Planet Interactive Fiction

There’s a lot of interesting stuff to talk about in Ultima III, to the extent that I wasn’t quite sure how to wedge it all into a conventional review. So I decided to try this approach, to balance my usual telling with quite a bit of showing. Or something like that. Anyway, I found it fun to do.

If you’re inspired to play Ultima III yourself, know that Good Old Games is selling it in a collection which also contains Ultima I and II. Less legitimately, there are the usual abandonware sites and ROM collections where you can find the original Apple II version that I play here, but you’re on your own there. Some spoilers do follow, although Ultima III is tricky enough that you may just welcome whatever little bit of guidance you glean from this post.

---

Garriott was really proud of his game’s subtitle, Exodus, to the extent that in the game itself and most early advertising it’s actually more prominent than the Ultima name. He draws no connection to its meaning as an English noun or to the Bible. It’s simply a cool-sounding word that he takes as the name of his latest evil wizard, the love child of his two previous evil wizards, Mondain from Ultima I and Minax from Ultima II. Roe R. Adams III did make a somewhat strained attempt to draw a connection to the expected implications of the word in the manual via a recasting of an old seafaring mystery:

One possible clue as to the identity of thy nemesis has been discovered. A derelict merchant ship was recently towed into port. No crewmen were aboard, alive or dead. Everyone had vanished, as if plucked by some evil force off the boat. The only thing found was a word written in blood on the deck: EXODUS.

I never hear anything about this ghost ship in the game itself. Also left unexplained, as it was in Ultima II, is why Mondain was on Garriott’s fantasy world of Sosaria and Minax was on our own Earth. This time I’m stuck back on Sosaria again. Garriott would finally get more serious about making an Ultima mythos that makes some kind of sense with the next game, but for now… let’s just say I won’t be spending much more time discussing the plotting or the worldbuilding.

---

In Ultima III I get to create and control a full party of four adventurers rather than a single avatar. This is actually the only Ultima that works quite this way. Later games would use the code Garriott first developed here to allow players to have more than one person in their parties, but would start them off with a single avatar. Finding other adventurers in the game world itself and convincing them to join would become part of the experience of play and an important component of those games’ much richer plots.

---

With my party created, I’m dumped into Sosaria, right outside the town of Britain and the castle of Lord British in what has already become by Ultima III a time-honored tradition.

One of the fascinating aspects of playing through the Ultima games in order is seeing which pieces are reused from earlier games and which are replaced. Programming often really is a game of interchangeable parts. On the left above is Ultima II, on the right Ultima III. The same old tile engine that dates back to Ultima I is still in place in both games, but Ultima III changes the screen layout considerably and makes everything a bit more attractive and ornate within the considerable limitations of the Apple II. It no longer uses the Apple II’s mixed display mode that displays text rather than graphics on the bottom four lines of the screen. Instead the whole screen is now given over to a graphics display, with a character generator, once an exotic piece of technology but by 1983 commonplace, used to put words anywhere on the screen.

---

When I enter a town for the first time another of Ultima III‘s additions to the old tile-graphics engine becomes clear: a line-of-sight algorithm now prevents me from seeing through walls. This adds an extra dimension of realism, but proves to be a mixed blessing. We’ll talk about why that is in just a little bit.

---

And when I run into a couple of wandering orcs for the first time I see another big addition: a separate strategic-combat screen that pops up when a fight begins. You can see that on the right above; the old Ultima II system of flailing in place on the map screen is on the left. The earlier system would obviously be unworkable with a party of four. Unlike with Wizardry, combat has never been the heart of Ultima‘s appeal, but that doesn’t mean you don’t spend a lot of time — maybe too much time — in Ultima III engaging in it. The new system does add some welcome interest to the old formula. I can now move each character about individually, use missile weapons (a highly recommended strategy that lets me take out many monsters before they can get close enough to damage me), and cast quite a variety of offensive and defensive spells. Less wonderfully, all those random encounters with orcs and cutthroats now take much more time to resolve, which is one of the things that can turn Ultima III into quite the slog by the time all is said and done. Also contributing to the tedium: in a harbinger of certain modern CRPGs, random encounters are balanced to suit the general potency of my party, thus guaranteeing that they will still take some time even once I have quite a powerful group of characters.

---

As part of a general tightening of the game’s mechanics likely prompted by unfavorable comparisons of previous Ultimas to previous Wizardries, the strange system of hit points as a commodity purchasable from Lord British has finally been overhauled. Now healing works as you might expect: each character has a maximum number of hit points which Lord British raises by 100 every time I visit him after gaining a level. Alas, this works only until level 25 and 2500 hit points. At least I don’t have to pay him for his trouble anymore. In the screenshot above his “Experience more!” means that I haven’t yet gained a level for him to boost my hit-point total; small wonder, as all my characters are still level 1.

---

Having gotten the initial lay of the land, I settle into the rhythm of building my characters, exploring the world map, and talking to everyone I can find in the towns. The latter process, like so much in Ultima III, is equal parts frustrating and gratifying. The good citizens of Sosaria insist on speaking in the most cryptic of riddles. And here we see the darker side of Garriott’s new line-of-sight system: most of the most vital clue-givers are tucked away in the most obscure possible corners of the towns, like the fellow shown in the screenshot above and left. I have to scour every town square by tedious square to be absolutely certain I haven’t missed a vital clue, a vital link in a chain of tasks required to win that is much more complicated than those found in the earlier games. On the other hand, the gratification that comes when another piece of the puzzle falls into place is considerable. Ultima has always been better at delivering that thrill of exploration than just about any other CRPG.

There are in many places in Ultima III some small kindnesses, some elements that, once I figure out how they work, can make things easier. In the screenshot to the right I’m using a magic gem, purchasable from thieves guilds in a couple of the towns, to get a bird’s-eye view of the town I’m currently in. Ferreting out these secrets and hidden mechanics contributes to another thing Ultima always does well: making you feel smart.

---

Still, it’s possible to take this whole discovery thing too far. In one of the more astonishing design decisions in Ultima III, Garriott has consciously engineered into his hotkey-driven interface an element of guess the verb. After all, why should text adventurers have all the fun? There’s a mysterious OTHER command this time, which lets me enter new verbs. Divining what these are depends on my sussing that words surrounded by “” in characters’ speech refer to new verbs. (“<SEARCH> the shrines.”) A very strange design choice, which does a good job of illustrating the gulf in player expectations between now and then, when guess the verb was still trumpeted by many as an essential element of adventure games rather than just a byproduct of their technical limitations. Given that, why not try to engineer it into Ultima, a series which always tried to offer more, more, more? Thankfully, it would disappear again from Ultima IV, in what could be read as another reflection of changing player expectations.

In the screenshot at left above I’ve just used the hidden verb “BRIBE” to convince a guard who just a second before was standing right next to me to go away for the modest fee of 100 gold. Now I can go into the shop and steal with relative impunity. (Ultima III is, as we’ll continue to see, very much an amoral world, the last Ultima about which that can be said.) Bribing is only useful; other hidden verbs are vital.

For instance, the second screenshot above shows me gathering a piece of important information using the hidden verb “PRAY” inside a temple. This is actually quite an interesting sequence. PRAYing yields the information that I must YELL — YELL being one of the standard hotkey-based commands — “EVOCARE” at a certain place. It’s perilously closed to two guess-the-verb — or at least guess-the-word — puzzles joined together.

---

We see an interesting re-purposing of previous Ultima technology in the form of the eight moon gates which wink in and out of existence in a set pattern on the world map. In Ultima II, you may recall, these supposedly allowed me to travel through time, although effectively they just provided access to different world maps; nothing I did in one time could have any direct effect on any of the others. Here they’re renamed and used more honestly, as ways to move quickly from place to place on the primary world map. (There are only two world maps this time, the primary one and an alternate world called Ambrosia which we’ll get to shortly.) They also allow me to reach a few places that are otherwise completely inaccessible, as the screenshot at right above illustrates. Well, okay… I could also get there with a ship, an element we’ll talk about later. But that’s not always the case; there’s at least one vital location that can be visited only via moon gate. Thus understanding the logic of the moon gates and charting their patterns is another critical aspect of cracking the puzzle of Ultima III. Moon gates would continue to be a fixture in the Ultimas to come.

---

Garriott had completely rewritten his dungeon-delving engine for Ultima II, replacing what had been the slowest and most painful part of Ultima I with a snappy new piece that replaced a wire-frame portrait of the surroundings with glorious filled-in color. It’s easily the most impressive and appreciated improvement in that game. But then, like so much else in Ultima II, he squandered it by giving his players no reason to go there. Thus Ultima III almost feels like the new dungeon engine’s real debut. Not only can I harvest a lot of desperately needed gold from the dungeons, but I must also explore them to find five vital “marks” that give special abilities which are in turn key to solving the game. And at the bottom of the Dungeon of Time I meet the Time Lord. (Garriott’s Time Bandits fixation had apparently not yet completely runs its course — or are we now dealing with a Doctor Who obsession?) He gives a portentous clue that will be vital to the end-game.

---

Sosaria is still a world where might makes right. Lord British, the supposedly benevolent monarch, has a dirty little secret, an ugly torture chamber hidden in the depths of his castle. It’s almost enough to make you ask who’s really the evil one here. The manual talks a good game about Exodus, but he doesn’t actually do anything at all in the game itself, just hangs out in his castle and waits for us to come kill him. Meanwhile Lord British has torture chambers, and his lands are best with monsters trying to kill me, and he seems completely disinterested in helping me beyond boosting my hit points from time to time. Nor am I exactly morally pure: my own mission in the torture chamber is not to save the fellow who’s been thrown into a lake of fire, merely to extract some information from him.

The screenshot at the right shows an even more morally questionable episode, albeit one that requires a bit more explanation. I’m the one on the horse. Each of the three clerics next to me has a critical clue to convey. However, I can’t interact on a diagonal, meaning that the one at bottom right is inaccessible to me — unless I open up a lane by killing one of his companions in cold blood, that is. I want to emphasize here that the clue the inaccessible cleric has to offer is absolutely necessary; he tells where to dig for some special weapons and armor that provide the only realistic way to survive the end-game in Exodus’s castle. Thus the only way forward is, literally, murder, and it’s a conscious design choice on Garriott’s part. Of course, he didn’t think of it quite that way. He just saw it as an interesting mechanic for a puzzle, having not yet made the leap himself from mechanics to experiential fiction. Again, all of that would change with Ultima IV.

---

Speaking of horses: given Garriott’s newfound willingness to edit, the vehicles available to me in Ultima III are neither so plentiful nor so outrageous as they were in Ultima II. The ridiculous and ridiculously cool airplane, for instance, is gone.

I can buy horses for my party in a couple of towns. These let me move overland a bit faster, using less food and avoiding many of the wandering monsters and the endless combats they bring which can test the patience of the hardiest of players. A ship can be acquired only by taking it from one of the roving bands of pirates that haunt the coastline. There aren’t actually a lot of pirates about, which can get very frustrating; a ship is required to visit several important areas of the game, and finding one can be tough. In the right-hand screenshot above I’ve sailed to an island, where, following the lead of the cleric whose companion I killed in cold blood, I’ve dug up the aforementioned special weapons that are required to harm Exodus’s innermost circle of minions.

---

I also need a ship to get to the alternate world of Ambrosia, which I can manage only by the counter-intuitive step of sailing into a whirlpool. Here I find shrines to each of the four abilities, the only ways to raise my scores above their starting values. Doing so is vital; in Ultima III‘s still somewhat strange system, ability scores have much more effect on my performance in combat and other situations than my character level. For instance, the number and power of spells I can cast has nothing to do with my level, only with my intelligence (wizard spells) or wisdom (cleric spells).

