Twisty Little Passages

by Nick Montfort

  The greatest success in all based-on-a-book interactive fiction was the collaboration between Douglas Adams and Steven Meretzky that resulted in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, published by Infocom in 1984.This was clearly the best-selling work of this sort and probably the greatest creative achievement as well.While the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy did precede the interactive fiction work of the same name and clearly has many affinities with it, this IF work differs in some important ways from the other efforts that have been discussed. First, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was originally a radio play, so in a sense the well-known novel is already a "conversion" from a different format. Second, and of most interest, is that Infocom involved Adams rather deeply in the process of designing the interactive fiction work itself. Other companies were pleased to license the rights to a novel and assign a programmer (who might have little interest in the original book, and might receive no royalties or credit for the new creative effort that was involved) to piece together a work of interactive fiction from preexisting material. Infocom, on the other hand, sought to develop a new sort of collaboration between a well-known author and one of their Implementors-and succeeded.

  Adams's "world-class procrastination abilities," as Meretzky called them, did cause some problems for the project, which began in February 1984 and was slated (ambitiously) to be completed by the following Christmas. Meretzky (2002) said of Adams that "being a successful person with tons of interesting acquaintances, he had an extremely distracting life. Plus, he wasn't fond of the actual task of writing. He loved coming up with ideas, but hated wrestling them into a properly-formed work." There was also the issue of developing an interactive fiction work based on an earlier creation-an issue that was new for Infocom. Another implementor, Michael Berlyn, said of IF works, "Nobody can sit down and write one of these as if they were writing a novel. They are too interactive and they are too complex. Take it from someone who's done both. It can't be done" (qtd. in Addams 1984). Meretzky described some of the general differences he discovered in writing a work of interactive fiction that is based on a previous work:

  It's easier because you have some constraints on the universe you're going to be designing, and on the characters you're going to be using ... On the other hand, there's more of a challenge because you want to take advantage of the features of an interactive game, and you don't want it to be just a translation of the book, because the book is necessarily linear. If it was just a translation ... there wouldn't be any reason to do it at all.You have to avoid getting into the trap of "well, this is the way it was in the book, so this is the way it has to be in the game." (qtd. in Darling 1985)

  The result, according to Adams, was a work "bearing as much relationship to the books as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead does to Hamlet" (qtd. in Gaiman 1993, 151). Hitchhiker's ended up being divided into a series of discrete segments, giving it more of a "rail game" sense than many other Infocom works had with their broad and interconnected worlds. The conclusion-devised by the two when Meretzky visited England for a weekwas not as satisfying as the general texture of the work, in which Adams's humor worked very effectively in the context of interactivity. But the result was clearly a popular and critical success, earning praise from the London Times and becoming a best-seller in the United States (Gaiman 1993). It was also a new type of collaboration. At one point, Adams mentioned that he couldn't tell which parts of the work were written by him and which were written by Meretzky (Darling 1985; Meretzky 2002). While interactive fiction was a collaborative enterprise from the very beginning (as with Adventure and Zork), Hitchhiker's was the first case in which a veteran IF author and programmer worked closely with a famous author to produce something that was almost certainly greater than what either would have devised working alone.

  D O C T O R V I R G I L ' S TECHNOLOGY: M I N D W H E E L

  While the collaboration at Infocom between a veteran IF author and an established novelist was a first, a company called Synapse had earlier brought in several accomplished authors of printed literature to work intensively with programmers on interactive fiction. As the company sought out interested authors who didn't have preconceptions about the form, programmer William Mataga worked on an IF authoring language called BTZ (Better Than Zork), expressing the company's desire to produce works that, although quite different from Zork, could also be compared to it and seen as better. Founder Ihor Wolosenko, one Synapse author said, "was eager to avoid the concept or terminology of a `game' and had quite ambitious notions about dialogue with characters" and about associating qualities with objects in the IF world (Pinsky 2002).The results were published during 1984-1986, after the company was acquired by Broderbund. They included the messianic science fiction Breakers by Rod Smith, a literary adventure dream called Brimstone: The Dream of Gawain by James Paul, and the spaceship-based Essex by Bill Darrah. It was a title by a poet that Synapse published in 1984Mindwheel, a fantastic science fiction work with a bizarre premise-that turned out to be the most intriguing of these.

