The riddling situation of the literary riddle is thus founded on an agreement between riddler and riddlee. The author is obliged to pose a riddle tantalizing in its opacity, yet fair in the clues it provides. The riddlee is obliged to solve the riddle, to announce the solution and to explain the author's intent with reference to the clues. (84)
Merely stating the answer to the riddle is not enough for a solution-this is worth emphasizing. The riddlee who has truly reached a solution should be able to completely explain the riddle-question and how each of the metaphorical clues operates.
In most interactive fiction, puzzles (sorts of challenges or obstacles) are part of the world the player character moves through. In order to complete the IF work, the interactor must figure out how to meet these challenges. The solutions may be arrived at through the player character's senses or by having the player character manipulate things in the surroundings and then observe the results to determine the workings of the world. In terms of appropriate difficulty, the comparison between literary riddles and IF works is much more direct than one could find by considering traditional, precomputer games, as Marc Blank of Infocom did:
We like to judge ourselves by the classic games, the really good ones like Monopoly or Risk. A game should be interesting and fair; it should have feedback, so you have a way of knowing whether you are doing well. It should have replay value, so it is fun the second, third, and tenth time that you play it. Our games should serve the same function as any entertainment does-provide diversion for people that could use some. I think our games are good entertainment because they are not mindless; they are mind-exercising entertainment. They are not intended to be educational or spiritually uplifting; they are intended to be fun. (qtd. in Dyer 1984)
Blank's statements clearly made sense from a marketing perspective, since Monopoly and Risk sell better than riddles do and since it was important to distinguish Infocom's products from educational software, which people almost never buy of their own volition.
But how can one look at the arrangement of rules that make Monopoly and Risk "interesting" and apply lessons learned from these games to interactive fiction? These rules are established to make play fair between some small number of players, each working individually toward the same goal on a game board, speaking to each other in a competitive social situation, and moving tokens about. Infocom's interactive fiction, like most interactive fiction, is generally held by players to not have replay value in the usual sense, much as one cannot simply "replay" a riddle to which one knows the answer (although one can pose it to another, think about it again once the answer has been forgotten, or appreciate it in new ways with knowledge of the solution). Critics have noted that "once this kind of finite interactive fiction has been mastered, it generally ceases to hold the reader's interest, save for demonstrating prowess or ingenuity to the uninitiated.A finite interactive text is like pop fiction, read once and no more" (Niesz and Holland 1984, 122).
Once one learns to play a board game, on the other hand, the knowledge gained from one game hardly ruins the experience of the next one. Adjusting the difficulty of a riddle by describing things more clearly or pro viding more hints, unlike changing the rules of a game, is very directly related to making an IF work, or individual challenges within it, more or less difficult. The situation of the written literary riddle and the riddlee or riddlees attempting to solve it-so different than four people sitting around a Risk board forming and breaking alliances in the course of play-is very similar to that of one or more interactors attempting to solve a work of interactive fiction. The riddle can also help one understand how a work may not need to be made infinite in order to deal with the problem of"replay value." One does not need a book that is too large to read in a lifetime to hold one's interest, after all.An IF work can be solvable and finite on one level (in terms of how long it takes to move from initial state to final state through its world) and endlessly profound on other levels.
As for whether or not interactive fiction can be "spiritually uplifting," although Blank stated this was not Infocom's goal (the year before A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity were released, ironically) the relationship to the riddle should by itself suggest that IF works of this sort are at least possible. Without diminishing the cultural importance of games, players would not expect Monopoly, Risk, or other board games, considered as objects that one contemplates, to be profound or affecting. Literary riddles, with the new view of the world that they offer, can be.
Considering a few of the items in "A Bill of Player's Rights" (Nelson 1993) should make the relationship between riddling and IF poetics even clearer. Nelson states in this influential document that one right is "not to be given horribly unclear hints," which has no parallel at all to board gaming (almost none of these rights do) but a clear parallel to riddling. Another of the player's rights, "not to need to do unlikely things," also relates to the object of a riddle being something widely known; the actions required to solve an IF work should similarly not be bizarre or obscure. Even "not to have to type exactly the right verb" and "to be allowed reasonable synonyms" relate to riddling, since a riddler who did not accept reasonable synonyms, but required the exact word being thought of to be guessed, would be unfair in the same way. "Not to be given too many red herrings" relates to the requirement that the parts of a riddle's description all describe important and necessary features of whatever is the answer. Even the after-the-fact understanding that should exist when a successful riddling session has concluded is represented in the list by the right "to be able to understand a problem once it is solved."
The literary riddle is a poem and therefore the poetics of that form applies directly to it. This is quite different than is the case with the language in which a mathematical problem is couched or with which the rules of a game are presented. A metrical riddle can have stresses arranged within its metrical framework well or poorly, as is the case with any other metrical poem. A riddle, like a poem, can also be distinguished by its diction.