The explicitly Christian imagery in these shrines, and occasionally in other places in the game, is worth noting. It’s doubtless a somewhat thoughtless result of Garriott’s SCA activities and his accompanying fascination with real medieval culture, but it could certainly be read as disrespectful, a trivializing of religious belief. It’s the sort of thing that TSR, creators of Dungeons and Dragons, were always smart enough to stay well away from (not that it always helped them to avoid controversy). Similarly, you definitely will never see crosses in a modern CRPG.

---

Ready at last, I piece together a string of clues and sail to the “Silver Snake”. There I yell the password “EVOCARE” to enter Exodus’s private grotto. The Silver Snake itself provides a good illustration of just how intertwined the early Ultima games were with Garriott’s own life. And the anecdote that explains its presence here also shows some of the difficulties of trying to pin down the facts about Garriott’s life and career.

Growing up in Houston in the mid-1970s, Garriott was one of the few people to see the infamously awful adventure film Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. Members of the lost Central American tribe that Savage battles in the movie all bear a tattoo on their chest of the Mayan god Kulkulkan, about whom little is known today apart from his symbol: a serpent.

Young Richard thought the symbol so cool-looking that he went to his mother’s silversmithing workshop in that room above his family’s garage that would one day house Origin Systems and made the design — or as close an approximation as he could manage — for himself. He put his new amulet on a chain made from one of his mother’s belts. He told Shay Addams about it circa 1990:

“And this chain now resides around my neck 365 days a year, 24 hours a day — it has essentially remained there for the rest of my life ever since the day I put it on. There is no way to remove it without taking a screwdriver to it and prying open one of the links. For the first couple of years that I wore it, I actually had a link that I used to open and close a little bit. After I realized I was wearing out something by doing that, I quit doing it, so this necklace has remained here ever since. It literally never comes off. The chain was gold-colored with I first put it on. As it wears off, the colors keep changing, and now it rusts on my neck. I mean literally, every day. When I go, I may die of rust poisoning or something.”

Shortly after finishing Ultima III, Garriott loaned the original to his father Owen to carry with him on his second and final trip into space. It went into space again with Richard himself in 2008, and it seems that he still wears it frequently if not constantly. For what it’s worth, the color now seems to be a dull silver, almost a pewter shade.

But… wait. A close look at the early portrait of Origin Systems I published earlier shows that he doesn’t seem to be wearing it there, although Ken Arnold is using either the original or a duplicate as a key ring. Various other contemporary photos show no evidence of a chain or amulet, at least not of the construction and bulk of the one he wears to public appearances in recent years. Now, you could say that to even question this is petty, and in a very real sense you’d be right. Really what does it matter whether he never takes the serpent medallion off or whether it’s merely a precious link to his past that he wears on special occasions? I mention it here only because it points to how slippery everything involving Garriott can be, how much the man often seems to prefer SCA-style legend over the messier world of historical facts, and by extension how eager his interviewers and chroniclers often are to mythologize rather than document. That in turn forces me to spend far more time than I’d like to debunking or at least double-checking everything he says and much of what is said about him. But we’ve moved far afield from Ultima III now, so enough beating of this particular dead horse.

---

As I’ve mentioned before, Garriott excised most of the anachronistic science-fiction elements from Ultima III to focus on fantasy. But notice that I said “most.” When I get to the grand climax at last, I learn that Exodus apparently is in fact… a giant deranged computer in the tradition of Star Trek. The four magic cards I quested for were apparently punched cards — Exodus is an old-fashioned evil computer — that I need to use to shut him down or change his programming or… something. Of course, none of this make a lick of sense — how did Mondain and Minax manage to breed a computer child? But I dutifully insert the cards and shut him down, and am left to “speculation” about Ultima IV.

In that spirit, let’s note that Garriott himself sees the Ultimas through Ultima III as essentially technical exercises, written “to satisfy my personal interest in seeing how much better a game I could put together with the skills I’d acquired while creating the previous game.” While his technology would continue to improve, with Ultima III it reached a certain point of fruition at which it was capable of delivering more than an exercise in rote mechanics, was capable of sustaining real experiential fictions. Garriott didn’t entirely realize that at the time he was writing Ultima III, and thus the game takes only the most modest of steps in that direction. When he started on the next one, however, it would all come home. In a way, it’s with that game that Ultima really became Ultima as we remember it today. We have much else to talk about before we get there, but I hope you’ll still be around when we do. With Ultima III Garriott had his foundation in place. Next would come the cathedral.

Although the &NOW AWARDS 2: The Best Innovative Writing may appear at first to be an HTML character entity reference, it’s actually a new book. Arranged back-to-back like Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee in The Killer, it offers copious amounts (400 pages) of recent provocative writing in various genres. It’s published by Lake Forest College Press.

I’m delighted to have my work in the good company of that by many excellent writers, including J.R. Carpenter, Craig Dworkin, and Michael Leong. My contribution to the volume is just a page each of output from the Latin and Cyrillic versions of “Letterformed Terrain,” from Concrete Perl.

I direct a lab at MIT called The Trope Tank. This is a lab for research, teaching, and creative production, located in building 14 (where the Hayden Library is also housed), in room 14N-233. Its mission is to develop new poetic practices and new understandings of digital media by focusing on the material, formal, and historical aspects of computation and language.

The Trope Tank is a physical facility with unusual material computing resources from the past few decades – as well as places for researchers to sit and work with their more modern computers. The facility and materials provide for visits from classes, discussions with visiting researchers, and support for creative and research projects. The lab space continues to house the monthly meetings of the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction, the Boston Area’s local IF group. Trope Tank equipment has supported talks this year at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery, Microsoft Research in Redmond, UCLA, the University of Maine, and other venues.

This academic year, two Trope Tank affiliates are becoming faculty members:

• Clara Fernández-Vara, who took part in the Tools for the Telling project back in 2007-2008 and has been a visiting scholar at the Trope Tank this year, is joining the faculty of NYU’s Game Center at the end of summer as an associate arts professor.

• Amaranth Borsuk, who was guest organizer of the Purple Blurb series in 2011-2012 and is a current collaborator on The Deletionist, is joining the faculty of The University of Washington, Bothell as an assistant professor. She has been a senior lecturer there.

The Trope Tank’s series of technical reports, called the “Trope Report” series, now features five items and is archived in MIT’s DSpace.

There have been two major research projects (both with artistic aspects) and one creative, poetic project this past year:

• The book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 was published last year by the MIT Press (and is also available for free download as a PDF). Various subsets of the ten authors have been doing presentations related to the book in many different contents.

• The story generation project Slant was initiated and the first paper was accepted at ICCC 2013. It will be presented there, in Sydney, next month. The project involves integrating or developing new work based on decades of research by Nick Montfort, Rafael Pérez y Pérez, and Fox Harrell; those three and Andrew Campana have collaborated to initiate the project.

• The Deletionist is a current poetic project by Amaranth Borsuk, Jesper Juul, and Nick Montfort which will premiere at E-Poetry next month at Kingston University, London.

The Trope Tank will continue to support research, creative work, and teaching this summer and beyond. This is a laboratory to allow people to work with material computing systems; while it is not an archive, museum, or library, and does not offer all that such institutions do, it does provide for hands-on access to the history of creative computing. If you are interested in using the systems and materials in the Trope Tank, please contact Nick.

A nice creepy little game

It's hard to write a proper review of this game without giving away key points in the plot which will likely ruin the game for anyone interested in playing it, or turning the review into one of those nasty spoiler-tagged things that I'm so against.

But briefly you're a man called Tom who suffers from a number of stress-related issues. At the request/order of your boss, you return home to visit your parents, to take a break from it all, only you're kind of reluctant to head home because of events that happened there when you were a kid. After some lengthy introductory scenes - which I didn"t have an issue with, though I did keep trying to change the outcome by attempting all sorts of random things, alas to no avail - the game begins with you waking the morning after your arrival to discover that your parents have mysteriously disappeared, there are signs of a struggle in their bedroom (which you apparently slept through) and there's a telephone ringing somewhere in the house. You set off to find what has happened to your parents and

Some fairly easy puzzles follow. I'm usually useless at puzzle solving, but I managed all the ones here with flying colours*. The ending was sort of the one I'd been expecting (hint: you're definitely not playing a good guy here, though you certainly had good reason for doing what you did), but I kept expecting the strange man I had seen at the train station to show up again. I'd assume he was crucial to the plot in some way and when the game ended without him putting in another appearance, it seemed a little odd. But perhaps he was just scenery.

Although in all fairness, I only succeeded in retrieving the key from its hiding place after randomly trying something in a different location. I didn"t 'figure' out the puzzle so much as stumble upon the solution through sheer luck. But, hey, I beat the puzzle so I'm still claiming credit for it.

"Back Home" doesn"t really break new ground but it was a nice, bite-sized game and well worth checking out if you have half an hour to spare.

Rated 3/5

A nice creepy little game

It's hard to write a proper review of this game without giving away key points in the plot which will likely ruin the game for anyone interested in playing it, or turning the review into one of those nasty spoiler-tagged things that I'm so against.

But briefly you're a man called Tom who suffers from a number of stress-related issues. At the request/order of your boss, you return home to visit your parents, to take a break from it all, only you're kind of reluctant to head home because of events that happened there when you were a kid. After some lengthy introductory scenes - which I didn"t have an issue with, though I did keep trying to change the outcome by attempting all sorts of random things, alas to no avail - the game begins with you waking the morning after your arrival to discover that your parents have mysteriously disappeared, there are signs of a struggle in their bedroom (which you apparently slept through) and there's a telephone ringing somewhere in the house. You set off to find what has happened to your parents and

Some fairly easy puzzles follow. I'm usually useless at puzzle solving, but I managed all the ones here with flying colours*. The ending was sort of the one I'd been expecting (hint: you're definitely not playing a good guy here, though you certainly had good reason for doing what you did), but I kept expecting the strange man I had seen at the train station to show up again. I'd assume he was crucial to the plot in some way and when the game ended without him putting in another appearance, it seemed a little odd. But perhaps he was just scenery.

Although in all fairness, I only succeeded in retrieving the key from its hiding place after randomly trying something in a different location. I didn"t 'figure' out the puzzle so much as stumble upon the solution through sheer luck. But, hey, I beat the puzzle so I'm still claiming credit for it.

"Back Home" doesn"t really break new ground but it was a nice, bite-sized game and well worth checking out if you have half an hour to spare.

Rated 3/5

Cloak of Darkness is the de facto standard short game used for comparing how game code looks in different IF languages. I've therefore created a page showing an adv3Lite version of Cloak of Darkness, in case anyone's interested. It's very closely bases on Steve Breslin's TADS 3 version (you'll have to scroll down the page to see it below the TADS 2 version), so you can easily compare the two.

Our latest free app is for iPad is now available – an illustrated interactive children’s book called Filbert and the Broccoli Escape, by Erik Fetler.

Filbert, the world’s laziest boy, always looks for ways to get out of doing what he is supposed to do, like cleaning his room, taking out the trash, or in this case, eating his broccoli!

When Filbert comes to the dinner table and sees his least favorite vegetable sitting on his plate, he is desperate to get rid of it any way he can.

Help Filbert find a way to take care of this vegetable dilemma in this interactive adventure!

Erik wrote and illustrated the original book, which you can read online at the author’s website (or order the printed version). He says:

I’d just recently finished putting together Filbert and the Broccoli Escape book and wanted to do some kind of audio slideshow, or a “Choose Your Own Adventure” version. Somehow that morphed into making it an interactive adventure. Originally I was going to just string the pages of the book together, but I liked the idea of letting the player use a little more of his or her imagination.