  Synapse was founded by Wolosenko, who had studied drama and psychology in college, and Ken Grant, who had been in charge of data processing at San Francisco's Federal Reserve Bank. Both programmed on the Atari 800; the company was formed to work on a piece of business software for that computer, FileManager 800. In direct contrast to Infocom, Synapse moved from developing this type of software into the entertainment software market. Other programmers working for the company developed actionoriented games. One of these was Steve Hales, whose first work for Synapse was redoing a partially completed game called Slime. Mataga came to the company with a game similar to the arcade hit Berzerk (Wolosenko 1983). The writer Synapse had found to work on Mindwheel, Robert Pinsky, was teaching English at Berkeley at the time. He had studied at Rutgers with Frances Fergusson and then at Stanford withYvor Winters; there, he did his Ph.D. dissertation on the poetry of Walter Savage Landon. When he started on the project he had published two books of poetry, An Explanation of America (1980) and Sadness and Happiness (1975). He was just finishing up another, History of My Heart. That book would be published the same year that Mindwheel was. Synapse had found a rising star to work on the project: By 2000 Pinsky's publications would include six books of poetry and an acclaimed translation of Dante's Inferno (1994). Pinsky later served as poet laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2000.

  In retrospect, then, it is not surprising that in Mindwheel, as one reviewer noted, "The imagery is definitely something out of Dante's Inferno" (Friedland 1984), with an initial situation in which Doctor Virgil is ready to launch the player character on a fantastic journey. (Since Pinsky's work on Mindwheel preceded his translation of Dante, which is widely read today and is the way that many people know Dante's poem, Mindwheel can be considered the first work of interactive fiction to have influenced the Inferno.) Although Mindwheel is harder to come by and does not have the cult of Infocom's canon or of The Knight Orc, many interactors and reviewers loved Mindwheel when it came out. Its fantastic world represented the minds of four dead celebrities. The player character ventured into this array of puzzles and lively phrases in a quest to acquire the Wheel of Wisdom and save the planet.

  Pinsky (2002) said he gave Wolosenko "four or five treatments, with Mindwheel--I think the title was there from the start-being the wildest. I probably wrote it as a semi-parody of Ihor's talk about discs and qualities .. . He immediately said that was the one he'd like me to work on." As with all of Synapse's self-styled "electronic novels," a hardback book was included. This book was mostly written by Pinsky, although credited to another Synapse employee at Pinsky's request (Pinsky 2001). The book's "The Beginnings of Mindwheel" begins with an section told from the point of view of an "arch-senator" named Hay-Seuss Pederson. Randall (1988), who mistook this character for the player character (Pederson actually is not mentioned in the interactive fiction work Mindwheel at all, and section III of the book is devoted to "The Mind Adventurer," a different character w
ho is never named and whose gender is never specified), noted that this name is "a rather clumsy and obvious rearrangement of Jesus' and `Son of Peter"' (187). In his high-cultural enthusiasm, Randall seems to have overlooked the allusion, also rather obvious, to an American illustrator and author of children's books, not to mention the suggestion that this futuristic political leader is Hispanic. (It's also interesting to note that the president in this unusual future is named Helen Honda.) "The Beginnings of Mindwheel," with its bizarre and futuristic political situation, has some affinity with science fiction, but it seems equally connected to Mark Strand's "The President's Resignation," a famous bit of unusual prose by a poet (1985).

