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Planet Interactive Fiction

Thursday, 28. March 2024

Choice of Games LLC

Malin Rydén’s book is back in print, so both Fallen Hero games are on sale!

We’re excited to announce that Volume 1 of the graphic novel Breaks, cowritten by Malin Rydén, author of the popular Hosted Games Fallen Hero: Rebirth and Fallen Hero: Retribution, and Emma Vieceli, is back in print and available to buy! To celebrate, we’re putting Malin’s games on sale until April 4th! Breaks Volume 1 Before Heartstopper, there was Breaks…the enemies-to-lov

We’re excited to announce that Volume 1 of the graphic novel Breaks, cowritten by Malin Rydén, author of the popular Hosted Games Fallen Hero: Rebirth and Fallen Hero: Retribution, and Emma Vieceli, is back in print and available to buy! To celebrate, we’re putting Malin’s games on sale until April 4th!

Breaks Volume 1

Before Heartstopper, there was Breaks…the enemies-to-lovers queer comic book sensation. Cortland Hunt has made some dangerous mistakes. Now he’s waiting quietly for those mistakes to catch up with him. Ian Tanner coasts through life denying the spark of anger beneath his laid back exterior. When school politics and personal lives become a battleground, the pair find that what they share may just be their only safe haven. Breaks is the story of two young men discovering who they were, who they are, and who they will become.

Buy Breaks Volume 1 today! And don’t forget to pick up Fallen Hero: Rebirth for 30% off and Fallen Hero: Retribution for 33% off before April 4th!

Become the greatest telepathic villain Los Diablos has ever known! Once you were famous; soon you will be infamous. That is, unless your old friends in the Rangers stop you first. Juggle different identities and preserve your secrets as you build new alliances and try to forget the friendships you’ve left behind.

Fallen Hero: Retribution

Fallen Hero: Rebirth is a 380,000 word interactive novel by Malin Rydén, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

  • Hone your telepathic talents, possess people and venture into their minds.
  • Build your own personalized combat armor: be a terrifying super-strong behemoth, a mysterious speedster or anything inbetween
  • Make alliances or enemies in the Los Diablos underworld while you outfight and outthink the heroes set against you.
  • Explore relationships as straight, gay, bisexual or aromantic. Romance a mad scientist, your former partner, or both.
  • Juggle two bodies and three identities, play as male, female or genderqueer.
  • Above all; make sure your past never catches up with you.

How far will you fall down the path of villainy?

Wednesday, 27. March 2024

The Rosebush

Game Jams’ Influence on Interactive Fiction

Sophia and Manon chat about running game jams to foster creativity and experimentation, and to build bridges between different IF communities and forms.

Sophia: Hi, Manon! For those of us who aren’t already familiar, could you introduce yourself?

Manon: Hi Sophia! Gladly. 🙂

My name is Manon, a French netizen, also going as manonamora on the internet (it is a combination of my name and a French mustard brand Amora — 8 year-old me thought it was the perfect username). I’ve been doing creative things since forever, but only discovered the Interactive Fiction scene in mid-2021. Since then, I’ve been making IF games for fun in my spare time.

I am also one of the organisers of Neo-Interactives, along with Autumn Chen, Jinx/Lapin Lunaire, and you, a collective that organises monthly game jams with fun restrictions to help foster creativity and experimentation, as well as bringing together all shapes of IF.

S: Something I’ve found really charming about interactive fiction is how varied the ways we find it are. How did you find IF, and what made you stick around?

M: I found the IF scene kinda by chance, actually!

I’ve always had a preference for narrative-based and puzzle games. So, I played IF games (and IF-adjacent games) without ever knowing they were IF, like Disco Elysium, Fallen London, the Telltale titles, old LucasArts (and inspired) point-n-click like Sam & Max or Grim Fandango, or a bunch of Visual Novels. I even used to have educational CYOA books when I was a small kiddo, where you’d have to solve problems to complete the story.

But I didn’t get acquainted with the IF scene until a few years ago, when a close friend sent me the link to an IF game (A Tale of Crowns) they thought I’d enjoy because it was text-based and I just… love reading!

After going through the creator’s blog, I wondered if I could try my hands at the medium as well (my friend also dared me to try), even if I had absolutely no coding knowledge nor had I written anything creatively for about a decade at that point. It seemed like a nice challenge, where I could learn a thing or two in the process.

So I created a blog on Tumblr, followed a bunch of other IF creators on that platform and made my first game (Meeting the Parents). Through teaching myself to code and playing more IF games, I found my way into other IF circles, participated in game jams and competitions…

The community helped reignite my love for writing and creating, and I never really left.

S: Game jams. You’ve certainly organised a melange of them. Can you tell me more about the process of how you got started doing so, and why?

M: There was a thread on the IntFiction Forum, in late 2021, spitballing about a fun gimmick for a competition — that would become the SeedComp! — which I thought was neat. Participating in the discussion, I volunteered to be one of the organisers and helped it become an actual event 14 days after the thread was created. It was exhilarating making it all happen, having all kinds of exchanges to set down the rules and trying to figure out how to ensure the event would work smoothly, in such a short time.

Until then I’d been looking for more things to do to give back to the community who’d helped me so much already. Creating bonds between people through collaboration, making people excited to create and play new games, adding maybe new perspectives to ideas and themes or what IF can look like… it just felt right, you know?

With the SeedComp! being a fairly successful event, I thought it would be fun to organise more of those throughout the year, especially a more relaxed, more approachable type. There were already quite a few IF events throughout the year, with SpringThing, IFComp, EctoComp, and the different Parser-specific comps, but little in the unranked department. Very few of them where you would not get that heavy pressure of judgement and ranking. And so a bunch of jams happened!

S: You’ve run game jams with a number of people from the community — though, I think it’s fair to say that most of them have been with the Neo-Interactives. How has consolidating a team influenced the experience of hosting game jams? What was the rationale behind forming the group?

M: Indeed, most recent game jams have been organised under the Neo-Interactives (or with some of the N-I organisers). I am grateful we have each other to rely on and bounce ideas off each other, whether it is working on the important details or the silly elements of the jams. It is less stressful to do it as a group rather than alone, especially when it comes to bringing back older game jams (and wanting to stay true to that original aim) or including all types of IF in the set restrictions. Different minds bring different perspectives. We help each other with tasks, spreading the work with one another, taking each other’s parts when needed.

Consolidating the team under one name also helped with ensuring our message and ethos with the game jams stay consistent, since the group has a shared rationale: wanting to see more experimentation in IF, bringing new blood and new perspectives to the medium, building bridges between the different IF communities and IF forms. We wanted a space where people could comfortably share their work without the pressure of ranking or competition, where they could test the water with themes, formats, or mechanics.

The whole do word/coding crimes vibes! 😂

S: Speaking of your assortment — I’d love to hear more about some of the highlights — the inspiration behind some of your game jams, how they panned out, and anything special you took away from hosting them.

M: And I’d love to tell you more about them!

S: The Neo-Twiny jam was one dear to my heart, as I have a special fondness for Porpentine’s body of work. I’m really interested in why you chose to revive that particular jam. Many of the game jams you’ve run play with mechanical restrictions, rather than thematic inspiration, and I’m curious on how you felt the strict word limit influenced the IF made. Why did you increase it from the original jam’s limitation of 300?

M: This one actually started after seeing a post shared by Autumn Chen on Tumblr about the original Twiny Jam that ran in 2015, where she toyed with the idea of rebooting the jam. I had forgotten about it until I participated in the Partim500, the French version of the Twiny Jam, organised yearly by Adrien Saurat since 2017. However, because French is a verbose language compared to English, the word count limit was raised to 500 words. And 500 words is still very little…

That jam had been such a fun experience for me, that it brought Autumn’s post to mind. I hit her up with the idea of bringing back Porpentine’s jam for the international IF scene and we got to work.

Honestly, we are both now unsure why the limit was raised — though it would probably be a safe bet that the Partim500 had something to do with it. I think having a little more wiggle room, with those extra 200 words, was welcomed by the participants, with many of them voicing how they struggled keeping under the limit.

With much of the IF scene orbiting towards large word counts in games, with tens of thousands of words being the “norm” for a basic project, having such a limited number can feel almost impossible. How can you tell a full story with so few words? How can it feel complete and rounded? How can you convey your message successfully and impactfully?

Creativity thrives on restrictions. The 124 unique submissions clearly showed that.

S. The Anti-Romance jam was hosted by our mutual, lovely friend Jinx. You and I are both fond of the romance genre, as you explore in works like your own Crimson Rose & White Lily (in progress) and it seems a rather curious choice for you to have helped run a jam so antithetical to it! So, why did you?

M: I could be asking you the same thing, Sophia! You helped too!

There wasn’t much thinking going into the why. 😂
When Jinx introduced the concept of organising what would become the Anti-Romance jam, I offered to help in a heartbeat. Just diving head first, without a second thought on what it would entail. Because, you know, friends help friends.

While I enjoy a good Romance or two, I am still fonder of exploring themes — any themes! I’m more the kind of person who tries a bunch of different things and experiments with them rather than sticking with one thing. So being part of this event wasn’t too much out of the ordinary for me…

S: The Anti-Romance jam held a fairly fluid view on what anti-romance looked like – what is it to you? Did any of the works from the jam surprise you in its interpretation of the theme?

M: To me, Anti-Romance was simply the lack of Romance. No romantic gestures, no lovey-dovey words… Not that there isn’t love to share or relationships, but just not the romantic relationship kind. The way I went at it when I participated was to create a premise where you stop people from being romantically involved.

After reviewing all the entries when the jam ended, what I took from the event was how diverse the interpretation of the theme ended up being between the submissions. Although the starting point was the same, some stories focused on requited love, others on the end of romance, or the doomed relationship trope. I don’t think my definition of Anti-Romance changed much after that, but it gave me a lot to think about. It was so interesting how each participant thought of such different stories, or used different mediums to convey their reading of the theme, adding depth to what might seem a silly game jam premise.

S: The Single Choice jam. You’ve dabbled rather extensively in both choice, parser, and the radically experimental area bridging both camps of IF. Were there any challenges in adapting the jam, which limits the player to only one choice, to accommodate both choice and parser games? The latter seems like it’d be particularly tricky to address, given the large vocabulary players develop — X, N/S/E/W, take all, and so on.

M: Extensively is being generous, Sophia! I’ve only just scratched the surface for parsers, I’m sure. But dabbling with both has helped me think about the similarities and differences in how IF games are created. Though thinking hadn’t gone that far when we were setting up the Single Choice Jam

That jam was probably the one that challenged us the most when trying to accommodate both choice and parser games within the game jam’s constraints, especially since we [the organisers] come from a more choice-based mindset. Unlike the Neo Twiny Jam, the restriction focused on the mechanical side of programming rather than a numerical limitation. Participants could only give the player one choice, and only one passage could have more than one option for action.

There are fundamental differences between parsers and non-parser games, especially in the way they are built and the logic behind the code. A passage is not really synonymous to a room. Available actions in parsers are not neatly printed on the screen. Different players will use different inputs for one command (e.g. X, EXAMINE, LOOK AT). There are common commands that may not be considered an action (like examining something). The many details we probably didn’t consider as extensively as we should have when we thought of this event.

When we were setting up the jam, we didn’t realise the constraint would not translate that well for parser entries, not in the way we first defined it. Though it did result in some interesting discussions on the IntFiction Forum when the jam was announced, with users trying to feel where the line was/should be drawn. We had to make many decisions on the fly in those first few days, defining what was acceptable and what would be going against the spirit of the jam. Thankfully, we did manage to get some lovely parser entries at the end!

We hope that for the next iteration of the jam, it will be clearer for all from the start! 😅

S: The Orifice jam was another homage to Porpentine’s influence, embracing the lascivious lushness that I, and many others, have come to associate with her body of work. Some of the entries were, then, unsurprisingly and explicitly NSFW. That’s a little unique among most of the jams you’ve run, I’d say! What was that experience like?

M: As an organiser, the experience was pretty similar to other theme-focused jams, in the way that you set up a page, agree on some rules, announce it, and hope for the best. The exception maybe being that we definitely expected most submissions to be mainly NSFW compared to other IF jams.

When running the Neo-Twiny Jam, another jam paying homage to Porpentine, we’d seen that influence through some of the more explicit entries. I do think the way we formatted the game page of the Orifice Jam, with your amazing header, did set the tone for the jam from the start. Make it weird, make it gross, make it hole-y. And the submissions delivered!

As a participant, however, I felt a bit out of my wheelhouse with the jam. While I enjoy NSFW content, writing more (borderline) explicit content was very alien to me. Even when embracing Porpentine’s work, trying to bring out that lushness you mentioned, or that focus on the body, was pretty strange. It made for an interesting experience, maybe pushing some out of their comfort zone.

S: The Bring Out Your Ghosts jam was a lovely nod to festivals of the dead, where old, unfinished WIPs were the focus. You’ve also organised SeedComp!, a venue where people throw out their ideas for IF games to be sprouted by others into fully fledged pieces. Has this emphasis on killing your darlings resonated with you or your work, personally?

M: We should all be killing our darlings on the regular. A sort of spring cleaning of our mind, idea file, or project folder. Creativity is sometimes a double-edged sword: you can get tons of great ideas… but you also get tons of ideas you want to work on, now. So, it’s very freeing to let go of things that probably won’t end up being realised, to focus on the ones that are possible or already in process.

While I didn’t share anything in Bring Out Your Ghost last year, both jams have definitely had an impact on how I view ideas and projects, for sure. Aside from helping me letting go of ideas I know I won’t ever have the time/energy/capabilities for making, or barely formed ones, which I have a drawer full of, it has helped me realise what could be feasible and what wouldn’t, whether a project would be short or long, and when to end a story, even if it didn’t include all I wanted to do. It’s a lot of reclaimed headspace!

Though I might actually not be that good of an example: I still have a bunch of Works In Progress on my desk (wish-fulfilment, then?). But Pinkunz, one of the SeedComp! organiser, might be, having submitted almost 40 ideas for games that never came to be during the last edition. Ideas that ended up resonating with other creators, as we saw a couple of games based on a few of those seeds.

S: The Bare-Bones jam seems to be the perfect counterpart to your usual wonderful stylization: the factory defaults on whatever program you used to make IF! With your experience in IF communities outside of the IntFiction forum (such as Tumblr, and interact-if), what has been your experience of differing presentation expectations? Did your work in extensively modifying Twine (especially with your Sugarcube templates and hybrid choice-parser works) inspire the jam?

M: That jam was actually inspired by the Naked Twine Jam that ran on Tumblr in 2014, which we reappropriated as a Halloween jam and opened to all programs, not just Twine — though we did expect to see many entries to stick with Twine. The original jam had been organised as a reaction to the worry of Twine games being expected to be in a more “polished” state (due to the increased availability of tools to customise a project, mechanically and through audiovisuals), and releasing the pressure on new game makers to make… well, something. A sort of levelling of the playing field by removing any custom elements, by bringing it back to its bare bones (hehe).

The ethos of the original jam did fuel what we wanted to achieve with the Bare-Bones Jam, in that we wanted a space for people to focus fully on their story, or their puzzle, or their mechanic, without having to worry about how their game would look at the end — spending maybe too much time on the interface they later wished they’d used on the writing or coding.

With so many gorgeous looking games and well-constructed custom UI out there, it is not uncommon to see messages from creators feeling that pressure of having a polished project. Visuals are another way of conveying elements to the player, and an aesthetically pleasing interface can help enhance the player’s experience. Yet, even with there being more resources available now than in 2014 to extensively modify Twine projects (with templates, macros, etc…), I’ve seen in discussions, especially with new creators on the scene on Tumblr, that people can feel like they are drowning with having to learn so much to reach that level of polish — at best, coding and customising feels like a chore. Many would just prefer to spend that time writing and focusing on the story.

Aside from trying to alleviate pressure from the game-making side, we wanted the jam to be especially accessible to newcomers, as competition can be nerve-wracking. By providing a safe space for people to get comfortable with a new program, or even to try a different one, we tried to ensure people could experiment without any expectation.

And I think it worked! We saw new users participating in the jams making their first game, a few who tried to explore a different kind of IF-flavour (parser instead of choice, or vice-versa), some who tested out new programs (from non-IF ones to more traditional CYOA formats), and other who turned to more aesthetically pleasing formats.

S: While IF has its own Speed-IF tradition, the compressed timelines of game jams are a bit of a shakeup compared to the larger, long standing competitions like SpringThing or the IFComp. What do you think game jams bring to the table of IF as a whole?

M: Alike to competitions, game jams are very interesting events for IF. They provide a structure for participants to create a game of some sort, in a limited amount of time, with a set determined deadline. Game jams are often much shorter than competitions, so they create this sense of urgency: you have a limited amount of time to come up with an idea or a concept that would fit the rules and implement it — this is a great motivator to do things.

Sometimes, game jams will even create this sense of uncertainty: the jam could be a one-off and never happen again, or it could come back but with completely different rules. You may end up with some sort of FOMO (fear of missing out) if you don’t participate right then and there with the idea you’ve just cooked up. If not now, when?

Another important thing I feel about game jams, especially the unranked type, is that they help welcome newcomers to the scene, as I said before, without having the pressure to perform well or worrying about a ranking. They are relaxed events that bring in new blood and diverse perspectives to the IF landscape. I believe those elements are important for the community, especially if we want to continue to grow and reach more people – or at least keep the flame alight.

These unranked jams also provide a special space for experiments, especially for the ones that may not find their place in larger competitions, or for testing formats before committing to them. This way, you can see what works and what doesn’t for you, where you may need some guidance or help, or the path you might want to pursue further (narratively or in terms of programming).

With the addition of restrictions or themes, game jams can help kickstart creativity: they can help with finding ideas for a story, or an angle to take on the restriction(s) — sometimes even force participants to think outside of the box! I mean, what can you do with 500 words? How will you tell a story if you can format it only a certain way? How can you make things interesting if the player only has one choice?

As a whole, those short, focused bursts of collaborative creativity, powered through these game jams, end up shaping what gets written and how they get written.

S: Any game jam plans for the future?

M: Oh, so many! And we are just getting started!

Our aim is to have unranked game jams happening year round, each with its specific flavour in themes, mechanic, or customisation. If a certain theme or constraint is overwhelmingly welcomed by the community, like the Neo-Twiny Jam or the Single Choice Jam, our goal is to bring it back the following year. If not, we would be exploring a different concept, maybe bringing back another historical IF jam. We have plenty of jam ideas stored in our ideas drawer!

After the ShuffleComp was wrapped up, a competition which hadn’t happened since 2015, we worked on ironing out details for the 2024 schedule of the Neo-Interactives, bringing new jams monthly (or so), and are already getting ready to announce the next ones!

[Note: since the interview, the Recipe Jam, Smoochie Jam and Revival Jam have been conducted and you can check out our latest event, the Dialogue Jam, which will run from March 31st through April 29th! And as a solo event project: the Interactive Fiction Showcase!]

Monday, 25. March 2024

Renga in Blue

Dr. Who Adventure (1982)

I’m assuming Doctor Who needs no introduction, but I’ll link a brief video explanation of the long-running British series if you need one before we get started. Australia started broadcasting Dr. Who back in the 1960s roughly contemporary to when they were being made in the UK, but the broadcast history was not straightforward; episodes […]

I’m assuming Doctor Who needs no introduction, but I’ll link a brief video explanation of the long-running British series if you need one before we get started.

Tarro, where today’s author (James Smith) was located.

Australia started broadcasting Dr. Who back in the 1960s roughly contemporary to when they were being made in the UK, but the broadcast history was not straightforward; episodes needed to be censored for “early evening general viewing” — that is, unedited they were considered suitable only for adults — and some of the early serials just never aired at all.

In 1981, the first licensed Dr. Who animation was created, as part an ad for Streets ice cream in Australia. It used Tom Baker, right before Peter Davison took over the mantle of the Doctor. The Logopolis serial (where the switchover between Baker and Davidson happens) was already broadcast in the UK, but it didn’t air in Australia until March 1982.

1982 also saw the first Dr. Who text adventure I’ve been able to locate in any country, written in March 1982 and published in the July 1982 issue of the magazine Micro-80. If you check my dates, you’ll see Baker was still “the current Doctor” from the author’s perspective.

The source is for TRS-80 but I am playing Jim Gerrie’s edited version for TRS-80 MC-10. In his blog post about the game he mentions bug fixes, including one where you can get “mugged” for an object but it doesn’t fix your inventory count, meaning you eventually can hit your inventory limit with 0 items. He also made some random values a little nicer and I’m not that gung ho about authenticity when it simply is going to be pain.

You do not seem to be “The Doctor” but just “you” sent along on a TARDIS the Time Lords have managed to scrouge up. I assume you are a Different Time Lord.

After Dr. Who collected the Key to Time and defeated the Black Guardian, he received many praises and went on to greater things. The Key itself was again broken into its component pieces and scattered throughout the universe.

But the dark forces threaten, and in order to save the universe, the Timelords again need the Key. You have been chosen to go forth and locate it for them.

The Key of Time is from Tom Baker’s run, specifically starting with The Ribos Operation in 1978, where the Doctor is asked by the White Guardian to find the six segments of the Key, bringing balance to the universe. The main gimmick to note for our purposes is that the pieces of the key are disguised as other things; in the first serial, a lump of Jethrik crystal is the first part of the key.

X pieces of some item of power makes for an extremely common videogame plot, so it is not shocking James Smith picked up on this as a game device. Your job is to bounce around planets searching for the Key, given that the pieces will be disguised.

You start on Gallifrey. It is terribly easy to get lost, and at one intersection I got rammed by a passing TARDIS.

I did manage to find a “throne room” where the parts apparently get delivered after finding them.

However, upon exiting the throne room I got stuck in a series of junctions which I’m sure are a fairly simple maze, but since I didn’t have any objects yet I had to restart the game.

So I decided it was best to hop into the TARDIS and start time-hopping.

You will be given a TARDIS (rather old and unreliable, but the best available) that has the coordinates of the planets on which the six parts are located pre-programmed into it. By RESETing its controls you can travel between the six planets and Gallifrey. As usual, the six parts are disguised as other things, and you will have to use your intuition to figure out which is which. (There is a way to tell … )

All the planets are inhabited, and most inhabitants tend to be antisocial. Whether you TALK to them, HIDE from them, kill them, OFFER them gifts of appeasement, or simply ignore them is up to you. Most objects are obvious, but some are hidden and have to be SEARCHed for. Only one key part is on any one planet. Beware the maze on Peladon …

Of course, it was terrific that the first place I landed in an effort to avoid mazes was Peladon, the place of three moons and constant storms.

From a recent Big Finish series set on the planet. “Journey to Peladon, member world of the Galactic Federation and home to intrigue and adventure. With each passing generation, industrial exploitation and deadly political games are taking their toll on the planet.”

sigh Well, let’s try it. I stepped out to a trail, only to find some Peladonians coming nearby. As the instructions mentioned HIDE, I tried the verb out, landing me in the maze.

There was really nothing for me to try than wander randomly. I did hit some non-maze paths but quickly landed in the maze again. I eventually had to simply restart my game and go back to the planet from the TARDIS. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, since RESET from the TARDIS lands you on a random planet; you can’t choose.

The destinations are GALAFRY, SKARO, HIDAOUS, PELADON, DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, MUTOS, and DIETHYLAMIDE. You can also just end up in SPACE which in case it is simply another reset.

I wanted to be stubborn and finish what I could on Peladon, so I eventually got there after about twenty resets. The TARDIS incidentally comes with a limited number of resets in this game, and that number is intended to be random! (One of the values made nicer in the MC-10 port is making this random number of resets simply be the maximum from the range.)