The game was written using Quest’s text adventure mode, but I have stripped back the UI so the game is played entirely via hyperlinks, and it looks more like a gamebook. There are no puzzles as such – the interactivity is fairly light, so it’s hopefully a nice and easy bedtime read.

If you have young children and an iPad, please download it and let us know what you think!

It would be really helpful to get your feedback of reading this interactive story – there are more books in the “Filbert” series, so any comments will really help with making the sequels as good as they can be.

The latest version of adv3Lite is now available from Dropbox. The change log may be viewed on line here. In addition to a number of (mostly minor) bug fixes and feature tweaks, the new version features:

1. Significant enhancements to the message system (and in particular the conjugation of regular verbs in message parameter substitutions).
   
   
2. Additions to the documentation in the form of (a) an index to the Library Manual, (b) the inclusion of the Library Reference Manual (similar to that which comes with adv3) as standard and (c) the addition of a Messages index to the Library Reference Manual (to enable users to look up all the messages defined with DMsg() and BMsg() macros in the library).
   
   
3. The ability to create a new Adv3Lite project directly from Workbench's New Project wizard. Note that this feature requires the latest version of TADS 3, TADS 3.1.3, which has just become available at tads.org.
   

— Eric Eve

Kerkerkruip 8 has been released. If you don’t know Kerkerkruip, it was recently cited as one of the most important representatives of the roguelike genre of video games This latest release brings new content, including five new rooms, new items, a new monster, new combat actions, and the addition of “blood magic” to Kerkerkruip’s dungeon.

Kerkerkruip 8 also marks the release of the new graphic/animation content that I’ve been working to bring to the game using Glimmr. Here’s a quick summary of the Glimmr stuff that’s now in Kerkerkruip!

 1. Minimovies

Before the animated titles appear, a silent animated narrative plays out. There are currently three of these, each 4 to 5 seconds long, and more will likely be added over time. Composed of typographic symbols, they depict–with a touch of humor–situations that can occur in Kerkerkruip, each one prefaced by the typed command that brings it about. Here is a less than successful > ATTACK against the swarm of daggers.

 2. Main title

Following the mini-movie, the game’s main title screen appears, highlighting a typographically constructed dagger (see other examples of such daggers here). The main menu options appear as well, and for players who have not yet defeated any of Kerkerkruip’s monsters, the title is followed by a blinking instruction explaining how to begin a game.

3. Rogues Gallery

A player who has defeated some of the denizens of Kerkerkruip, on the other hand, can wait at the main menu for the Rogues Gallery to appear. This is a succession of trading-card like depictions of each monster defeated, along with stats that summarize the player’s history with that enemy (for more on the cards, see my previous posts).

Unfortunately, not all of the planned monster cards are completed. Placeholder cards mark the missing spots for now:

4. Map

Kerkerkruip is a game in which your strategy depends on navigating the spatial arrangement of your enemies. Who to attack when–and in what order–to be best prepared to take on the evil wizard Malygris? Kerkerkruip 8 adds an isometric map that I find very helpful in planning my path to victory.

5. Information panels

The final feature I want to highlight doesn’t involve Glimmr or graphics per se. However, it does provide a visual organization of Kerkerkruip’s copious amounts of information. From your inventory of weapons and items to your character’s vital statistics, attributes & situational combat bonuses, to the powers you have absorbed from your enemies, the new information panels put it all at your fingertips. I’ve found that having combat information at the ready, in particular, has really changed the way I play the game.

 

I hope that you’ll try the new Kerkerkruip. You can download it here.

UC Santa Cruz recently held their second Inventing the Future of Games (IFOG) conference at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.  While the conference definitely has a lot of thoughtful discussion, it's not overly academic, in that it draws speakers and participants from the commercial gaming industry.  This is of course, much smaller than the Game Developer Conference (GDC), but still drew top talent.  The nice part about a smaller conference like this is you can actually ask questions of the speakers and get to meet them on the breaks.

Michael Mateas from UCSC Center for Games & Playable Media gave a great opening presentation, getting to the heart of the tensions between game playing and storytelling and encouraging developers to get over the debate and just focus on good games.  Mateas called out several interesting game development platforms and tools as well as some interesting creative games.  He also emphasized that there isn't one unified theory of gaming -- instead there are lots of interesting & divergent approaches that can be taken. 

Warren Spector, one of the longest tenured game designers, gave a wonderful keynote that compared gaming to other media including movies, television, comics and urged designers not to borrow too heavily from other media.  While there are plenty of parallels, gaming is truly unique and it continues to evolve as its own distinct form.  While I'm inclined to agree that the world might not need another First-Person Shooter Wolfenstein game, I still appreciate the thrill of a good Sci-Fi Nazi shooting game.  Spector was critical of our current level of artificial intelligence in games and suggested that designers go beyond traditional combat AI to focus on better interaction.   

The conference also had a demo area that featured interesting new tools and interactive fiction projects, including Aaron Reed and his latest storytelling project, 18 Cadence.  I would have liked to see short "lightning" presentations on some of these projects, or even updates or challenges from a broader range of indie or student game designers. But it was still nice to have the demo area.

Several panel sessions were held that enabled designers to get up and talk for 10-15 minutes on loosely interrelated topics.  I thought all of these panels were good, but the format seemed a bit odd to me -- they weren't quite full-blown presentations but there also wasn't much interaction between the panelists.  Perhaps shorter up front presentations would have enabled more discussion between the panelists and the audience. But I can appreciate the fact that the organizers were able to pack in quite a lot high quality content using this format.  My head was practically spinning by the end of the day.

I've posted some additional photos on PicasaWeb below from several of the presentations and panels.  

One of the highlights of the conference was an afternoon panel session called "Tools & Authorship for Next Generation Narratives."  This featured three distinct presentations from Asa Kalama of Disney, independent game designer Stéphane Bura and Emily Short from Linden Labs.  Emily Short's contributions in the area of Interactive Fiction are almost legendary.  Not only did she help on the development and documentation of Inform7 but she is also renowned for the groundbreaking games she has created. She spoke about her work on Versu, a new interactive storytelling platform that she has developed at Linden Labs.  I've posted a video (slightly edited for YouTube) which provides more detail.

Ultima collectors are a hardy and dedicated lot, not only authoring web sites but even huge books on their passion. An oddity called Ultima: Escape from Mt. Drash has for years been rivaled only by the original hand-assembled Akalabeth as the Holy Grail for these folks. Drash, a game for of all platforms the lowly Commodore VIC-20, trickled out of Sierra in the spring of 1983, achieved miniscule distribution and miniscule sales, then vanished from history. For some years there was reason to wonder whether it had actually been released at all, rather than only being something that came and went from a single advertisement (as shown above, from the July 1983 Compute!) and a few product catalogs. Only in 2000 was a working copy of the game finally found, “at the bottom of a cliff in British Columbia” amidst a pile of other old, unsold software apparently dumped long before by a retailer or distributor.

As befits a Holy Grail, a legend sprung up around Drash that consisted of a few known facts woven together within a tapestry of conjecture. Drash, the story went, was an attempt by Sierra to make a quick buck off the Ultima name by releasing a slapdash game to the VIC-20 market, terra incognita to Richard Garriott, without his knowledge or consent. The implication is that someone at Sierra eventually got nervous about this dubious scheme and buried the game — in some versions of the story literally, by dumping remaining copies into a landfill in a tale that echoes the (itself likely exaggerated) tale of Atari’s dumping of millions of E.T. cartridges into a New Mexico landfill that same year. It’s a glib story which seems to explain much about the game’s obscurity while also investing it with a nice dollop of the nefarious, a plus for collectors of an industry that, let’s face it, isn’t exactly rife with the sort of dark secrets and forbidden fruits that their pals who collect, say, vintage records get to enjoy. Yet it’s also a story that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, to an extent that it’s hard to understand how so many bright people could buy into it. There are two serious objections, either of which would make it highly improbable. Together they make it impossible to believe.

We should first of all take note of the author of Drash: Keith Zabalaoui. Zabalaoui was a member of what I somewhat facetiously called Garriot’s “entourage” in my previous post, one of his old high-school running buddies who hung around with him in Houston and helped from time to time with his various projects. It could only have been through Garriott that Zabalaoui came into contact with Sierra in the first place. So, the legend requires us to believe that Zabalaoui met the folks at Sierra through Garriott and sold them a game, then agreed with them to secretly release it as an illegitimate knockoff of his friend’s work. Finally, after publishing the game and receiving at least some sort of royalties he continued to keep the whole affair a secret from his buddy. That’s behavior that borders on the sociopathic. There are also some serious plotting problems to this little narrative; didn’t Richard ever say, “Hey, Keith, whatever happened to that game you were working on for Sierra?”

And then let’s look at this from the other side, from the viewpoint of Sierra. Yes, the company may have started with advertising pasted together from newspaper clippings around Ken and Roberta Williams’s kitchen table, but those days were already long gone by early 1983. Sierra was by then negotiating licensing deals with Big Media players like The Jim Henson Company and accepting millions from venture capitalists who saw them as major players in a major emerging industry. Can we really believe that such a company, which by now employed a substantial legal team, would risk their reputation by sticking someone else’s trademarked name on a game in the hopes of making a quick few (tens of?) thousands of dollars and maybe sticking it somehow to Garriott, the man who had recently jilted them? As John Williams says, “Sierra On-Line management was young but not stupid.” Ken Williams had been closely involved in the complications of securing for Garriott and Sierra legal right to the Ultima name from the now defunct California Pacific after Garriott had first agreed to sign with Sierra. To imagine that he would then just blatantly steal the trademark is… well, absurd is perhaps being kind. To imagine that the legal team the venture capitalists insisted be in place would even allow him to do so is to fail to understand how such relationships work.

So, the true story is, as these things so often go, more prosaic than the legend. Zabalaoui did visit Sierra in Garriott’s company, where he was inspired to start work on a simple maze-running action game. When he eventually showed the finished product to them, they were doubtful. It wasn’t a terrible game, but it wasn’t a great one either. And by early 1983 the huge but breathtakingly short-lived VIC-20 software market had already passed its peak and started on a downward slope that would soon turn into a veritable cliff as the ever-plunging price of the vastly more capable Commodore 64 made the older machine more and more irrelevant. And Zabalaoui’s game required more than just a VIC-20: one also needed to have the 8 K memory expansion (to boost the machine’s RAM from just 5.5 K to 13.5 K) and a cassette drive, since it was too large to be installed onto a cartridge. Most of the kids who owned VIC-20s as learning toys or game machines didn’t equip them with such luxuries. Sierra hemmed and hawed, and then made a suggestion: if they could maybe market it as an Ultima that might help… Garriott was perhaps not thrilled with Sierra at this point in time, but he was always good to his friends. When Zabalaoui came to him with Sierra’s request, Garriott agreed, likely more as a personal favor to someone who had helped him out with his own projects quite a bit in the past than anything else. Today, of course, when the industry is so much more mature and so much more sensitive to the power of branding, one in Garriott’s position would never risk tarnishing his trademark in such a way. But in 1983 both Garriott and his industry were still very young.

Even with the Ultima name, Sierra was obviously skeptical about the game’s chances, particularly as the VIC-20 software market continued to decline even as packaging was prepared and the game was sent off for duplication. They manufactured the minimum quantity required by their contract with Zabalaoui, on the order of a few thousand units, placed that one halfhearted advertisement, and watched with disinterest as the game foundered commercially. The vast majority of the production run was likely, like that first copy that was rediscovered in 2000, written off and trashed, whether by Sierra themselves or their various distributors. It’s an example of a phenomenon you see from time to time in business, where a project about which no one (with the possible exception in this case of Zabalaoui) feels terribly enthusiastic just sort of drifts to completion through inertia and the lack of anyone stepping up to kill it with a definitive “no.” In this case that led to Escape from Mt. Drash passing into history as the first of the spin-off Ultimas, games that are not part of the main sequence but nevertheless use the name. Future entries in that category would actually be some of the most impressive to bear the Ultima name; Mt. Drash, however, should most definitely not be included in that group.

