The player character in Infidel is no charming, whip-wielding professor, however. The materials packed with the game make that character's greed clear, indicating the character has abused the dig team. In the game's prologue, the player character recalls forcing them to work on a holy day. (The crew is never identified as Muslim, but everything suggests that they are.) The text generated deeper within the world indicates the greed of this character, too, as in this initial description of the royal barge's Fore Cabin area: "The cabin is bare with none of the luxuries you expected to see.You close your eyes for a moment, picturing the barge you'll someday own, the yacht fully rigged and crewed.You open your eyes and shake your head, anxious to make your dream reality."As McGath (1984) noted,"Even the messages you get in response to silly commands have a nastier edge than usual and rub in the character's worthlessness" (41). There is none of Zork's treasure-collecting humor (such as the joke about the player character being a vandal) to make light of such unpleasant character traits.
The conclusion to Infidel comes after picking up numerous precious artifacts and using them to work further into the pyramid. In the final chamber, the player character unlocks and then opens a sarcophagus to reveal an enormous stash of treasure. The final reply is worth quoting in full:
You lift the cover with great care, and in an instant you see all your dreams come true. The interior of the sarcophagus is lined with gold, inset with jewels, glistening in your torchlight. The riches and their dazzling beauty overwhelm you. You take a deep breath, amazed that all of this is yours.You tremble with excitement, then realize the ground beneath your feet is trembling, too.
As a knife cuts through butter, this realization cuts through your mind, makes your hands shake and cold sweat appear on your forehead. The Burial Chamber is collapsing, the walls closing in. You will never get out of this pyramid alive.You earned this treasure. But it cost you your life. And as you sit there, gazing into the glistening wealth of the inner sarcophagus, you can't help but feel a little empty, a little foolish. If someone were on the other side of the quickly-collapsing wall, they could have dug you out. If only you'd treated the workers better. If only you'd cut Craige in on the find. If only you'd hired a reliable guide.
Well, someday, someone will discover your bones here. And then you will get your fame.
Clearly this text is cliche-ridden and highly moralistic. Yet it is a powerful critique of the assumptions of adventure garners.
Consider the effect of reading this unprecedented conclusion at the end of twenty or more hours of challenging interaction, when the expected outcome of your long toils is some form of outright triumph accompanied by a "You have won!" message. One reaction was denunciation:
apparent goal of moving in a realistic and literary direction is a commendable one. But there is more to reality than selfdestructiveness, and more to literature than anti-heroes. Of all Infocom's adventures, this has the least to recommend it. (McGath 1984, 42)
An extremely interesting response to this one possible "winning" final reply is given by the maintainer of the Infocom Bugs List:
You receive the full 400 out of 400 points when you turn the final statue, not when you open the sarcophagus and trap yourself Why not just turn that final statue, and then leave the pyramid, taking the five jewelled clusters [some of the artifacts found during exploration of the pyramid] ... as your retirement fund? The farewell note at the beginning of the game establishes that your workers left you enough to get back to civilization safely. The game won't officially end of its own accord if you leave the pyramid, but so what? Leave the pyramid, QUIT with the full number of points, and if that isn't winning, I don't know what is. (Cree 2001)
The interactor who follows these steps is not rewarded by an alternative final reply; unlike the dig crew, Berlyn and Fogleman did not provide for the player character to return alive.Those who follow this path enable themselves to imagine their own ending, consistent with the framework of the text adventure. Even a third party examining a transcript of such a game could plausibly read it as having an outcome that Berlyn had not thought of and had not provided for in implementing Infidel. This demonstrates that reading against the grain (and writing against the grain, by interactors) is possible even in a work of interactive fiction, where the system of the world and the possible textual outcomes are programmatically fixed.
Interactors can choose their own adventures in other ways besides providing input to the program, and it is in this realm of interpretation-not in helping to understand how the actual operation of the text-machine occurs-that theories of reader response are likely to be of most help. In some cases, as in Infidel, interactors may even be able to operate the IF work in a way that is consistent with an unanticipated interpretation.