Even when not explicitly in the MAZE (as three of the exits go) the map is fairly maze-like and is the sort of game where if I go EAST from one room, I immediately need to test WEST back the other direction to see if it returns, since I’m likely to get a nasty surprise.

The wandering Peladonites turned out not to be a threat — I could just go somewhere else when they showed up — and the only other thing on the planet I managed to find is an Aggedor.

Perhaps I need to return with some music?

From the Alien Species Wiki: “The Aggedor is a wild beast native to the mountainous regions of planet Peladon … The ancient natives of Peladon viewed the Aggedor as a sacred animal and symbol of great power, to be feared and respected. The creatures can be domesticated and trained, and are susceptible to some kinds of music. The Doctor was once able to hypnotize one such beast with his watch while singing a Venusian lullaby.”

This game has been a hassle to get going, so I wanted to report in for now. Hopefully I’ll have visited all the different planets next time. I don’t think this is be like G.F.S Sorceress with a dense plot — this still is only a type-in with limited space — but at least the random elements (whatever they happen to be) should make for an interesting write-up, even if it turns out to be suffering on my part.


top expert

Let’s Make IF Reboot: Let’s Cave

introduction. As I’ve already discussed here and elsewhere, Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight must be delayed to Spring Thing 2025. Have no fear, fellow beginners! There is more IF to be made, which means more posts, I’ll be shifting focus to my “cave game” project, which contains many ambitious–for a person of my skill […]

introduction.

As I’ve already discussed here and elsewhere, Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight must be delayed to Spring Thing 2025. Have no fear, fellow beginners! There is more IF to be made, which means more posts,

I’ll be shifting focus to my “cave game” project, which contains many ambitious–for a person of my skill level, at least–design features that we can discuss here. Because I intend for this work to be a competition piece, rather than one written for exhibition purposes, I will have to be more guarded in what I share. Here are some important distinctions. Sadly, I will no longer be able to share the following:

  • Source code for the entire project.
  • Lengthy transcribed passages of gameplay.
  • Specific, detailed descriptions of the game’s story.

You might wonder: what’s the point, then? Don’t worry, there’s still a lot to talk about! Remember, this blog is intended, among other things, to be a resource for beginning authors who would like to read about Inform 7 coding and design techniques. Live blogging Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight is only one of the ways that I intend to realize those ambitions. The cave project will afford many opportunities to assist and amuse new authors. At least, that is the plan.

what’s in a cave game.

Let’s consider some of my high-level design goals for the project. You may better understand these goals if you have played my first game, Repeat the Ending. Referring to the source code for RTE may be helpful as well. You can find both source and game here.

  • Devise a new or improved system of magic.
  • Create QoL (player quality of life) systems that will provide helpful information (goal tracking, etc) as well as thematic content.
  • Create a wide-linear world that faciliates exploration for exploration’s sake.
  • A much larger map, compared with RTE.
  • Explore paratext in a new way. No academic essays or footnotes, but something lighter and more “fun” to experience.
  • While this will be a parser game in all of its complexity, drudgery should be reduced. Commands required for the main throughline should generate interesting feedback with minimal repetition.
  • Incorporate scenes that evoke a sense of dramatic tension without feeling “on rails.”
  • Explore methods to create a sense of pacing or engagement.
  • Design from the ground up with a story mode option, i.e., written for both playing and reading.

Whew! That’s a lot, and the list will only grow as the project progresses. Where should we begin?

cg1: devise a new or improved system of magic.

The entropic magic system of Repeat the Ending was, by necessity, one of the first things that I ever created in Inform 7. It is used in the prologue in the game’s second room. My primary inspiration for the system–in terms of structure, not content or quality–was that of Infocom’s Enchanter. The basic gameplay loop of the Enchanter games is this:

  1. Find and collect sources of magic (spells).
  2. Memorize them.
  3. Cast them to find and collect more sources of magic (spells)

…and so forth. Now, as many of you already know, I am not in the business of interpreting or explicating my own writing. So thematic distinctions between the magic systems of Enchanter and Repeat the Ending aren’t up for discussion here. Mechanically, though, they operate quite differently. Let’s peek under the hood of Repeat the Ending for a moment. There are no spell books; magic is a thing in the world. The *READ SPELLBOOK* command in Enchanter will list all available spells, each with a brief description of its function, but that isn’t possible in RTE.

Diagnosing is an action applying to one thing.
Understand "diagnose [something]" as diagnosing.

Don’t forget abbreviations and/or synonyms!

Understand "dn [something]" as diagnosing.
Understand "dg [something]" as diagnosing.

With the *DIAGNOSE [SOMETHING]* command in Repeat the Ending, the player can evaluate a source of magic in the game world and discern possible uses for it. In Inform 7 terms, that source must be a “thing” created in the world of the game. That precipitates a lot of situations to manage. None of them are overwhelming, but they gave a first-time author a lot to think about. There are two especially pressing considerations. In the first place, as Inform 7 things, they must be given appropriate properties. For instance, are they printed as part of room descriptions? Listed in Inform 7’s locale descriptions? Similarly, as things, players can direct all sorts of actions toward them. For instance, EATing, OPENing, or SMELLing are all by default possible verbs from Inform 7’s standard rules.

In Repeat the Ending, these sources were so constrained by set responses and restrictions to default actions that the player couldn’t cause much trouble. It was also very obvious what actions would move things forward (the game explicitly gives the player this information once the source is discovered). In truth, this is a poor practice. It is hard to be sure of oneself when dealing with the 77 verbs built into the Standard Rules, plus whatever new verbs I implemented along the way, and no tester will check every action against a noun. There is an extension, Juhana Leinonen’s “Object Response Tests” that automates such checks, and it can be a great help in such cases. However, I fully believe that if we know that a thing is good for only a handful of actions, it is best to constrain it ourselves. That way, we can control the output and give some helpful, directed feedback for the player. That’s the first thing we can do, then: limit the actions applicable to sources of magic in the game world.

instead of doing anything other than xyzzying or plughing or discerning to the magic:
say "The magic is little more than an invisible quality. *DISCERN THE MAGIC* to learn more about its nature.".

“Instead” rules, we know, happen very early in Inform’s action processing, and they are generally used to divert or halt player actions. Rather than allow a command like *EAT MAGIC* to be parsed as an *EAT* action, an instead rule will stop that command before it can begin. Inform will never even evaluate the possibilities of EATing. Instead, it will print the above message and be done with the command entirely. Problem solved?

Perhaps. We can be more thorough. What about a command like *UNLOCK DOOR WITH MAGIC*? Our construction won’t apply, sadly. It is specifically for commands that use *MAGIC* as their direct object. Using magic as an indirect object (*WITH MAGIC*) will sail right past our defenses. This phrasing, which doesn’t quite feel as good on the tongue, will do:

instead of doing anything other than xyzzying or plughing or discerning when the second noun is the magic:
say "The magic is little more than an invisible quality. *DISCERN THE MAGIC* to learn more about its nature.".

In most cases, though, there will not be a need to manage direct and indirect objects separately. Mercifully, Inform 7 includes this phrasing:

instead of doing anything other than xyzzying or plughing or discerning when the current action involves the magic:
say "The magic is little more than an invisible quality. *DISCERN THE MAGIC* to learn more about its nature.".

This is one of those cases in which Inform 7 is quite readable: “when the current action involves the magic” makes good intuitive sense. This code will be our solution of choice. It heads off unexpected action processing while helpfully redirecting the player toward some productive action. This makes it an improvement for authors (less complexity) and players (better feedback) alike.

This by itself is hardly a magic system, though! We have only scratched the surface.

meanwhile/next.

Here, on Top Expert, I’ll continue to discuss a design for a system of magic in the cave game, using the mechanics of Repeat the Ending as a baseline.

Elsewhere, Graham Nelson’s “The Craft of the Adventure” on the Gold Microphone podcast, and continued discussion of Brian Moriarty’s Trinity at Gold Machine.

I’m also going to start streaming a full playthrough of From Software’s Elden Ring, a triple-A action RPG on Twitch. It will focus on strategies for beginning players as well as narrative features.

You can find new content announcements on Mastodon and Tumblr. I’ve asked for this blog to be added to the Planet IF aggregator, but I have no sense of when or how adjustments are made. Hopefully it will be there soon!

Sunday, 24. March 2024

The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction

March meeting (online)

The Boston IF meetup for March will be Friday, March 29, 6:30 pm Eastern time. We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.

The Boston IF meetup for March will be Friday, March 29, 6:30 pm Eastern time.

We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.

Saturday, 23. March 2024

Renga in Blue

Eno (1982)

PAL Creations is another one of those early-80s companies I haven’t found much on about other than that they existed. They worked out of San Diego, and advertised in Tandy Color Computer magazines like The Rainbow, with games like SKI LODGE (“Manage a Vermont ski lodge”) and SCAVANGE HUNT (“Find the items on the list […]

PAL Creations is another one of those early-80s companies I haven’t found much on about other than that they existed. They worked out of San Diego, and advertised in Tandy Color Computer magazines like The Rainbow, with games like SKI LODGE (“Manage a Vermont ski lodge”) and SCAVANGE HUNT (“Find the items on the list and return them lo Hickory Ridge to free your niece Rebecca from the hermit of Medicine Tree County”). To give you an idea of the obscurity-level, the ad above mentions 20 games; as of this writing, Mobygames only is aware of the existence of 5.

Our game today is ENO (“You inherited a million dollars. Just one catch – first you have to find it!”) which was given away as a “bonus game” option for buying one of their regular games. It also ended up being published by Dragon Data (the Welsh company I’ve written about here) in a two-pack, Eno paired with a prison-escape game called Stalag.

We’ll pass on Stalag for now and stick with Eno, which has the noteworthy attribute of being quite short. So far, if someone has wanted to write a short game for sale, they’ve generally landed in gamedisk or tapedisk format; see Space Gorn for an example. Eno’s publishing demonstrates two other options, being published as part of a “pack” or being given away in conjunction with another game.

It is weirdly both modern and ancient. Let me just narrate what happens straightforwardly and then explain after.

You are simply tasked with finding your wealthy deceased relative’s inheritance, and the “living room” clue is indicative of the full environment of the game. The entire game is in the living room, just it is divided into small sub-areas to make a 15 “room” map.

You start in the center (“Living Room”) and then can move around to each of the pieces of furniture in the room, the TV in the far east, and the fish tank to the northeast.

The verb list (past the usual directions and INVENTORY) is severely limited, but at least the game is good enough to list it in the instructions: PUSH, TAKE, LOOK, DROP, TEAR, TURN, READ, OPEN, HELP. You can, if you want, mechanically try all the verbs on everything in the room, although the game discourages this by having some items in the living room be deadly.

For example, TURN TV (in a valiant attempt to change the channel) results in electrocution.

Both end tables to the west have doors that can be opened. The southwest end table has some smelly nurse shoes; the northwest end table kills you.

The game wants you to type HELP here before moving on to the next screen.

The very important room happens to be to the north, where there is a picture of a black cat. You can move it to find a safe.

It will then prompt you for three numbers if you try to OPEN SAFE, and if you get one number wrong you get a game over.

Although not technically “death”, and even though the game restarts, the “world fiction” technically begins where you left off.

So the rest of the game is a matter of figuring out three numbers, and which order those numbers might go in. This acts a little bit like a Rhem puzzle where there’s a symbol somewhere that only marginally relates to what you’re looking for, but you’re supposed to make the connection anyway. While I only found it in the middle of my searching process, the first item related to the number sequence is hidden under a cushion to the southeast.

This gives you the order you are supposed to enter numbers into the safe, and the source of the numbers: the number of black cats the house is supposed to have, the number of fish the house is supposed to have, and the TV channel showing a space show.

You incidentally cannot find a black cat in the house despite the picture. If you move the rug in the opening room, however, you can find a dead cat under a loose board.

You can count up the fish at the tank to be 29, and as already seen in a previous screenshot, the TV is tuned to channel 11.

Unfortunately, 1-29-11 doesn’t quite work. You’re supposed to examine the cat further and notice it ate one of the fish.

That is, the live-cat count is supposed to be 1, and the live-fish count is supposed to be 30. 1-30-11 opens the safe.

While a modern reaction, I imagine that this brief review by Alastair from Computer Solution Archive captures what people from the 80s likely thought of the game.

No wonder Dragon Data bundled this with another adventure game, this effort is no more than magazine type-in quality.

I don’t actually disagree, but weirdly enough, I liked it? Notice how it

  • somewhat fits the one-room adventure genre, which really didn’t start kicking until the late 90s
  • fits the “reduced verbset” genre, which is spread through all adventure gaming but never got “respectable” until probably the 2000s with games like Midnight. Swordfight.
  • has the clue-finding feel of a modern escape room
  • tries to make the deaths participatory and comedic

Despite the lack of a save file system, the game being very very short means it doesn’t matter; it’s more polite than a Super Mario “troll” level anyway. In the very specific circumstances here of a reduced-verb short game (where you hand-wave over realism) it works, just in the context of the early 80s market there isn’t much it fits with. The only slightly comparable game I can think of is Mansion Adventure which had its difficulty in clue-interpretation rather than object manipulation.

We will be seeing more from Paul Austin and Leroy Smith (including the other half of this commercial package, Stalag) but next up we’re going to head over to Australia for some Dr. Who.

Thursday, 21. March 2024

Choice of Games LLC

On the Run: Rogue Heroes—Awaken your powers and save your friends!

We’re proud to announce that On the Run: Rogue Heroes, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app. On the Run: Rogue Heroes is 33% off until March 28th! Awaken your powers and save your friends! Uncover the secrets that the military has been hiding about

We’re proud to announce that On the Run: Rogue Heroes, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app.

On the Run: Rogue Heroes is 33% off until March 28th!

Awaken your powers and save your friends! Uncover the secrets that the military has been hiding about Activated people, about your family, and about you.

On the Run: Rogue Heroes is an interactive teenage-superpower novel by Alyssa N. Vaughn. It’s entirely text-based, 200,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

For decades, everyone with special powers like super-strength or flight has been forced into lifelong conscription in W.I.N.G.S.: the Weaponized Individual National Guardian Services. Most of this military branch’s activities are secret—except for the daring exploits of heroes like Ms. Midnight, Phantom Phaeton, and Sergeant Smash.

You and your older sister grew up living with your grandmother, who cared for you, provided for you, and sheltered you from the truth. She knows what they do at W.I.N.G.S., she knows what happened to your parents, and she knows about the deadly genetic disease that you and your sister both carry.

Now, you and your sister have finally Activated your powers, W.I.N.G.S has arrested and conscripted your sister, and you’ve fled with your grandmother, on the run from psionic government agents with abilities just as powerful as yours.

But you’re not alone! There are people out there trying to fight back against W.I.N.G.S., people who could be your friend—or more than friends. There’s Micah, a long-lost friend with shoulder-length locs and a big secret to protect. Alex, a pickpocket/con-artist has illusion powers and a lot of eye makeup. Then there’s Knockout, a vigilante with a red-brown ponytail and homemade costume, including a mask and cape.

While your scrappy little group races against time to save your sister and yourselves, your own powers are growing stronger every day. Outrun cars on the highway with super-speed, pull down telephone poles with your super-strength, let out supersonic cries that can shatter glass—or just turn invisible and sneak away from it all. You’ll need every bit of your power and your smarts as you uncover secrets that could change the lives of every Activated person on earth.

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, bi, or asexual.
• Choose your portfolio of powers: super-strength, super-speed, heightened senses, supersonic shouts, or invisibility!
• Befriend or romance a childhood sweetheart, a scrappy con-artist runaway, or a powered vigilante with big golden-retriever energy.
• Discover the truth about your family and rebuild your relationship with your long-lost mother—or leave it all behind and seek support only with your friends.
• Fight back against the government’s control of Activated people, join their secret organization and become even more powerful yourself, or make peace between opposing factions.

Who will you trust? Who are your parents? Who will you date?

We hope you enjoy playing On the Run: Rogue Heroes. We encourage you to tell your friends about it and to recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

Monday, 18. March 2024

Choice of Games LLC

Author Interview—Alyssa N. Vaughn, On the Run: Rogue Heroes

You’ve got an extensive list of short-story credits, but this is your first novel-length publication. What were your favorite aspects of moving from short-form to long-form, and what were some of the challenges? One thing I really enjoyed was getting to develop the world and characters of the story in more depth. With my short stories, I usually have an idea I want to get across and everythin
Awaken your powers and save your friends! Uncover the secrets that the military has been hiding about Activated people, about your family, and about you.

On the Run: Rogue Heroes is an interactive teenage-superpower novel by Alyssa N. Vaughn. We sat down with Alyssa to talk about her work. On the Run: Rogue Heroes releases this Thursday, March 21st. You can play the first three chapters for free today.

You’ve got an extensive list of short-story credits, but this is your first novel-length publication. What were your favorite aspects of moving from short-form to long-form, and what were some of the challenges?

One thing I really enjoyed was getting to develop the world and characters of the story in more depth. With my short stories, I usually have an idea I want to get across and everything takes a backseat to that since I have more limited space. Since I had more room to stretch out, so to speak, I really felt like I had the ability to get more of what was in my mind onto the page–or screen in this case.

As I got further into development for On The Run, I think this ended up being one of the biggest challenges as well. With a short story it’s so easy to say “this is the end”, go through it two or three times, and feel really satisfied with your final draft. With On The Run, I felt like there was always something new I could add, something I could improve, so it was really hard to get to that last deadline and say “it’s finished.”

On the Run offers a darker and grittier take on superheroes: government conspiracies and coverups, exploitation of powered people, and military conscription. What led you to take this approach, and what were some of your media influences and inspirations?

I was a big fan of the X-Men growing up, and I always thought that the political storylines from the various adaptations were the most realistic in the way the government and general public would react to an outbreak of superpowers. Fear. Control. That vicious cycle of giving up rights in return for supposed safety.

Like a lot of fans, high-school-aged me dreamed up my own characters to join in on the adventures I loved so much, but I gradually became more interested in the stories of these new heroes.

There was one YA novel I read by Eoin Colfer, The Supernaturalists, which is a science fiction story of teenagers living in a technocratic dystopia, sneaking around rooftops and alleyways trying to do good using their recently acquired supernatural abilities. At the time I read it, I was really taken with this idea of teenagers going out and doing things on their own.

These ideas simmered around in my teenage brain and eventually became, in my sophomore year, the first hundred or so words of an interaction between the PC and Yeni, although those were not their names. Plus a handful of very bad character sketches.

Despite the serious themes, On the Run has a healthy amount of banter and shenanigans among its characters. How did you maintain the humor amid this story’s darkness?

To be honest, I’m not sure that I could write a one-hundred-percent serious story, because even in dark times (maybe especially then) I tend to look for something to laugh at. There were definitely a few moments when writing the story that I really felt somber, but heightened stress, confrontation, filling awkward silences? I go for the funny. At least it relieves some of my tension.

This game also focuses very strongly on the experience of being a teenager: struggling with your identity, growing into independence, learning how to see your parents as flawed humans, and more. What drew you to the decision to have younger protagonists?

One of the parts of the story I really wanted to tell originally (when I myself was a teenager) was this conflict between children and parents. In my high school journals, I would have scenes of the parents aggressively seeking out their children, while the teenage protagonists cleverly outwitted them.

While the adults in On the Run are less antagonistic, I still felt strongly about this idea of having the young protagonist confront the older generation about their actions. I feel like adults, facing the same problems all the time, can get bogged down in their perspectives. A lot of teenagers try to enter conversations in good faith and have so much positive energy and just get shut down. I wanted this game to reflect their genuine experience but also be somewhat cathartic for anyone who’s felt that way.

What other projects are you working on now?

I’m currently working on a fantasy YA novel and hope to participate in some upcoming game jams through itch.io!

Friday, 15. March 2024

Interactive Fiction – The Digital Antiquarian

Age of Empires (or, How Microsoft Got in on Games)

We don’t have a strategy to do a $200 game console that is a direct competitor to what Nintendo, Sega, and Sony are doing… — Bill Gates, June 1996 It’s hard to overstate the scale of the real-time-strategy deluge of the late 1990s. For a period of several years, it seemed that every studio and […]

We don’t have a strategy to do a $200 game console that is a direct competitor to what Nintendo, Sega, and Sony are doing…

— Bill Gates, June 1996

It’s hard to overstate the scale of the real-time-strategy deluge of the late 1990s. For a period of several years, it seemed that every studio and publisher in the industry was convinced that duplicating the gameplay of Blizzard’s Warcraft and Westwood’s Command & Conquer franchises, those two most striking success stories in the business of computer games since Myst and DOOM, must surely be the digital equivalent of printing money. In the fall of 1997, Computer Gaming World magazine counted no fewer than 40 RTS’s slated for release during the coming Christmas season alone, to go along with the “nearly 20” that had already appeared with names other than Warcraft or Command & Conquer on their boxes. With no other obvious way of sorting through the jumble, the magazine chose simply to alphabetize the combatants in this “biggest clone war to hit the PC,” resulting in a list that began with 7th Legion and ended with Waterworld.

If those names don’t ring any bells with you today, you aren’t alone. While many of these games were competently made by genuinely enthusiastic developers, few mass movements in gaming have ever felt quite so anonymous. Although the drill of collecting resources, building up an army, and attacking your computerized or human enemies in real time struck a lot of people as a whole lot of fun — there was, after all, a reason that Warcraft and Command & Conquer had become so popular in the first place — it was hard for the creators of the next RTS generation to figure out what to do to set their games apart, whilst also staying within a strict set of design constraints that were either self-imposed or imposed upon them by their conservative publishers. Adventure games, CRPGs, and first-person shooters had all been the beneficiaries or victims of similar gluts in the past, but they had managed to explore a larger variety of fictional contexts if not always gameplay innovations. When it came to RTS’s, though, they all seemed to follow in the footsteps of either the high-fantasy Warcraft or the techno-futuristic Command & Conquer in their fictions as well as their gameplay. This can make even those members of the RTS Class of 1997 that are most fondly remembered today, such as the fantasy Myth or the science-fictional Total Annihilation, feel just a little generic to the uninitiated.

One game from this group, however, did stand out starkly from the crowd for the editors of Computer Gaming World, as it still does in the memories of gamers to this day. Whilst sticking to the tried and true in many of its mechanics, Age of Empires dared to try something different in terms of theme, mining its fiction from the real cultures of our planet’s ancient past. It played relatively straight with history, with no magic spells or aliens in sight. This alone was enough to make Age of Empires a welcome gust of fresh air in a sub-genre that was already sorely in need of it.

Yet there was also something else that made it stand out from the pack. Although its developer was an unknown outfit called Ensemble Studios — one of many that were springing up like toadstools after a rain to feed the real or perceived hunger among gamers for more, more, more RTS’s — its publisher was, of all companies, Microsoft, that one name in software that even your grandparents knew. The arrival of Age of Empires signaled a new era of interest and engagement with games by the most daunting single corporate power in the broader field of computing in general. If anyone still needed convincing that computer games were becoming mainstream entertainments in every sense of the phrase, this ought to have been enough to do the trick. For, whatever else one could say about Microsoft, it was not in the habit of exploring the nooks and crannies of the software market — not when there was a sprawling middle ground where it could plant its flag.



The man behind Ensemble Studios was one Tony Goodman, whose life’s direction had been set in the sixth grade, when his father, a professor of management science at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, brought home a terminal that could be used to connect to the university’s mainframe. “He would give me the same problems that he had given his students,” says Goodman. “My father would say, ‘Tony, I have a puzzle for you.’ Immediately, I was sucked in for the rest of the day. I always looked at the problems as puzzles. I loved puzzles and games, so I just couldn’t get enough. It came to me naturally. I remember saying, ‘This is it. This is what I’m going to do with the rest of my life!'”