I’m not the first one to reveal the true story of Escape from Mt. Drash. John Williams has occasionally tried to correct the record in the past via comments to other blog posts and the like that repeated the legend. Recently it has begun to seem that word is finally getting out. Blogger Pix had the opportunity to interact with Garriott personally last year, and asked him directly about the Mt. Drash legend. Garriott at last confirmed to him that he had known about the game and duly authorized its release.

So why should I take up the cause now? Well, there are still plenty of online sources that repeat the legend. I’d thus like to add this blog’s weight — to whatever extent it has weight — to the true story. This I partly do as a favor to John Williams, who has gifted me (and you) with so many memories and insights on the early days of Sierra and the industry as a whole. John is, understandably enough, annoyed at the persistence of this falsehood, as it directly impinges the honor of Sierra and by extension himself.

More generally — and yes, I know I rant about this more than I should — this can serve as a lesson to people who consider themselves historians in this field to be a bit more rigorous, and not to substitute easy assumptions for research. I won’t get into the original source of the false legend here, only say that I’m disappointed that it was repeated for so long without ever being seriously questioned. When you are thinking of saying something that directly accuses people of unethical dealings you really need to be sure of your facts and careful with your words. Frankly, that’s a lesson that Richard Garriott himself could learn; despite my admiration for his vision and persistence as a gaming pioneer, I find his glib dismissal of the folks at California Pacific and Sierra who launched his career as dishonest, “stupid bozoos,” and “heavy drug users” to be unconscionable. It’s a lesson his fans should also take to heart.

If you do have one of those websites that repeats the legend of Escape from Mt. Drash… hey, it happens. I’ve made a hash of things myself once or twice in public. But maybe think about taking a moment to make a correction? I’m sure that at the very least John Williams and the others who built Sierra would appreciate it.

Recently, more and more teachers are starting to use Quest and text adventure games with their classes. Some teachers have used text-based games to inspire children to read; others use it as an introduction to programming; others get their students to create games around a set historical theme.

The main textadventures.co.uk site isn’t particularly optimised for educational groups, however. Some teachers find it a pain to set up user accounts for a whole class full of students, and others would prefer to restrict their classes to playing a pre-set list of games instead of giving their pupils unrestricted access to everything available on the site.

For these reasons, I’m setting up a new site called ActiveLit, which is designed for schools, colleges and youth groups who want to play, create and share text adventure games.

ActiveLit is currently being built, and I’m aiming to focus the first stage of development on the features which will be most useful to the most people. So, if you are a teacher, or run a group getting children or students to play or create text adventures, please express your interest by filling in the form at activelit.com. You’re not committing to anything at all yet, and I’m not going to spam you – you’ll genuinely help me build the product that best suits you, and you’ll get to be one of the first users.

My current plans for ActiveLit are that it will enable you to…

1. Create your own private area of the website:
   • Curate a list of games which your group is allowed access to.
   • Allow your group to share games they’ve created only among other group members.
   • Direct your group to a dedicated URL – using activelit.com/your-group-name or via your own subdomain. (This would allow your network to block the main textadventures.co.uk domain, if required)
   • Control who can access your private area by generating accounts automatically.
2. Get activity reports:
   • Access game transcripts, so you can see who played which games, for how long and how well they did.
   • Export student activity data to other platforms such as Moodle.
3. Help your students out:
   • Link to worksheets and assignments directly from the website.
   • Toggle editor functionality on and off – give your students a simplified editor view that is tailored to the games you want them to make.
   • Game templates – give your students the bare bones of a game which they can flesh out, instead of starting them all on a blank slate.

If you’re using the Windows desktop version of Quest, there will also be a way to configure it to take its game feed from your private area instead of the main website.

If there’s anything else that would help you with running your text adventure group, please let me know via the comments section on the ActiveLit sign-up form.

Wondering how to use text adventures and Quest in the classroom? Take a look at the Education page – and if you’re using Quest with your group, please let me know and I’ll add it to the examples.

Any questions or anything else I can do to help, please email me alex@textadventures.co.uk.

What miracle is this? This giant tree.
It stands ten thousand feet high
But doesn’t reach the ground. Still it stands.
Its roots must hold the sky.

O

HYMEN! O hymenee!
Why do you tantalize me thus?
O why sting me for a swift moment only?
Why can you not continue? O why do you now cease?
Is it because, if you continued beyond the swift moment, you would soon certainly kill me?

[This "House of Leaves of Grass" is a 24K poetry generator that produces about 100 trillion stanzas. Vast, it contains multitudes; it is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. By Mark Sample, based on "Sea and Spar Between."]

When we last checked in with Richard Garriott, he had just released Ultima II under the imprint of Sierra Online. Despite all of the pain and tension of its extended development process and the manifold design flaws that resulted from that, Ultima II proved to be a hit, selling over 50,000 copies within the first year or so and eventually approaching sales of 100,000. Contemporary reviews were uniformly stellar. In contrast to Ultima II‘s modern reputation as the black sheep of the Ultima family, reviewers of the era seemed so entranced by the scope and vision of the game, so much grander than anything else out there, that they were willing to overlook all of the useless spinning gears that didn’t connect with anything else and the many things that just didn’t make sense even by the generous standards of CRPG storytelling. Only one review that I’ve seen takes note of Ultima II‘s strangely disconnected design elements at all, James A. McPherson’s piece for Computer Gaming World. Even he bends over backwards to put the best possible interpretation on it:

My only thought as I finished the game was that very little of this enormous work was really being utilized as being required to finish the game. It was almost as if this was only a small initial quest to give you the lay of the land and that additional scenarios would be released, each one using more of the game until the “Ultimate” quest was finished.

No “additional scenarios” would have a chance to appear even if Garriott or someone at Sierra had read this review and thought it a good idea. As McPherson wrote those words Garriott’s relationship with Sierra was falling to pieces.

As I described in my earlier article, the relationship had been full of tension for months before the release of Ultima II. Big, blustery Ken Williams of Sierra took pretty good care of his people and was beloved by most of them for it, but he never let it be forgot that he considered them his people; he always made it clear who was ultimately in charge. Richard Garriott, younger and quieter than Ken though he may have been, had just as strong a will. He just wasn’t going to be the junior partner in anything. In fact, he even had a small entourage of his own, some of his old running buddies from high school who assisted with his projects in various ways. Most prominent amongst this group were Ken Arnold, Keith Zabalaoui, and Chuck Bueche (immortalized as “Chuckles the Jester” in many an Ultima), the latter two of whom also spent time in Oakhurst at the Sierra offices. Throw in a serious culture clash between the free-spirited California lifestyle of Sierra and the conservatism of Garriott’s suburban Texas upbringing and a final blow-up was probably inevitable. It came just weeks after Ultima II‘s release.

Through much of 1982 Sierra was essentially a two-platform shop. Most of their games were developed on the Apple II, and then those that were successful would be ported to the Atari 8-bit line. (A minority, such as the works of Atari stalwart John Harris, went in the opposite direction.) Accordingly, immediately upon signing Garriott Sierra had not only re-released Ultima I, whose rights they recovered from the now defunct California Pacific as part of the deal, but also funded a port of that game to the Atari machines. Ultima II‘s Atari port was done by prior agreement by Chuck Bueche for a piece of Garriott’s generous royalties. By this time, however, it was becoming clear that Sierra would need to support more than just these two platforms if they wished to remain a major player in the exploding software industry. They therefore funded an additional port of Ultima II, without Garriott’s direct oversight, to the IBM PC. (Another unsupervised port, to the Commodore 64, would follow later in 1983.) The contract he had signed not only allowed Sierra to choose where and when to port Ultima II, but also allowed them to pay Garriott a considerably lower royalty for ports with which he and his entourage were not involved. Effectively he would be paid as the designer only, not as the designer and the programmer. Garriott, who had apparently overlooked this aspect of the contract, felt like he was being swindled even though Sierra remained well within the letter of the law. You can choose to see all of this as you like, as Ken Williams slyly manipulating contract law to put one over on his naive young signee or as a simple failure of due diligence on Garriott’s part.

Regardless, Garriott had consciously or subconsciously been looking for a reason to split with Sierra for some time. Now he had a suitable grievance. Luckily, he had been wise enough to retain the right to the Ultima name. Even Ultima I and II were given exclusively to Sierra only for a few years before reverting back to their creator. There was thus nothing stopping him from continuing the Ultima series elsewhere.

But where? He certainly had no shortage of suitors, among them Trip Hawkins, who pitched hard for Garriott to become one of his electronic artists. Still, Richard wasn’t sure that he wanted to get in bed with yet another publisher at all. He talked it over with his business adviser, his older brother Robert, who in the best over-educated tradition of the Garriott family was just finishing his second Master’s degree at MIT with the thesis “Cross Elasticity Demand for Computer Games.” Robert proposed that they start their own publisher, with him managing the business side and Richard and his buddy Chuck Bueche the technical and creative. And so Origin Systems was born. It would be a little while before they came up with their brilliant slogan — “We Create Worlds” — but just the company name itself was pretty great. It probably owed something to the Origins Games Fair, one of the two most prominent North American conventions for tabletop gamers of all types. Richard, who had played Dungeons and Dragons obsessively in high school and at university in Austin had become an intimate of Steve Jackson Games, had deep roots in that culture. Richard, Robert, their father Owen, and Chuck Bueche all put up money — with the lion’s share naturally coming from the relatively flush Richard — to become the founders of a new games publisher.

Everything about the young (literally; look at their picture above!) Origin Systems was bizarre, even by startup standards. They set up shop in Richard’s personal playhouse, a space above the Garriott family’s three-car garage which had once served as an art studio for his mother but had been commandeered by Richard and his friends years before for their D&D games. It was a big room scattered with desks, chairs, and even cots. Here Richard and his friends set up their various computers. A little cubbyhole at one end served as Robert’s business office. Robert himself was still officially living in Massachusetts with his wife, who had quite a career of her own going as a manager at Bell Labs and thus couldn’t move. Robert, however, was a pilot with a little Cessna at his disposal. He spent three weeks of each month in Houston, then flew back to spend the last with his wife in Massachusetts.

Together Chuck Bueche and Richard worked feverishly on the games that would become Origin Systems’s first two products. Chuck’s was an action game called Caverns of Callisto; Richard’s was of course the big one upon which they were all depending to get Origin properly off the ground, Ultima III.

Given its flagship status, Garriott felt compelled to try to remedy some of the shortcomings of his earlier games. In particular, he was obviously eying the Wizardry series; for all of the Ultima series’s stellar reviews and sales, the first two Wizardry games had garnered even better and more of both. Much of what’s new in Ultima III is there in the name of addressing his series’s real or perceived failings in comparison with Wizardry. Thus he replaced the single adventurer of the early games with a full party which the player must manage; added a new strategic combat screen to make fights more interesting; added a full magic system with 32 separate spells to cast to replace the simplistic system (which the player could easily and safely ignore entirely) of his previous games; added many new class and race options from which to build characters; made some effort to bring some Wizardry-style rigorousness to the loosy-goosy rules of play that marked his earlier games.

