I tremble at each breath of air
And yet can heaviest burdens bear.
[A riddle does not have to explicitly ask a question. This one describes something, as required, and implicitly asks who am I?, to which the answer is, in this case, water (Wilbur 1989, 333).]
What lives in a river?
[The answer to this literal riddle, which is part of oral tradition and was recorded by a folklorist, is a fish (Georges and Dundes 1963). Riddles need not be clever to meet the previous definition.]
Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.
[Judges 14:14.This is a type of"neck-riddle," the sort of exceedingly difficult riddle often used by the condemned to will pardon (Abrahams 1980; Dorst 1983). This one is used by Samson to place a wager, not in an attempt to save his life, but it is certainly of the neck-riddle type. The answer is a honeycomb in a lion's carcass. As is the case with most neck-riddles, the answer can only be guessed with detailed knowledge of Samson's life. He slew a lion and when later returning across the same field saw the lion's carcass with a honeycomb in it.]
Here are a few non-riddles, according to the definition provided:
How many Freudians does it take to change a light bulb? [Response-format jokes are not riddles since they do not describe something that is genuinely to be guessed but rather provide the setup for a punch line.]
What's that thing on top of the engine that controls the mix of fuel and air?
[If someone can't think of the term carburetor and simply asks this in order the find out what that term is, the descriptive phrases are not offered to be guessed but rather in the hopes of learning the answer.]
What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?
[Ecclesiastes 1:3. Perhaps this question could be interpreted as a rhetorical question, with the implied answer to it being none. Another interpretation is that while the question is not rhetorical, it has no one answer that can be guessed, but is in the category one riddle scholar has described as "eternal puzzles that torment the human consciousness" (Amit 1996, 285). In either case, this is not a riddle.]
Such a distinction is a good start, but there are problems with this and any structural definition of the riddle. It is ultimately the riddling context that makes an expression with descriptive elements into the question part of a riddle. In fact, "to be guessed" in the preceding definition already brings the notion of the riddling context into that supposedly structural definition. In chapter 5 of The Hobbit, "What have I got in my pocket?" becomes a riddle accidentally, illustrating the importance of a good definition of a riddle but also showing that the context in which a question is offered can be very important. Bilbo mutters this question out loud, not intending for Gollum to guess it, and then decides to enter it-a poor riddle by most standards but typical of neck-riddles in that it is essentially impossible to solve without special knowledge-into the ongoing riddling contest. Some scholars specify the literary riddle so as to require such a context of competition or challenge: "Every proper riddle must fulfill two conditions: the first is its social function as a competition between the riddler and riddlees; the second is its literary form, which must be difficult and enigmatic, yet containing the clues necessary to decipher it" (Pagis 1996, 81).The second condition would disallow Bilbo's question and would probably also disallow literal riddles, which are not "difficult and enigmatic" yet are actually posed as riddles in oral discourse situations and in literature. (It is possible, of course, that their literal nature makes them hard to guess-people are expecting a hard riddle and are thrown off guard by an easy one-and so literal riddles actually could be allowed under this definition.) At any rate, as far as literary riddles are concerned, this seems a sensible criterion.
It seems reasonable to distinguish mathematical problems from riddles, as scholars have done (Amit 1996, 284). Some riddles (including ancient ones, such as riddle 46 from The Exeter Book and the riddle about Diophantus's age in the Palatine Anthology) rely on counting and arithmetic or other mathematical operations. Generally the literary riddle relies on description and metaphor, however, and thus different versions of the same riddle may be seen to vary in quality depending on how well they are written; clarity is usually the only aspect of language valued in mathematical problems, on the other hand.
One other form, the situational puzzle, seems to be closely related to the riddle and may bear a close relationship to interactive fiction. Such a puzzle describes a situation and challenges the listener to give the full context of the description. For instance: "A man walks into a bar and asks for a drink. The bartender pulls out a gun and points it at him. The man says, `Thank you,' and walks out" (Hartman 1999). Once such a situation is described the one who gave the description will reply to yes or no questions asked by the others. "Irrelevant" is also sometimes given as an answer. For this situation (originally given in Agnes 1953) others might ask, "Did he want a drink?" "Yes." "Was he trying to rob the bar?" "No." "Was the man really thankful?" "Yes." etc. After a while those trying to figure out the situation might hit upon the answer, the man had the hiccups and the bartender cured them by scaring him.