In an ironic sense, Goodman’s career path would be the opposite of that of the typical game developer, who joins the world of more plebeian software development only after getting burnt out by the long hours and comparatively low pay in games. Long before starting Ensemble Studios, Goodman made a career for himself in the information-technology departments of the banking industry, specializing, like his father before him, in data-visualization tools and the like that could aid executive-level decision-making. Along the way, he learned much that he would later be able to apply to games — for, he says, good games have much in common with good software of any other stripe: “One of the most valuable things that I learned about developing software was that, for users to be productive, the software had to be fun to use. The key is to keep people entertained long enough to be rewarded. This also happens to be the fundamental dynamic of games and, indeed, all human experiences.”

In 1989, Tony Goodman and three partners formed Ensemble Corporation — not to be confused with Ensemble Studios — in his garage. Two years later, they released Command Center, a user-friendly front-end for Borland’s Paradox database system that could “automate queries, reports, forms, and graphics.” The company exploded from there, becoming a darling of the Forbes and Inc. set.

Throughout his years in business software, Goodman never lost touch with that younger version of himself who had been drawn to computers simply because he found them so wonderfully entertaining. He and his older brother Rick, who joined Ensemble Corporation as a programmer shortly after the release of Command Center, were lifelong board and computer gamers, watching at first-hand the aesthetic and technical evolution of the latter, parallel software industry. They found a kindred soul in another Ensemble programmer named Angelo Laudon, who, like them, could appreciate the higher salaries and profit margins in productivity software but nonetheless felt a longing to engage with his biggest passion. “We would talk about games until the early hours of the morning,” says Tony Goodman. “I loved the business of developing software, but I wanted to create products that everyone would tell their friends about. I wanted to create a pop-culture phenomenon. If you want to create software that people really want, developing videogames places you at the center of the universe.”

He realized that computer games had hit a watershed moment when Microsoft announced Windows 95, and with it DirectX, a software subsystem that would allow people to install and run even cutting-edge games as effortlessly as any other type of software, without the travails of the bespoke IRQ and DMA settings and memory managers that had been such a barrier to entry in the past. If he ever wanted to try to make games of his own, he knew, the time to get started was now, between the market’s expansion and the inevitable market saturation that would follow. Rick Goodman remembers how one day his brother

walks into work, assembles the team of database programmers, and says, “Would any of you guys rather be making games than database applications?”

I think people were caught off-guard. We were looking around the room, like, “Is this a trick question?” But I raised my hand, and Angelo Laudon raised his. Tony was serious. He said, “I’m going to pull you guys aside and we’ll make a game.” I thought that was awesome. I said, “Okay! What kind of game?” None of us had any idea.

For months thereafter, they continued to do their usual jobs during the day, then gathered again in the evening to hash through ideas and plans. During one of these sessions, Rick suddenly brought up a name that Tony hadn’t heard in a long, long time: Bruce Shelley, an older fellow with whom the brothers had played a lot of board games during their pre-teen and teenage years. Shelley worked in computer games now, said Rick — had in fact assisted Sid Meier with the design of Railroad Tycoon and Civilization. “Maybe — maybe —  he’s not busy.”

And lo and behold, it turned out that he wasn’t. After finishing Civilization, Shelley had left Meier and his other colleagues at MicroProse Software in order to follow his new wife, a banking executive, to Chicago, where she’d secured a job that was far more lucrative than any that he’d ever held. He was writing gaming strategy guides out of his home office when Tony Goodman called him up one day out of the blue: “I hadn’t heard from him in fifteen years, and here he is with his own business in Dallas, doing software for banks, and he’s got guys who want to make computer games. We had these long conversations about what it takes to make a game. I told my wife, ‘I think this guy’s going to start a game company.’ And finally he did call me and say, ‘We are going to start a game company, and we want you to be involved.'” Shelley agreed to fly down to Dallas to talk it over.

But they still weren’t sure what kind of game they wanted to make. Then, as Shelley remembers, “One day one of the guys walked in with Warcraft. He said, ‘We’ve got to make this. We’ve got to make one of these. This is blowing the socks off the gaming world right now.'” It all came together quickly after that. Why not combine the hottest current trend in gaming with the last game Shelley had helped to make, which was already widely regarded as a hallowed classic? “The idea was, let’s take the ideas of Civilization — an historical game — and do a Warcraft/Command & Conquer-style RTS.”

This, then, was the guiding ethos of the project, the first line of any pitch document to a potential publisher: to combine the fast action of the typical RTS with at least some of the more expansive scope of Civilization. You would guide a tribe — in time, a full-fledged civilization — through the Paleolithic Age, the Neolithic Age, the Bronze Age, and the early stages of the Iron Age (where this particular voyage through history would end, leaving the table set for a sequel). Along the way, you would research a variety of technologies and build ever more impressive structures, some of which would not be strictly military in application, such as granaries and temples. There would even be a version of Wonders of the World, those grandest of all Civilization achievements, waiting to be built. But the whole experience would be compressed down into the typical RTS time frame of an hour or so, as opposed to the dozen or more hours it might take to get through a full game of MicroProse’s Civilization.

Initially titled Dawn of Man, the game evolved slowly but steadily betwixt and between the usual daily routine at Ensemble Corporation. The other Ensemble principals took Tony Goodman’s after-hours vanity project with a shrug. They didn’t really understand it, but he had worked hard for a long time and was entitled to it, they supposed, in the same way that other successful entrepreneurs were entitled to go out and buy themselves a Porsche.

When Tony Goodman started shopping the game to prospective publishers, it already looked and played decently well. He was growing more and more convinced that he had a winner on his hands. Yet even he was surprised at his good fortune when he made a cold call to Stuart Moulder, a middle manager at Microsoft’s relatively little-remarked games division, and captured the interest of the biggest fish in the software sea.

Historically speaking, Microsoft’s relationship to games had long been a tentative one. It was true that, in the very early days of the company, when it was known chiefly as a peddler of 8-bit BASIC implementations, Microsoft had published a fair number of games. (The most important of these was probably its ethically dodgy commercial version of Will Crowther and Don Woods’s classic Adventure, the game that lent its name to a whole genre.) Even after it signed the landmark deal to provide IBM’s first mass-market personal computer with an operating system — a deal that resulted in the ever-evolving PC standard that remains dominant to this day — Microsoft continued to dabble in games for a while. There was a good reason for this; it’s often forgotten today that IBM and Microsoft first envisioned that original IBM PC becoming a fixture in homes as well as offices. But when home users didn’t embrace the platform as rapturously as the partners had hoped, even as Corporate America took it to its bosom more quickly than they had ever dreamed, Microsoft abandoned games, thanks not only to the bigger profits that could be earned in operating systems and business software but out of fear of the stigma that surrounded games and their makers in the more “serious” software circles of the 1980s. The one exception to Microsoft’s no-fun-allowed policy was — at least according to some people’s definition of “fun” — Flight Simulator, an early product for the IBM PC that turned into a minor cash cow for the company; like Microsoft’s operating systems and productivity packages, it was a program that people proved willing to buy all over again every few years, whenever it was updated to take advantage of the latest graphics cards and microprocessors. Its focus on the pedantic details of flying a real civilian airplane — the complications of VOR navigation systems and the insidious threat of carburetor ice were implemented, but absolutely no guns were to hand — presumably made it acceptable in Microsoft’s staid software lineup.

The release in 1990 of the comparatively approachable, user-friendly Windows 3.0 operating environment marked the moment when more conventional games began to become less of an anathema to Microsoft once again. An implementation of the hoary old card game Solitaire was among this latest Windows’s standard suite of software accessories. As easy to pick up as it was to put down, it became the perfect time killer or palate cleanser for hundreds of millions of office workers all over the world, enough to make it quite probably the most popular videogame ever in terms of sheer number of person-hours played. Microsoft went on to release four “Entertainment Packs” of similarly simple games for the Windows 3.x desktop, and to include a clever Battleship variant called Minesweeper in 1992’s Windows 3.1. Microsoft was slowly loosening up; even Bill Gates confessed to a Minesweeper addiction.

The company now began to dabble in more ambitious games, the kind that could stand on their own rather than needing to be packaged a half-dozen to a box. There came a golf game for the corporate set, and then there came Space Simulator, an attempt to do for armchair astronauts what Flight Simulator had for so long been doing for armchair aviators. But the big shift came with Windows 95, the first (and arguably only) Microsoft operating system whose arrival would become a full-fledged pop-culture event. That old dream of the PC as a standard for the home as well as the office was coming true in spades by now; amidst the hype over multimedia and the World Wide Web, ordinary people were buying computers to use in their homes in unprecedented numbers. Microsoft was determined to serve their wishes and needs just as they had for so long been serving those of the corporate world. One result of this determination was DirectX, which allowed Microsoft’s customers to install and play audiovisually rich, immersive games without having to learn the arcane mantras of MS-DOS or memorize every detail of a computer’s hardware configuration. Another, less initially prominent one was a more empowered games division, which was for the first time given permission to blow through the musty vibes of office life or educational value that had clung to Microsoft’s earlier entertainment efforts and give the hardcore gamers what they really wanted.

At the same time, though, it should be understood that even by this point game publishing had not become a major priority at Microsoft. Far from it. There remained plenty of people inside the company who didn’t think getting into that business was a good idea at all, who feared that it would be perceived as a conflict of interest by the very extant game publishers Microsoft was trying to convince to embrace DirectX, or who thought the potential rewards just weren’t worth the distraction; after all, even if Microsoft managed to publish the most popular computer game in the world, those revenues would still pale in comparison to the Windows and Office juggernauts. Among the skeptics who did no more than tolerate the notion of Microsoft peddling games was Bill Gates himself.

The games division was in the keeping of one Tony Garcia at this time. One day a manager a rung below him on the hierarchy, a “talent scout” named Stuart Moulder whom he had explicitly tasked with finding hot “gamer’s games” to sway the naysayers and reinvigorate the division, knocked on his door to say that he’d just seen an RTS work-in-progress by a brand-new studio that was being bootstrapped out of a business-software maker. Yes, Moulder rushed to add, he understood that no part of that sentence sounded overly promising at first blush. But the game itself looked surprisingly good, he said. Really, really good. This could be the Big One they’d been waiting for.

So, Garcia invited the Dawn of Man crew to come up to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and show him what they had. And he too liked what he saw enough to want to put the Microsoft logo on it.

Microsoft was an infamously tough negotiator, but Tony Goodman was no slouch in that department either. “Negotiation is often about compromise,” he says. “However, negotiating with Microsoft is more often about leverage. Microsoft negotiates hard. They don’t respect you unless you do the same.” Goodman gained some of his needed leverage by showing the game to other publishers as well — Electronic Arts, Hasbro, even Discovery Channel Multimedia (who were attracted by the game’s interest in real history) — and showing Microsoft the letters they had sent him to express their very real interest. Meanwhile Microsoft’s marketing department had already come up with the perfect name for a game whose historical time frame extended well beyond the Dawn of Man: Age of Empires. Having invented the name, Microsoft insisted on owning the trademark. Goodman wasn’t able to move the beast from Redmond on this point, but he did secure a royalty rate and other contract terms that he could live with.

In February of 1996, Goodman’s moonlighting venture was transformed from a skunk works inside a business-software maker to a proper games studio at long last, via official articles of incorporation. That said, it wouldn’t do to exaggerate the degree of separation even now: Ensemble Studios was still run out of the office of Ensemble Corporation. It had about ten employees in the beginning. Angelo Laudon was listed as lead programmer and Rick Goodman as lead designer, despite the latter’s complete lack of experience in that field. Fortunately, Bruce Shelley had agreed to join up as well, coming down to Dallas about one week of every month and working from home in Chicago the rest of the time.

Soon after Age of Empires became a real project from a real studio, Tony Garcia left Microsoft. He was replaced by Ed Fries, a veteran member of the Office team who had programmed games for 8-bit Atari computers before starting at Microsoft in 1986. When he agreed to take this new job in games, he was told by his colleagues that he was committing career suicide: “Why would you leave Office, one of the most important parts of this company, to go work on something nobody cares about?”

For all their apparent differences in size and clout, Microsoft and Ensemble Corporation were in an oddly similar boat; both were specialists in other kinds of software who were trying to break into games. Or rather, a handful of passionate individuals within each of the companies was, while everyone else looked on with bemused indifference. In an odd sort of way, though, said indifference was the passionate individuals’ superpower. If the new RTS failed utterly, it wouldn’t show up on the ledgers of Microsoft or Ensemble Corporation as anything more than a slight blip on an otherwise healthy bottom line. This lack of existential stakes — an extreme rarity in an industry whose instability is legendary — was greatly to the game’s benefit. With no pressure to have it finished by such-and-such a date or else, the developers could fuss over it until they got every detail just exactly perfect. Sticking close to the RTS playbook even in his choice of metaphors, Rick Goodman describes time in game development as “a resource, like collecting wood. The more of it you have, the better off you are. We took a lot of time. A lot of time. Most companies would not have survived that length of time.”

During that time, the game got played. Over and over and over and over again, it got played, not only by the Ensemble crew but by lots of folks at Microsoft, including the experts at that company’s “usability laboratory.” Microsoft brought in people from the street who had never played an RTS before, who didn’t even know what those initials stood for, and had them run through the early tutorial missions to see if they communicated what they were supposed to. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. Age of Empires was tested and tweaked no differently than it would have been if it was a $1000 mission-critical software application destined to be the fodder of corporate purchasing departments all over the world.

For this was to be a broad-spectrum computer game, beamed straight at the center of the mass market but wide and diffuse enough to capture an unusual variety of playing styles and priorities. Bruce Shelley has spoken often since of the value of putting “multiple gaming experiences within one box.”

To reach a broad audience, include a variety of game types and adjustable game parameters that combine in different ways to create a range of quite different gaming experiences, all within the same game. Examples of different gaming experiences with the Age of Empires games are multiplayer death matches, single-player campaigns, random-map games, cooperative-play games, and Wonder races. Victory conditions, map types, and level-of-difficulty settings are examples of parameters that can be adjusted to create different gaming experiences.

We want the smartest kid in junior-high school (a hardcore gamer) telling his or her friends that our game is his or her favorite right now. When those friends buy our game, they probably won’t be able to compete with the star, but by adjusting those parameters they can still find a type of game that suits them and have fun. The average kids and the smart kids can both enjoy our game, although they play quite different parts of it.

When we provide a variety of gaming experiences within the single box, we increase the number of people who can buy our game and be happy with it. Each of these satisfied customers becomes in turn a potential evangelist.

Although I wouldn’t directly equate being “hardcore” when it comes to games with being “smarter” than those who are not in the way that Shelley (perhaps inadvertently) does here, the larger point is well-taken. This was something that the industry in general was finally coming to realize by the latter 1990s, probably more belatedly than it ought to have done. By making it possible to play the same game in a variety of different ways, you could dramatically expand the size of that game’s audience. You did so by including varying difficulty levels and speed settings, to make the game as easy or hard, as relaxing or frenetic, as any particular player wished. And you did so by including different modes of play: story-driven campaigns, a single-player skirmish mode, online multiplayer contests. It might take additional time and money to make all of these things, especially if you were determined, as you ought to be, to make them all well, but it remained vastly cheaper than making a whole new game. Most older games dictate to you how you must play them; newer ones ask you how you would like to play them. And this has been, it seems to me, an immensely positive development on the whole, broadening immeasurably the quantity and types of people who are able to enjoy games — both each individual game that appears and gaming in the aggregate.

Certainly Age of Empires understood all of this; in addition to selectable difficulty levels and speed settings, it includes campaigns, pre-crafted singleton maps for single- or multiplayer sessions, randomly generated maps, even a scenario and campaign editor for those who want to turn their hobby into a truly creative pursuit. Anyone who has been reading these histories of mine for a while will surely know that the RTS is far from my favorite sub-genre of games. Yet even I found Age of Empires surprisingly easy to get along with. I turned the difficulty and speed down and approached the campaigns as an interactive whirlwind tour of the ancient world; as readers of this site’s companion The Analog Antiquarian are well aware, that is a subject I can never get enough of. I have a friend, on the other hand, who tells me that he can’t remember ever even starting a campaign back in the day, that he jumped right into multiplayer on Day One to engage in ferocious zero-sum contests with his friends and never looked back. And that’s fine too. Different strokes for different folks.

But since I am the person I am, I just have to say a bit more about the campaigns. There are actually four of them in all, chronicling the evolution of ancient Egypt, Greece, Babylon, and Japan. (An expansion pack that appeared about a year after the base game includes three more campaigns that deal exclusively with the rise and fall of Rome.) The campaigns were a labor of love for the lifetime history buff Bruce Shelley, as were the 40-plus pages in the manual dedicated to the twelve different playable civilizations, whose ranks include not only the aforementioned but also such comparatively obscure cultures as the Minoans, the Phoenicians, and even the Shang Chinese, all with strengths and weaknesses that stem from what we know — in some cases, what little we know — of their real-world inspirations.

“We really only needed one grand theme for a civilization that was historical enough to make people believe,” says Rick Goodman. “Like, they know Rome was good at X and the Greeks were good at Y.” For all that Age of Empires is no one’s idea of a studious exploration of history, it does have a little bit more on its mind than the likes of Warcraft or Command & Conquer. At its best, it can make you ponder where and how human civilization came to be, starting as it does with the bedrock resources, the food and wood and, yes, stone out of which everything that followed was built. I’m sure it must have sent at least a few of its young players scurrying to the library to learn a little more about our shared heritage. Perhaps it managed to spark an enduring passion for history in some of them.

The graphics style was an additional key to Age of Empires’s appeal. Bruce Shelley:

The sun is always shining in Age of Empires. It was always a bright, inviting world that you wanted to know more about. I’ve always had problems with dark, forbidding games. You’re crushing your audience — you’re really narrowing who is going to consider buying a game when you make it ugly, dark, and forbidding. Maybe it appeals to a certain audience, but…

When you set out to develop a PC game, the potential market is everyone on Earth who owns a PC. Once you begin making decisions about your game (gory, sci-fi, RTS, shooter), you begin losing potential customers who are not interested in your topic, genre, or style. Commercially successful games hold onto [a] significant share of that market because they choose a topic, genre, and style that connect with a broad audience. The acceptance of the PC into more world communities, different age groups, and by women means that games do not need to be targeted, and perhaps should not be targeted, solely to the traditional gaming audience of young males.

Age of Empires inevitably comes down to war in the end, as do most computerized depictions of history. But the violence is kept low-key in comparison to many another RTS bloodbath, and there is at least a nod in the direction of a non-conquest victory, an equivalent to sending a spaceship off to Alpha Centauri as a capstone to a game of Civilization: if you can build yourself a Wonder of the World in Age of Empires, then defend it for a period of time against all comers, you are declared the victor then and there. A “religious” victory can also be achieved, by collecting all of the religious artifacts on the map or holding all of its sacred sites for a period of 2000 years — about ten minutes in game time. There’s even some nods toward diplomacy, although in practice becoming allies usually just means you’ve agreed not to fight each other quite yet.

I don’t want to overstate the scale of the game’s innovations. At the end of the day, Age of Empires remains an RTS in the classic mold, with far more in common with Warcraft and Command & Conquer than it has with Civilization. It’s an extremely well-made derivative work with a handful of fresh ideas, not a revolution from whole cloth. Its nods in the direction of Civilization are no more than that; it’s not, that is to say, the full-blown fusion that may have been Bruce Shelley’s original vision for it. Compressing into just one hour the first 10,000 to 12,000 years of human civilization, from the dawn of sedentary farming to the splendors of high antiquity, means that lots of the detail and texture that make the game called Civilization so compelling must get lost. Even if you’re a story guy like me, you’ll no longer be marveling that you’ve brought writing, irrigation, or religion to your little group of meeples after you’ve played your first map or two; those things will have become mere rungs on the ladder to the victory screen, the real point of the endeavor. In a rare lukewarm review, GameSpot‘s T. Liam MacDonald put his finger on some of the places where Age of Empires’s aspirations toward Civilization don’t live up to the reality of its well-worn RTS template.

I wish that Age of Empires was what it claimed to be: Civilization with a Warcraft twist. Instead, it is Warcraft with a hint of Civilization. That’s all well and good, but it places it firmly in the action-oriented real-time combat camp, rather than in the high-minded empire-building [camp] of Civilization. The result is Warcraft in togas, with slightly more depth but a familiar feel.

I too must confess that I did eventually get bored with the standard RTS drill of collect, build, and attack that is the basis of almost every scenario. As the scenarios got harder, I gradually lost the will to put in the effort it would take to beat them; I wound up quitting without regrets about halfway through the second campaign, satisfied that I’d had my measure of fun and certain that life is too short to continue with entertainments of any type that you no longer find entertaining. Still, I won’t soon forget Age of Empires, and not just because its theme and atmosphere make it stand out so from the crowd. I would be the last person to deny that it’s an incredibly polished product from top to bottom, a game that was clearly fussed over and thought about to the nth degree. It exudes quality from its every virtual pore.


The Age of Empire intro movie displays some of the game’s contradictory impulses. The scenes of combat are no better nor worse than those of any other game that attempts to make war seem glorious rather than terrible. Yet the weathered ancient stone raises other, more poignant thoughts about the cycles of life, time, and civilization. “For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”

Each campaign follows the historical development of the civilization in question to whatever extent the demands of gameplay allow.



In commercial terms, Age of Empires was a perfect storm, a great game with wide appeal combined with a lot of marketing savvy and the international distributional muscle of the biggest software publisher in the world. The principals from Ensemble remember a pivotal demonstration to Bill Gates, whose reservations about Microsoft’s recent push into games were well-known to all of them. He emerged from his first first-hand encounter with Age of Empires calling it “amazing,” assuring it the full support of the Microsoft machine.

While Microsoft’s marketing department prepared an advertising campaign whose slick sophistication would make it the envy of the industry, Tony Goodman deployed a more personal touch, working the phones at the big gaming magazines. He wasn’t above using some psychological sleight-of-hand to inculcate a herd mentality.

I built relationships with the most recognized gaming magazines. I invested a lot of time with key editors, seeding the idea that Age of Empires was “revolutionary” and would become a “phenomenon.” They may not have believed me at first, but my goal wasn’t to convince them. My goal was to plant wondrous possibilities in their brains and create anticipation, like Christmas for kids.

When the early previews began appearing, they were using the terms that we seeded: “revolutionary” and “phenomenon.” These early opinions were then picked up and echoed by other publications, creating a snowball effect. Eventually, all the publications would get on board with this message, just so they didn’t look out of touch.

Sure enough, in the Computer Gaming World RTS roundup with which I opened this article, Age of Empires was given pride of place at the top of the otherwise alphabetized pile, alongside just one august companion: Starcraft, Blizzard’s long-awaited follow-up to Warcraft II, which was to try the science-fiction side of the usual RTS fantasy/science-fiction dichotomy on for size. As it happened, Starcraft would wind up slipping several months into 1998, leaving the coming yuletide season free to become the Christmas of Age of Empires.

So, while Age of Empires may not have quite lived up to its “revolutionary” billing in gameplay terms, it definitely did become a marketplace phenomenon after its release in October of 1997, demonstrating to everyone what good things can happen when a fun game with broad appeal is combined with equally broad and smart marketing. It doubled Microsoft’s own lifetime sales projections of about 400,000 units in its first three months; it would probably have sold considerably more than that, but Microsoft had under-produced based on those same sales predictions, leaving the game out of stock on many store shelves for weeks on end while the factories scrambled to take up the slack. Age of Empires recovered from those early travails well enough to sell 3 million units by 1999, grossing a cool $120 million. It left far behind even those other members of the RTS Class of 1997 that did very well for themselves by the conventional standards of the industry, such as Myth and Total Annihilation. In fact, Age of Empires and the franchise that it spawned came to overshadow even Command & Conquer, taking the latter’s place as the only RTS series capable of going toe-to-toe with Blizzard’s Warcraft and Starcraft.

