stream twice when a situation recurs, since she may have a different level of knowledge the second time. But "situation" refers only to the state of the IF world, not to that of the interactor.
A traversal of an IF work is a course extending from a prologue to a final reply, and from an initial situation to a final situation. The term traversal, which essentially means "cros
sing," has conveniently already been used in graph theory and would also be familiar to cavers, since it is used in rock climbing. A successful traversal ends with a final situation that corresponds to winning.
PLAYER CHARACTERS AND NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS
A character in interactive fiction is a person in the IF world who is simulated within the IF world. A good indication of this is that a character's actions as narrated can differ, depending upon the input provided. The term as it pertains to interactive fiction derives not only from dramatic use and from discussion of the novel, but also from the specific use of the terms player character and non player character in the prototypical fantasy role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons, discussed in chapter 3. These terms have a similar special meaning in interactive fiction.
A player character, or PC, is a character directly commanded by the interactor. Any other character is a non-player character, or NPC.The interactor may request that an NPC do something, or even command an NPC to do something, but such a request or command will always be done via the PC, who is directly commanded. NPCs certainly include entities that can take actions within the IF world like the PC can-called actors (Lebling, Blank, and Anderson 1979)-but they may appear in other forms, as long as they are simulated within the world and not under direct command of the interactor.
There are also otlier persons who are mentioned but who are neither PCs nor NPCs. (Since the terms player character and non-player character seem to complete the set of characters, these other persons are better not called characters; besides, in the study of narratives the term "characters" only refers to those people who actually exist within the story, not those who are simply mentioned.) Marshall Robner, the man whose death sets up the initial situation in Marc Blank's 1982 Deadline, is not a character in that work of interactive fiction. In Brian Moriarty's 1985 Wishbringer, the dragon Thermofax appears alive (albeit in a daydream) in the prologue, but it is not possible at any other point during an interaction for Thermofax to be mentioned again in a reply, and thus no input causes his actions to vary and he is not simulated. Thermofax is a person, but not a character.
The idea of a character (including player characters and non-player characters) in interactive fiction is analogous to the idea of a character in a narrative, defined as "an EXISTENT endowed with anthropomorphic traits and engaged in anthropomorphic actions; an ACTOR with anthropomorphic attributes" (Prince 1987, 12).The difference is that a character in interactive fiction must be an existent who acts within the IF world. Being a part of the simulation, rather than being a part of the story that the generated narrative tells, is what is essential for a character in interactive fiction. Since people may disagree about what traits are sufficiently anthropomorphic to allow an entity to be a character in a story, there are sure to be some similar disagreements about whether something is a character (or indeed, whether it is even in the broader anthropomorphic category "person") in interactive fiction. But the category "character" in interactive fiction is similar to that category in narrative, and should be as useful. The presence of entities that cannot easily be seen as anthropomorphic or not, as seen in the For a Clian& e session text, has an interesting effect, in part, because it tends to defy the easy categorization that readers and interactors would like to make when thinking about characters.
Although IF works are always called games, and almost all of them are games, their nature as games is seldom discussed very explicitly. For instance, many people assume in casual discussion that the computer program is one player and the interactor is another, or that the author of an interactive fiction work is playing against the interactor. But neither the computer nor the author is literally the opponent in interactive fiction, any more than is the case in a computer version of solitare. Instead, the program usually serves as a referee; if the program provides hints it may be also acting in a different role, that of a second (Solomon 1984, 20).
As discussed in chapter 3 in the specific case of Adventure, interactive fiction is a cooperative game. If several people play, they work together to solve puzzles. From the standpoint of game theory, the typical interactive fiction game differs from a game like chess not only because the players in chess oppose one another but because in that game total information about the situation is always available to players. Not only is the state of the game (i.e., the situation of the IF world) known only in part in interactive fiction, but the workings of this world (and of the interface to it) are at first also only partly known, so even card games without total information may not be good points of comparison. Learning to operate the text, and discovering what language is accepted and understood, is part of the pleasure of interactive fiction. According to Menick (1984), "The first step for the player is figuring out what language the game speaks.... One of the joys of adventuring is that discovery of the extents and limitations of the game's vocabulary" (56). It is "the discovery of the rules, through trial and error, [that] is one of the principal attractions of the game. The mark of a welldesigned game of this type is that the rules reveal a consistent style, and are not merely arbitrary" (Solomon 1984, 20).