Notably, however, Ultima III is also the first Garriott design that doesn’t simply try to pile on more stuff than the game before. Whether because he knew that, what with his family and friends all counting on him, this game needed to be both good and finished quickly or just because he was maturing as a designer, with Ultima III he for the first time showed an ability to edit. Garriott was never going to be a minimalist, but Ultima III is nevertheless only some 60% of the geographical size of Ultima II, the only example of the series shrinking between installments prior to everything going off the rails many years later with Ultima VIII. Also gone entirely is the weird sub-game of space travel, as well as — for the most part — the painful stabs at humor. Yet it’s safe to say that Ultima III will take the average player much longer to finish, because instead of leaving huge swathes of game — entire planets! — dangling uselessly in the wind Garriott this time wove everything together with an intricate quest structure that gives a reason to explore all those dungeons. In fact, there’s a reason to visit every significant area in the game.

Viewed from the vantage point of today, Ultima III is perched on a slightly uncomfortable border, right between the simple early Ultimas that predate it and the deeper, richer works that make up the heart of Ultima‘s (and Richard Garriott’s) legacy today. I don’t know if any other game in the series sparks as much diversity of opinion. To some it’s just a long, boring grind, while a small but notable minority actually name it as their favorite in the entire series. Personally, I can appreciate its advances but take issue with many aspects of its design, which strike me as cruel and rather exhausting. My favorite of the early Ultimas, the one that strikes me as most playable today, remains Ultima I. But I’ll talk about Ultima III at much greater length in a future post. For now let’s just note that it gave CRPG players of 1983 exactly what they wanted — a big, convoluted, epic experience that pushed the technology even further than had the previous game — without the bugs and other issues that had plagued Ultima II.

Having dropped out of even a part-time university schedule and now largely living right there in that garage loft, Richard wrote Ultima III quickly, almost inconceivably so given its technical advancements. It was done in about six months, barely one-third the time invested into Ultima II and considerably less time than it would take many a player to finish it. As usual, the game itself was essentially a one-man effort, but as it came together he recruited family and friends to help with numerous ancillary matters. Ken Arnold, his old buddy from the ComputerLand days, wrote and programmed a lovely soundtrack for the game, playable by those who had purchased one of the new Mockingboard sound cards for their Apple II. A huge advance over the bleeps and farts of the previous games, it was the first of three Arnold-composed soundtracks that have become a core part of Ultima nostalgia for a generation of players, especially once ported to the Commodore 64, where they sounded even better on the magnificent SID chip.

But most of the outside effort went into the package. Origin may have literally been a garage startup, but Richard was determined that their products should not look the part. He wanted to outdo Sierra’s efforts for Ultima II; he succeeded handily. Denis Loubet, whom Richard had met back when he did the original cover art for the California Pacific Akalabeth, now drew a striking demon for the Ultima III cover which might not have had anything obviously to do with the contents of the disks but sure looked cool. (Maybe too cool; lots of overzealous Christian parents would take one look and start sending Garriott letters accusing him of Satanism.) Loubet also provided pictures for the manuals, as did Richard’s mother Helen, who drew up another mysterious cloth map complete with arcane runes along the borders; such maps were about to become another of the series’s trademarks. And did you notice I said “manuals”? That wasn’t a typo. Ultima III included three: a main game manual along with two more booklets containing elaborate faux-medieval descriptions and illustrations for each wizard and cleric spell. Said faux-medieval writing is a bit more tolerable this time because Richard, no wordsmith, didn’t write it himself. The spell descriptions were done by Margaret Weigers, a local friend, while Roe R. Adams III, who was quickly parlaying his reputation as the king of adventure-game players into a career in game development (he would soon sign on to design Wizardry IV for Sir-Tech), doused the main manual in copious quantities of suitably purple prose (yet another Ultima trademark).

As July of 1983 faded into August the game was already largely finished and the various hardcopy pieces were beginning to come in from the printers. Showing that he could challenge even Ken Williams in the charisma department when we wanted to, Richard convinced Mary Fenton and Jeff Hillhouse, two Sierra employees he’d met during his time in Oakhurst, to come join Origin. Fenton would become Origin’s first customer-service person; Hillhouse, who had learned how the industry worked at Sierra, would handle logistics and distribution. When he made contact with distributors and announced Ultima III, everyone was astonished when initial orders totaled no less than 10,000 units. Richard and Robert now kicked their long-suffering parents’ vehicles out of their own garage to make room for a big shrink-wrap machine — their biggest capital investment yet — and a workbench of computers to use for disk duplication. By now Origin had rented a tiny office in Houston to serve as the front that they presented to the world, but the real heart of the company remained there in the garage. For several months evenings in front of the television at the Garriott household would be spent folding together lurid demon-painted boxes.

Ultima III began shipping in late August for the Apple II. Versions for the Atari 8-bit line and the Commodore 64 soon followed. Both ports were done by Chuck Beuche, whose role as a creative and technical force with Origin during these early days was almost as significant as Richard’s. The game was a huge hit across all platforms; Ultima III became the first Ultima to top 100,000 units in sales, a mark that all of the following titles would surpass with ease. Indeed, this moment marks the point where Ultima pulled ahead of the Wizardry series once and for all to become simply the premiere CRPG series of its era. Despite the occasional worthy competitor like the Bard’s Tale series, it would not be really, seriously challenged in that position until the arrival of the officially licensed D&D games that SSI would start releasing at the end of the decade. Happily, Ultima and Richard Garriott would prove worthy of their status; the next Ultima in particular would be downright inspiring.

But for now we still have some business for 1983 and Ultima III. I want to take a closer look at the game, which planted the seeds of much that would follow. First, however, we’ll take a little detour to set the record straight about another one of those persistent myths that dog fan histories of Ultima.

(Richard Garriott’s career has of course been very well documented. The two most in-depth histories are The Official Book of Ultima and Dungeons and Dreamers, even if a distinct whiff of hagiography makes both rather insufferable at times. And of course he’s all over contemporary magazines, not to mention the modern Internet. A particular gem of an article for students of this period in his career is in the November/December 1983 Softline. That’s where I found the wonderful picture at the beginning of this article.)

Boon Hill is a successful-but-still-in-progress Kickstarter for a project in which the player/reader explores a graveyard full of epitaphs. It’s an invitation to create your own meaning out of scraps of evidence, conceptually a little reminiscent of 18 Cadence.

Conversations With My Mother is a Twine piece by Merritt Kopas, in which you can click on the text to swap one piece of text for another before proceeding. It’s powerful and very brief to experience, and it does some things with Twine that go beyond typical formal features of choice-based narrative. Worth a look.

Pipe Trouble is one of those pipe-laying puzzle games… except that it’s also about the politics of gas pipelines in Canada. Connect the pipes in the wrong way and you’ll annoy farmers, cause spills, or irritate environmental protesters. And it has text by Jim Munroe.

Well, this time they did. And a Canadian one at that.

The Quiet Year is a story game about one year in the life of a threatened community. The War with the Jackals (not explained) is just over. The Frost Shepherds (also not explained) will turn up in a year, though the inhabitants of the town don’t know that.

In the meantime, there are up to 52 turns (one for each week of the year), and a deck of cards is used as a randomizer to determine what sorts of things might happen during those weeks. Each turn, a player draws the next card, follows instructions from a chart about what that card means for the community, and then takes one of three actions: proposing a communal discussion about a particular issue; discovering something new in or around the community (which means drawing it on the map); or starting a project (also drawn on the map, but set to conclude several turns later). By the time play is over and the last card is drawn, the map is large and complex and bears signs of many events that have happened to the community.

Our story told of a group divided by religious disagreements, threats from outsiders, limited resources (especially iron, which we didn’t have much of until late in the story), and a certain amount of archaeological curiosity.

The Quiet Year is even more aggressively Not About Characters than Microscope. Each player represents some faction or group within the community who wants certain things, but they’re not tied to a specific person or personality and are not even supposed to overtly communicate their faction concept, though there are ways to hint at it implicitly during gameplay. The “discussion” activities are the closest anyone ever comes to roleplaying an actual scene, but these are highly formalized and no individual human is represented there.

In our playthrough, the groups represented were, roughly speaking: superstitious peasants; a faction who wanted to do things the way we did back before the Empire fell (the apocalypse, for us, was something like the fall of the Roman Empire); a theistic religious faction who wanted to interpret everything as the will of a single God; and a ruthlessly unity-focused pragmatic faction who mainly wanted everyone to work together to save their communal skins — or else get out.

The map is a nice focusing feature, which at first reminded me of Microscope’s evolving timeline (and I really like games that leave you with an artifact at the end, as witness San Tilapian Studies). But in Microscope the timeline kind of is the story you’re building, while The Quiet Year’s map represents a story in some ways, but is neither the goal of the exercise nor a full representation of everything that happens.

Another way to put this: Microscope is a world-building game, almost, more than a story game, and the questions that you ask yourself while playing are the sorts of questions you ask while imagining what might happen in the history of an imagined world.

In The Quiet Year, by contrast, you’re not asking yourself map-building questions so much. We did have one or two pedantic conversations about the likely relative positions of water sources and rock types, but the game mechanics aren’t necessarily about thinking geographically and extrapolating from existing map features, and lots of things get drawn or represented on the map that aren’t really map features. Every event has to be recorded on the map somewhere, even the communal discussions, so this makes for lots of symbols, stick-figures, and conceptual representations. This made me wonder a bit: what game would be to a map the way Microscope is to a timeline? I suspect it would involve a lot more “what’s here? okay, why is it there? what was in that location before? what natural resource made it a good idea to put that object there?” and so on.

From there I went on to vague wondering about storygames that built out genealogies, or subway charts, or just about any other sort of systematic representation. When would this stop being storygaming and be something else? What if, instead of a chart, you were creating via game a divination deck, the Tarot of your shared world? Or a language? Storygaming conlangs?

Anyhow. TQY does have one other feature that I associate with Microscope, which is that you can end up with a lot of loose threads and unresolved possibilities. The end of the game comes randomly — the 52 cards are shuffled within suits, so you go through “spring”, all the hearts first, but without knowing whether the next heart will be the 7 or the Ace or what; then the diamonds, clubs, and spades, again with internal randomness. When the King of Spades comes up, wherever that is in the final quarter of the deck, the Frost Shepherds are arriving and the game is over.

This is lovely as a portrayal of cut threads and the arbitrariness of death. It’s maybe a little less lovely for structural cohesion, though.

Anyway, this sounds gripey, which is not a fair portrayal of my experience. I had a very enjoyable time playing TQY; but I also felt that a couple of my particular favorite storygaming experiences were not there. There weren’t any moments of major character change or discovery, because the game isn’t about that: not like you can have in Polaris or Monsterhearts or A Penny For My Thoughts. And it also doesn’t necessarily deliver a strong arc or a lot of causality.

Instead it’s — intentionally — rather chaotic, with lots of projects started and abandoned, lots of ideas pursued and left behind.

Césure

Dark rocky slopes tumble through empty spaces and dim red glow, connected by twisted fragments of catwalks and girders. Gravity seems to work different here, and light. Huge shells rotate slowly in the dim periphery, beyond a lake of black water; and farther still into the dimness, an uneven plane strewn with vector-sketched boulders. Peristaltic gurglings, distant bells, and a deep, resonant droning fill your ears as you explore. In Césure (Orihaus, 2013) exploring this strange shadowed place is all you can do.