And yet that is only a part of Age of Empires’s legacy — in a way, the smaller part. In the process of single-handedly accounting for half or more of the Microsoft games division’s revenue during the last couple of years of the 1990s, Age of Empires changed Microsoft’s attitude about games forever. The direct result of that shift in attitude would be a little product called the Xbox. “I believe there were two successes that had to happen at Microsoft in order for the Xbox console to happen,” says Stuart Moulder. “One was DirectX, which showed that we had the chops on the operating-system side to deliver technology that made it possible to build great games. Then, on the other side, we had to show that we had the ability as a first-party publisher to deliver a hit game aimed at core gamers — because that’s [the] people who buy and play console games.” Thanks to Age of Empires, gaming would be overlooked no more at Microsoft.



Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.


Sources: The book Gamers at Work by Morgan Ramsay; Computer Gaming World of October 1997, November 1997, and January 1998; Next Generation of June 1996; InfoWorld of April 22 1991.

Online sources include Soren Johnson’s interview with Bruce Shelley, Scott Stilphen’s interview with Ed Fries, David L. Craddock’s long ShackNews series on Microsoft’s gaming history (especially the chapter dealing directly with Age of Empires), Thomas Wilde’s profile of Ed Fries for GeekWire, Richard C. Moss’s history of Age of Empires for Ars Technica, a Microsoft press release from February of 1998, T. Liam MacDonald’s vintage review of Age of Empires for GameSpot.

Finally, the box of documents that Bruce Shelley donated to the Strong Museum of Play were a valuable resource.

A “Definitive Edition” of the original Age of Empires is available as a digital purchase on Steam.


Choice of Games LLC

The Bread Must Rise is a finalist for the 2024 Nebula Game Writing Award!

We are thrilled to announce that The Bread Must Rise, by Stewart C Baker & James Beamon, is a finalist for the Nebula Game Writing Award, and it’s on sale for 40% off until March 22! The Bread Must Rise is a 450,000-word interactive comedy/fantasy/baking/eldritch horror novel by James Beamon and Stewart C Baker. In this magical baking contest, you’ll team up with the Queen
The Bread Must Rise

We are thrilled to announce that The Bread Must Rise, by Stewart C Baker & James Beamon, is a finalist for the Nebula Game Writing Award, and it’s on sale for 40% off until March 22!

The Bread Must Rise is a 450,000-word interactive comedy/fantasy/baking/eldritch horror novel by James Beamon and Stewart C Baker. In this magical baking contest, you’ll team up with the Queen Undying to bake your rivals into an early grave—or out of the grave, with necromancy!

To celebrate, we are also putting every previous Nebula Finalist game on sale:

Vampire: The Masquerade—Sins of the Sires
The Luminous Underground
The Road to Canterbury
The Magician’s Workshop

Rent-A-Vice
The Martian Job

Check out our Nebula Finalists bundle on Steam for an even bigger discount!

This is the sixth year that there has been a Nebula award for game writing—and the fifth year that Choice of Games authors have been finalists. Past Choice of Games Nebula finalists are: Natalia Theodoridou for Vampire: The Masquerade — Sins of the Sires and Rent-A-Vice, Phoebe Barton for The Luminous Underground, Kate Heartfield for The Road to Canterbury and The Magician’s Workshop, and M. Darusha Wehm for The Martian Job.

We also want to congratulate one of our Hosted Games authors, Baudelaire Welch, who is nominated in the same category for their work on Baldur’s Gate 3. Their Hosted Game, Don’t Wake Me Up, is also on sale this week!

Since 1965, the Nebula Awards have been given annually to the best works of science fiction and fantasy published that year, as voted on by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). The 59th Annual Nebula Awards ceremony will be streamed live during the 2024 Nebula Conference, June 6-9, 2024. Stay tuned for more!


The Rosebush

On Making Trauma Legible: How Interactive Fiction Identifies Trauma

Trauma resists definitions. Nevertheless, people will try to write about it, even within interactive fiction.

Trauma resists definitions. Nevertheless, people will try to write about it, even within interactive fiction.

In last year’s IFComp alone, we see Naomi Norbez’s My Pseudo-Dementia Exhibition, B.J. Best’s LAKE ADVENTURE, Ayu Sekarlangit Mokoginta’s Lonehouse, and others deal with aspects of trauma. The value of interactivity is not self-evident as there are many works that successfully depict trauma without it. What does interactivity have to offer in narratives that explore trauma?

This essay argues that interactivity helps players recognize trauma more clearly than, say, reading a book or watching a movie about it. Rather than passively watching trauma unfold, players can become more intimate with trauma through gameplay. Their interaction brings the unseen aspects of trauma into something more legible. Legibility is therefore an ideal for trauma-informed interactive fiction: it clarifies, explains, and depicts trauma in such a way that players cannot pretend the trauma isn’t there. In order to play the game properly, they must confront the traumas explored in the game, whether they want to or not.

A Machine to Help Transfer Experiences

When Taylor McCue was asked why they made a game instead of a comic, He Fucked the Girl Out of Me, they began their answer with “I am not a good person. I wanted people to understand me, not pity me.”1

In HFTGOOM, the player controls a ghost avatar. At first, all they can do is walk past the horrible reactions people have said about the story they’re going to hear.2 The narration then doubts itself because the game would never be finished if it tried to “recall traumatic details and recreate things perfectly”. Instead, it invites the player to focus on an “impulsive decision”.

After this prologue, the player learns that their player character is seeking hormones. They follow their character to the pharmacy where they are given the choice of buying hormones or looking around the pharmacy. The latter fleshes out the location, but it doesn’t advance the game state. The player has to choose hormones, making them share the same goals as the character.

But it turns out the player character, Ann, is poor and they need some quick cash. They are roped in by their crush, Sally, to try their hand at “sugaring”. Sally wants to drill into Ann’s head that they need to be comfortable taking the initiative and refuse to let the customer dictate what should be done in sex work. The player regains control of Ann in a food court and must take food samples until someone says no. That end-point is never reached; the dialog box of “Would you like a sample?” will keep popping up until Sally says it’s enough. The awkwardness lingers, but the point is well-taken: people can take from each other as much as they want.

The player will relive more and more of these traumatic memories as Ann becomes a sex worker and depends on it for their livelihood. They will walk home through a photorealistic rendition of the developer’s neighborhood, buy snacks at a 7-11 only to find that the character is thinking about the sexual activities necessary to justify those purchases, and realize that all meaningful choices that can be made are false.

If the player resonates with HFTGOOM, they will understand that this narrative is the only way these events could ever unfold. Contrary to narratives that blame survivors for their actions, the game’s design reinforces the lack of agency to show how limiting the choices can be in these desperate situations.

This design approach is similar to how Emily Short describes interactivity in so-called dynamic fiction, which is a kind of IF that allows some interaction but otherwise does not allow the reader to change the course of the story. She explains the appeal of such works like this:

The interaction in a dynamic fiction story is doing something else: it’s providing pacing, it’s creating a sense of identification with the protagonist, it’s eliciting complicity with what happens or demonstrating the futility of the protagonist’s experience.

In particular, she mentions how interactive horror fiction in this style is effective because she has to “inhabit that moment of doubt over and over again” as she clicks through the text.3 The same dynamic is present in titles like HFTGOOM where the interactivity doesn’t usually affect the progression or change the state of the game, but rather how the player relates to the character and the setting. Interaction allows players to take actions (even those explicitly ordained by the developer) and become complicit in what is happening in the game. Whatever happens on the screen is co-signed by them, regardless of how they feel about the game.

Of course, different games may be more or less successful at engaging the player, and there will be players who refuse to engage with the game because the interactivity presented doesn’t match their heuristic for a game. Strongly implied in these games is the need for players to play these games knowing that whatever subject matter is being explored is being done in good faith. This means that the intertwining of interactivity and complicity is always fragile: not everyone will take the leap of faith and accept this style of interactivity at face value.

But if players accept these premises of trauma-informed games, then there is some possibility that some of their strengths may come from hurting the player. As McCue admits:

I really basically just designed a machine to inflict trauma on people in a weird way, so that they would understand rejection, understand shame, and then accept me.4

If the rhetorical techniques5 they use to get the message across are so effective they hurt the player, then so be it. McCue justifies their “trauma machine” in another interview:

By having a machine have that conversation for me, I can explain myself once with all the agony that comes with it and then never technically have to do it again or something. That’s what HFTGOOM basically is, it’s a machine to help transfer that experience to the player a bit so they can understand me and hopefully accept me.6

In other words, interactive fiction like HFTGOOM is usually designed by developers to make their trauma legible for players. The game mechanics will ideally force them to work out the issues and come to a better understanding on their own. If successful, there will be no need for further agonizing explanations.

Strategies

To achieve this goal, developers must find ways to make players invested in their games. There are at least two commonly employed strategies that try to make this possible:

Simulation

The Archivist and the Revolution

In The Archivist and the Revolution by Autumn Chen, the player character is an archivist who has been laid off and pays rent by working as a freelance contractor recovering data from DNA. But the player also has the option to “cajole and beg for support” from two people. No matter what they do (or don’t do), the player character has to pay rent or risk becoming homeless.

While the player can choose to work in the archives or waste their time reading internet forums, the player character may become “too tired to do anything else.” Later on, they’ll face the possibility of running out of food in their apartment; they need to choose whether to buy food or “take what you need.” If the character gets sick and has no money, they may become too sick to work and worsen their situation. The player ends up juggling their character’s stamina, health, funds, and relationships.

But they can take a break from this exhausting routine, which may include helping the character perform a funerary ritual from the distant past:

You are in front of Lily’s gravestone, a small brown brick in a field of gray lichen. The name carved on the stone is illegible from years of scratches. Above the scratches, deepening grooves mark her real name.

The player may “scratch at the gravestone some more”:

With a key you deepen the grooves of her true name, and add new scratches to her “legal” name. Since she never had dignity in life, the least you could do was give her some modicum of dignity in death.

Her family was the most supportive family of all the nonbinaries you had ever encountered. Still they buried her under the name they had chosen, and not the name she chose.

This is not a required scene. The player character admits that they don’t know Lily and believes she would’ve considered them “a traitor for submitting [themselves] to the authoritarian capitalist patriarchal system.”

But this optional event is powerful because the player chooses to read it. They may not know how the event will turn out, but they’ve calculated that the cost of one turn is still worth the waste.

The player character is able to mourn now. They scratch the slurs off the tombstones and write the names they remember on paper to burn as an offering. The scene ends with the last choice, “You are alive, and you hope to stay that way.”

A simulationist approach places the player inside the game and asks them to interact in the way the game wants them to. This could mean going through the rhythms of someone’s life, but it doesn’t have to be a full-blown life simulator. As long as there are choices and the player is forced to go through the motions, the interaction makes them identify with the character and share the stakes.

DO NOT KILL THE SLEEPING BEAST

This is best seen in a short game like DO NOT KILL THE SLEEPING BEAST, a game about substance addiction.

It begins by saying, “there’s a monster in your closet, but you know that already.” The narration addresses a family history of addiction and then, the player character’s struggle to contain it in the language of chivalry:

you crawl from your bed in the dead of night, scaling it like a mountain; even at seventeen, you’ve never felt so small. the descent, the climb out of your warm bed and into the dragon’s den, is a bit like playing knights and princesses when you were much younger. you, you reported to the king— but the king isn’t here.

Abandoned by the king, the only thing “loyal to the knight” is the monster who is “his keeper.” The player character finds the monster:

your fingers curl like claws, tugging at the monster’s keep until it is revealed: it sings to you, like a siren, in the clinking of glass bottles and the hiss of a bottle cap, popped.

The monster pressed to their lips:

crooning, it cries out, “why are you alone?”
nobody called
nobody came
nobody cares

Any choice leads to the same outcome:

“maybe it’s you,” it snarls, “maybe you’re unlovable.”
maybe so
maybe no
get me out of here

The same happens here:

“the king should know better,” it says, scolding.
i trust him
i love him
i want to go home

The narration reminds them they could kill the monster, but the character cannot. While “the beast clutches at your throat and makes it hard to scream,” it treats the character with affection. This is something the king could never give.

Nevertheless, the player character sends a message to the king that they love them, and the game loops with this final message:

tonight, you do not kill the sleeping beast. maybe you’ll be stronger tomorrow.

The interactivity (or lack thereof) in this game illustrates the difficulty of overcoming drug addiction. The player has no choice but to accept the monster and when there are choices, it’s about how lonely the player character is. They’ve seen all the moves and so, they’re forced to realize that there’s little the character can do to slay the monster.

LAKE ADVENTURE

LAKE ADVENTURE, on the other hand, simulates the experience and feel of old text adventure games to explore repressed memories of the past. Ed Hughes has discovered an “ancient” game he made when he was thirteen, but couldn’t get it to work. He feels lonely during the COVID quarantine, so he asks the player who works in his company’s IT department to play the game for him while he’s on call.

However, the player will soon encounter disconcerting descriptions that hint at something deeper:

More Hall
You are in some more hall. Exits lead north, south, east, and west.
### Behold the glory of More Hall. Guess I felt I really had to map my house well. Yeah. Um, let’s see. I think it’s stairs to the south, sister’s room to the east, and a storage closet thing to the west. ###
>? e
You don’t want to go into your sister’s room.

While this doesn’t bother Hughes, different actions in the same hallway will surprise him:

>? s
A mystical veil of magic prevents you from going south! Try west first!
### Um, okay? ###

When the player finds a Memory Shard and puts it in the vase as the game requested,

As you drop the shard into the vase, it seems like it disappears! But suddenly you have this strong memory ...
      	— HIT ANY KEY —
It’s a beautiful spring day. You and your 4-year-old sister are playing at a park near your house. You’re pushing her high on the swings, and she’s laughing and having a great time!
      	— HIT ANY KEY —
### Uff. Um, okay. Okay.
### No. No, I’m fine. It’s just ... shit. It’s coming back to me. Yeah, the game. You don’t know anything about my sister, do you? Yeah. That’s me and that’s her. Look, this—this might turn into a wild ride. Fair warning. I wrote this game when I was thirteen or whatever, and then I ... I went back to it when I was older. Yeah, kinda. Like revising it. I added stuff. I have no idea what version this—no, no. I mean, we’ve known each other for a while, right? I ... I’d like to keep going. As long as you would, that is.
### Yeah. The girl in the game is my sister. She might ... she might show up again. ###
      	— HIT ANY KEY —

As the player gets deeper into the game, Hughes begins to realize that this game is the place where he has bottled up his feelings about the world around him. His grief over the loss of his loved ones, his fantasies of revenge, and what he aspires to be are clearly laid out in the game. A sudden realization dawns on him: he may be in his forties, but he has not overcome his trauma.

Meanwhile, the player is just playing the game he made. Unlike most of the other games discussed here, the player does not directly identify with the traumatized character. They may sympathize, but they’re also aware of the distance because they’re playing an old computer game far away from Hughes.

As a result, it’s hard not to play LAKE ADVENTURE and feel complicit in hurting Hughes. Players may be typing the same well-worn commands they’ve always typed in other text adventure games, but those same inputs are unearthing his darker memories. The game may have the same amount of player freedom and agency found in other parser games, but there are no commands that go outside the parser game framework to calm him down. Unlike the other games described here where limited choices set by the developers immerse the player in the traumatic experience, the players have inadvertently retraumatized Hughes by simply playing the game. Their curiosity as parser players makes Hughes suffer. They can only continue playing Hughes’s traumatic memories as a text adventure game or stop.

Simulations, large or small, are effective because they lay out the choices and let the player choose. The player cannot go beyond what the simulation has offered, so they have to reckon with the consequences. Only then will they begin to identify how trauma affects everyday life.

Ellipsis

Sting

Sting is an interactive memoir by Mike Russo about growing up in New England and his memories with his twin sister Liz. The game starts like this:

Port Washington, NY — 1985
Mom said you and Liz can play for ten more minutes, because that’s how long it is until lunchtime. Sometimes ten minutes feels very long and sometimes it feels very short.

The player character can check their surroundings, but their interaction is limited by fading memories:

> x swing
Wait, there wasn’t a swing set yet when this happened — my mistake.

Each of the six vignettes is punctuated by a bee sting experienced by Russo. After each sting, the story jumps forward in time to follow the sibling relationship between Russo and Liz.

In the third vignette, the player character is hanging out with his buddies, but he is also very shy about talking to his crush, Laura. She is the central character of this chapter and never appears in the story again, except for a brief mention in the final vignette. Instead, Russo can talk to Liz about how to get the courage to talk to girls. The player learns more about Liz as a close friend, Russo growing up, and the symbolic meaning of the bee sting than Laura herself.

The player also has some freedom to interact with the game but cannot go beyond the contours of the memory. In the second vignette, the player is plunged into a sailing section where Liz screams at or praises Russo’s actions. Whether the player succeeds or not is not really relevant to the story as the scene is more about how these twins communicate with each other and the bee sting.

In fact, the final vignette allows the player to correctly or incorrectly say what Russo thought happened in the second vignette. It’s as if Sting is trying to say that even as we relive these cherished memories, they may be wrong, and that’s okay. What matters is what we make of them.

The final vignette reveals that Liz has recently passed away from cancer and Russo’s family is expecting a child. Liz’s absence is clearly felt by Russo and his spouse because she has made an impact on them. However, her influence can only be guessed at by the player; it is not explicitly written into the work. Russo writes in his author’s notes that “she was an amazing person and trying to pin her down with the few meager glimpses these anecdotes afford would be impossible”7 and he is deliberately avoiding the pitfalls of works that create art out of real life tragedies. Words and stories cannot capture the magic of Liz.

Instead, Russo invites players to join him in reflecting on his life, processing his grief, and his coming of age. The bee stings mark the beginning and end of Russo’s story with Liz. For the player, the intentional omission requires speculation about the depth of their relationship and how Russo has learned to grieve. What they don’t see paradoxically becomes more concrete. The bee stings take on new meanings, and what’s already on the page helps the player contextualize what’s being paved over. Brevity allows the unwritten to speak louder than words.

This is elliptical writing, a method of skipping over a portion of the narrative to heighten its significance. When used in interactive fiction, the transitions (or lack thereof) force the player to make sense of what the story is trying to evoke through that absence.8 Its interactive elements suggest that there must be something relevant in them.9 The player is forced to speculate about what is unwritten.

Sting relies on this style of writing to talk about how important Liz is to Russo without overtly sentimentalizing their relationship. Her presence and absence are clearly felt through the passage of time and the glimpses the story has provided. And yet, it can only be felt, not written. To write something down is to limit interpretations to one way and leave a solid trail. Grief cannot be described by prose but by absence, by what might have been. It has to be opened up by the players who are willing to engage and participate in processing the loss together.

After the Accident

There are other works about trauma that employ ellipsis in different ways. After the Accident by Amanda Walker features episodic and elliptical storytelling segmented by parser input. After the intro, the game starts out like this:

Side of the Road
The sunset is laid out before you, throwing gold stripes on the black asphalt, the pink and gold and soft blue light swirling against the mountains, the barren landscape, touching the scrub grass, the roadside litter, the barbed wire fences, lining the road with fire. You don't know why you are here, your skin stinging, eyes fixed on the sunset.
There's something trying to get into your head. Or out, you're not sure. Something pressing on you. It's a memory, but you can't catch hold of it. This is wrong, something very wrong here, what is it, where is it.
>x memory
You can't see it, but you can feel it, brushing against you, coiling on your shoulder, whispering in your ear. You want to tame it, to remember...
>remember memory
You try to remember, but your head is aching and you can't quite grasp it, not yet, you're not ready for it, there's something wrong with you, with your body, pain as if from some distance but coming nearer, sharp teeth snapping.

The player needs to explore their surroundings before the player character can properly remember their memories. For example:

>x myself
You look down at yourself. Your hands and arms glitter, the last rays of sun catching like diamonds on the hundreds of tiny shards of glass bristling from the sleeves of your cornflower blue angora sweater, from the backs of your hands. Your bare feet are bleeding.
You weren't here. Now you are, with a memory fluttering around you, whispering softly.

Once enough observation is done, the player can proceed to

>remember
You shut your eyes and squeeze them tight, tears of effort slipping from them, groping at the memory. Grasping.
Finding the edge of the memory.
Pulling at it with the fingertips of your will.
Until it breaks over you…
In the Car: One Hour Ago
The echo of angry words hangs heavy. It's cold in here. The heater is broken and the day is chilly. He's driving, hands caressing the wheel because even though the car is a piece of shit, he bought it, it's his, he loves it. He's saying something to you, an edge in his voice, and you can't quite hear. The sun is going down through the windshield, the impossibly bright winter light making you squint to see the road ahead, unfurling like a ribbon under you, the speed blurring the barbed wire fences you pass.
He's talking to you, but you can't quite hear.

This is the first of several flashbacks that tell the story of the accident and the relationship between the two characters. The main goal is to find the commands that further clarify the scene:

>listen
You turn to him and strain to hear. He sounds irritated,
(that's right you were fighting sniping at each other working up a conflagration)
 
his voice a weapon, saying "... must be cold. It's freezing. Where's your sweater? Can't you at least pretend to have some sense?"
And the memory widens: your sweater is here.

The description will also point out important objects to interact with:

>x sweater
A cornflower blue angora sweater, soft and thick.
>wear sweater
(first taking the angora sweater)
You put on the angora sweater, soft against your arms, a gift from him after an earlier fight so that it's both a haven and a trap. He says, "Find a song on the radio so we don't have to talk anymore."
And the memory deepens: you can see the radio in the dashboard.

The player will have to follow a few more instructions from the player character’s partner before he asks for his sunglasses.

>give sunglasses to him
You hand him the sunglasses and he fumbles them, the light streaming in, and it's blinding, and the air is filled with noise and you hear a snatch of the song about a landslide, about an avalanche, and then you are in the avalanche and your eyes are filled with stars and light and dark and you are floating and then and then and then
PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE

Following that command will return the player to the present:

Side of the Road
The sun is almost down, the last light like gold stripes scattered on the road, the sky above you darkening, the cold snapping at your bare feet. You were in the car with him. Now you are here. Something happened. It's behind you on the road, the thing that happened.
You can see a backpack, an empty bottle and some sunglasses here.

The player may then interact with the object and remember to go back in time. However, instead of remembering important details of what just happened, the player character goes further into the past:

Kitchen: Three Months Ago
It's Autumn. He's standing by the window, watching the rain stream against the glass, looking out to the fields glassed over with water, flooded, impassable. You're stuck here in his father's farm house with him, and the fight last night was so terrible, such unforgivable things said as the rain roared and the wind shrieked and you hissed and spat at each other. But you have to forgive him, forgive yourself. You're making up and there's that feeling of capitulating, of losing something, losing yourself. But you want to fix it, so here you are at the counter, with a bowl and ingredients for making bread, your gift of atonement.
The memory shows you the sink, the cabinets, the refrigerator, your own hands putting out the ingredients: flour, milk, yeast.
He's standing by the window, watching the rain stream against the glass.
The rain roars on the tin roof.

The player must now follow the player character’s instructions to make bread. This may seem like a strange change of direction, but this memory will prove to be very important. If the player character and her partner are arguing, they can reconcile by giving each other gifts: the player character gives him freshly baked bread, and he gives her the angola sweater she’ll be wearing in the first memory.

After the player returns to the present and gets into the car, the next memory to be recalled takes place six months ago. And later, when they first met seven months ago. Rather than exploring the accident, these storylets and the elliptical connections players make flesh out the characters’ troubled but resilient relationship.