  While Mindwheel was written up in one literary journal after its publication (Campbell 1987), the response of academics interested in computer literature was at best tepid. From the perspective of those working with hypertext literature, Mindwheel was described as having "not networks of possibilities to be explored but arrangements of traps and obstacles to be overcome in an insistent drive to a goal" (Moulthrop and Kaplan 1991). It is indeed possible to conceptualize the system of Mindwheel's world this way, just as one can reduce a hypertext fiction to nothing but an arrangement of texts to be clicked upon and shuffled through. Both formulations miss the point, though, and overlook the possibilities these two types of potential literature offer. The obstacles and spaces in the IF world of Mindwheel make for a pleasing text-generating system, one arranged for explicit solution, just as literary riddles are. But the solution, as with a great riddle, results in more than the simple attainment of a goal. It leads to a new realization with its own new possibilities, both the possibilities of seeing things in a new way and the possibilities of operating the system differently to uncover new texts. As Pinsky (1997) put it:

  My experience of the computer is the experience of a puzzle that is an aperture. That is, each time I learn to do something new with the computer I try to find my way through a maze-the software or hardware manual, the protocol, the peculiarities of some new application. There is a blend of happiness and frustration, a forceful need to see one's way through the bottleneck. Through the narrow neck or aperture of this maze, I know, a vast world will open.

  More than any previous work, Mindwheel (despite being called "an electronic novel") revealed the profound connection between interactive fiction and, not the novel, but poetry. Most obviously, there were poems on the surface of it. A central puzzle in the work involved filling in six words of a sonnet. This could possibly be accomplished by guesswork, but it was advisable instead to find the words in different texts that were scattered about, by exploring the IF world. Although filling in the blanks does not make for the most original and exciting activity, the puzzle is framed well. The sonnet is presented to the player character in Mindwheel by an amusing devil, Spaw, who stands amid references to lawyers and the IRS and checks over player character's works as if grading an assignment. The incomplete sonnet he offers is not an original either; it was one of many texts and incidents in Mindwheel drawn from earlier sources. In this case it was based on a sonnet by Fulke Greville (1554-1628): poem 100 from Caelica, a turning point in that work in which Greville dismissed devils as illusion. Pinsky had planned to use the poem, but he encountered a problem when it came to actually putting it into Mindwheel: Its lines were too long to fit on a forty-column screen of the sort many home computers of the era had, and it would not do to break them (Pinsky 2001). Rather than finding a poem with shorter lines, he became a clever Procrustes, converting the pentameter lines (except for line 11) to tetrameter. Here is the first quatrain of Greville's poem (as it was printed with modernized spelling in Slate in 2000), followed by the first quatrain of his tetrameter version from Mindwheel as it was printed in the documentation, with the words that were to be filled in indicated in italics.

  In creating Mindwheel, Pinsky (1996) also employed an early riddle and situations and imagery from earlier literature; he has mentioned a situation in which the player character is immobilized from the waist down as being "raided out of the Thousand and One Nights" (41-42). There were more contemporary references, too. In a crowd scene, some of the people brandished books from the Ecco Press, publisher of Pinsky's History of My Heart. (Another fill-in-the-blank poem that appeared in Mindwheel was Pinsky's "Sonnet," which also appeared in that book.) In a twist on the baseball puzzle in Zork II, the bums who huddled around a fire in one location could be seen, upon closer inspection and with the appropriate cultural background, to be "bums" of a different sort: the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  The manifestation of poems was only the most obvious way in which Mindwheel brought the perspectives of a poet to bear on interactive fiction. When the interactor did nothing, different sorts of lines would appear from time to time, either "weather" (which had some emotional effect) or" drivel" (which did not) (Pinsky 1996, 41).This would allow Mindwheel to generate an atmospheric poem if left to its own devices, or to sprinkle whimsy throughout the interaction otherwise. Some examples from the initial crowd scene: "Held high in one pair of limbs you see a Twinkie and a silver revolver." "Gibbering reptiles dressed in antique finery whirl past and away from you." Some of the development work required Pinsky to enumerate all possible names of different sorts-for instance, all the possible taunts the interactor might type (Pinsky 1996, 42). Pinsky's love of naming things can be seen in later poems such as "Creation According to Ovid" and "Shirt."