Proteus

Exploration has always been a key component of games with simulated spaces, with a lineage reaching from contemporary games like Journey and Minecraft back through Myst, Adventure and even earlier. Given a bounded space (a cave; an island) and a narrative pretext for being there (no matter how flimsy), you explore, often uncovering backstory and overcoming obstacles along the way. But one strand of experimental games of late has been to strip that concept to its bones, zeroing in on the core mechanic of moving through an unfamiliar space and discovering what's there. We might trace this trend most clearly through Dear Esther (Dan Pinchbeck, 2008), which controversially removed the gameplay elements from an island exploration, and then to Proteus (Ed Key and David Kanaga, 2011) which (also controversially) took away most of the story, too. While this concept isn't entirely new---the much-missed IF Art Show had categories for playable portraits and landscapes, with entries like The Fire Tower (Jacqueline Lott, 2004) about simply hiking a trail through wilderness---the thriving world of low-cost artisan games engendered by frequent public competitions such as Ludum Dare, and the easy availability of tools like Unity for building virtual spaces, has helped spur interest in this new type of storyless not-game: the first person explorer, characterized by richly detailed simulations of space that deprive the player of any verb but movement (and, sometimes, a nearly vestigial jump).

March

Many pieces position themselves on the edge of this space without quite letting go entirely. In March (Felix Park, 2012), an experiment in "implying narrative through spaces," the player moves through a series of abstract environments while encountering story text about the evolution of a relationship. The environmental obstacles (difficult jumps, long spiraling pathways, ascents and descents) mirror the ups and downs of the narrator and his girlfriend. Towards the Light (Peter Gardner, 2012) traps you deep in a pitch-black cave, your only source of light (and hope of escape) seven short-lived flares. To find your way out you'll need to replay several times, carefully planning your use of each flare, absorbing enough about the cave's topography to navigate at least some of it in the dark and position yourself carefully for your next brief burst of fleeting light. Exploration is clearly central to both pieces, with a sprinkling of story (in March) or gameplay (in Light) providing motivation for play. Perhaps unsurprisingly, March is longer and less replayable (like many stories), while Light is shorter and requires replay (like many games): as these two pieces reach towards each other across a center with neither game nor story, they exhibit patterns common to the terrain they're threatening to abandon. But this blog is about story in games: what can we say about experiences that supposedly have neither?

Césure, with its brooding, twisted spaces, feels oddly like a narrative game as I play it, perhaps only residually through association with other first-person experiences. It certainly evokes a strong mood, partially through its complex, layered audio, partially through spare, abstract visuals, but critically also through the mechanic of exploration itself. Exploration suggests an atom of narrative: if I'm exploring, I must be an explorer, and if I'm an explorer I'm probably somewhere far from home. That sensation, of being somewhere strange, invites a chorus of other emotions: is this place safe or scary? Is some treasure or breathtaking vista just around the next corner? Will I find something here that made the journey worthwhile? This is primal, even primeval stuff, predating story or even humanity, exploring a different part of the lizard brain than the fight or flight reflex of a shooter or the drawn-out tension and adrenalin spikes of survival horror. It's mystery, sublimed into its purest form.

Lumiere

Perhaps we can't help but narrativize that sensation. In Césure I try to make sense of this space and why I'm in it (the rocky shapes and low gravity imply an outer space setting: is this some sort of asteroid? Who put these catwalks here, and if I'm supposed to walk on them why do they keep twisting into nothingness and folding in on themselves?) Despite the lack of any ludic danger I feel afraid: this place with its red lights, sudden dropoffs, and oppressive darkness is clearly not safe.

Césure provides only the simplest iconography with which to construct an implied story: water, heat, metal, flickering light. Lumiere (2013), by the same author, strips away even these minimal foundations. Drifting slowly in absolute silence through a weightless vista of whirling shapes, black-and-white angles, and distant lights, my reference points have become mere echoes of concrete things, an abstract poem rendered somehow to geometry. The experience is either curiously compelling, or boring, depending on who you ask. Most first person explorers trend the opposite direction. Proteus throws a few bones towards setting and story, its island filled with alien but recognizable flora and fauna, hints of civilization in abandoned towers and statues on distant hills, the rings and lines of standing stones responding to your presence in consistent ways that are vague but interpretable. Farther along this spectrum is something like Stephen Lavelle's overwhelming Slave of God (2012), which presents an at-first entirely disorienting cacophony of swirling lights and sounds that resolves, through exploration, into a recognizable setting and plot.

Slave of God

On the other hand, maybe the first person explorer is better understood not as narrative but as art installation or symphonic interlude: something designed to impart a mood, not tell a story. In Ruins (Tom Betts, 2012) is an "experimental, ambient game examining the procedural construction of space." Each time you play you appear in a different, randomly generated world, but these worlds are all of a piece: islands filled with sprawling, dilapidated towers and stairways, abandoned courtyards, and beacons of light reaching up towards the sky. The piece has hints of both narrative and ludic content (getting to each beacon reveals a snippet of philosophy from Lucretius; finding all of them unlocks access to the generative controls) but these elements do not seem critical to the core experience ("inspired by artistic interpretations of the sublime," says the author) of exploring the abandoned ruins. As I wander the overgrown alleys between these crumbling towers I get a sense of faded grandeur, a wistfulness: I think about the inevitability of collapse, and things left behind. Maybe these spaces don't need stories to fill them: as if plunged into a narrative deprivation tank, my imagination merely flickers through shadows of story to fill an unexpected emptiness. Maybe I should just be here instead.

In Ruins

That's not enough for most gamers, perhaps, or for someone who just wants to find a good story. But there's value in isolating and investigating the essence of an experience. I treasure my visits to these places, and I'll remember some of my expeditions with as much clarity as my real-world explorations. How these projects achieved that result is something a lot of more overdesigned games might want to study up on.

The Kerkerkruip team is very pleased to release version 8 of the interactive fiction roguelike Kerkerkruip! This release brings some major interface changes, including: Introductory movies. A graphical main menu. After you defeat a monster, it will be added to your Rogues Gallery, a collection of trading cards with stats that summarize your history with each enemy. Side panels that allow

Here are some things I want to say from my own perspective about the IF community. I acknowledge starting out that my perspective is one of considerable privilege and good fortune, and that I know my experience is not the same one everyone has. But I think also that what I’ve said may give the wrong impression about what I think is going on, and I would like to balance it a little. Necessarily this is more personal than my usual output, and I do it in a separate thread because I don’t want to frame this as an excuse for things that are wrong. If that’s not input you’re interested in and you mostly hang out here for the reviews, that’s totally cool too.

Note: This article was originally written as part of a discussion about a text that has since been revised and can in its current form be found here. Consequently, I’ve trimmed a portion that no longer makes sense.

First, I do see participation from female and queer authors and from people of color, and not just because I am female myself. I see work by Jenni Polodna, Lea Albaugh, Carolyn VanEseltine, Katherine Morayati, Emily Boegheim, and Deirdra Kiai, among others; I see Meg Jayanth and Yasmeen Khan writing for StoryNexus and Echo Bazaar/Fallen London, and Heather Albano and others for Choice of Games. I see Aaron Reed’s games, where gender and sexuality are often made a matter of player choice. I see Antifascista.

I remember that when I joined the community back in the late 90s, Suzanne Britton, Kathleen Fischer, Eileen Mullin, Papillon and other women were already prominent members of the community and already writing about female sexuality, self-image, and experiences of power, and that Ian Finley was already writing about gay relationships. Several of them reached out to me and made me feel welcome in the community.

Ian and Suzanne wrote two of the reviews I most cherish from all the reviews I’ve ever received, Ian’s because he understood and cared about what Galatea was trying to do, and Suzanne’s because she felt what I wanted to express with Metamorphoses when many others found the story elements distancing and cold. No amount of technical praise, no comp win or score, not even being hired for a job on the strength of your work or being recognized by someone famous you admire, quite compares to the feeling of achieving a human connection through something you made. This is the most precious of all jewels, because it cannot be faked.

I see differences of focus and style between trad IF about these issues and more recent material from the Twine community from Merritt Kopas, Mattie Brice, Porpentine, Cara Ellison, Anna Anthropy and others. I see a greater culture of interpersonal support in the Twine community; I see a rawness and willingness to talk about personal wounds. A lot of those wounds take the form of having not been listened to in the past, sometimes about really essential matters of identity and the right to be taken seriously as a human being. This makes criticism of such work strike that much closer to home for the authors, even when the criticism is intended neutrally or positively by those offering it.

I see that howling dogs got a lot of acclaim in many reviews, described with phrases like “dynamically beautiful”, “clear and strange” (Wade Clarke), “deep and affecting” (Yuna), “I loved both that theme and that uncertainty… In some ways it cut very close to the bone, and I always appreciate that in a story” (Orestes Drunk and Pylades Fasting), “Laughed out loud; frightened the neighbors.” (Jenni Polodna).

I do see that there is abusive email, occurring where it is hard for the rest of us to know about it to counteract or disclaim it, which directly attacks vulnerable people in bullying terms. Such responses should have no place here, and I respect Porpentine’s willingness to call it out. There are also some more public trolls, though the intfiction forum is moderated in a way that makes that contingent less prominent and less powerful than it was in the Usenet days.

I see that there are sometimes some reviews and forum postings written from an instinct of contempt: trivializing the artist because they don’t like the work, assuming that community decisions are taken in bad faith, being needlessly snarky. There are fewer truly broiling reviews than there used to be, but they still happen. Contempt is worse than hurt, worse than anger; contempt makes it easy to dismiss other people, but it also isolates the contemptuous person in bitter solitude and helps to perpetuate indefinitely the attitude that others are unworthy of attention.

I see that there are reviews and tags on IFDB that sometimes mark out games with sexual and especially queer material as pornographic, even when it is not graphic or does not exist for a primarily pornographic purpose. I see that the IF community has a long history of being bad at navigating the challenges associated with content that might need trigger warnings or not-for-children warnings. Attempts to curate sometimes get tangled up and exclusionary.

I see people in a position of institutional power — those who moderate the intfiction board, run the XYZZY awards, and set the rules for the IF comp — changing the way they do things in order to respond to input about accessibility. I see the rules for XYZZY eligibility being made clearer and more open, so that people who think they should be eligible can opt themselves in, rather than hoping to be noticed. I see Emily Boegheim reaching out on Twitter to try to help those who are having trouble with the intfiction forum or feeling marginalized there. I see Sam Ashwell inviting people in the larger indie community as XYZZY reviewers. I see an increasing amount of coverage, on Planet-IF and the intfiction forum, for material that might formerly not have been considered IF. I see things like the online Quest developer and Playfic offering a new more more accessible route to creation and sharing of classic parser IF, because they expect and require the absolute minimum of platform resources or expenditure. I see lots of people doing lots of hard work, on languages and interpreters and webpages and blog back-ends, often for relatively little acknowledgement.

I see people making live meetup groups where there used to be none, and people having dinner together at conferences, and people flying to be together because they want to talk about interactive narrative.

I see the IF community as only one locus of discussion or power. I see Porpentine on freeindiegames and RockPaperShotgun, Kirk Hamilton at Kotaku, Leigh Alexander in various venues, bringing attention to IF not just occasionally but repeatedly and systematically. I see academics and games conference organizers reaching out to the IF community and asking us to speak. I see games companies looking to hire experienced IF writers. I see inkle, Failbetter, and Choice of Games, among others, advancing the cause in the commercial space; I see people doing related projects in transmedia groups and in ebooks. We are being listened to now more than we ever have been before; and the indie, commercial, academic and even publishing worlds are more than ever doing things that are relevant to our interests.

I see the value of our past. At GDC I heard more than one talk that presented as new information observations about choice, consequence, narrative, and puzzle structure that have been well-discussed here for nearly two decades. There is a great deal of experience and craft knowledge about IF that deserves to be carried forward from this community, not lost, even if the community itself is changed beyond recognition. I see that we’re having a bit of a crisis about who and what we are, and that there are people who don’t understand where parser games will be supported and appreciated, if “IF” now primarily refers to CYOA, hypertext, and other unparsed interactive text. There are others who see the whole insistence on the parser as inherently and pointlessly elitist. For myself, I am eager to see growth and attention in all of these areas and do not think it needs to be a zero-sum game.