Focusing on their everyday life together means that the trauma of the accident carries more emotional weight. Instead of writing out gory descriptions of what happened, the work makes players think about how those days can only be memories and nothing more. It is the aftermath, not the accident, that defines the traumatic experience for the player character, and the aftermath is presented as the culmination of all these fragmented memories.

After the Accident is a visceral game because it knows that the acts of remembering and connecting memories are real struggles that trauma survivors have to go through. What seems random at first is actually poignant to those who have experienced the whole game. The car crash forces the player character to reevaluate her life with her spouse. However, the immediacy of this traumatic event does not result in a neat narrative sequence of events. Memories are fractured and do not make chronological sense. After the Accident situates the sudden loss of a loved one in the context of a violent accident, and shows how grief in these situations is impalpable. Without explicitly writing it down, the game manages to replicate the feeling of something irreplaceable being gone through the clever use of ellipsis.

My Pseudo-Dementia Exhibition

On the other hand, My Pseudo-Dementia Exhibition is a virtual museum that tells its entire story through curated artifacts. Players encounter notebooks and photographs that represent the author’s time in mental institutions; they move slowly through each exhibit and have to create connections between objects that catch their attention.

This creates an affective distance that is not present in something like Winter in June. Instead, it’s most similar to LAKE ADVENTURE where players are given some distance to observe the game elements. As Mike Russo writes, “it’s a reflective distance that invites the player to engage with what they’re seeing and reading, and then think about it.”10 It is up to the player to decide how much they want to understand the symbolism of the stamps, old bags, and artwork.

For example, the player may encounter a “little plushie” of a fictional band member given to the author by his twin:

I brought Little Seki everywhere with me during my time at every single facility, carrying him inside of my bag. When I got stressed in group or therapy, I brought out Little Seki to both think of Eliana and use his fluffy head as a stress toy. Having that plush helped me think of the person who loves me most in the world, and was an anchor for me, especially when things got really hard.

North of the Little Seki exhibit is an art display called “Sailor Souls Forever!”:

While at TR, I developed a new story concept, based around the idea of fictional bands (like Gorillaz, for example). I drew these four characters who were brought together to be in a band called Sailor Souls, all of whom have their own inner demons that are finally able to be dealt with, thanks to the power of found family.

The introductory statement in this section of the gallery doesn’t refer to fictional bands. Other objects include a notebook, sketchbook, and “the first of many, many recovery folders”. However, there is a group of paintings titled “Leo Tolstoy Was Right About Families”:

One of the projects I devoted myself to was painting all 4 of my family members—or at least⇨, my family members in the ways that I saw them—which included myself. Each of us is represented by a different color: I’m sea green; Eliana is orange; my mother is bronze; and my father is blue.

The text goes on to describe the author as “a phoenix rising, with a shining center that is painted with the transgender & nonbinary flags”, his twin as a musical note with the text “do no harm, take no shit”, his mother as “a stethoscope” whose “heart is dark & murky, with clawed hands coming out of it, which make wounds that make a river of blood”, and his father with the same darkness as his mother but disguised as a “happy, smiling face”.

It may be a stretch to associate fictional bands with unhappy families in most circumstances, but phrases like “found families” seem to suggest a connection. These three exhibits read like a longing for relationships beyond the nuclear family. The doll captures this tension because it represents the author’s only ally and the fantasy of found families in anime bands. This reading may not be expected by the author, but what is certain is that the game provides an environment for contemplating these objects and their connections.

There are only elliptical connections in My Pseudo-Dementia Exhibition and that is the work’s greatest strength. After walking through the museum, the player is only left with their own interpretation. Not only are their readings likely valid but they are all engagements in the author’s terms. The game harnesses the freedom of interpretation to help clarify the dimensions of trauma.

The power of ellipsis, then, comes from the player’s own ability to make sense of what they have just played. They have to read between the lines and draw their own conclusions without realizing they’re being guided by the author.

Conclusion: On Games About Trauma

When it comes to interactive fiction titles that explore trauma, developers and critics hope that players will have an experience that redefines their understanding of trauma.

This hearkens back to age-old debates about the impact of art on us. For example, the literary theorist Wolfgang Iser sees something emancipatory in the way we read novels. Iser argues that when authors allow texts to develop ambiguity, they are actually guiding readers to fill in the blanks. As readers try to grasp for meaning, the text may surprise them with a twist and force them to rethink the situation. What was once familiar became unfamiliar, especially in the field of realistic literature where they interrogated the norms of their time. This mental activity of reconstituting the “reality” of novels again and again according to new discoveries allows readers to begin to see norms for what they are.11 This includes how readers see themselves, because literature, by allowing readers to be someone else, provides the necessary distance to judge one’s own behavior.12 Fiction thus has practical value: readers will not only learn to examine the social construction of reality and knowledge but also develop self-awareness.

A similar optimism is shared by Mary Ann Buckles in her dissertation on the first interactive fiction title, ADVENTURE. She recognizes that “the process of reading interactive fiction is morally grounded and can be a playful way of gaining a deeper understanding of oneself.”13 The world that the author constructed can be read in different ways by the potential reader because “readers must make the text happen.”14 Interactive fiction is not complete without an active reader whose “fairly sophisticated assumptions” will complete the text. Otherwise, they are simply disconnected puzzles. It’s why Buckles argues that

Many readers get intensely, emotionally involved in fictional events because of their step-by-step activity in exploring the fictional world and mastering the fictional events. This can unlock strong feelings and memories of associated events from their own lives which they then build into the imaginary world they are creating.15

Both Iser and Buckley claim that the way readers and players engage with media causes them to bring something from the world they’re in to these texts. Perhaps then, they’ll think about the world they’re in. They could, in Augusto Boal’s words, participate in a “rehearsal for the revolution.”16

It’s not surprising then that creators like swanchime see the potential of trauma IF “to humanize the most vulnerable to systemic and pervasive dehumanization.” These games are worlds: “the dev’s autobiographical world. the world of their experience. the world of their life.” If players “choose to believe”, their “heart [will open] to the depth of breadth of human experience beyond [their] own.”17 This brief moment when players can imagine what it would feel like to be traumatized and oppressed seems to be a glimmer of hope in communicating the unspeakable.

But while I am touched by these games and there are indeed people who have reformed their outlook, I doubt its impact on the larger community of players who play mainstream games and occasionally encounter these titles. These are the works that are “caught between ‘everything is horrible’, ‘everything is survivable’, and ‘this is too hard to talk about'” in the first place18. Not only are they difficult to discuss in public but their subject matter requires faith and trust from players. In fact, there’s a good chance that the game will actually succeed in making trauma legible and the players will choose to reject it. It is easy to imagine them playing these games and getting nothing out of the games or, in exceptional cases, being so effective that the games are heavily censored. Knowledge and understanding are not inevitable conclusions; on the contrary, we should expect hostility because trauma is still a stigma in our world. No amount of theorizing will convince a hostile world to think otherwise.

But while these games may not elicit empathy, they do achieve a more important goal: they shed light on the invisible pain of trauma. Whether one accepts or rejects the message of these games, they have to read it. Rather than wishing for some transformative experience for the player, I argue the power of these games comes from rendering trauma legible. Silence becomes unacceptable; we have to face these issues and talk about them. Even the denials imply some recognition of the trauma.

For my part, I’ve made my fair share of games like June 1998, Sydney, and Chinese Family Dinner Moment that explore uncomfortable situations and repressed memories. I don’t see myself as someone who wants to make these games forever, but they allow me to communicate something I can’t express in plain language. Very few people will connect with my games, but I’m happy when players write what they think of the game and notice the effort I’ve put into it. People don’t just want to be heard – they want to be recognized as peers.

And in the context of these games, recognizing trauma as a real thing that exists requires strategies that make it legible. Through the use of simulationist and elliptical techniques, trauma becomes something concrete and perceivable. Simulation techniques constrain the player’s actions while elliptical techniques allow space and freedom for the player’s imagination. In other words, trauma-informed games simultaneously minimize and maximize their depictions of trauma for the player to experience. This paradoxical approach recreates what it is like to hyperfixate on some details while ignoring others, leading to a better understanding of what can and cannot be talked about trauma. Trauma is everything and nothing at the same time. It is a peculiar dynamic that can only be explored through contradictory strategies.

Our interaction with the game mechanics fleshes trauma out, rendering it more and more legible. They make it impossible for players to avert their eyes without closing the game, and they allow stories to respect the indeterminate nature of trauma without sacrificing clarity.

We cannot deny the existence of these traumas because the games are designed to make us think about them. The conclusions that players reach may not be what the developers anticipated, but they are an understanding that has grown organically from playing the games. Whatever the outcome, they are responses to traumas explored within the games.

What comes next is beyond the scope of this article, but it is this first step — legibility — that starts the whole discussion. Once the word is out there, the status quo cannot resist the need to say something about it. No one can predict how toxic or productive these discourses will be, but one thing is certain: people will always want to speak up about how they have suffered from trauma.

The next step is to respond to what’s in front of us.

Footnotes

1 https://indietsushin.net/posts/2023-05-21-Taylor-McCue-Fuglekongerige-HFTGOOM-en

2 McCue says the intent is to prime the player “to not view it as like porn, but as like, disorienting.” https://www.xrmust.com/xrmagazine/taylor-mccue-he-fucked-the-girl-out-of-me/

3 https://emshort.blog/2015/11/17/a-couple-examples-of-dynamic-fiction-and-why-they-work/. I thank Aster for bringing this connection up as editorial feedback for the article.

4 Indie Tsushin interview with Taylor McCue.

5 I am thinking of Ian Bogost’s “procedural rhetoric” found in books like Persuasive Games. While I agree that games can persuade players by making them go through procedures, I find this analysis lacking and could be supplemented by theories on how people experience art.

6 Indie Tsushin interview with Taylor McCue.

7 https://intfiction.org/t/sting-authors-notes/53479

8 I am greatly indebted to Staging Memories: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness by Abé Mark Nornes and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, which analyzes narrative techniques such as ellipsis in the film. Wolfgang Iser, in The Implied Reader and The Act of Reading, has also described this feature as “blanks”, “vacancies”, and “places of indeterminacies” depending on the context. While I find this distinction useful, indeterminacy doesn’t feel precise when applied to writing techniques.

9 In hypertext, Tosca discusses how links can indicate to the player that “there is meaning here: explore the context.” I extrapolate this insight to the broader world of interactive fiction. See: Tosca, Susana Pajares. “A pragmatics of links.” Hypertext ’00: Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM on Hypertext and Hypermedia, 2000, https://doi.org/10.1145/336296.336327. pp.80.

10 https://intfiction.org/t/mike-russos-if-comp-2023-reviews/64792/135

11 These are the key insights I’ve gleaned over from The Implied Reader and The Act of Reading by Wolfgang Iser.

12 Fluck, Winfried. “The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory.” New Literary History, vol. 31, no. 1, 2000, pp. 175–210.

13 Buckles, M.A. Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame “ADVENTURE”. pp.4

14 ibid., pp.178

15 ibid.

16 Augusto Boal’s famous quote found in pp.98 from the 2008 edition of The Theatre of the Oppressed.

17 swanchime, “A Working Thesis on Traumatic Interactive Fiction”. https://pancreas.gay/a-working-thesis-on-traumatic-interactive-fiction

18 This description originates from Nathalie Lawhead. See: http://www.nathalielawhead.com/candybox/real-talk-games-about-trauma-art-caught-between-everything-is-horrible-everything-is-survivable-and-this-is-too-hard-to-talk-about

Thursday, 14. March 2024

Choice of Games LLC

Giveaway! Unlock tribes for free in Werewolf: The Apocalypse — The Book of Hungry Names

"Wardens and Furies" unlocks the options to play as a member of the Black Fury tribe or the Hart Warden tribe. Experience "Werewolf: The Apocalypse — The Book of Hungry Names" as one of the ruthless slayers of the Black Furies or the howling celebrants of the Hart Wardens. Hunt the wilds of New England with Gifts of divine archery, beast-speech, and the dark blessings of long-dead werewolves.

We’re super excited for the release of “Werewolf: The Apocalypse — The Book of Hungry Names” on April 25th!

As a special offer, if you purchase “Werewolf: The Apocalypse — The Book of Hungry Names” by 11:59pm PDT on April 26th, we’ll give you the “Wardens and Furies” DLC, featuring the options to play as a member of the Black Fury tribe or the Hart Warden tribe, for free.

Experience “Werewolf: The Apocalypse — The Book of Hungry Names” as one of the ruthless slayers of the Black Furies or the howling celebrants of the Hart Wardens. Hunt the wilds of New England with Gifts of divine archery, beast-speech, and the dark blessings of long-dead werewolves.

Don’t forget to wishlist it on Steam or preregister on Google Play now! You can also pre-purchase the app on iOS.


Also: All our games are on sale on Steam this week as part of the Steam Spring Sale!

Tuesday, 12. March 2024

Zarf Updates

Oh, that's what happened to Kickstarter

A couple of years ago I wrote about "That Kickstarter news". The "news" was blockchain crap. I pointed out that an open-source protocol for crowdfunding project tracking was a pretty neat idea, but blockchain doesn't make it happen. To make ...

A couple of years ago I wrote about "That Kickstarter news". The "news" was blockchain crap.

I pointed out that an open-source protocol for crowdfunding project tracking was a pretty neat idea, but blockchain doesn't make it happen. To make it happen, you need a bunch of people of good will to sit down together and work out details. Then you need a trusted organization to run it. Kickstarter was well-situated to get that process started.

They didn't, though. Everybody yelled that blockchain was crap -- it wasn't just me. The company flailed for a while and then seemed to back off on their plan. Although they never disclaimed it completely.

So what was that all about? We now know, or have a good notion anyway, thanks to an article that appeared yesterday.

The stealth round totaled $100 million, according to people familiar with the deal. It was led by a16z crypto and included a handful of other smaller investors [...]

In return for the a16z largesse, Kickstarter would take its own crack at becoming a Web3 company. The grand but improbable plan called for shifting its entire platform onto a blockchain called Celo, another a16z portfolio company, where it would operate as an open-source protocol – akin to http or Bitcoin – rather than rely on the proprietary code model used by most tech firms.

-- "The untold story of Kickstarter’s crypto Hail Mary – and the secret $100 million a16z-led investment to save its fading brand", Leo Schwartz and Jessica Matthew, Fortune

So that's a simple story. Some finance bro from the blockchain department of Andreessen Horowitz turned up with a suitcase full of cash and said "Here, we'll pay you to become a Web3 company. It'll be great. PS: Use our blockchain."

Now it's not really that simple. The article notes that the funding round was in the form of a "tender offer", meaning the money went to shareholders -- including employees -- rather than to Kickstarter as a company. As a public benefit corporation, Kickstarter had pledged to never IPO or seek acquisition, leaving employee stock options as ghost paper. This was an offer to cash some of them out on the spot.

Also, the plan wasn't a commitment to go blockchain. Nonetheless, it was pretty clear that management had bought in. It was also clear that nobody else had.

Most of the community outrage fell upon employees, who expressed their disbelief in group chats and swapped sardonic jokes about Kickstarter NFTs. Meanwhile, the company’s decision to use an outside consultant to announce the blockchain news meant that many staffers were ill-prepared for the sudden torrent of vitriol from users. And given Kickstarter’s checkered history of launching new initiatives, doubt spread about its capacity to pull off a major technology pivot. “It was inconceivable,” said one employee.

The blockchain plan seemed impossible – and that would soon prove to be the case. Within months, executives stopped bringing it up at all, and no section of the platform was ever converted to run on a blockchain. “It felt like Drip,” said one former employee, referring to the ill-fated Patreon competitor. “Announcing this thing, and then just abandoning it.”

-- ibid.

You can say "Well, great -- the employees got cash and the company never went Web3 at all. Win/win!" Or win/status-quo, I suppose.

But then there's the reputational hit. Big projects started shying away from Kickstarter and going to BackerKit or other competitors. I, personally, never backed another Kickstarter after the blockchain announcement. We all have the sense that Kickstarter is in the doldrums. None of this is really news.

The interesting angle is that, from the company's point of view, they were already in the doldrums. Thus the title of the Fortune article: "Kickstarter’s crypto Hail Mary".

But a dozen years after its launch, Kickstarter had lost its cachet of cool and churned through CEOs. The Kickstarter of 2021 had little to offer would-be investors but headaches. Growth had flatlined at the startup, which made its money by taking a small cut when a project on its platform met a funding threshold, and its onetime feel-good culture had become toxic in the wake of a bitter unionization drive. New shareholders would be inheriting ownership of a brand that many felt had turned stale.

And:

Even though Kickstarter figured out early on how to make a profit, the company could never seem to take off. The number of projects plateaued in 2016 at around 19,000 per year – with no signs of growth. Dollars raised on the platform, where Kickstarter got its cut, would fluctuate year-to-year and peaked during the pandemic at nearly $814 million.

An early investor told Fortune that Kickstarter was never able to find an equilibrium between growth and staying true to its new charter, which committed it to socially worthy but expensive or difficult obligations. Despite the noble mission, employees struggled to find paths for career growth or advance their own initiatives as the company’s competing priorities bred dysfunction.

Growth! The assumption is as invisible as air -- at least, if you're reading a magazine called Fortune. Does Kickstarter have to grow? Or can it just keep supporting 19,000 projects a year, making enough profit to pay its employees and its social pledges? That's a social benefit, right? Nothing in the charter says Kickstarter has to be the biggest crowdfunding platform, or the hottest.

I don't know the whole story. The article talks about "dysfunction". There was the whole unionization mess. I can easily believe that morale was lousy, that people felt the company was in a rut.

I just wish they could have asked: what does success look like when it's not the divine windstorm of venture capital? Can we just do a good job? I miss when companies did a good job.

I am not deep enough in the business to know what Kickstarter "really needs". The open-source information-sharing protocol still sounds nifty! A nonprofit organization connecting information Kickstarter, BackerKit, IndieGogo and other platforms. Would it be useful? I don't know, geez, but people like data.

(If that open-source data stream existed, Microsoft would be using it to train LLMs. I can't keep up with the enshittification cycle, either.)

Then there's the Patreon-style model: supporting lots of creators with small consistent payments, rather than per-project bursts of cash. You can tell that's a tough nut. Patreon has been thrashing for years to try to keep it working. Kickstarter tried to enter that race in 2017 with Drip; it failed. Twice. I doubt they're eager to take another run at it, but the problem still needs solving.

Well, I went over this stuff in my original post. Civic infrastructure. Emergency aid. Effective altruism charity management. There's room for new models. What we know, for sure, is that venture capital is unable to solve these problems. "Investment" means you are not acting for the public benefit; you are not solving anything except maybe unprofitability. That's the unspoken message behind the entire Kickstarter article, although the authors may not be able to see it.

(Do I even need to point out OpenAI, that attempted compromise between the non-profit and tech-capital world? Spoiler: the non-profit got junked as soon as it interfered with profit.)

But there should still be a way to employ people to act for the common good. To build valuable tools. To leave value "on the table", that is -- where the table is society.


top expert

Good News, Bad News

“Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight” has been delayed. can spring be far behind? As I recently discussed elsewhere, mental health problems have significantly delayed my creative efforts for a handful of months. That includes production of “Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight,” the game that I have been writing about here. Because my plans […]

“Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight” has been delayed.

can spring be far behind?

As I recently discussed elsewhere, mental health problems have significantly delayed my creative efforts for a handful of months. That includes production of “Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight,” the game that I have been writing about here. Because my plans for publishing it are unusual, these lost months will have some unfortunate consequences.

What were these unusual circumstances? You’re looking at them! Posting so much source code for a work in progress will typically disqualify it from participating in community events, but Spring Thing is special. It would have been welcomed as a “back garden” entry in this year’s festival, but I can no longer complete the project in time. Since people really don’t play new games outside of competitions and festivals, I have no choice but to push the project out a year.

now what.

I’ll shift my attention to another work in progress, my “cave game” project.

cave game FAQs

  • What is this cave game?
    • The cave game is a large text adventure game inspired by the world, characters, and gameplay of the Zork trilogy.
  • Do I need to play the Zork games to enjoy the cave game?
    • No! Though you may enjoy some references, it is more important that you know that Zork is a famous thing. There will be some fan fiction stories to help ease you in.
  • When will the cave game be released?
    • That’s a very good question! I would like to release it as part of the annual IF Competition. However, I think that has been moved up to make room for something else? Or not, I’m not sure. There sure are a lot of IF things happening all the time! Who can keep track! …but this game will either be released in IF Competition this year or else Spring Thing of next year.
  • Will the cave game be documented as extensively as “Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight” was, and will complete source code be available?
    • Sadly, no. I do not think that would be acceptable for an IF Comp game. Or for a Spring Thing main festival entry, for that matter. I will have to keep most of my source private and make far fewer posts. But I will continue documenting my process and discussing it along the way. I will release the complete source code after publication, just as I have done with Repeat the Ending.
  • Can I play test your game?

More soon! Thanks for sticking around.

-d

Monday, 11. March 2024

Choice of Games LLC

“Werewolf: The Apocalypse — The Book of Hungry Names” Demo Available Now!

We're super excited for the release of "Werewolf: The Apocalypse — The Book of Hungry Names" on April 25th! Today, for the first time, you can try the free demo!

We’re super excited for the release of “Werewolf: The Apocalypse — The Book of Hungry Names” on April 25th!

Today, for the first time, you can try the free demo!

Don’t forget to wishlist it on Steam or preregister on Google Play now! You can also pre-purchase the app on iOS.

Thursday, 07. March 2024

Choice of Games LLC

Tale of Two Cranes—Reach your magical destiny and tangle with your rival in mythic ancient China!

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play! Fulfill your epic destiny in mythic ancient China! Lead armies, wield magic, and put an emperor on the throne—or become the emperor yourself! Tale of Two Cranes is a 750,000-word interactive epic historical fantasy novel by Michelle Balaban and Stephanie Balaban, winner of 2nd prize in the 2018 Choice of Games Contest for Interactive Novels.  It’s entire

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Tale of Two Cranes

Fulfill your epic destiny in mythic ancient China! Lead armies, wield magic, and put an emperor on the throne—or become the emperor yourself!

Tale of Two Cranes is a 750,000-word interactive epic historical fantasy novel by Michelle Balaban and Stephanie Balaban, winner of 2nd prize in the 2018 Choice of Games Contest for Interactive Novels.  It’s entirely text based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

The mighty Qin dynasty has fallen. As the land breaks into warring states, everyone must choose their side in the growing civil war. 

Within this epic turmoil, you have been chosen to fulfill a grand but mysterious destiny. You are a Yǒngshì warrior, bonded with a heavenly spirit that grants you magical powers, and trained since childhood in the arts of battle. Your spirit is greater than any Yǒngshì has ever been: you are the mortal link to the Red-Crowned Crane, a mystical patron unique among all of the heavens…or so you thought. As war rises around you, you discover that there is a rival: Chan Ming, bonded to the Other Crane, is the only person who could ever match your power—or he might even exceed it.

Your mystical power can sway the course of the war and determine who will be the next emperor. Whose faction will you choose: Liu Bang, a charismatic lord beloved by the people; or Xiang Yu, a veteran of war respected by the military? Can you navigate the politics of the Imperial court, or will you gather your power in seclusion at your country estate? When China’s enemies encroach from the northern steppes, can you negotiate with them to call a truce – or even win them over as allies? Will you prove your loyalty to the new Emperor, or will you betray your allies at every turn? Uncover conspiracies of spies, trace the source of rebellions and mutinies, blackmail an Empress, marry into the Imperial family to become the power behind the throne—or even become the Emperor yourself!