Meretzky's first creation, the 1983 Plane fall, had the player character crashland on a planet and try to survive to be rescued. The work included a few innovations that were wisely not emulated later: a requirement that the player character eat and sleep, for instance, which seemed appropriate for the survival situation but did not make for particularly interesting challenges. A litany of other failings is provided by one notable independent IF author and critic, who called Planetfall "the worst Infocom game I've played yet" (Rees 1993). But Meretzky also added one element that made Planetfall a memorable hit and advanced the state of interactive fiction. He implemented one of interactive fiction's best-loved characters: the robot buddy Floyd.
Meretzky started at Infocom as a game tester in November 1981 after two years of working in the construction industry.While he went to MIT and said that he had "some components of nerditute," Meretzky did not start off as a programmer and was not initially as taken with computers as were most of the other Implementors (Greenlee 1996).Yet he became one of the most prolific Implementors and was credited as author of seven Infocom games. He has continued to create games (such as the Spellcasting 101 series, which anticipated Harry Potter in having a school for wizards) since leaving Infocom.
Floyd is the player character's sole bit of company in the deserted complex on the planet Resida. His antics and his enjoyment of games provide amusement as the interactor contends with the puzzles at hand.
Yet solving one such puzzle requires that this childlike robot helper sacrifice himself:
"Looks dangerous in there," says Floyd. "I don't think you should go inside." He peers in again. "We'll need card there to fix computer. HYnnun... I know! Floyd will get card. Robots are tough. Nothing can hurt robots. You open the door, then Floyd will rush in. Then you close door. When Floyd knocks, open door again. Okay? Go!" Floyd's voice trembles slightly as he waits for you to open the door.
>open the door
The door opens and Floyd, pausing only for the briefest moment, plunges into the Bio Lab. Immediately, he is set upon by hideous, mutated monsters! More are heading straight toward the open door! Floyd shrieks and yells to you to close the door.
If the interactor has the player character close the door and wait, Floyd will knock; opening the door (and then immediately shutting it) allows Floyd to emerge from the room without the mutants escaping:
Floyd staggers to the ground, dropping the mini card. He is badly torn apart, with loose wires and broken circuits everywhere. Oil flows from his lubrication system. He obviously has only moments to live.
You drop to your knees and cradle Floyd's head in your lap. Floyd looks up at his friend with half-open eyes. "Floyd did it ... got card. Floyd a good friend, huh?" Quietly, you sing Floyd's favorite song, the Ballad of the Starcrossed Miner ...
Floyd smiles with contentment, and then his eyes close as his head rolls to one side.You sit in silence for a moment, in memory of a brave friend who gave his life so that you might live.
Although Floyd is well loved, as a part of the overall workings of Plane fall he is, as one reviewer wrote, "tragically underused.... He is only used to solve two or three puzzles, puzzles which could have been written with only minor changes to have them be solve
d by the player, and probably would have been stronger" (M. Murray 1997).
As a character who is also a technological artifact, Floyd is more important than his immediate function in the IF world suggests. He is a figure for the sometimes emotional relationships that people have with computers, or that are mediated through computers. Floyd represents the subtle emotional capacity of computers in how his antics provide amusement. Meretzky (2002) noted that Isaac Asimov also "found it easier to write silicon-based characters than carbon-based characters," adding that in the case of interactive fiction
I wouldn't be surprised if it's an issue of expectations; with a human character, people expect a full range of human emotions and reactions which games then (and still today) couldn't begin to come close to doing. But with something like a robot or an alien the reader/player doesn't have the same set of expectations and therefore the character can come closer to matching them and seeming like a real, believable, fully-realized creation.
Despite the many limitations of Floyd, his role was both affecting and provocative, causing critics to think about what made for a good character in an interactive work. In having little knowledge of his own, yet communicating effectively within a certain scenario, Floyd hearkened back to Weizenbaum's ELIZA/DOCTOR. Although he was not fully developed as a part of the IF world of Planetfall, his comic value and critical function in the potential narratives of that work made him a more interesting character, in many ways, than predecessors like the thief and robot of Zork. Meretzky would go on to create a very effective robot player character named PRISM (a.k.a. Perry Simm) in his 1985 A Mind Forever Voyaging.