I see that there’s awareness about technical accessibility issues — are we supporting screenreaders? providing tools for inexpensive platforms as well as costly ones? — but that there isn’t always enough available manpower or skill to address those problems, and some people continue to have less access than we would like, and sometimes it is hard to parse the difference between “I can’t do that for you” and “I don’t care about you.” Because I don’t want to send the latter message, I sometimes overcommit and attempt more than I can do, which is a dual failure: people do not get what they expect, and I exhaust the resources I need to be of use to anyone.

I see that when I posted my first post on this topic, several people were hurt and angered by what I said, in ways I hadn’t anticipated and perhaps should have foreseen. I strongly suspect that more people were upset than chose to speak with me about it. I am sorry to have caused that hurt. I don’t regret that I said something about this, but I regret that I did it in a way that made it sound as though I blamed people I don’t blame, or that I was angry at people I’m not angry at, or that I don’t credit the contributions of people who work hard on these matters.

I see that though several people were very hurt or very angry about what I said, they wrote measured, polite, and non-inflammatory email to me about the fact and left me the space to explain myself. Those people extended me the benefit of the doubt, at the cost of making themselves more vulnerable, and I am grateful for their discretion and good faith. In each case I feel I have come to know those people better and think more highly of them. Grace comes even out of painful things.

I am challenged by the language of destruction. In my experience, when communities turn ugly, often it is not because something needs to be torn down, but because not enough has yet been built.

What would make us healthier is more. More centers of interest, more voices, more communication, more ways of presenting and talking about IF, more ways for people to find what fits their own background, and to be invited to contribute when there is so far nothing like them at all. More tools for creating more types of experience. We have had a star — often a rather small cold star, very far from any other — where we need a constellation.

I’ve gotten a lot of email about yesterday’s post, and it’s clear that at a minimum I need to say a few things to clarify what I meant by it.

I intended to say:

— when I hear about things like the hate mail people receive, my instinctive reaction is to say something like “we would never do that!” “we are all far too decent!” or “that is not at all my experience!”; but this is not true, and I know it is not true. There are people in our community who would and do write threateningly to women. For me, because I know the community as a whole much better, it is easy to say “this person is a jerk, but not representative”; that is not always so obvious for recipients in a different position, and it gives us the reputation that the community is an unsafe place. I have had enough conversation with Porpentine about this situation to feel certain that it was neither invented nor from some random non-IF person.

— I feel shame at being associated with a community known for such behavior, even if the reasons are not under my direct control and were not caused by me. Shame is not the same as guilt, and deals in perceptions and associations, not in technical justice.

— to the extent that I do harbor any blame towards someone other than the author of said email, that blame is directed first toward myself, not toward “everyone” or “the men of the IF community” or another nebulous group. I do believe there is some collective responsibility for the trends of communities we’re part of, and that sometimes it’s not enough not to endorse something; it’s necessary to explicitly call it out as unacceptable.

I have known for a long time that women in the IF community sometimes get threats or inappropriate romantic advances or inflammatory rants, because I’ve received them and heard from others who received them. But I’ve avoided talking about my own because it seemed self-dramatizing and self-centered; I’ve avoided talking about other people’s because conveyed privately. Porpentine’s public statement about her experience provides a context in which to explicitly say “this happens and is not okay” without betraying anything said to me in confidence about anyone else’s experience.

Here are some things I did not intend to express, but that other people have thought I did:

— that I agree with everything Porpentine wrote in the rest of her article. We’re different people with different experiences and views
— that I think most of the IF community would endorse this email-sending, or that I regard most of the IF community with animosity
— that I have the exact same take on Porpentine’s reviews that she did. I didn’t quote that bit for a reason. Most of nastiest feedback I saw about howling dogs came from sources outside the traditional community; but I’m not sure I’m interpreting the reviews in the same way that Porpentine does, and am not sure I’m drawing the lines of the IF community in the same place she would.

At the same time, I know there are things about IF community reviewing and expressions of community standards that do cause hurt and alienation, and I am fairly routinely told about bad experiences by people who bounced off the community; it seems like every time I go to a game dev conference, I’m guaranteed to have at least one of each of these conversations:

1) I love the concept of IF but hate the parser!
2) IF is the reason I got into writing my own games! (sometimes there are surprise hugs here)
3) I tried to engage with the IF community and I felt totally excluded/everyone was mean/no one was interested in me.

Over time, that adds up. You’d be surprised how many game designers are in the business because of IF or partly inspired by IF. And you might also be surprised by how many people have found themselves on the outside, looking in sadly, for reasons that I at least didn’t ever detect. Porpentine, again, is unlike most of the people I’ve talked to about this in that she’s articulated some reasons and issues aloud.

I am not sure what to do about this aspect of things. I am still learning to hear people when they tell me about this, because my instinct to say “oh no we are incredibly nice really” or “that’s not what happened to me (so therefore I don’t think it really happened to you)” is so powerful. I don’t know what to do, but I am trying at least to listen when people tell me about these encounters with the community and not dismiss them even when they come in forms I find painful.

Porpentine wrote this about her experience of entering howling dogs in the IF Comp:

It was natural for me to approach the circle of interactive fiction. I made games with words in them. But there was nothing for me. I was poor, not middle class. I was queer, not straight. I wrote experimental hypertext, not traditional parser. I was a woman, not a man, and there were many of them, and one of me.

It was intimidating.

Once I did participate, by submitting my Twine game howling dogs, I got harassing emails saying making howling dogs was a “crime”.

It shames and angers me that that was her experience with the IF community. I am sorry for it, but cannot repair it; I’d like to think we’re better than that, but I can see that we aren’t, because the reality is right there.

In April 2012 I marked a year of working on Quest full-time by conducting my own “Annual Review” (Part 1, Part 2). Well, er, 13 months have elapsed since then, which makes it the perfect time to do it all again.

So, what have I been doing for the last 1.0833 years? What’s going well, what’s going badly, and where is all this going?

A quick recap of the last 13 months

Unlike last time, I’ve not actually been working on Quest 100% full-time. For the last 5 months I have, but between May and November 2012 it was relegated to spare time, and the occasional day off, as I took up some contract C# developer work to top up my bank balance.

• May saw the release of Quest 5.2, which featured the new gamebook mode
• In June I presented Quest at the CAS Conference
• In July I ran Quest workshops at Games Britannia
• In September I chatted to Rob Pratten about Quest on the Transmedia Podcast
• In October I presented Quest at the South West Learning Technologies conference, and ran workshops at GameCity
• In December I spoke at AdventureX (the video of this is now online) and released the second Quest-powered smartphone and tablet app, Escape from Byron Bay
• January 2013 saw the release of Quest 5.3, featuring a new map view, support for web fonts, and cover art. I also applied for some funding from Nesta (which we didn’t get)
• In February I presented Quest at the Story Sharing Web Conference and released the third app – Aventura Pirata
• March saw the release of Quest 5.4, bringing enhancements to gamebook mode and the new text processor making it easier to embed links and images within text. There was also the launch of QuestComp and the release of the fourth app, First Times
• In April I launched the revamped website and a game about the elections in Pakistan became a surprise hit

Some numbers

Usage of the site has increased over the last 13 months:

• Games played online averages to 480 per day – up from 400 per day, so a 20% increase
• Game download count averages to 190 per day – up from 140 per day so a 35% increase

So, a nice bit of growth there but nothing explosive. What has truly gone up hugely though is the number of games on the website. 13 months ago, we had 380 games on the website, of which 76 had been added in the previous year. Now we have 980 games on the website in total – so 600 games have been added in the last 13 months. Pro-rated to a 12 month figure of 553, that’s an increase of 628% in game submissions.

Note that in April 2012, I added the ability to publish games privately, which means not all of these 600 games are public. In fact, 297 of these are private (“unlisted”). But even if we only count public games, that’s still a big increase – 303 public games in 13 months, which if pro-rated to a 12 month figure of 280 is still a 268% increase.

The web version of Quest is being well used, with 7300 games started since it was launched in March 2012. 331 of these have been published. This is slightly over half the total number of games published on this site in the time it has been available, so it shows that it’s about equally as popular as the desktop version.

What went well

I’ve really enjoyed running Quest workshops for the first time during the last year. It was amazing to see just how creative children are, and how quickly they can pick things up. Most of the attendees had never heard of text adventure games before my sessions, but within an hour or two they were creating their own games, setting their own puzzles, and sharing their creations with their friends.

It has given me a lot of confidence that Quest is a great way of getting kids into programming, getting them reading and getting them writing. They can get a lot out of it even over one session.

It’s also been really positive to see the site stats going up, loads of new games being created, and the forums getting busier. The new-look website which I launched a couple of weeks ago is doing well – it looks cleaner and more engaging to me, but more importantly the feedback is good and early indications from Google Analytics suggest people are staying longer on the site too.

Finally, adding Gamebook mode to Quest turned out to be a good idea – it has enabled significantly more people to create an interactive story, and is I think largely behind the big rise in submissions over the last year. It feels like this may well be the primary game type in the future, which is why I made significant enhancements to it a couple of months ago for Quest 5.4.

A mixed bag

For smartphone and tablet apps, there has been a mixture of good and bad results. It’s difficult to get publicity, so while there has been some good coverage – it was great to see First Times listed as one of the Guardian’s 30 best Android apps of that week …

If you, like me, pine (a bit) for the heyday of text adventures, you should definitely check out First Times. It’s a horror text adventure that kicks off with you waking up in a morgue, and without giving the game away, it’s genuinely creepy as you try to figure out what happened. If you’re young enough to be baffled by the term “text adventures”, ask your dad (but go north, open the door and hit the elf with the sword first).

… and it was also an IndieGames freeware pick, but after an initial flurry the “long tail” is indeed long, and shallow. On iOS, First Times went from 2,280 downloads in March down to 252 in April – which is actually slightly less than the older app, The Things That Go Bump In The Night, which had 313.

Even so this is much better than the sad tale of Aventura Pirata, a Spanish-language game which only had 27 downloads on iOS in April.

Interestingly, by far the most successful app I have released is the Windows Phone version of The Things That Go Bump In The Night – 1,168 downloads in the last month, and this is 9 months after its release. This is indicative of the decreased competition over on the Windows Phone Store, I think.

Room for improvement

It’s been great to add new translations for Quest into Italian, Portuguese and Romanian – bringing the total number of languages supported to 9. But very few games in these languages have been published yet – which is a huge shame as I know that text adventures would be a great resource for learning foreign languages. Clearly there is more work to be done here, both to make the Quest editor more usable by those who don’t speak English, and to set up the website to handle non-English games better – which may be as simple as adding language tags for easier searching and filtering.

I was excited to hear about the Nesta Digital Makers open call – here was a body offering funding for projects to get young people making things, “to become creators, not just consumers of digital technologies”. To my mind, Quest is absolutely perfect for that. So it was hugely disappointing not to be shortlisted – or even to receive any feedback. It’s understandable given the huge interest Nesta had in the scheme, but it makes me reluctant to pursue this approach for getting Quest to pay for itself, as it takes time to put together these kinds of funding applications.

Instead, selling products and services around Quest sounds far more sustainable and less risky to me. I know that there are schools out there using Quest, and offering services to them is one of my main focuses for the coming months. One of my current “areas for improvement” is simply identifying who these schools are. I can see from my web server log files that there are regularly groups of users from the same IP address using the web-based editor and playing games on the site – it would be great to know who you are, so please get in touch!

What people are saying

That’s what I think, then – what have other people been saying about Quest over the last year-and-a-bit?