The situational puzzle is certainly not as old as the riddle, and no real consideration has been given to these puzzles as literature. They do not seem to have been presented in their current form until the twentieth century; the classic collection of situational puzzles appeared in 1953 (Agnes).They are an active part of folk culture and are known by many names; one puzzle aficionado lists some of these as "mystery questions, story riddles.... minimysteries, minute mysteries, missing links, how come?, situational puzzles, law school puzzles, quistels (in the Netherlands and other parts of Europe), mystery puzzles, and so on" (Hartman 1993). "Situation puzzles" and "story games" are other terms used. They are quite frequently known as "lateral thinking puzzles" today (although some distinguish the two (Hartman 1998)) but were only formulated as an exercise for "lateral thinking" when that term was coined in 1967 (de Bono). Situational puzzles are related to interactive fiction in ways that usual riddles are not, particularly in the way that they allow further interrogation using a set of rules, but they are not as helpful as riddles are in relating the literary aspects of interactive fiction with those ways in which the form explicitly calls for a solution.
For purposes of comparison to interactive fiction the riddles considered are ones meant to challenge the listener but to be soluble, rather than those meant to be insoluble (such as neck-riddles) or those not intended to challenge (such as literal riddles). Excellent riddles will therefore have to be both enjoyably challenging yet soluble with the information provided. Neck-riddles can make for interesting stories and might demonstrate the resourcefulness of a character, but they are seldom profound. The neck-riddle itself may reveal little about the world beyond what is in Bilbo's pocket. Literal riddles are interesting phenomena from certain perspectives and can provide insight into the nature of riddling, human discourse, and culture, but the fact that a fish lives in a river also does not, by itself, provide much of a new perspective on the world.Whatever the merits of such riddles, they simply do not relate to interactive fiction very strongly.
The focus here is on literary riddles rather than folk riddles, not out of some simple desire to privilege written production but because of certain correspondences that exist only between interactive fiction and the literary riddle. Such riddles are generally of the type described earlier-challenging but soluble. Additionally, since the IF work is a program, its code has a fixity more like that of a printed literary riddle than an orally transmitted one. In all but the case of the very first IF work, Adventure, which is often mentioned without reference to its authors, there is a relationship to the way in which, as Dan Pagis writes, "in the literary, `learned' realm, the riddler is the author himself, who reserves the same rights over his own riddles as over his other works" (1996, 81).The description Pagis (1996) gives of the literary riddling situation also relat
es to interactive fiction:
The archetypal riddling situation ... is in private, where the individual reader contends with riddles transmitted in writing; but here as well-again, contrary to common belief-the public riddling situation was quite popular, and in some eras even predominant. (83)
Although the stereotype is for IF works to be encountered in the solitary, "private" situation, "public" interaction with interactive fiction, in which multiple interactors try to make progress using a single computer, is actually quite common. Finally, the length and intricacy of the literary riddle, when compared to the folk riddle (Taylor 1948, 3), make it more like an IF work and suggest that a comparison focusing on literary riddles can be more useful.
Having selected riddles of this type-literary riddles that are challenging and yet solvable-what remains is to demonstrate that such riddles relate to interactive fiction in an interesting way, and that they shed some additional light on a form that has been characterized by reference to many different genres of literature and activity but has not yet been well understood. For the purposes of this chapter, the focus is on interactive fiction works that are structured with puzzles (or challenges, or obstacles) rather than those that are "puzzleless." The insights gleaned should actually apply to puzzleless IF works as well, but the comparison to those more common IF works with puzzles is more straightforward and makes for a better starting point. Literary riddles and this type of interactive fiction are related in four important ways: Both have a systematic world, are something to be solved, present challenge and appropriate and join the literary and the puzzling.
Beyond simply having a literary setting, the riddle offers what can be understood as a "world" in which things relate to each other and are endowed with special abilities or attributes systematically. This world has its own nomenclature that reflects a different sort of ordering and a different conception of the world we live in. Hence it is common for scholarship on the riddle to refer to the world of particular riddles: "The riddle can reveal in a brief flash an excluded cosmos, a non-world or topsy-turvy world lurking just beneath or within our properly ordered and familiar one" (Hasan-Rokem and Shulman 1996, 4). This concept of the world also describes the relationship between the riddler (who creates this world) and the riddlee (who must explore it to figure out how it works):
Riddlers, like poets, imitate God by creating their own cosmos; they re-create through words, making familiar objects into something completely new, re-arranging the parts of pieces of things to produce creatures with strange combinations of arms, legs, eyes and mouths. In this transformed world, a distorted mirror of the real world, the riddler is in control, but the reader has the ability to break the code and solve the mystery. (Wehlau 1997, 99-100)
Of course plays, novels, stories, and poems that are not riddles all can be said to have their own "worlds"-settings, laws governing events, or Lorca's poetic logic governing the progression of images-but the concept of the world as it relates to the riddle is applicable to interactive fiction in a way that these other worlds are not, since the systematic but unusual nature of the riddle's world is presented for explicit understanding and solution by the riddlee. If the workings of the world of a story are obscure to a reader, the reader can still finish the story and often even understand some important things about it. Without understanding the workings of the riddle's world, however, the solution cannot be reached and the experience of the riddle remains incomplete. It has been suggested that the "making strange" described by the Russian Formalists can be used as a test of an interactive fiction work's literary nature (Randall 1988), but the specific way in which the literary riddle makes strange-and then invites the riddlee to figure its strangeness-may offer an even better way to understand interactive fiction.