And through it all, cross paths and swords with your rival, the Other Crane. Will you defeat him in an epic battle for the ages, or will you join him and create the most powerful mystical partnership the realm has ever known? 

  • Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, bi, or asexual.
  • Find romance amongst your six closest allies or opt for an arranged marriage.
  • Choose from four magical classes: mystic, militant, sage or strategist.
  • Unravel the mystery of your mystical link to the Crane and discover the truth behind your unique connection to a fellow warrior.
  • Fight epic battles across a landscape inspired by the Warring States period of ancient China.
  • Build your personal power, customizing your estate to create a place specializing in military training, agriculture, spiritual enlightenment, scholarship, commerce, and more!
  • Master the Imperial court to propel yourself into the administration, nobility, or even to become ruler of all China! 

Your destiny calls, and a new dynasty awaits!

Tale of Two Cranes is 33% off until March 14th!

Michelle and Stephanie developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.


Divine Ascension—Can you ascend to a higher level of divinity?

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play! Divine Ascension is 40% off until March 14th! Teemu developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a sh

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Divine Ascension

As a Minor Deity, you have a large Domain of sapient beings to rule over as you see fit. Can you gather enough faith to ascend to a higher level of divinity?

Divine Ascension is a thrilling 41,000-word interactive fantasy novel by Teemu Salminen, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

  • Play as an all-powerful deity with total control over your Domain.
  • Interact with six other Minor Deities, each with their own realm.
  • Gather faith, divinity and power to protect or use those who have faith in you.
  • Use your divine powers to bless or destroy your targets.
  • Experience several possible endings – based on the choices you made during the story.

Your choices will decide the fate of your world!

Divine Ascension is 40% off until March 14th!

Teemu developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.

Wednesday, 06. March 2024

Renga in Blue

Magical Journey: For Beginners and Experts Simultaneously

(Continued from my previous post.) Previously, we’ve encountered Softside magazine issue 47 (August 1982) with the game Operation: Sabotage. The same issue had a piece by Peter Kirsch entitled Anatomy of an Adventure. In it he dissects his framework in BASIC that he has used for all his games up to that point: Early in […]

(Continued from my previous post.)

Previously, we’ve encountered Softside magazine issue 47 (August 1982) with the game Operation: Sabotage. The same issue had a piece by Peter Kirsch entitled Anatomy of an Adventure.

In it he dissects his framework in BASIC that he has used for all his games up to that point:

Early in my adventure writing career, I created an adventure interpreter, or skeleton, as I call it, to serve as the backbone of each of my adventures. It has since been updated many times (now at version 4), but basically remains the same tool.

Magical Journey is clearly version 1, as the same skeleton structure of that game is clearly similar to the general structure Kirsch describes. I’ll go into it in a moment, but a few points from the article:

  • He gets introduced as “author of most of SoftSide’s Adventure of the Month series.” Alas there is no further biographical information.
  • He notes “The days of simply finding treasure and returning it to a storage location are gone forever.” which is a curious comment given how many Treasure Hunts there still are in 1982, but Kirsch got it out of his system back in 1980.
  • He tries different layouts before putting “a final version of my adventure map on a giant piece of heavy paper.”
  • He ran out of memory in writing Titanic Adventure and had to make cuts.
  • His games eventually all had ports for TRS-80, Apple II, and Atari; for making the Atari port used a special routine since the Atari BASIC doesn’t support string array, making a single string and treating it as an array by cutting the part he needs.
  • His parser on TRS-80 and Apple II uses the last three letters. He explains this “alleviates some of the annoying keyboard bounce in the TRS-80”. His Atari parser uses the first three letters because of the Atari string array issue meaning he makes the strings with padding. (I’ve played most of the Kirsch games on Atari, which explains why I didn’t recognize the last-three-letters style parser.)
  • He found Atari BASIC easier to debug because he could change something and still keep running the program, unlike on Apple on Atari.
  • Applesoft BASIC has the issue where if you use A has a variable and you write it before a THEN statement it interprets ATHEN as the command “AT”, so parentheses are required.

For the skeleton, he does something relatively distinct from other BASIC authors to start things off:

He has every single room description as a PRINT statement, and manually sets room exits along with these statements. From Magical Journey, where A is the variable which indicates the room the player is in:

10 IFDT=1THEN320ELSEONAGOTO11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81,82,83,84,85,86
11 PRINT”IN A FOREST.”:W=1:N=3:E=1:S=1:GOTO350
12 PRINT”ON TOP OF A TREE.”:D=1:GOTO350
13 PRINT”AT THE BASE OF A MOUNTAIN.”:S=1:E=4:GOTO350
14 PRINT”ON AN OPEN PASTURE.”:W=3:GOTO350
15 PRINT”ON TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN.”:D=3:GOTO350

This is wildly atypical. Consider Hog Jowl mansion (written July 1981, printed January 1982 in 80 Micro), which starts with room descriptions but uses DATA statements instead:

50 DATA “IN A DUMBWAITER.”,0,0,2,0,21,0,”IN A LONG HALLWAY.”,0,6,3,0,0,0,”IN A WORKSHOP.”,0,0,0,2,0,0
60 DATA “AT THE BOTTOM OF A SECRET PASSAGE.”,0,0,0,0,0,0,”IN A LABYRINTH OF TUNNELS.”,0,9,0,0,0,0
70 DATA “IN A TORTURE CHAMBER”,2,0,7,0,0,0,”IN A LABYRINTH OF TUNNELS.”,0,11,8,6,0,0,”IN A LABYRINTH OF TUNNELS.”,0,12,0,7,0,0
80 DATA “IN A LABYRINTH OF TUNNELS.”,5,0,10,0,0,0,”IN A LABYRINTH OF TUNNELS.”,0,0,11,9,0,0,”IN A LABYRINTH OF TUNNELS.”

This is the method given in other tutorials at the time, like the booklet for Deathship. Kirsch used DATA for objects and verbs, so clearly had a notion of just using a “data table” for exits rather than having to specify what the variables equal each and every time. My guess is due to the Atari string handling he didn’t want to deal with changing the method.

The remainder of the skeleton also follows the Magical Journey structure fairly closely. There’s a routine for display exits (“IFN>0PRINT” NORTH”; :B(2)=N”), a player input routine, special routines for movement, taking, and dropping, and then the whole list of other verb routines. This is followed by DATA statements for objects and verbs, and then — quite importantly for me, as you’ll see — the line

3000 PRINTA$” WHAT?”:RESUME390

What’s going on here is that the game is set up to automatically send errors to 3000. The intent is for anything that confuses the parser past what it can understand has at least some grace and a sequence reset back to resetting the parser. In practice, it means that if there’s a bug in the main code, it will stop what’s going on and jump straight to WHAT, as opposed to breaking out with a custom error message explaining what’s wrong, making the game much harder to debug.

Unfortunately, I only realized what was going on fairly late in my process of debugging Magical Journey.

For a while, I thought the issue above was potentially some sort of parser misdirection, but no; in the portion of the code that handles removing and adding objects to the player’s inventory, there was a straightforward typo. See if you can spot it:

1100 FORK2-1TO5:IFC$(K2)=H$(K3)THENC$(K2)=R$:GOSUB1150:RETURN:ELSENEXT:RETURN

That should be K2=1 to 5, with an equal sign, not a minus sign.

Or consider the hungry dwarf I gave a screenshot of last time:

There’s a farmhouse with an oven, pie filling, and pie crust, and you can BAKE PIE with them all together, but after YOU HAVE JUST BAKED A RHUBARB PIE. the game told me WHAT? and gave me no item. Spot the error:

810 PRINT”YOU HAVE JUST BAKED A RHUBARB PIE.”:PE=1:A$(59)=”RHUBARB PIE”:H$=”59)=A$(59):A(59)=25:K3=21:R$=””:GOSUB1100:K3=25:GOSUB1100:M$=””:K3=21:GOSUB1200:K3=25:GOSUB1200:GOTO5000

A few more along these lines happened, so I was simultaneously exploring the map and then every once in a while searching the source code for a misplaced character. This was as close to the metal as adventuring gets. (I also hit one inexplicable bug at the very end which I’ll get into later.)

Fortunately, the game itself was extremely simple in terms of puzzles. Find SNAKE FOOD, it goes to some RATTLESNAKES.

A GIANT CHICKEN wants to eat some CORN.

This leaves a golden egg.

For an only slightly more elaborate example, some FLYPAPER was next to some FLIES was near a GIANT KILLER FROG.

The meta-map of the game seems slightly elaborate…

…but for the most part there is only a handful of obstacles that block your way. In addition to the pie mentioned, a troll needs a toll which you can offer with a SILVER DOLLAR (not marked as a treasure) found down a pit. Even a dragon is relatively easy to defeat.

Two rooms away are a GAS MASK and some SLEEPING GAS, and the dragon is described as wide awake.

The only part slightly messy to juggle is that the game can return you to the start in two cases; in one case (passing through a dwarf house) you need to take the warp back, because it puts you at a treasure (a gold watch) before returning to the starting area.

To get back to the starting area to the main junction you need the shovel, so if you’ve left it behind, this means your game is softlocked, which is kind of rude for what is clearly intended as a beginner’s game.

The only slightly less obvious puzzle; you throw sneezing powder to defeat a MADMAN swinging an ax.

My major hang-up turned out to be at the very end. Quite inexplicably, after getting in the cave past the dragon, and heading west, the game decided to always crash, or at least stop with WHAT? when trying to show the room name, then end up in endless loop. This turned out to be the last room.

The end room is marked in red.

I still have no idea the reason for the crash. I ended up having to add some code to essentially hack my way out of the bug:

300 N=0:W=0:E=0:S=0:U=0:D=0:Y=0:CLS:PRINT”YOU’RE “;:IF(DK=0)*(A>5)DT=1
305 IF A = 72 GOTO 82
310 GOTO10

Line 305 is mine. Rather than going to the select-a-room routine, I just have the game jump directly to the relevant line that displays the room name (82). This bypasses whatever is going on with line 10 to have a bug.

With this fix in place, I could finally see the last room.

Pressing the button congratulates you and then tells you how many of the 17 treasures you found.

6000 PRINT”CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’VE MADE IT ALL THE WAY THROUGH AND BACK.”:IFNT=17PRINT”YOU FOUND ALL 17 TREASURES.”:GOTO6100
6050 PRINT”YOU ONLY FOUND”NT”TREASURES, HOWEVER. THERE ARE”17-NT”STILL OUT THERE SOMEWHERE.”
6100 INPUT”TO PARTAKE ANOTHER JOURNEY, HIT “;A$:RUN

I should possibly be thankful for the bugs. Other than the interest of the “rucksack” holding all treasures while ignoring the inventory limit, there wasn’t much of theoretical interest, but I essentially had to study all of the source code in order to make it to the end. The adventure wasn’t an abstract magical journey as much as one programmer’s journey — badly typed by someone else in the past — as interpreted by some quirky source code.

Unfortunately, some of the rooms remain inaccessible, including one to the west of a room “near the magic garden”. You’ll see on my meta map it currently goes to the opening forest, but it isn’t supposed to do that — it is supposed to go to a tool shed where you can find a ring.

Feel free to check the source yourself to try a diagnosis (including my extra line 305). It seems to have trouble with room numbers 72 or larger (jumping to lines 82 and up). Alternately, you can download a disk here I have prepared that can be run directly with the emulator trs80gp (just drag and drop the file on the emulator). I can’t guarantee there aren’t more bugs. (For example, colors of keys will change when you drop them, but at least that isn’t important for winning the game.)

Tuesday, 05. March 2024

Zarf Updates

The end of my term on the IFTF board of directors

I am delighted, yes I said delighted, to announce that today is my last day on the IFTF board of directors. I have been on the board since the beginning -- that being 2016 -- but now I depart. With me ends the era of the oh-gee IFTF founders. ...

I am delighted, yes I said delighted, to announce that today is my last day on the IFTF board of directors. I have been on the board since the beginning -- that being 2016 -- but now I depart. With me ends the era of the oh-gee IFTF founders. (Fellow founding member Jason termed out a year ago.)

(You may wonder how it is that two founding members reached their term limits a year apart. Well, we didn't set up the organization with term limits. We added that idea a few years ago. When we did, we rigged the "start times" so that our terms would be staggered rather than ending all at once. It's easier on the new board members if the old ones drop off one at a time.)

Anyway! I am assuredly not done with IFTF. I'm still Treasurer, for a start. Which means I still have board meetings on my calendar. (We're not a big enough organization to have separate board meetings and officer meetings.) I'm also still head of the IF Archive team, and I'm co-chair (or maybe chair, it's fuzzy) of NarraScope. And I'm involved with a couple of other programs to varying degrees.

But I am definitely tapering down my involvement with IFTF. Eight years is plenty long enough; and it's no good for any single person to be load-bearing. So:

The board: We have four new board members as of January. Awesome! Perhaps after I'm gone, or after Liza Daly terms out in July, the board will seek a few more fresh members. I don't know! That won't be my decision! How sweet it is to say that.

Treasurer: There is no official time limit to the Treasurer role, but I'm ready to start shuffling it off. This will necessarily be a slow process, as the Treasurer has accumulated a lot of random responsibilities over the past eight years. (Due to me saying "Never mind, I'll do it" way too many times.) The Treasurer is IFTF's de-facto password manager, 2FA key holder, back-end sysadmin, and a few more odd tasks. I would like to have an understudy for these jobs by the end of this year. (Maybe more than one person? We could split them up.) Then we can start figuring out a schedule to hand them over.

NarraScope: This is a high-intensity job for half of each year (November through June). I've been either chair or co-chair since 2022. NarraScope 2024 is cruising along nicely towards its instantiation in Rochester; but burnout is real, my friends. Someone else will have to step up for NarraScope 2025.

IF Archive: Nah, I'll hold onto this one. It's chill. :)

You may ask: How do I get involved with IFTF? Obviously, both Treasurer and NarraScope lead are high-responsibility positions, so we'll be looking for people who have been around the organization -- or at least known in the community -- for a while now. But that means we're also looking for people to, you know, start hanging around the organization.

How does that works? The current answer is to check out the IFTF News section of the forum. But we haven't done a great job of keeping that up to date. Sounds like something that needs a volunteer, honestly.

And what's next for Crazy Uncle Zarf? (Aside from continuing to run the Archive, and being a general advice-giver for all IF activities.) Heck if I know. Maybe I'll mess around with secret IF tool projects. Maybe I'll finish that poetry idle game idea. Or the LED project. Go to more local dance practices. Anything could happen.


Spring narrative games

Is it spring? It's less winter, anyhow. If I play another batch of games in April I'll need to invent "second spring" for the blog post title. Universe For Sale Harmony: The Fall of Reverie The Roottrees are Dead Universe For Sale by Tmesis ...

Is it spring? It's less winter, anyhow. If I play another batch of games in April I'll need to invent "second spring" for the blog post title.

  • Universe For Sale
  • Harmony: The Fall of Reverie
  • The Roottrees are Dead

Universe For Sale

A sweet, bizarre little point-and-click set in a post-industrial slum floating in, or rather sinking into, the cloud-decks of Jupiter. The environmental shields are falling apart so people put up tarps to keep out the corrosive hydrogen rain.

("Sounds more like Venus, amirite," I mutter, but that's just me.)

You alternately play a nameless walking skeleton and Lila, who stirs universes up out of a teacup. It gets weirder from there. There's mechanical orangutans. I think I played for an hour before I realized that the skeleton's head isn't even attached; it floats three inches above his collar. (He practices an ascetic discpline of detachment, see.) Also he keeps waking up in a rubble-strewn alley.

I'd say the sheer over-the-top imagination of the world somewhat outstrips the gameplay, which is a pretty standard walk-and-talk adventure with occasional puzzles. Chapters are broken up by Lila's day job, making universes to order for petty cash. This is, again, picturesque -- but not all that deep as a game mechanic, and not all that integrated with the rest of the game.

File it with Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, maybe; ambitious ideas and gorgeous art that don't entirely cohere into a game. But it's definitely worth a look anyway.

Harmony: The Fall of Reverie

A visual novel about corporate oppression and popular revolution in a Mediterranean city.

On the face of it that sounds like Solace State, and indeed there's a strong comparison between the games. You've got "Mono Konzern", a monopolistic FaceGoogMazon whose surveillance drones also offer same-day package delivery. You've got vibrant street communities being squeezed out by corporate growth and police brutality. You've got cinematic 3D set dressing behind the hand-drawn characters.

Solace State came off as rather simplistic, though -- a sort of cartoon guide to social activism. Harmony digs deeper. You get a better sense of people's lives, first in the gradually worsening utopia-dystopia of the island, then in the shock of action, then in the aftermath. It's lightly sketched, but these are real people, and their lives go to hell over the course of the story. You choose the consequences but you don't get easy answers. Fighting the system hurts like hell -- that's what Harmony gets right.

The other half of the story is the Aspirations, six god-like figures from the island's ancient history. Your contact with them and with Reverie, their spiritual realm, will help you guide the city's fate.

The obvious comparison there is Stray Gods. This isn't Greece and the Aspirations aren't familiar gods, but they serve the same role: invisible figures who give you an edge in the real world as they entangle you in their backstage schemes.

Sadly, Harmony has no singing. (Despite the title.) It doesn't really try to bring the Aspirations into the story, either. They're NPCs, with voice acting and nice concept art, but they're not characters. They have no personalities or inner lives. (One of the Aspiration smooched a human, it turns out, but the plot whooshes past this with barely a nervous glance.)

This is not a complaint about the writing. The game's human characters are richly drawn and engaging. They're who the game is about. But the six Aspirations are basically just literalizations of your story stats. You make choices and the stats go up and down: "bliss", "chaos", "truth", and so forth. (I almost wonder if the game wasn't written only about the human world, with the Aspirations personified in late in design.)

It's rather a disappointment after Stray Gods, whose Idols are all leading lights of the story and show-stealers to boot. (If you didn't buy into Pan's smirk the minute you met him, I don't know who you are.)

On the other hand, the story stats are a serious part of this game! If you imagine narrative games on a scale from "hidden stats" (Heaven's Vault) to "exposed mechanics" (Disco Elysium), Harmony is doing its best to bust through the "exposed" end and go a half-block farther up the street.

You are Reverie's newest Oracle, see, and your Oracular power is seeing the plot graph. In every chapter, you can see exactly how much "bliss", "power", "chaos", etc you need to reach any given chapter-ending. And then you can map out the choice-route needed to get there. Similarly, the branches blocked out by your previous actions are mapped out, taunting you with their inaccessibility.

This certainly puts a spotlight on the narrative limitations of branches-and-stats game design. But then it says, look, this is the game, let's play it by the rules. I repeatedly found myself caught between the story arc I wanted (say, supporting the city's community ideals, its "bond" stat) and the actions I would have to take to get there (spending a day with my estranged mother rather than my forlorn stepsister, "bond" vs "bliss"). My ideals prevented me from making time with my hot corporate crush -- not as an explicit choice, but as a matter of what stats I needed when. This is good! It's the narrative tension any choice-based game would go for; it's just laid out for you to plan.

Well, mostly laid out. The board is sometimes veiled for a few steps ahead. It's also sometimes unclear which paths will block out or uncover what other paths. The game wants the map to be explicit, but I still stumbled into an unintended path a few times, just by misreading the presentation. I may take another run at the story (hot corporate crush awaits!) -- but, sigh, so many new games to play.

(That's a whole different source of narrative tension.)

Anyhow: an interesting narrative experiment and an excellent story overall.

The Roottrees are Dead

The latest hit in what I've started calling the static deduction genre. (C.f. Obra Dinn, Golden Idol. "Static deduction" because you're not a detective running around questioning people; you're outside a frozen world, looking at snapshots.)

The Roottrees are a five-generation dynasty of candy magnates from western Pennsylvania. Or rather, they were, because the most famous scions of that line just died in a plane crash. You're handed a blank family tree and ordered to fill in the names, faces, and professions of every blood descendant of old Elias Roottree. It's 1998 and you have a state-of-the-art terrible web browser. Get searching.

The game is rough around the edges, but it's very playable. I was able to solve all the core questions, most of the optional collateral info, and got half credit on the final bonus round.

The rough spots are about tracking your clues. You have a journal which automatically gets copies of all photos and documents that you find. That's great -- easy to browse, with a cue for which pages still conceal useful leads. But the journal doesn't track your web searches. If you found a name or reference that needs more followup, you have to remember what you typed to get back to it. (Or take extensive notes, which is what I did.) And repeating a search is deliberately annoying, complete with 9600-baud page loads and fake modem screech. It's cute for the first five minutes.

(Really, I think all this needs is a browser history. Say, a journal page that lists every web search term that didn't get a generic "404 nothing interesting".)

The other problem I ran into: it's supposed to be obvious that you should web-search the name of every periodical you see mentioned. Then it's entered into your library list and you can search that periodical for more specific articles. This is a great idea -- contextual search results -- but I somehow missed the causality of how you get the periodical listed. I stumbled into some of them very late, and it seriously held back some of the intended deductive tracks.

But, on the other hand, most of what you need can be approached from multiple angles. I was never in real danger of getting stuck.

I should also say something about the art. This is a mostly-solo project and the developer went whole-hog for AI-generated art. I give them a pass on that; the game needed a lot of portraits in specific styles on zero budget. And this was just before AI discourse got completely toxic. But everybody's a wee bit creepy-glossy all the way through, and I saw at least one classic AI hand-blob.

Also, the AI-generated art may possibly be misleading. The very first puzzle (the tutorial, so no big spoiler) is a photo of three young Roottrees; you get a clue that one has earrings and another is wearing plaid. Except, as Carl Muckenhoupt noticed, there is no plaid -- the shirt has black and red stripes.

Now, I absolutely zipped past that when I played. I saw black and red and thought "Yeah, that looks like your standard plaid flannel shirt." But it's not, and that's a very AI sort of mistake to make.

For what it's worth, most of the clue details in the photos (the earrings, for a start) seem to be photoshopped in on top of the AI art. So they're generally reliable. But if you have a keen eye -- which I obviously don't -- you may go off track.

That's a side note, though. It's a great solving experience, thoughtfully designed, with a lot of attention to period atmosphere through the family's generations. Highly recommended if you're into this sort of game.

Update: After writing the above, I learned that the author is working on remaking the game for a Steam release. ("Starting over from scratch", the author's words.) New hand-drawn art, revamped UI. See Steam page. Looks like they're already on top of the browser-history idea; yay.

I am delighted that this is happening. Roottrees is already a hit and it'll be worth the upgrade as a paid release. I admit that I'll miss the pseudo-photorealistic style -- that was one of the hallmarks of the game, uncanny-valley though it was -- but AI illustration is clearly not saleable to the game-playing audience at this point. Never mind the risk of visual inconsistencies. The new art on the Steam preview looks good. (Yes, it's got plaid.)

Friday, 01. March 2024

Interactive Fiction – The Digital Antiquarian

The Rise of POMG, Part 4: A World for the Taking

Just as the Ultima Online beta test was beginning, Electronic Arts was initiating the final phase of its slow-motion takeover of Origin Systems. In June of 1997, the mother ship in California sent down two Vice Presidents to take over completely in Texas, integrate Origin well and truly into the EA machine, and end once […]

Just as the Ultima Online beta test was beginning, Electronic Arts was initiating the final phase of its slow-motion takeover of Origin Systems. In June of 1997, the mother ship in California sent down two Vice Presidents to take over completely in Texas, integrate Origin well and truly into the EA machine, and end once and for all any semblance of independence for the studio. Neil Young became Origin’s new General Manager on behalf of EA, while Chris Yates became Chief Technical Officer. Both men were industry veterans.