  Some of the best replies that Mindwheel produced in interaction were unanticipated, as with "Digging with the hands is slow and tedious" in Zork and "Upon looking over and dusting the me you notice that there are no good fingerprints to be found" in Deadline. Pinsky (1997) recounts one such reply from an encounter with his work:

  Demonstrating the game for a friend, I guided him to a room where he confronted a female character. She addressed him in some faintly provocative manner, and having typed in the "look-at" command he found that she was, say-I forget the details-attractive, dark-haired, wearing surgical scrubs. My friend addressed her:

  "You look like my mother," he typed. The machine, an antediluvian Kaypro as I recall, clucked over its hard drive, and the character responded:

  "I will look," she said to him, "any way you want me to look."

  To my pleasure, he looked startled, claimed he got goosebumps, and I got a little thrill myself-the pleasure of feeling that the clunky little game, on that yellow-and-black monochrome monitor, had made a plot that imitated reality: he saw her, he made a remark half-mocking and half-flirtatious, and she had responded in a way germane and unexpected.

  While this experience is a pleasing one, the implications of such an interaction for the poetics of interactive fiction seem troubling, at least at first. If the most powerful moments of an interaction occur because of configurations of text that were not in any way anticipated by the author, how can authors hope to intentionally create better works? Improvement certainly will not come by piecing together appropriate replies for every input text in every context. Relying on chance combinations will not do, either, since by chance it is easier to arrive at a frustrating or otherwise unpleasant reply than a surprising and appropriate one. If moments like this one-in which Pinsky's female character outdoes ELIZA/DOCTOR with her noncommittal and dazzling response-are to occur more often, authors will have to recognize what classes of combinations of text have resonance. Not just the quality of an individual reply, but rather the ways of replying will have to be evaluated in the context of the immediate generated text, the interaction, and the overall traversal of the work-and also in the context of the culture or cultures in which the work and the interactor exist. Only then can beautiful accidents like this one be consciously worked into the texture of interactive fiction.

  By investing four different parts of Mindwheel's IF world with features representing four markedly different personae, Pinsky accomplished an interesting new communication between what, in a novel, would be the sharply divided elements of setting and character. (This
innovation may have been prompted by Wolosenko's ideas about associating qualities with objects and the IF world.) It was impossible to have a literal conversation with those four who were, if not characters in a narratological sense, certainly the principal personalities of Mindwheel. Instead, the player character walked through connected rooms that presented the minds of these other characters in images and in the structures of simulated space. The inability of the computer to converse naturally was no longer a problem, since the personae of these dead celebrities were represented not through interactive conversation but in space; the compelling simulation of spaces had been, of course, the strong point of interactive fiction from the beginning.

  The eschatological Mindwheel calls for comparison to two of its contemporary works. One is Brian Moriarty's Trinity, which also sends a hero on a quest to stave off global crisis. The other work is a poem, one that was included in Pinsky's 1984 History of My Heart: "The Figured Wheel." It shares a title word, of course, and Pinsky has said it was an inspiration for Mindwheel (Pinsky 2002), but an additional connection is that the final word that must be supplied to fill in the final blank in Mindwheel is supplied in the last line of"The Figured Wheel." The poem-which is printed, in part, in the documentation to Mindwheel-literally provides the answer to the final question posed in Mindwheel. The poem sweeps from "the Antarctic station of American sailors and technicians" to "the mineral-rich tundra of the Soviet northernmost settlements," and the wheel of the title moves through these places as well, "and through the dead-world of bomb, fireblast, and fallout." The science fiction apocalypse of Mindwheel is a more distant, less threatening figure for the more immediate Cold War doom depicted in "The Figured Wheel," the same doom that is very explicitly present in Trinity. In Mindwheel-as in Trinity-the player character enters a fantastic world, leaving behind a familiar society on the brink of collapse in an attempt to rescue that society. In the poem the wheel of art is seen turning "even in the scorched and frozen world of the dead after the holocaust." Pinsky declares in "The Figured Wheel" that he too is completely subject to the destructive course of this wheel.