A follow-up to Planetfall, also done by Meretzky, was the 1987 Stationfall. With a different setting (a desolate space station) and a resuscitated Floyd, Meretzky blended the old and new well. One reviewer wrote that Stationfall "provides a quintessential example of what a sequel ought to be" (Cree 1995).
It is almost essential to interactive fiction that some things in the world change during interaction: Doors must open so the player character can proceed to new areas, objects must be lifted from the ground, and bigger alterations (e.g., the draining of a reservoir, the moving around of segments of the Royal Puzzle) must be made by the player character now and then. It wasn't until the 1985 publication of Moriarty's Wishbringer that interactors found this malleability of the IF world taken to a new and powerful conclusion. Early in a traversal of that work (which is in the juvenile fiction genre), the entire world was magically transformed in medias res. After wandering through a village and making a delivery, the player character, a letter carrier, returns to find the familiar seaside town of Festeron altered in disturbing and fantastic ways. Wishbringer used this transformative technique to great effect; it would be employed even more strikingly in Meretzky's dystopian science fiction work A Mind Forever Voyaging, which was released later in the same year.
Moriarty had worked for the magazine ANALOG ("Atari Newsletter And a Lot Of Games") before coming to Infocom to develop Z-machine interpreters in 1984. He had written two works of interactive fiction that were published in ANALOG: Adventure in the Fifth Dimension, written in BASIC, and Crash Dive! in assembly. Moriarty also worked on Infocom's first juvenile fiction title, Seastalker, before starting on Wishbringer.
One important IF author and critic finds Wishbringer "solidly mediocre" (Nelson 2001b, 354).The concepts behind it certainly don't have an impressive heritage. Wishbringer, as Moriarty explained,"came from a plastic rock"-the idea for the packaging and included goodies first motivated the design of the work, with an original idea for including magic rings developing into an idea to include actual rocks, then glow-in-the-dark plastic lumps in the shape of rocks-while work on software development was continuing (Rigby 1991). But the work was Infocom's highest achievement for young interactors and is a good introductory interactive fiction work for those of any age. It provides alternate ways to solve most puzzles-one grounded in realism and typical adventure puzzle solving and one that uses the power of the eponymous magical stone-so two interactors might have almost entirely different experiences of solving it. The transformation of the town leaves it a frightening but amusingly skewed place: The police have been replaced by giant boots who stomp around menacingly, for instance. The particular blend of sinister bizarreness and more lighthearted fantasy is not frequently found in literature written for adults but is typical in children's literature, from Alice in Wonderland to Norton Duster's The Phantom Tollbooth. This sort of transformation has antecedents in mass media fiction. Specifically, Wishbringer has been related to "Mirror, Mirror," an episode of the original Star Trek that presented a strangely transformed "evil Enterprise" with a sinister, bearded Mister Spock (Cree 1995). The Enterprise set, of course, did not change as radically as Festeron does in Wishbringer.
While Wishbringer used its transformative effect to good effect, the surprising appearance of a wholly changed setting made Meretzky's A Mind Forever Voyaging, in development at the same time, an interactive fiction work of unparalleled power. One educator who has taught using interactive fiction for more than a decade names A Mind Forever Voyaging "a work of serious science fiction that many readers regard as the finest piece of interactive fiction yet written" (Desilets 1999). This work takes its title from The Prelude, was unveiled in a press conference at the NewYork Public Library (Infocom, Inc. 1985), and treats political issues of obvious contemporary relevance. Meretzky (2002) explained that Infocom "chose the NYPL in order to emphasize the `literary' nature of the game; the PR for the game was all geared toward spinning the game as the computer game equivalent of Brave New World and 1984." While Implementor and author Stu Galley read an introduction to A Mind Forever Voyaging that came from the manual, the event was otherwise similar to other Infocom press conferences (Meretzky 2002). The attempt to connect with literature can be seen within the work as well: It is arranged in three parts with epigraphs at the beginning of each. Meretzky's well-known humor isn't evident in the dystopian A Mind Forever Voyaging.