The nature of interactive fiction as game is too complex a topic to explore further in this discussion, but clearly it is necessary here as well to recognize what type of game it is and what aspects of that sort of game help to make it interesting. It is worth noting that the perspective of game theory does support the figure of the riddle as a way of understanding interactive fiction, although the riddle may not formally be the same type of game. The text of a riddle itself is completely known to a riddlee (the person to whom a riddle is posed), but solving a riddle requires that the workings of the riddle's world be explored and understood and that its rules be discovered.
This discussion has not even broached the more difficult topic of the puzzle. As an element of interactive fiction, the puzzle should certainly be considered in formal terms and in terms of the interactor's interpretive activity. Some in-depth discussion of the puzzle is beginning as well (Carbol 2001; Short 2001; Montfort 2002b). The formal nature of the puzzle is but one piece of the overall question of how interactive fiction operates, one of many pieces that can only be mentioned in the current discussion. This narratological perspective on the form is offered as one starting point for further investigation that concerns the relationship between simulation and narrative. Another starting point of a different sort is offered in chapter 2, which considers a different form that is both an early ancestor of interactive fiction and a powerful figure for understanding how it works. This form is the literary riddle.
The riddle is not only the most important early ancestor of interactive fiction but also an extremely valuable figure for understanding it, perhaps the most directly useful figure in considering the aesthetics and poetics of the form today. One obvious way of understanding something new is to see it in terms of something older and better understood, while keeping in mind the limitations of the particular comparison and what particular new types of understanding it can afford. But consideration of this new form in terms of game, story, novel, or puzzle-although each manages to highlight certain interesting aspects of the form-fails to illuminate interactive fiction completely (Montfort 2003). The riddle, almost never invoked in discussions about interactive fiction until now, has more explanatory power than any of those other often referenced figures.The workings of the riddle are so closely tied to those of interactive fiction that the early history of the form should properly begin not with sessions of Dungeons and Dragons or with twentieth-century literary experiments but with ancient exchanges of riddles.
The connection between poetry and the computer has been noted before (Novak 1991; Pinsky 1995, 1997); one London newspaper has even declared that "interactive fiction is computer gaming's best parallel with poetry: complex, subtle, and these days absolutely unsaleable" (Guest 2002). Perhaps the most striking statement about the importance of poetry to computing is by architect Marcos Novak (1991), who begins an article with a description
of Federico Garcia Lorca's concept of poetic logic and goes on to declare that cyberspace is "poetry inhabited":
What is the technology of magic? For the answer we must turn not only to computer science but to the most ancient of arts, perhaps the only art: poetry. It is in poetry that we find a developed understanding of the workings of magic, and not only that, but a wise and powerful knowledge of its purposes and potentials. (228-229)
But rather than discuss the relationship between poetry and the computer in general, or the relationship between poetry and cyberspace-although these relationships are important ones-here it is most productive to focus on one species of poetry: the riddle, a form that corresponds in a rather direct and useful way to the specific new media form under consideration, interactive fiction.
Although the riddle is a literary form of great antiquity, it is often dismissed as nothing more than a diversion for children; "riddle" may not even be commonly understood in the sense that scholars of folk and literary riddles use it. In some ways, then, it may be even more difficult to draw a connection between the riddle and interactive fiction than between Lorca's idea of poetry and the concept of cyberspace. But the riddle is certainly accepted by many as poetry. One dictionary of poetic forms states: "The riddle is a short lyric poem that poses a question, the answer to which lies hidden in hints" (Turco 1986, 134). The true riddle is not merely enigmatic; it actually poses a question (a real one, although it need not be explicit) that is to be answered by the reader or listener-the riddlee. This description of the riddle as a poem is in harmony with a structural definition that has been offered, one that includes folk riddles as well: "A riddle is a traditional verbal expression which contains one or more descriptive elements, a pair of which may be in opposition; the referent of the elements is to be guessed" (Georges and Dundes 1963, 113). (The taxonomy of the riddle offered following this definition distinguishes those that have elements in opposition, such as "covered with eyes, but it can't see-a potato" from those that do not.) Defining the riddle this way admits a range of literary and folk texts and utterances:
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