The arrangement of the riddle's statements-the order in which the qualities of the unknown object are described-can also be better or worse, as the poet Richard Wilbur (1989) describes:
Aristotle speaks in his Rhetoric of this pattern of surprise, delay, and excited recognition, observing that metaphor enlivens language by deceiving expectations ... If poetry deals in surprise and delayed apprehensions, then the riddle exaggerates an essential characteristic of poetry. (347)
Swift's long riddles become more and more obvious in order to bring the riddlee along and achieve the intended effect. If they were rearranged with their "easiest" part at the beginning (some of Swenson's riddles are constructed like this) a completely different effect would be achieved because the awareness of the answer would be inuriediate instead of gradual.
Finally, a riddle has a subject (often, but not always, its answer) and it can treat it with consideration of broader questions or themes. The way in which the riddlee arrives at the riddle's answer involves understanding the relationship of the parts of the riddle and grasping a new ordering of things, and along with it the meaning of the riddle. The reason literal riddles and neck-riddles disappoint is not only because they are too easy or too hard, but because they usually do not present a reordered world that is very interesting-what they mean is not compelling.
The "same" puzzles can be implemented well or poorly in different IF works-and many have been implemented in better or worse ways depending upon the working of the parser and world model but also as a result of better or worse writing. The writing in an IF work is not some surface feature to be applied at the last moment any more than the choice of words in a riddle can be done "last." Although structure as well as writing is important, the writing is intimately related to the workings of an IF world. The arrangement of challenges and the way in which the IF world can be experienced can be discussed with reference to the riddle. (An art such as architecture, which considers that people may take different courses through a
space, also has advantages in considering this aspect.) To understand how language functions in interactive fiction and what the literary aspects of interactive fiction are, the best comparison seems to be not to the novel but to the form of poetry considered here, the riddle. The riddle, like an IF work, must express itself clearly enough to be solved, obliquely enough to be challenging, and beautifully enough to be compelling. These are all different aspects of the same goal; they are not in competition. An excellent interactive fiction work is no more "a crossword at war with a narrative" (Nelson 1995a) than a poem is sound at war with sense.
Not everyone shares Wilbur's (1989) view that the riddle "is a poem, not a mere verbal trick, and one might wish to hear a good one many times, even if one knows the answer" (339), or his view that the riddle
was never a trivial puzzle. To make a riddle, or to answer one, was to see the peculiar qualities of an object or creature, to discern its resemblance to other forms and forces, and to have an insight into the relatedness of all phenomena, the reticulum of the world. (334)
Even those who study the riddle have slighted the form, as seen in one earlytwentieth-century article that mentions riddles as "intellectual fencing," "an exercise of the wits," and "mental gymnastics" (Schevill 1911). Although Andrew Welsh (1978) devoted a chapter to understanding lyric poetry through the riddle, he considered that "riddles are now just a game and even to folklorists a minor form of folk literature" (26). There is a risk, then, in associating interactive fiction-a denigrated form-with another form often held in slight esteem. Consideration of the history of the riddle as literature should help to demonstrate that it has been and remains a form of some real importance. Because the nature of the riddle is so related to that of its computer descendant, interactive fiction, it is also in the history of the riddle that the earliest origins of interactive fiction are found.
The riddle is older than history, but writing does record much of the development of the literary riddle as distinct from the folk riddle. Folk riddles were not only transmitted as oral poems with didactic and entertainment purposes, but also had important roles in marriage and funeral ceremonies. Their role persists today in certain cultures and suggests some of the ways riddles may have worked centuries ago. According to Hasan-Rokem and Shulman (1996),
The Gonds of central India perform a ritual when a member of their tribe is dying: at night, the adult men divide into two groups and gather at the boundary of the village; one group chants riddles to the beat of a drum, and the other group searches for the answers. No riddle can go unanswered, and each answer has to reproduce a text sanctified by tradition. (3)
Early oral riddles of course played different roles in different cultures, although many cross-cultural riddles, or world riddles, are known. The earliest written riddles that survive are from a Babylonian schoolbook, appearing there in both Assyrian and Sumerian. Like many early riddles that exist in the written record, they are best classified as folk riddles that have been written down; they lack the more elaborate development that literary riddles usually have. "My knees hasten, my feet do not rest, a shepherd without pity drives me to pasture" is one of these; an answer that has been suggested is river. Another is: "Who becomes pregnant without conceiving, who becomes fat without eating?" Scholars agree that rain cloud is the answer (Taylor 1948, 12-13).
Riddles appear in early sacred texts as well. According to Archer Taylor (1948), "Some very old Sanskrit riddles that are in part literary and in part popular have been dressed up for use in ritual. The oldest of them are in the Rigveda."These deal with cosmological themes; units of time are the answers to some of them (13-15). Taylor exempts biblical riddles from his consider ation of the Hebrew literary riddle, considering neither the neck-riddle Samson offers nor the riddle-like description of old age in Ecclesiastes to be true literary riddles (31-32). Although they do not contain riddles set off as clearly as those in the Rigveda, both the Bible and the Koran refer to riddling. It is generally thought that riddles with abstract answers (e.g., units of time) are part of literary rather than folk traditions (Taylor 1948, 13; Welsh 1978, 34); religious riddles are some of the earliest of this sort.