In the frame world, the player character exists as a sentient computer in the United States of North America of 2031. This computer player character, PRISM, is gendered male and comes complete with a human-like, synthesized past, described in the documentation. The interactor can switch this computer between modes (e.g., to read communications or to view a news feed) and can peer through cameras situated around the complex in which this artificial intelligence is housed. PRISM has a job to do, of course. He must enter into a special mode, simulation mode, and try to learn what the future effects of the proposed right-wing Plan for Renewed National Purpose. He does this not as a disembodied intelligence, as in the frame IF world, but through the eyes of his human persona, Perry Simm. The mission must be carried out in an IF world within the first simulated world: the computer-generated landscape of Rockvil, a middle American city, as it is supposed to exist ten years in the future of this fictional future.
The inventiveness of A Mind Forever Voyaging should be clear from a description of the outer and inner worlds that are represented within it. Text adventures began as programs in which a human adventurer, who was supposed to be "you," undertook a fantasy quest. The player character of A Mind Forever Voyaging is, for the first time, not human; he is a computer. He is therefore definitely not "you" in the usual sense. This computer has a richer and more detailed background (explained in the accompanying manual) than any human player character who had been originally developed for a text adventure in 1985, with the exception of those in works based on existing literature, such as Lord. Although in the work's "real world" the player character is a computer, he exists as a person in a simulated world within. Furthermore, this simulated world, although it incorporates science fiction elements, is no fantastic landscape. It is the character's home, an ordinary American city extended into the future. Finally, although there is an overarching riddle involving the highest-level IF world, there are no puzzles at all in the simulated city. There is simply a list of thi
ngs to be observed, and a city in which to observe them. A Mind Forever Voyaging radically reversed many assumptions of the early text adventure.
An initial visit to Rockvil's future (during the year 2041) reveals that everything is rosy: it looks as if the somewhat draconian Plan for Renewed National Purpose has had a good effect. After returning and dutifully submitting video records of the simulated future, it seems there is little else for PRISM to do.
Then, PRISM's chief developer explains that thanks to these explorations, the simulator has been able to grind away and create an additional simulation set further in the future. Rockvil of 2051 is now available in simulation mode, and PRISM can voyage there as well. During the return visit, Perry Simm's family members have grown appropriately older and some parts of the city have changed. Most interestingly, some signs of trouble can be seen. In Perry Simm's apartment, for instance, this can happen:
You hear a commotion in the hallway and then a half-dozen Border Security Force officers storm in, rifles ready.You freeze as they tramp about the apartment wielding Rad-Detectors. After a few nightmare minutes, they seem satisfied and begin to file out. The apparent leader turns to you. "Sorry for the inconvenience," he says apologetically. "You know how things are. We're only doing it for your own protection." He closes the door behind him.You hear sobbing and turn to see Jill crying in the corner of the living room.
After recording scenes like this one, PRISM can manage to make the sympathetic scientist in charge aware of potential problems with the Plan. But more research has to be done.
PRISM is eventually allowed access to the Rockvils of 2061, 2071, and then 2081. In these visions of the city, the deterioration of the infrastructure, the increasing misery of the population, and the breakdown of Perry Simm's family become evident as increasingly harsh events play themselves out in the crumbling world. All this is accomplished by means of sparse descriptions of city locations that change very slightly. As is often the case in interactive fiction, a transcript can do little to suggest the power of an interaction with A Mind Forever Voyaging. As PRISM records the events that happen, it soon becomes clear that even with evidence of the Plan's danger, his scientist creator will not be able to stop the Plan from passing. The senator who is sponsoring this oppressive legislation decides that PRISM must be shut down to avoid negative publicity, and a black bag team of saboteurs enters the research facility where PRISM is housed. (This moment is reminiscent not only of an obvious incident in American history, but also of a moment in Suspended, when people enter the underground complex to fatally "replace" the player character with a backup planetary controller.) To solve the problem posed in the frame world requires a lateral leap of thinking; it requires, in fact, that PRISM become a sort of hacker and pirate broadcaster, achieving a victory through subversion of the media.
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