Appropriately enough given that he was about to become the last word on virtual Britannia, Neil Young was himself British. He attributes his career choice to the infamously awful English weather. “There are a lot of people in the games industry that come from the UK,” he says. “I think it’s because the weather is so bad that you don’t have a lot to do, so you either go into a band or teach yourself to program.” He chose the latter course at a time when computer games in Britain were still being sold on cassette tape for a couple of quid. After deciding to forgo university in favor of a programming job at a tiny studio called Imagitec Design in 1988, he “quickly realized there were more gifted engineers,” as he puts it, and “moved into producing.” Having made a name for himself in that role, he was lured to the United States by Virgin Interactive in 1992, then moved on to EA five years later, which organization had hand-picked him for the task of whipping its sometimes wayward and lackadaisical stepchild Origin into fighting shape.

Chris Yates had grown up amidst the opposite of English rain, hailing as he did from the desert gambler’s paradise Las Vegas. He was hired by the hometown studio Westwood Associates in 1988, where he worked as a programmer on games like Eye of the Beholder, Dune II, and Lands of Lore. In 1994, two years after Virgin acquired Westwood, he moved to Los Angeles to join the parent company. There he and Young became close friends as well as colleagues, such that they chose to go to EA together as a unit.

The two were so attractive to EA thanks not least to an unusual project which had occupied some of their time during their last year and a half or so at Virgin. Inspired by Air Warrior, the pioneering massively-multiplayer online flight simulator that had been running on the GEnie commercial online service since the late 1980s, a Virgin programmer named Rod Humble proposed in 1995 that his company invest in something similar, but also a bit simpler and more accessible: a massively-multiplayer version of Asteroids, the 1979 arcade classic whose roots stretched all the way back to Spacewar!, that urtext of videogaming. Neil Young and his friend Chris Yates went to bat for the project: Young making the business case for it as an important experiment that could lead to big windfalls later on, Yates pitching in to offer his exceptional technical expertise whenever necessary. Humble and a colleague named Jeff Paterson completed an alpha version of the game they called SubSpace in time to put it up on the Internet for an invitation-only testing round in December of 1995. Three months later, the server was opened to anyone who cared to download the client — still officially described as a beta version — and have at it.

SubSpace was obviously a very different proposition from the likes of Ultima Online, but it fits in perfectly with this series’s broader interest in persistent online multiplayer gaming (or POMG as I’ve perhaps not so helpfully shortened it). For, make no mistake, the quality of persistence was as key to its appeal as it was to that of such earlier featured players in this series as Kali or Battle.net. SubSpace spawned squads and leagues and zones; it became an entire subculture unto itself, one that lived in and around the actual battles in space. The distinction between it and the games of Kali and Battle.net was that SubSpace was massively — or at least bigly — multiplayer. Whereas an online Diablo session was limited to four participants, SubSpace supported battles involving up to 250 players, sometimes indulging in crazy free-for-alls, more often sorted into two or more teams, each of them flying and fighting in close coordination. It thus quickly transcended Asteroids in its tactical dimensions as well as its social aspects — transcended even other deceptively complex games with the same roots, such as Toys for Bobs’s cult classic Star Control. That it was playable at all over dial-up modem connections was remarkable; that it was so much fun to play and then to hang out in afterward, talking shop and taking stock, struck many of the thousands of players who stumbled across it as miraculous; that it was completely free for a good long time was the icing on the cake.

It remained that way because Virgin didn’t really know what else to do with it. When the few months that had been allocated to the beta test were about to run out, the fans raised such a hue and cry that Virgin gave in and left it up. And so the alleged beta test continued for more than a year, the happy beneficiary of corporate indecision. In one of his last acts before leaving Virgin, Neil Young managed to broker a sponsorship deal with Pepsi Cola, which gave SubSpace some actual advertising and another lease on life as a free-to-play game. During that memorable summer of the Ultima Online beta test, SubSpace was enjoying what one fan history calls its “greatest days” of all: “The population tripled in three months, and now there were easily 1500-plus people playing during peak times.”

With the Pepsi deal about to run out, Virgin finally took SubSpace fully commercial in October of 1997, again just as Ultima Online was doing the same. Alas, it didn’t go so well for SubSpace. Virgin released it as a boxed retail game, with the promise that, once customers had plunked down the cash to buy it, access would be free in perpetuity. This didn’t prevent half or more of the existing user base from leaving the community, even as nowhere near enough new players joined to replace them. Virgin shut down the server in November of 1998; “in perpetuity” had turned out to be a much shorter span of time than anyone had anticipated.

As we’ve seen before in this series, however, the remaining hardcore SubSpace fans simply refused to let their community die. They put up their own servers — Virgin had made the mistake of putting all the code you needed to do so on the same disc as the client — and kept right on space-warring. You can still play SubSpace today, just as you can Meridian 59 and The Realm. A website dedicated to tracking the game’s “population statistics” estimated in 2015 that the community still had between 2000 and 3000 active members, of whom around 300 might be online at any given time; assuming these numbers are to be trusted, a bit of math reveals that those who like the game must really like it, spending 10 percent or more of their lives in it. That same year, fans put their latest version of the game, now known as Subspace Continuum, onto Steam for free. Meanwhile its original father Rod Humble has gone on to a long and fruitful career in POMG, working on Everquest, The Sims Online, and Second Life among other projects.



But we should return now to the summer of 1997 and to Origin Systems, to which Neil Young and Chris Yates came as some of the few people in existence who could boast not only of ideas about POMG but of genuine commercial experience in the field, thanks to SubSpace. EA hoped this experience would serve them well when it came to Ultima Online.

Which isn’t to say that the latter was the only thing they had on their plates: the sheer diversity of Young’s portfolio as an EA general manager reflects the confusion about what Origin’s identity as a studio should be going forward. There were of course the two perennials, Ultima — meaning for the moment at least Ultima Online — and Wing Commander, which was, as Young says today, “a little lost as a product.” Wing Commander, the franchise in computer gaming during the years immediately prior to DOOM, was becoming a monstrous anachronism by 1997. Shortly after the arrival of Young and Yates, Origin would release Wing Commander: Prophecy, whose lack of the Roman numeral “V” that one expected to see in its name reflected a desire for a fresh start on a more sustainable model in this post-Chris Roberts era, with a more modest budget to go along with more modest cinematic ambitions. But instead of heralding the dawn of a new era, it would prove the franchise’s swan song; it and its 1998 expansion pack would be the last new Wing Commander computer games ever. Their intended follow-up, a third game in the Wing Commander: Privateer spinoff series of more free-form outer-space adventures, would be cancelled.

In addition to Ultima and Wing Commander, EA had chosen to bring under the Origin umbrella two product lines that were nothing like the games for which the studio had always been known. One was a line of military simulations that bore the imprimatur of “Jane’s,” a print publisher which had been the source since the turn of the twentieth century of the definitive encyclopedias of military hardware of all types. The Jane’s simulations were overseen by one Andy Hollis, who had begun making games of this type for MicroProse back in the early 1980s. The other line involved another MicroProse alum — in fact, none other than Sid Meier, whose name had entered the lexicon of many a gaming household by serving as the prefix before such titles as Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, Civilization, and Colonization. Meier and two other MicroProse veterans had just set up a studio of their own, known as Firaxis Games, with a substantial investment from EA, who planned to release their products under the Origin Systems label. Origin was becoming, in other words, EA’s home for all of its games that were made first and usually exclusively for computers rather than for the consoles that now provided the large majority of EA’s revenues; the studio had, it seemed, more value in the eyes of the EA executive suite as a brand than as a working collective.

Still, this final stage of the transition from independent subsidiary to branch office certainly could have been even more painful than it was. Neil Young and Chris Yates were fully aware of how their arrival would be seen down in Austin, and did everything they could to be good sports and fit into the office culture. Brit-in-Texas Young was the first to come with the fish-out-of-water jokes at his own expense — “I was expecting a flat terrain with lots of cowboys, cacti, and horses, so I was pleasantly surprised,” he said of Austin — and both men rolled up their sleeves alongside Richard Garriott to serve the rest of the company a turkey dinner at Thanksgiving, a longtime Origin tradition.

Neil Young and Chris Yates on the Thanksgiving chow line.

Young and Yates had received instructions from above that Ultima Online absolutely had to ship by the end of September. Rather than cracking the whip, they tried to cajole and josh their way to that milestone as much as possible. They agreed to attend the release party in drag if the deadline was met; then Young went one step farther, promising Starr Long a kiss on the lips. Yates didn’t go that far, but he did agree to grow a beard to commemorate the occasion, even as Richard Garriott, whose upper lip hadn’t seen the sun since he’d graduated from high school, agreed to shave his.

Young and Yates got it done, earning for themselves the status of, if not the unsung heroes of Ultima Online, two among a larger group of same. The core group of ex-MUDders whose dream and love Ultima Online had always been could probably have kept running beta tests for years to come, had not these outsiders stepped in to set the technical agenda. “That meant trading off features with technology choices and decisions every minute of the day,” says Young. He brought in one Rich Vogel, who had set up and run the server infrastructure for Meridian 59 at The 3DO Company, to do the same for Ultima Online. In transforming Origin Systems into a maintainer of servers and a seller of subscriptions, he foreshadowed a transition that would eventually come to the games industry in general, from games as boxed products to gaming as a service. These tasks did not involve the sexy, philosophically stimulating ideas about virtual worlds and societies with which Raph Koster and his closest colleagues spent their time and which will always capture the lion’s share of the attention in articles like this one, but the work was no less essential for all that, and no less of a paradigm shift in its way.

So, the big day came and the deadline was met: Ultima Online shipped on September 24, 1997, three days before Meridian 59 would celebrate its first anniversary. The sleek black box was an end and a beginning at the same time. Young and Yates did their drag show, Starr Long got his kiss, and, most shockingly of all, Richard Garriott revealed his naked upper lip to all and sundry. (Opinions were divided as to whether the mangy stubble which Chris Yates deigned to grow before picking up his razor again really qualified as a beard or not.) And then everyone waited to see what would happen next.

A (semi-)bearded Chris Yates and a rare sight indeed: a clean-shaven Richard Garriott.

EA made and shipped to stores all over the country 50,000 copies of Ultima Online, accompanying it with a marketing campaign that was, as Wired magazine described it, of “Hollywood proportions.” The virtual world garnered attention everywhere, from CNN to The New York Times. These mainstream organs covered it breathlessly as the latest harbinger of humanity’s inevitable cyber-future, simultaneously bracing and unnerving. Flailing about for a way to convey some sense of the virtual world’s scope, The New York Times noted that it would take 38,000 computer monitors — enough to fill a football field — to display it in its entirety at one time. Needless to say, the William Gibson quotes, all “collective hallucinations” and the like, flew thick and fast, as they always did to mark events like this one.

Three weeks after the launch, 38,000 copies of Ultima Online had been sold and EA was spooling up the production line again to make another 65,000. Sales would hit the 100,000 mark within three months of the release. Such numbers were more than gratifying. EA knew that 100,000 copies sold of this game ought to be worth far more to its bottom line than 100,000 copies of any other game would have been, given that each retail sale hopefully represented only the down payment on a long-running subscription at $10 per month. For its publisher, Ultima Online would be the gift that kept on giving.

In another sense, however, the sales figures were a problem. When Ultima Online went officially live, it did so on just three shards: the Atlantic and Pacific shards from the beta test, plus a new Great Lakes one to handle the middle of the country. Origin was left scrambling to open more to meet the deluge of subscribers. Lake Superior came up on October 3, Baja on October 10, Chesapeake on October 16,  Napa Valley on November 14, Sonoma on December 13, Catskills on December 22. And still it wasn’t enough.

Origin’s estimates of how many players a single server could reliably support proved predictably overoptimistic. But rather than dial back on the number of players they allowed inside, thereby ensuring that each of them who did get in could have a reasonably enjoyable experience, they kept trying to cover the gap between technical theory and reality by hacking their code on the fly. As a result, Ultima Online became simultaneously the most loved and most hated game in the country. When it all came together, it was magic for many of its players. But truth be told, that didn’t happen anywhere near as often as one might have wished in that first year or so. Extreme lag, inexplicable glitches, dropped connections, and even total server crashes were the more typical order of the day. Of course, with almost everyone who surfed the Web still relying on dial-up modems running over wires that had been designed to carry voices rather than computer data, slowdowns and dropped connections were a reality of daily online life even for those who weren’t attempting to log onto virtual worlds. This created a veneer of plausible deniability, which Origin’s tech-support people, for lack of any other suggestions or excuses to offer, leaned on perhaps a bit too heavily. After all, who could say for sure that the problem any individual player might be having wasn’t downstream from Origin’s poor overtaxed server?

Weaselly excuses like these led to the first great act of civil disobedience by the residents of Britannia, just a few weeks after the launch, when hundreds of players gathered outside Lord British’s castle, stripped themselves naked, broke into the throne room, drank gallons of wine, and proceeded to disgorge all of it onto Richard Garriott’s virtual furniture, whilst chanting in unison their demands for a better, stabler virtual world. The world’s makers were appalled, but also weirdly gratified. What better sign of a budding civic life could there be than a full-on political protest? “We were all watching and thinking it was a grand statement about the project,” says Richard Garriott. “As unhappy as they were about the game, they voiced their unhappiness in the context of the game.” Much of what happened inside Ultima Online during the first year especially had the same quality of being amazing for philosophers of virtual worlds to witness, but stressful for the practical administrators who were trying to turn this one into a sustainable money tree. The rub was that the two categories were combined in the very same people, who were left feeling conflicted to say the least.

The journals of hardcore gaming, hardly known for their stoicism in the face of hype on most days, were ironically more reserved and skeptical than the mainstream press on the subject of Ultima Online, perchance because they were viewing the virtual world less as a harbinger of some collective cyber-future and more as a game that their readers might wish to, you know, actually play. Computer Gaming World wittily titled its scathing review, buried on page 162 and completely unmentioned on the cover of the issue in question, simply “Uh-Oh.” Among the litany of complaints were “numerous and never-ending bugs, horrible lag time, design issues [that] lead to repetitive and time-consuming activities, and [an] unbalanced economy.” The magazine did admit that “Ultima Online could become a truly great game. But we can’t review potential, we can only review concrete product.” Editor-in-chief Johnny L. Wilson, for his part, held out little hope for improvement. “Ultima Online begins with hubris and ends in Greek tragedy,” he said. “The hubris is a result of being unwilling to learn from others’ mistakes. The tragedy is that it could have been so much more.” Randy Farmer, co-creator of the earlier would-be virtual world Habitat, expressed a similar sentiment, saying that “Origin seems to have ignored many of the lessons that our industry has learned in the last ten years of building online worlds. They’re making the same mistakes that first-time virtual-world builders always make.”

The constant crashes and long periods of unexplained down time associated with a service for which people were paying good money constituted a corporate lawyer’s worst nightmare — or a different sort of lawyer’s wet dream. One of these latter named George Schultz began collecting signatures from Origin’s most disgruntled customers within weeks, filing a class-action lawsuit in San Diego at the beginning of March of 1998. Exhibit A was the copy right there on the back of the box, promising “a living, growing world where thousands of real people discover real fantasy and adventure, 24 hours a day, every day of the year,” with all of it taking place “in real time.” This was, claimed Schultz, a blatant case of false advertising. “We’re not trying to tell anyone how to design a good or a bad game,” he said. “What it’s about is holding Origin and EA to the promises they made on the box, in their advertising, and [in] the manual. It’s about the misrepresentations they’ve made. A big problem with the gaming industry is that they think there are some special rules that only apply to them.”

Whatever the truth of that last claim, there was no denying that just about half of the learning curve of Ultima Online was learning to navigate around the countless bugs and technical quirks. For example, Origin took down each shard once per day for a backup and a “therapeutic” reboot that was itself a testament to just what a shaky edifice the software and hardware were. When the server came back up again, it restored the state of the world from the last backup. But said state was a snapshot in time from one hour before the server went down. There was, in other words, an hour every day during which everything you did in virtual Britannia was doomed to be lost; this was obviously not a time to go on any epic, treasure- and experience-point-rich adventures. Yet such things were documented nowhere; one learned them only through the proverbial school of hard knocks.

In their defense, Origin was sailing into completely uncharted waters with Ultima Online. Although there had been online virtual worlds before, dating all the way back to that first MUD of 1978 or 1979, none of them — no, not even Meridian 59 and The Realm — had been as expansive, sophisticated, and most of all popular as these shards of Britannia. Most of the hardware technologies that would give rise to the era of Web 2.0, from DSL in homes to VPS’s in data centers, existed only as blueprints; ditto most of the software. No one had ever made a computer game before that required this much care and feeding after the initial sale. And it wasn’t as if the group entrusted with maintaining the beast was a large one. Almost the entirety of the Ultima IX team which had been parachuted in six months before the launch to just get the world done already was pulled out just as abruptly as soon as it started accepting paying subscribers, leaving behind a crew of maintainers that was little bigger than the original team of ex-MUDders who had labored in obscurity for so long before catching the eye of EA’s management. The idea that maintaining a virtual world might require almost as much manpower and ongoing creative effort as making it in the first place was too high a mental hurdle for even otherwise clever folks like Neil Young and Chris Yates to clear at this point.

Overwhelmed as they were, the maintainers began to rely heavily on unpaid volunteers from the community of players to do much of the day-to-day work of administrating the world, just as was the practice on MUDs. But Ultima Online ran on a vastly larger scale than even the most elaborate MUDs, making it hard to keep tabs on these volunteer overseers. While some were godsends, putting in hours of labor every week to make Britannia a better place for their fellow players, others were corrupted by their powers, manipulating the levers they had to hand to benefit their friends and punish their enemies. Then, too, the volunteer system was another legal quagmire, one that would doubtless have sent EA’s lawyers running screaming from the room if anyone had bothered to ask them about it before it was rolled out; sure enough, it would eventually lead to another lawsuit, this one more extended, serious, and damaging than the first.

In the meanwhile, though, most players did not rally behind the first lawsuit to anything like the degree that George Schultz might have been hoping. The fact was that even the ones who had vomited all over Lord British’s throne had done so because they loved their virtual Britannia and wanted to see it fixed rather than destroyed, as it would likely be if Schultz won the day. The suit concluded in a settlement at the end of 1998. The biggest concession on the part of the defendants was a rather weird one that gave no recompense to any individual inhabitant of virtual Britannia: EA agreed to donate $15,000 to the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation. Perhaps Schultz thought that it would be able to innovate up a more reliable virtual world.

While many of the technical problems that beset Ultima Online were only to be expected in the context of the times, some of the other obstacles to enjoying the virtual world were more puzzling. First and foremost among these was the ever-present issue of players killing other players, which created so much frustration that George Schultz felt compelled to explicitly wall it off from the breach-of-trust claims that were the basis of his lawsuit: “We’re not getting into whether there should be player-killing.” Given that it had been such a constant theme of life (and death) in virtual Britannia going all the way back to the alpha-testing phase, the MUDders might have taken more steps to address it before the launch. As it was, though, one senses that, having seen so many of their ideas about a virtual ecology and the like not survive contact with real players, having been forced to give up in so many ways on virtual Britannia as a truly self-sustaining, living world, they were determined to make this the scene of their last stand, the hill that they would either hold onto or die trying.

Their great white hope was still the one that Richard Garriott had been voicing in interviews since well before the world’s commercial debut: that purely social pressures would act as a constraint on player-killing — that, in short, their world would learn to police itself. In fact, the presence of player-killing might act as a spur to civilization — for, as Raph Koster said, “cultures define and refine themselves through conflict.” They kept trying to implement systems that would nudge this particular culture in the right direction. They decided that, after committing murder five times, a player would be branded with literal scarlet letters: the color of his onscreen name would change from blue to red. Hopefully this would make him a pariah among his peers, while also making it very dangerous for him to enter a town, whose invulnerable computer-controlled guards would attack him on sight. The designers didn’t reckon with the fact that a virtual life is, no matter how much they might wish otherwise, simply not the same as a real life. Some percentage of players, presumably perfectly mild-mannered and law-abiding in the real world, reveled in the role of murderous outlaws online, taking the red letters of their name as a badge of honor rather than shame, the dangers of the cities as a challenge rather than a deterrent. To sneak past the city gates, creep up behind an unsuspecting newbie and stab her in the back, then get out of Dodge before the city watch appeared… now, that was good times. The most-wanted rolls posted outside the guard stations of Britannia became, says Raph Koster, “a high-score table for player killers.”

The MUDders’ stubborn inflexibility on this issue — an issue that was by all indications soon costing Ultima Online large numbers of customers — was made all the more inexplicable in the opinion of many players by the fact that it was, in marked contrast to so many of the other problems, almost trivial to address in programming terms. An “invulnerability” flag had long existed, to be applied not only to computer-controlled city guards but to special human-controlled personages such as Lord British to whom the normal laws of virtual time and space did not apply. All Origin had to do was add a few lines of code to automatically turn the flag on when a player walked into designated “safe” spaces. That way, you could have places where those who had signed up mostly in order to socialize could hang out without having to constantly look over their backs, along with other places where the hardcore pugilists could pummel one another to their heart’s content. Everyone would be catered to. Problem solved.

But Raph Koster and company refused to take this blindingly obvious step, having gotten it into their heads that to do so would be to betray their most cherished ideals. They kept tinkering around the edges of the problem, looking for a subtler solution that would preserve their world’s simulational autonomy. For example, they implemented a sort of karmic justice system, which dictated that players who had been evil during life would be resurrected after death only after losing a portion of their stats and skills. Inevitably, the player killers just took this as another challenge. Just don’t get killed, and you would never have to worry about it.

The end result was to leave the experience of tens of thousands of players in the unworthy hands of a relatively small minority of “griefers,” people who thrived on causing others pain and distress. Like all bullies, they preyed on the weak; their typical victims were the newbies, unschooled in the ways of defense, guiding characters with underwhelming statistics and no arms or armor to speak of. Such new players were, of course, the ones whose level of engagement with the game was most tentative, who were the mostly likely to just throw up their hands and go find something else to play after they’d been victimized once or twice, depriving Origin of potentially hundreds of dollars in future subscription revenue.

In light of this, it’s strange that no one from EA or Origin overrode the MUDders on this point. For his part, Richard Garriott was adamantly on their side, insisting that Ultima Online simply had to allow player-killing if it wasn’t to become a mockery of itself. It was up to the dissatisfied and victimized residents themselves to band together and turn Britannia into the type of world they wanted to live in; it wasn’t up to Origin to step in and fix their problems for them with a deus ex machina. “When we first launched Ultima Online, we set out to create a world that supported the evil player as a legitimate role,” said Garriott in his rather high-handed way. “Those who have truly learned the lessons of the [single-player] Ultima games should cease their complaining, rise to the challenge, and make Britannia into the place they want it to be.” He liked to tell a story on this subject. (Knowing Garriott’s penchant for embellishment, it probably didn’t happen, or at least didn’t happen quite like this. But that’s not relevant to its importance as allegory.)

One evening, he was wandering the streets of the capital in his Lord British persona, when he heard a woman screaming. Rushing over to her, he was told that a thief had stolen all of her possessions. His spirit of chivalry was awoken; he told her that he would get her things back for her. Together they tracked down the thief and cornered him in a back alley. Lord British demanded that the thief return the stolen goods, and the thief complied. They all went their separate ways. A moment later, the woman cried out again; the thief had done it again.

This time, Lord British froze the thief with a spell before he could leave the scene of the crime. “I told you not to do that,” he scolded. “What are you doing?”

“Sorry, I won’t do it again,” said the thief as he turned over the goods for a second time.

“If you do that again, I’m going to ban you from the game,” said Lord British.

You might be able to guess what happened next: the thief did it yet again. “I said I was going to ban you, and now I have to,” shouted Lord British, now well and truly incensed. “What’s wrong with you? I told you not to steal from this woman!”