Riddles, well regarded in ancient Greece, were an important part of rhetorical and literary tradition there. One legend, reported in fragment 56 of Heraclitus, is that Homer was confounded by a riddle and died of frustration:
Men deceive themselves in their knowledge of the obvious, even Homer the [blind] astronomer, considered wisest of all Greeks. For he [died of grief over a riddle when he] was fooled by boys killing lice who said: what we see and catch we leave behind; and what we neither see nor catch we carry away. (Crowe 1996; emendments are by the translator)
W S. Merwin used the answer to this riddle as the title of his sixth book of poems. This riddle presents a compelling figure for how those aspects of literature that are most understandable are "left behind," while those that are difficult remain to pester readers. Aristotle held that "well-constructed riddles are attractive ... a new idea is conveyed, and there is metaphorical expression" (1961, 3:11). Pindar andTheocritus wrote riddles, and other riddles are found in the Palatine Anthology, which includes an algebraic word problem that encodes the age of Diophantus, Greek father of Algebra. The most famous riddle from an ancient Greek source is no doubt the riddle of the Sphinx in the legend of Oedipus, a legend that may be of Egyptian origin. One version of it is, "What is that which has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?"The answer he gave was man, "for as a babe he is four-footed, going on four limbs, as an adult he is twofooted, and as an old man he gets besides a third support in a staff" (Apollodorus 3.5.7). Over time, the Sphinx became emblematic of riddles; several English anthologies of riddles from the past two centuries have titles that mention the Sphinx.
Post-classical literary riddling began about the fifth century C.E. Taylor (1948) explains that "in western Europe, literary riddling began with the hundred Latin riddles of Symphosius. For more than a thousand years Symphosius has been a model for writers of riddles, as Martial has been for writers of epigrams" (52). Called "the father of the riddles of our era" (Tupper 1910, xvii), his riddles, each of which is written in three hexameter lines, became the best-known of any single author's. Although they are not nearly as long as many later literary riddles would be, they are written as poems and incorporate nuanced description of detail; they share certain themes and language with other Latin poetry. One scholar and translator of Symphosius writes:" The Latinity is excellent, there being virtually no departures from the classical norm.... His meter is of equal excellence" (Ohl 1928, 16). Riddle 16 is a good example:
This is the first of many bookworm riddles known from the past fifteen hundred years, in Latin and vernacular languages. Not all of Symphosius's riddles were imitated as directly as this one was in later riddling, but different versions and translations of his riddles appear in many later collections. One sign of his influence is that many riddlers imitated him by writing books of a hundred riddles.
The next known Latin riddler was the author of the sixty-two seventhcentury Berne Riddles, whom Taylor (1948) calls "the first medieval riddlemaster in Italy" (59). Of the English riddlers who wrote in Latin, all of whom were strongly influenced by Symphosius and many of whom knew these Berne riddles as well, one was Aldhelm, who wrote a collection of one hundred riddles around 700 C.E. Forty riddles, some about religion, were written by Archbishop Tatwine of Canterbury, who died in 734 C.E. He introduced them with a couplet:
This highly constrained writing shows one of the ways masterful riddlers could fit language together. Taylor (1948) describes how "the first line of this couplet contains the initial letters of the forty riddles, and the second line contains, in reverse order, the initial letters of the last word in the first lines" (62). The contemporary Eusebius wrote sixty more riddles to add to these. Taylor (1948) noted that "the themes begin with God, an angel, man, the sky, and the letters of the alphabet" (62-63). The other nota
ble riddler of this era was Boniface, who wrote riddles on ten virtues and ten vices (Taylor 1948, 63).
The most important document in English riddling is The Exeter Book, one of the four existing collections of Anglo-Saxon poetry. It was bequeathed to the Exeter Cathedral Library by Leofric in 1072 C.E. The book, of unknown authorship, contains one hundred riddles, some of which are translations from Symphosius; others reflect the Christian background of the riddler. It contains some short, recorded folk riddles and some that are more elaborate and literary in form. Here is riddle 5, in Kevin CrossleyHolland's (1993) translation:
This presents an interesting personification of the shield as constantly wounded and standing alone in battle. Not only does the shield bear scars and suffer constant battering, it cannot even hope for medical aid during the battle. This personification of the shield obliquely indicates the importance of such aid to the warrior, and the importance of fellowship in battle. The riddle is not actually about a shield, although that is the answer; it is about what the warrior values most during the desperate moments of battle.
One way that the influence of riddles on Anglo-Saxon writing can be seen is in how "the entire body of Old English poetry is packed out with mini-riddles; they are known as `kennings,' and are in fact condensed metaphors" (Crossley-Holland 1993, x). Of course kennings are not strictly riddles in that they are not posed in order to be solved, but they reveal the influence of enigmatic writing in the typical texture of poetry of the time (Welsh 1978, 36-37).
In the sixteenth century riddling progressed apace throughout Europe, much of it still in Latin. According to Taylor (1948), "For reasons which are quite obscure, Protestant German scholars, especially those resident in western Germany, showed a great liking for riddles" (79).The 1540 riddle book by Johannes Lorichius Secundus of Hadamer contained this riddle:
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