Adrian Camm says:

Exploring Interactive Fiction (IF) design systems such as Inform7 and Adrift, I have found Quest to be probably the best for small projects ideally suited to K12 education.

Jon Bridgeman talks about using Quest with Year 7 and 8 students:

IF gets students writing.  A lot.  I can see cogs turning and imaginations sparking.  I get IF stories about zombies, Harry Potter, Area 51, London Zoo, zombies, Haunted Houses, and er..Manchester City…

Students HAVE to write descriptively, as they create a world from nothing and fill it with people, places, creatures and things from their own imaginings. …

It’s programming by stealth… It certainly sparked an interest in programming in a number of students… Try it yourself. Even better, get your kids to try it.

(It’s well worth your time reading his full blog post on getting students into writing interactive fiction)

Some tweets:

My boys loving this text adventure making software: Quest textadventures.co.uk/quest/ Interest-Led intense #unschool—
Stuart Dunstan (@Alternicity) April 18, 2012

Great way for kids to start coding: Build your own text-based adventure @TextAdv textadventures.co.uk/quest/ << LOVE THIS!—
ManchesterGirlGeeks (@mcrgirlgeeks) June 13, 2012

FreewareGenius says:

It’s pretty amazing what can be accomplished so easily now, with programs like Quest. Yes, I am in love with this program, and therefore, I could go on and on about it and how awesome all its features are and the like until I am blue in the face

IndieGames says:

Unlike Twine that can almost exclusively be used for choose-your-own-adventures and Inform 7 whose attempt at a natural language scripting environment can alienate, Quest uses a menu-driven system supported by a very simple scripting language. Truth be said, most basic stuff can be achieved via almost intuitive pointing-and-clicking, meaning you can have a simple first game ready in minutes.

Quest even helped out at a party:

Want to make your own text adventure game like Mr. Geek? You can use Quest, a free online program that makes it super easy!

Anybody got anything negative to say? To me, constructive criticism is more useful than a nice slap on the back. I’ve not actually seen much in the way of “bad press” this year, but one can always rely on forum member davidw for a choice quote. Over on the Adrift forum he writes:

Quest may attract the lion’s share of the IF market right now, but it still doesn’t produce much in the way of good games. “Quality over quantity” after all.

Personally, I am perfectly happy for most of the games on the website not to match up to davidw’s standards. Some poor quality games are, I think, the price to pay for giving people accessible tools with which to build things and express themselves. Many users are young and are trying out writing and programming for the first time – we’ve all got to start somewhere. This site relies on user-submitted reviews to highlight what’s good – and authors value feedback too. So whether you like a game or not, be sure to leave a review!

Being accessible is what allows a game like Go Rich Boy Go to exist in the first place. As the game’s author Jahanzaib Haque explains:

I found Quest – the text adventure creator that enabled me to just go ahead and create what was bubbling inside me. Six feverish days of writing later, my adventure game was born!

The game was been played by thousands of people over just a few days. As Global Voices covered it:

A timely online game and mobile app that packs humorous punches at Pakistan’s young and rich voters, some of whom say they will bravely dodge bombs to cast their vote next week, has been played by thousands of people.

Karachi-based journalist Jahanzaib Haque created the game “It’s election time in Pakistan: Go rich boy go!” ten days ago on April 21, 2013.

The months leading up to the 2013 elections have been rigged with violence, dozens of people have been killed in bombings targeting campaigns, rallies and crowded places. Last month the Pakistani Taliban warned voters and vowed to step up attacks against secular politicians.

Now this is the kind of thing that excites me – give people tools which are easy to use, and see what they come up with. People who would never have created any kind of computer game before now have the ability to do so. This could be the beginning of a very interesting journey.

Not just Quest that’s growing

Over the last year, it seems interactive fiction has started to take its first steps towards the mainstream. We have companies like Inkle releasing apps, and suddenly much talk about Twine. Playfic brought Inform into the browser and new platforms like Versu emerged. Crazy ideas are being tried out – like combining text games with something like Pinterest to create Dio. StoryNexus is powering a game from book publisher Random House which features in-app payments allowing you to do things like “expedite the narrative”. And check out the Choosatron. Stuff is happening here.

I think Quest occupies a unique position among all this. It encompasses both typing-based “old-school” text adventure games with a parser, and a newer style which is emerging based on hyperlinks that is closer to “Choose Your Own Adventure” than “Zork”. Will one style win over the other? Who knows – and I’m not going to be the one to prescribe exactly how people should interact with your game. We’re all still figuring this stuff out.

Perhaps more importantly, Quest is open source. Anybody can get involved in the project, contribute code or translations, or even fork the code if they don’t like where it’s heading – go ahead, build your own interactive fiction platform, even make it closed source and expensive if you want. You are allowed to do this by the licence, and you’ll save yourself a load of work.

The open source-ness also gives you security – Quest is not locked up inside one website, ready to disappear when a company runs out of money or their staff get acqui-hired. Even if textadventures.co.uk disappears or I spontaneously combust, the source code for Quest is available to be run somewhere else, and the games are all downloadable.

Finally, even though Quest is free, it is actively supported and maintained, and it is continuing to grow and explore new directions. Need help, or got a mad idea for a project where something like Quest might be useful? Get in touch – alex@textadventures.co.uk or @alexwarren.

Where now?

I’m still funding Quest almost entirely out of my own pocket, and I have spent most of the last couple of years working on it, in preference to working on things that would actually earn me some money. I’m far happier alternating between Quest and contract developer work - and until I can make Quest pay for itself it’s the way things have to be, of course. But I would like to bring the two together, and work on projects where Quest forms a part. So do get in touch if you think there’s something we can work on together.

Another way I plan to fund Quest is by selling additional services, and right now I’m working on some extra functionality to help schools and groups using Quest – take a look at ActiveLit for more details, and expect to hear more about that soon.

My other project for the next few months is to finally build my own game. Yes, it’s been 15 years since I started working on Quest, so it’s probably about time. Although I’ve been collecting various thoughts about storytelling on this blog over the last year (see here, here and here), I’ve come to the realisation that it’s probably better to stop talking hypothetically about the kind of stuff you could do in Quest – I should show some of my ideas in an actual game instead.

I am especially looking forward to davidw’s review of it.

So yes. Textfyre could be seen as trying to push a particular solution onto a non-existent or poorly defined problem. I can admit that I may have missed an important part of this process, especially if I plan to approach schools for money. The part that I believe has been missed is the education side and the business development side.

So I’m going back to square one and starting with:

What is the problem I am trying to solve? Well I do know this and it’s more or less that overall, K-12 schools are performing poorly, we have poor graduation rates, poor literacy rates, and highly complex classroom learning variances.

The primary problem that I believe Textfyre and technology in general can solve is the lesson-plan variance problem. There is research, especially in urban school districts, that show any given classroom requires varied lesson plans for the makeup of the students. There is also research that the very best teachers can handle at most three different lesson plans. Some classrooms require five or more. Clearly there is no way to make teachers more effective if the best they can do is lower than the average requirement. Technology can solve this problem by offering blended learning or ILP’s (Individual Learning Plans). In fact, there is a very strong effort by school districts around the country to procure technical solutions that promote ILP’s.

Within the ILP structure there is a need for immediate feedback to the student, to the teacher, and to the parents. There’s a need for tracking progress towards college access and a need to measure and challenge students to meet and exceed their grade-level requirements. There’s also a need to develop cognitive skills, problem-solving, collaboration, and more.

Many of these requirements, along with the new Common Core Standards, are the root dynamics in pushing a service through the IF medium.

But we need to go back to the beginning and cite all of the existing research for the basis of the IF medium in classrooms and founding a new ILP service.

We also need to build relationships with a number of schools, teachers, administrators, and learning specialists. We have the technology. We need the educators to support and hone the technology properly.

So that’s where I’m going. No more coding or writing. No more meetings. I’m setting all of that aside so I can go back and build personal relationships with people.

If you’re interested in our discussion, let me know. I’m interested in people that can speak strongly about interactivity, gaming, education, lesson plans, assessment, blended learning, and individual learning plans. We have a Yammer account where we’re having these discussions.

A quick note to all Sorcery! players – if you’ve finished already and are thinking of replaying, but are worried about your save game, we want to reassure you: in Part 2, you’ll be able to choose which of your save-games to continue, but you only need one cloud save spell to reference those saves (so there’s less to remember!)

Speaking of finishing, it looks from our database that the game has been completed over two and half thousand times, with several of those play-throughs by people playing two or more times through. We’ve had a great response to the game as well, with 80% of our reviews 5-star on the App Store worldwide.

Most of the lower reviews either look to the price – $5 is high for the App Store – or the length of the game; and it’s true that if you simply aim to survive the story, it can be done pretty fast – missing of the content along the way, of course.

A little more challenge…

If you’re looking for a bit more challenge, here’s a carrot – the current best number of Gold Pieces to finish with that we’ve heard of is 54. Can you do better? Also, have you managed to complete the game without fighting the Manticore at all? Have you saved the Plague Village? Have you found the jewel-studded collar, or the Borrinskin boots? Have you made it through the Black Lotus? And have you heard of Vik?

Reviews!

If you haven’t yet tried Sorcery!, here are some of the reviews to wet your appetite from some major gaming websites:

• Gamezebo
• Kotaku
• Pocket Gamer
• Eurogamer

…and if you have played, please add your own on the App Store!

I'm doing my best to salvage information on the Amstrad games mentioned in the news update from April 23. Some of these are included with this week's update.

Contributors: Gunness, Juan, iamaran, Amby, Alastair, dave

• New Games: Affaire Santa Fe, L', Candy, Castle of the Alchemists, Cliff Diver 2 Purchase Sight Unseen, Cliff Diver: Investigator For Hire, Devilry II, Dungeon of Doom, Forgotten Nightmare II, The: A New Reality, Lost New York, Maraudeur, Le, Microsoft Adventure, Mission Pour Pachebran, Moulinsart, Multi-Dimensional Thief, The, Mystique, Nam, Pépé Béquilles, Passager du Temps, Le, Past Tense, Phenix Noir, Qin, Recherche Miss X Desesperement, Rift, The, Sir Guy Gallant and the Deadly Warning, Tenebres, The Stolen - Landmark?! - of Delos, Things That Go Bump in the Night, The, Urban Cleanup, Waystation, Wizard's Castle, The
• New Solutions: Multi-Dimensional Thief, The
• Updated Hints: Fernando Poo: Part 1
• Updated Maps: Fernando Poo: Part 1
• Updated Solutions: Fernando Poo: Part 1

The Boston IF meetup for May will be Tuesday, May 14, 6:30 pm, MIT room 14N-233.

Quest 5.4.1 is now available. If you’re using the web version, you’re automatically up to date, and if you’re using the desktop version you can download the update.

This version is a bug-fix release – you can see all the closed tickets on CodePlex.

Thanks to Dick Aivia for updating the Dutch language template for this release.

One very minor enhancement in the desktop version – when running a game from the editor, you now have quicker access to the HTML Tools via the toolbar or by pressing F9.

Also one minor breaking change – if you have any exits that run scripts instead of automatically moving the player, you will need to tick a new checkbox on the exit editor “Run a script (instead of moving the player automatically)”.

As always, if you have any questions or problems, please let me know – you can email me alex@textadventures.co.uk or find me on Twitter @alexwarren.

As in years past, the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction is organizing a summer gathering of the IF folks of the world. If you are interested in hanging out and talking about IF, you are invited!

The weekend: September 14-15. The locale: Boston (the MIT area).

Once again, we will be gathering at NoShowConf, a tiny little indie game-dev conference. We will also have a presence at the Boston Festival of Indie Games, which runs the same weekend.

For the details, see this blog post.

Hope to see you there!