As described in the preface, the world model is an essential component of any IF work. Interactive fiction is distinguished from many other forms (such as the novel) in that it does not just have a setting that is described but actually simulates a world in which places, objects, and characters are modeled and obey programmed rules describing how they interact.There are certainly things to be learned about interactive fiction from considering the role of setting in other literature, but in many ways the systematic world of an IF work is more like the "cosmos" created by the riddler than like a novel's setting. Interactive fiction, as one reviewer of works in the form wrote, "should fit together as a self-consistent world.This means that the puzzles should play fair, but it includes much more. Elements that are foreign to the game's milieu shouldn't intrude" (McGath 1984, 21).
While the setting may be one aspect considered in the aesthetics of the novel, the consistency of the world in interactive fiction is important not only to the appreciation of the generated text but also to the interactor's ability to interact. Considering an IF work as a cybertextual machine (Aarseth 1997), one can see that the construction of the world influences not just the textual output of the machine but also the operation of the machine. Similarly, the riddlee can find it more or less difficult to solve a riddle depending on how well-constructed and self-consistent the world or "cosmos" of the riddle is.
As one scholar of the riddle writes:
The unique quality of the riddle as communication is that it engages the attention of the riddlee in particular ways and it contains a test for its success in this area. Its basic structure emphasizes the importance of the two parties to this communication: the riddle would not exist if it were not for one subject who created it and another subject who could enter the communication and solve it, or be deceived by it. (Cohen 1996, 311)
Mystery novels may be written so as to encourage readers to guess who the murderer is, but they do not ask to be explicitly solved the way that a riddle (posed in a true riddling situation) does. Similarly, as enigmatic as Finnegan Wake may be, there is no way for readers to reply to the book itself or to James Joyce with some answer and to then learn that they are right or wrong. However involved with riddles certain of Jorge Luis Borges's fictions may be (and certainly "La Casa de Asterion" (The House of Asterion) and "El Hacedor" (The Maker) seem about as close to riddles as one can get in a narrative prose form), there is also no explicit way to "solve" or "answer" them. Neither of these stories contains "a test for its success"; in fact, they instead contain their answers at the end. (Borges himself, in "El Jardin de Senderos que se Bifurcan" (The Garden of Forking Paths), has one of his characters explain that a true riddle may not contain its own answer.) So while certain other literary works invite the reader's engagement in a riddle-like way, the riddle is special in requiring it. This process of solving is not incidental; as Cohen (1996) states, rather,
the riddlee's involvement in the riddle-work is essential. The riddlee is the one who has to carry out the task of turning the unknown and unfamiliar into the familiar. It seems that the process of perceiving and solving a riddle, while at times dangerous, is a path toward new achievements in the development of experience and awareness and in constructing new relations to objects that are perceived as containing an inner life independent of one's own experience. (301)
In the strict computational sense of "interactive," an IF work relies on user input during execution. If nothing is typed, nothing happens. (There are a few exceptions: in certain IF works, such as the Synapse Electronic Novels and Marc Blank's Border Zone, timed events occur even if nothing is typed; the interactor still has to type, however, in order to make other events happen and to successfully traverse the work.) In the usual sort of IF work discussed here, the interactor is required not simply to type but to solve puzzles and explicitly report the solutions before making progress.
When one considers this process of explicit solution in detail, the limitations of comparing interactive fiction to mystery novels or other difficult pieces of writing become clear. Because solving, not just reading, is involved, theories of reader response that have been invoked at times (Randall 1988; O'Brian 1993; Montfort 1995, sec. 3) have, at the very least, severe limitati
ons when it comes to explaining the new features of interactive fiction and the way in which the interactor operates the text. The interactor is indeed engaged in literary appreciation and interpretation of the text that is generated, and thus the approaches used for understanding the response of the reader to a text can be brought to bear at the level of the generated text in the usual way (Niesz and Holland 1984, 124). But this "reader" is also trying to find the solution to puzzles and to explore and understand the world so as to successfully traverse the IF work. Instead of assigning these two tasks to the incompatible categories of "reading" and "game playing," it makes the most sense to see them as similar to the unified activity of the riddlee. Only when the riddlee's interpretation is aligned with that of the riddler as represented in the riddle-and when this interpretation explains all of the descriptions consistently-will it work to solve the riddle. The riddle lays down boundaries on interpretation because it has an answer, just as most IF works must be understood explicitly in certain ways so that the correct actions can be indicated by the interactor and completed within the IF world.
Despite the riddle contest between Bilbo and Gollum, and the riddle posed by Samson, the situation of literary riddling generally requires fair riddles, as Pagis (1996) explains:
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