The thief’s answer stopped Garriott in his tracks. “Listen. You created this world, and I’m a thief,” he said, breaking character for the first time. “I steal. That’s what I do. And now you’re going to ban me from the game for playing the role I’m supposed to play? I lied to you before because I’m a thief. The king caught me and told me not to steal. What am I going to do, tell you that as soon as you turn around I’m going to steal again? No! I’m going to lie.”

And Garriott realized that the thief was right. Garriott could do whatever he wished to him as Lord British, the reigning monarch of this world. But if he wished to stay true to all the things he had said in the past about what virtual Britannia was and ought to be, he couldn’t go outside the world to punish him as Richard Garriott, the god of the server looking down from on-high.

Some of the questions with which Origin was wrestling resonate all too well today: questions involving the appropriate limits of online free speech — or rather free action, in this case. They are questions with which everyone who has ever opened an Internet discussion up to the public, myself included, have had to engage. When does strongly felt disagreement spill over into bad faith, counterpoint into disruption for the sake of it? And what should we do about it when it does? In Origin’s case, the pivotal philosophical question at hand was where the boundary lay between playing an evil character in good faith in a fantasy world and purposely, willfully trying to cause real pain to other real people sitting behind other real computers. Origin had chosen to embrace a position close to the ground staked out by our self-described “free-speech maximalists” of today. And like them, Origin was learning that the issue is more dangerously nuanced than they had wished to believe.

But there were others sorts of disconnect at play here as well. Garriott’s stern commandment that his world’s inhabitants should “cease their complaining, rise to the challenge, and make Britannia into the place they want it to be” becomes more than a bit rich when we remember that it was being directed toward Origin’s paying customers. Many of them might have replied that it was up to Origin rather than they themselves to make Britannia a place they wanted to be, lest they choose to spend their $10 per month on something else. The living-world dynamic held “as long as everyone is playing the same game,” wrote Amy Jo Kim in an article about Ultima Online and its increasingly vocalized discontents that appeared in Wired magazine in the spring of 1998. “But what happens when players who think they’re attending an online Renaissance Faire find themselves at the mercy of a violent, abusive gang of thugs? In today’s Britannia, it’s not uncommon to stumble across groups of evil players who talk like Snoop Doggy Dogg, dress like gangstas, and act like rampaging punks.” To be sure, some players were fully onboard with the “living-world” policy of (non-)administration. Others, however, had thought, reasonably enough given what they had read on the back of the game’s box, that they were just buying an entertainment product, a place to hang out in a few hours per day or week and have fun, chatting and exploring and killing monsters. They hadn’t signed up to organize police forces or lead political rallies. Nor had they signed up to be the guinea pigs in some highfalutin social experiment. No; they had signed up to play a game.

As it was, Ultima Online was all but impossible to play casually, thanks not only to the murderers skulking in its every nook and cranny but to core systems of the simulation itself. For example, if you saved up until you could afford to build yourself a nice little house, made it just like you wanted it, then failed to log on for a few days, when you did return you’d find that your home had disappeared, razed to make room for some other, more active player to build something. Systems like these pushed players to spend more time online as a prerequisite to having fun when they were there. Some left when the demands of the game conflicted with those of real life, which was certainly the wisest choice. But some others began to spend far more time in virtual Britannia than was really good for them, raising the specter of gaming addiction, a psychological and sociological problem that would only become more prevalent in the post-millennial age.

Origin estimated that the median hardcore player spent a stunning if not vaguely horrifying total of six hours per day in the virtual world. And if the truth be told, many of the non-murderous things with which they were expected to fill those hours do seem kind of boring on the face of it. This is the flip side of making a virtual world that is more “realistic”: most people play games to escape from reality for a while, not to reenact it. With all due respect to our dedicated and talented real-world tailors and bakers, most people don’t dream of spending their free time doing such jobs online. Small wonder so many became player killers instead; at least doing that was exciting and, for some people at any rate, fun. From Amy Jo Kim’s article:

There’s no shortage of realism in this game — the trouble is, many of the nonviolent activities in Ultima Online are realistic to the point of numbingly lifelike boredom. If you choose to be a tailor, you can make a passable living at it, but only after untold hours of repetitive sewing. And there’s no moral incentive for choosing tailoring — or any honorable, upstanding vocation, for that matter. So why be a tailor? In fact, why not prey on the tailors?

True, Ultima Online is many things to many people. Habitués of online salons come looking for intellectual sparring and verbal repartee. Some other people log on in search of intimate but anonymous social relationships. Still others play the game with cunning yet also a discernible amount of self-restraint, getting rich while staying pretty honest. But there’s no avoiding where the real action is: an ever-growing number are playing Ultima Online to kill everything that moves.

All of this had an effect: all signs are that, after the first rush of sales and subscriptions, Ultima Online began to stagnate, mired in bad reviews, ongoing technical problems, and a growing disenchantment with the player-killing and the other barriers to casual fun. Raph Koster admits that “our subscriber numbers, while stratospheric for the day, weren’t keeping up” with sales of the boxed game, because “the losses [of frustrated newbies] were so high.”

Although Origin and EA never published official sales or subscriber numbers, I have found one useful data point from the early days of Ultima Online, in an internal Origin newsletter dated October 30, 1998. As of this date, just after its first anniversary, the game had 90,000 registered users, of whom approximately half logged on on any given day. These numbers are depicted in the article in question as very impressive, as indeed they were in comparison to the likes of Meridian 59 and The Realm. Still, a bit of context never hurts. Ultima Online had sold 100,000 boxed copies in its first three months, yet it didn’t have even that many subscribers after thirteen months, when its total boxed sales were rounding the 200,000 mark. The subscriber-retention rate, in other words, was not great; a lot of those purchased CDs had become coasters in fairly short order.

Nine shards were up in North America at this time, a number that had stayed the same since the previous December. And it’s this number that may be the most telling one of all. It’s true that, since demand was concentrated at certain times of day, Ultima Online was hosting just about all the players it could handle with its current server infrastructure as of October of 1998. But then again, this was by no means all the players it should be able to handle in the abstract: new shards were generally brought into being in response to increasing numbers of subscribers rather than vice versa. The fact that no new North American shards had been opened since December of 1997 becomes very interesting in this light.

I don’t want to overstate my case here: Ultima Online was extremely successful on its own, somewhat experimental terms. We just need to be sure that we understand what those terms were. By no means were its numbers up there with the industry’s biggest hits. As a point of comparison, let’s take Riven, the long-awaited sequel to the mega-hit adventure game Myst. It was released two months after Ultima Online and went on to sell 1 million units in its first year — at least five times the number of boxed entrées to Origin’s virtual world over the same time period, despite being in a genre that was in marked decline in commercial terms. Another, arguably more pertinent point of comparison is Age of Empires, a new entry in the red-hot real-time-strategy genre. Released just one month after Ultima Online, it outsold Origin’s virtual world by more than ten to one over its first year. Judged as a boxed retail game, Ultima Online was a middling performer at best.

Of course, Ultima Online was not just another boxed retail game; the unique thing about it was that each of the 90,000 subscribers it had retained was paying $10 every month, yielding a steady revenue of almost $11 million per year, with none of it having to be shared with any distributor or retailer. That was really, really nice — nice enough to keep Origin’s head above water at a time when the studio didn’t have a whole lot else to point to by way of justifying its ongoing existence to EA. And yet the reality remained that Ultima Online was a niche obsession rather than a mass-market sensation. As so often happens in life, taking the next step forward in commercial terms, not to mention fending off the competition that was soon to appear with budgets and publisher support of which Meridian 59 and The Realm couldn’t have dreamed, would require a degree of compromise with its founding ideals.

Be that as it may, however, one thing at least was now clear: there was real money to be made in the MMORPG space. Shared virtual worlds would soon learn to prioritize entertainment over experimentation. Going forward, there would be less talk about virtual ecologies and societies, and more focus on delivering slickly packaged fun, of the sort that would keep all kinds of players coming back for more — and, most importantly of all, get those subscriber counts rising once more.

I’ll continue to follow the evolution of PMOG, MMORPGs, and Ultima Online in future articles, and maybe see if I can’t invent some more confusing acronyms while I’m at it. But not right away… other subjects beg for attention in the more immediate future.



Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.


Sources: the books Braving Britannia: Tales of Life, Love, and Adventure in Ultima Online by Wes Locher, Postmortems: Selected Essays, Volume One by Raph Koster, Online Game Pioneers at Work by Morgan Ramsay, Through the Moongate, Part II by Andrea Contato, Explore/Create by Richard Garriott, and MMOs from the Inside Out by Richard Bartle, and Dungeons and Dreamers by Bard King and John Borland. Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of February 20 1998 and October 30 1998; Computer Gaming World of February 1998 and November 1998; New York Times of October 20 1997; Wired of May 1998.

Web sources include a 2018 Game Developers Conference talk by some of the Ultima Online principals, an Ultima Online timeline at UOGuide, and GameSpot‘s vintage reviews of Ultima Online and its first expansion, The Second Age. On the subject of SubSpace, we have histories by Rod Humble and Epinephrine, another vintage GameSpot review, and a Vice article by Emanuel Maiberg.


Reviews From Trotting Krips

The Mutant Spiders by Handic Software (1983)

Tweet Review: Players must do battle with a mutant spider and the game’s parser to save the world. Full Review: I have an unhealthy obsession with quirky, one-off text adventures from the early days of home computing. By the mid-to-late 1980s, certain norms had been adopted by the text adventure community. The ways games looked […]

Tweet Review:

Players must do battle with a mutant spider and the game’s parser to save the world.

Full Review:

I have an unhealthy obsession with quirky, one-off text adventures from the early days of home computing. By the mid-to-late 1980s, certain norms had been adopted by the text adventure community. The ways games looked and the way players controlled them had largely coalesced by then. But the early 80s, that was the wild, wild west. Controls were kooky. Concepts were bizarre. Convincing a game’s parser to bend to your wishes was often just as challenging as a game’s puzzles. Many games from that era are dreadful to play, and yet like a moth to a bug zapper, I am attracted to them.

Handic Software is barely a footnote in computing history. The Swedish company was leveraged by Commodore Business Machines in the dawn of the 1980s to import Commodore computers and roughly a dozen games into the country. Within just a couple of years, Commodore established their own presence in Sweden, making Handic’s distribution system largely obsolete. From 1981 to 1983 Handic imported several early CBM releases including Gorf, Wizard of Wor, and Omega Race, while also releasing a trio of text adventures they labeled as their Brain Stimulator series. Those games included The Ship, The Fourth Sarcophagus, and this one, The Mutant Spiders.

The Mutant Spiders begins rather abruptly with a single line of text: “I wake up and find myself in a flying plane!” While this brief bit of scene setting doesn’t tell us much about the game’s overall plot, it speaks volumes about what’s in store for gamers brave enough to accept the challenge. The game’s opening line begs for an explanation, one players will never learn.

Within just a few moves it is revealed not only are we the only person on the plane — there are no other passengers or pilots — but that the plane is running out of fuel. The plane contains only a few areas to explore, and solving this first puzzle is Text Adventure 101. By doing so, we learn a lot about the game’s design. It doesn’t take long to realize the game’s engine is as rickety as the plane we’re flying on. Moving to new rooms or areas results in a simple “OK,” forcing players to type LOOK after every single move. Commands are not only occasionally obscure, but worse than that, inconsistent. (To enter the restroom, type GO DOOR. To exit, you’ll GO WEST.) The game’s parser only looks for the correct move and rarely understands anything else — on the plane you’ll discover items that can be opened, but the parser doesn’t understand the verb CLOSE. The brevity of the game’s opening line continues throughout. The plane’s cockpit has a single gauge. The bathroom contains a single item. At no point was I convinced the author of this game had ever stepped foot on an actual airplane.

But it’s not just descriptions that are lacking; it’s any sense of story logic. Why were we sleeping on a plane in the first place? What happened to the other passengers? Where is the pilot? Where’s the plane going? None of these questions (and more) are answered. These early games seem barely connected to the rich world of modern interactive fiction many of us are used to playing today. The game doesn’t just fail to fill in some story details… it doesn’t try at all.

After escaping the mysteriously unpiloted and underfueled plane, players will conveniently land next to a discarded newspaper that provides the closest thing to expository the game’s willing to offer. According to the paper, people are being killed by mutated spiders, and wouldn’t it be great if someone — anyone — were to destroy any latent spider eggs before they hatch? Anyone, anyone at all. (Hint: it’s you. It’s totally you. You have to destroy the spider’s eggs.)

The Mutant Spiders doesn’t bother embedding items players need along their journey in its prose or even stash them in logical locations. Instead, you’ll discover a forest with things like saws, matches, rusty nails, lamps, and all sorts of helpful tools scattered around in piles between the trees. All things considered, it’s a pretty convenient forest to land in considering the task at hand. One frustrating limitation of the game is that players can only carry a finite number of objects and will quickly be prompted to start dropping old items to pick up newly discovered ones. These objects are often used in combination with one another and prior to playing through the game it’s nigh impossible to know which ones will work with others, meaning it’s extremely likely you’ll find yourself with some but not all of the items in your inventory needed to solve a particular puzzle with the other items discarded in a Hansel and Gretel-like trail in your wake through the forest. If I can provide any help at all it’s that every item only seems to have a single use. While logic dictates a machete would be an ideal item to hang onto in a world of mutant spiders, once you figure out where to use it, it’s safe to drop it. You won’t need your parachute or any discovered keys a second time. The game’s not big on callbacks.

If you like your vintage text adventures full of unfair and instant deaths, The Mutant Spiders is for you. Go the wrong direction from the beach and you’ll learn you don’t know how to swim, glub glub. Moving around in dark areas will result in a deadly head injury. Even worse are the instant deaths the game goads you into trying. One move after being informed I was getting hungry I stumbled upon some mushrooms. (They were poison.) After finding matches and some deadwood, I tried to light it. (The burns on my hand became infected and instantly killed me.) Adding insult to injury, you’ll die of starvation after 130 moves. I spent multiple games attempting to make a fishing pole (I had a branch and some wire), but like all of these old games, there’s no reward for coming up with alternate solutions to the single one the programmer had in mind. I tried every way I could think of to use my matches with the can of killer spray I found.

Oddly enough, the game’s most obvious enemy, the mutant spider itself, is the easiest to avoid. Progress far enough and you’ll encounter the spider wandering aimlessly and randomly from location to location. The spider will only attack you after remaining in the same location for three rounds. Players are way more likely to die from starvation, drowning poisoning, head trauma, or any other number of issues than be eaten by the titular arachnid.

A few of the game’s puzzles contain some pretty wide leaps of faith, and one of the few weblinks I found regarding this game contains a walkthrough hosted on the Classic Adventures Solution Archive. I honestly don’t know how anyone would have completed some of these old games, including this one, without assistance. The Mutant Spiders plays like a game in which we’re missing information, but if that’s the case you won’t find much help in the manual. The game’s documentation has been preserved by Plus4World, and it’s as scant as the game’s descriptions.

I once attended an evening pottery class and on display in the waiting room were several lopsided, misshapen, and non-symmetrical pot-like creations that, while resembling pots, didn’t quite make the cut. In the hall of text adventures, The Mutant Spiders would be on display in that same waiting room. While the game looks and plays like a classic text adventure, its sparse descriptions, awkward parser, thin plot and occasionally bizarre logic make it more of a text adventure curiosity than anything meant to be played for enjoyment. If navigating this game is the only way to save humanity from mutant spiders… prepare to be webbed.


The Last Mountain by Dee Cooke (2023)

The Little Ugly, Evil Guy On My Shoulder’s Verdict: I dropped the dead weight as soon as possible and somehow I STILL DIDN’T WIN?! The hell. On the other hand, I did get to put my pole in a crack so I’m still counting this one as a triumph. The Little Nice, Handsome Guy On […]

The Little Ugly, Evil Guy On My Shoulder’s Verdict:

I dropped the dead weight as soon as possible and somehow I STILL DIDN’T WIN?! The hell. On the other hand, I did get to put my pole in a crack so I’m still counting this one as a triumph.

The Little Nice, Handsome Guy On My Shoulder’s Verdict:

I’m not a very competitive person by nature, but I think I might enjoy mountain running. If the real thing anything like the game, then having the opportunity to share the experience with a good pal is way more important and rewarding than the final result. Now that’s what I call winning!

My Verdict:

A short meditation on competition and friendship. I enjoyed it thoroughly while it lasted, but I felt like it ended much too soon.

Game Information

Game Type: Adventuron

Author Info: Dee Cooke is a British text adventurer, writer, editor, runner, and telephone booth enthusiast. She has written a number of Adventuron games which can be played on Itch.io. She blogs at Spirit of Dee, tweets on Twitter or whatever the hell they call it these days, and posts photos and art to her Instagram.

Play Online Link: https://dee-cooke.itch.io/the-last-mountain

Other Games By This Author:Waiting for the Day Train, Barry Basic and the Quick Escape, Goblin Decathlon, The Cave of Hoarding, and more!

I love it when a game sends me hurtling into a world I was only vaguely aware even existed. The Last Mountain does just that by placing you with little preparation into the role of a long distance runner competing in the annual Merrithorne Mountain Race alongside a close friend and racing partner, Susan. As depicted in the game, long distance mountain races are grueling, multi-day affairs that test both the body and the mind. That’s at the best of times, and these, it turns out, aren’t really the best of times.

What makes this race so different and challenging for our main character is that Susan is clearly not feeling up to snuff. She’s slowing the team down, which is a bit annoying considering you and her have been training hard for this for some time, but just what is wrong with her and how serious is it? She’s not telling, and her pride won’t let her quit the race. Susan’s sluggishness creates a sense of unease that permeates the game and quickly makes the stakes seem far higher than just winning or losing.

Her condition is the main source of conflict in the story. Ultimately, it’s up to the player to decide whether competing in the race or spending time with and supporting Susan is more important. You can view one as the asshole path and the other as the right, morally correct choice, but I honestly felt like either one could be justified depending on how you think about it and how you want to roleplay your character. I was much more inclined to be there for Susan because I was worried about her and wanted to share the experience together with her even at the cost of victory, but the thing is I’m not a competitive runner. I haven’t exactly been training for this fucking thing for months like the main character has. Susan could even be accused of being selfish for keeping her partner in the dark and knowingly compromising their performance by insisting on competing even while she was ailing. By all appearances, Susan has been a great friend, but of course as players we aren’t privy to all their past conversations, training sessions, and races.

I think what The Last Mountain does best is provide interesting outcomes almost no matter what you do. Supporting Susan is emotionally rewarding. Focusing on winning turns this mountain race into something of a guilt trip, but you do better in the race if you do so yay selfishness! Fucking up the race is also an option, and I think the main thing I got out of deliberately doing that was gaining a deeper appreciation of what a badass Susan really is. She may not be able to race fast in her present condition, but she’s always racing hard. One tough lady, indeed. That brings to mind the other thing the game does really well: even without going deep into her backstory, Susan is a pretty vividly drawn character. I didn’t walk away from any playthrough without feeling mad respect for her toughness and competitive spirit.

The puzzles all involve navigating mundane challenges you might realistically encounter during a race: gathering water when your flasks run dry, finding your way when you get lost, carefully navigating a particularly perilous section of the race, and so forth. I found the game to be generally well implemented and straightforward. It’s particularly impressive how there are multiple solutions to most obstacles that all make sense and feel natural. The fact that one puzzle (on the “fucking up the race” route) features a crack I took to be a RFTK shout-out of sorts, but maybe Dee just really likes featuring crack in her games. I mean cracks.

Dee did a really good job with the writing here. Mostly due to the presence of Susan, it’s a more emotional experience than Waiting for the Day Train was. However, our author also did a great job with the nuts and bolts of the story as well. Everything is well-described, including things you don’t really necessarily need to examine before advancing, and there’s excellent attention to detail throughout.

The blurb for this game on the ParserComp Itch page reads, “A short game about a long race.” That sums it up pretty well, but also highlights the greatest weakness of The Last Mountain in my view: it’s really short. Any given playthrough will take you about ten minutes. If you look around a lot and do enough runs to see all the outcomes, you’ll spend about an hour with it. For what it is, it’s very good and I recommend it, but I feel it could have been much more. A longer game could’ve better invoked the length and challenge of the race (which is, by all accounts, absolutely exhausting). It would have given Dee more opportunities to explore the relationship between the player character and Susan further as well. We could’ve had flashbacks of races past, more conversations, and of course more mishaps and obstacles to overcome. I definitely found myself yearning for more at the end of this one.

Simple Rating: 7/10

Complicated Rating: 37/50

Story: 7/10

Writing: 8/10

Playability: 8/10

Puzzle Quality: 7/10 (There’s nothing too difficult here, but I really enjoyed the fact that there were multiple ways to solve or fail the puzzles. That’s definitely something I’d like to see more of in IF!)

Parser Responsiveness: 7/10 (I would say this game is a slight improvement on Waiting for the Day Train on the parser side of things. There were still a few awkward moments here and there, but it was smooth sailing for the most part.)


Zarf Updates

Off-beat poetics

"The English language only has one native poetic form, and that's the limerick," someone once told me. I don't remember who. Well, no. What I remember hearing is "the limerick is America's only home-grown verse form," but that's just silly. ...

"The English language only has one native poetic form, and that's the limerick," someone once told me. I don't remember who.

Well, no. What I remember hearing is "the limerick is America's only home-grown verse form," but that's just silly. I don't know how that even stuck in my head. It doesn't even rhyme!

Limericks are from England, if they're not from Ireland. (The city of Limerick may or may not have anything to do with the case.) Edward Lear was British. W. S. Gilbert was British. Ogden Nash was American but he came along later. I don't know anything about the Maigue Poets of Croom, but I am fantastically happy that "the Maigue Poets of Croom" is a thing people talk about.


No, the only truly American verse form is the Burma-Shave sign.

Ben met Anna Made a hit Neglected beard Ben-Anna split Burma-Shave

That's the one I remember, from some history of nonsense I read as a kid. Long after Burma-Shave, honest. The last original sign went up in 1963, so I would have read about them... all of fifteen years later? Maybe twenty?

But what is the poetic form of the Burma-Shave sign? A few years ago I was inspired to write it thusly:

Four short lines Iambic pace It's like haiku But for your face Burma-Shave

Credit me on that one if you quote it, please. I am proud.

Only that's wrong! A Burma-Shave poem is five lines, not counting the final "Burma-Shave" logo. I realized this while hunting down the exact wording of "Ben-Anna Split" at this Burma-Shave fan site:

Ben Met Anna Made a hit Neglected beard Ben-Anna split Burma-Shave

Or check this page, which reproduces the entire collection from Frank Rowsome Jr.'s definitive book The Verse by the Side of the Road.

How did I get that wrong? Obviously, my memory is oral tradition. If you recite the poem, it's four lines. It's just written in five. One line is always broken up. Doesn't have to be the first line; it just has to fit the rhythm.

Shaving brush Is out of date Use the Razor's Perfect mate Burma-Shave

Once you see it, the off-kilter phrasing jumps out; it's crucial. If you write "Ben-Anna" in four lines, like I did above, it's lifeless tump-tump.


Of course, the signs weren't perfectly consistent. It took the company a couple of years to really settle the formula. The first one (1927) was just an ad:

Shave the modern way No brush No lather No rub-in Big tube 35¢ drug stores Burma-Shave

(If you really want to be pedantic, the verse form must be written in all capital letters. I'm not saying typography can't be integral to a literary form -- just last night I saw a printout in Computer Modern and said "Ah, nerd document" -- but for this post I'll leave it be.)

By 1929 the company had gotten into poems. But they sometimes tried to connect up the "Burma-Shave" line at the end:

Every shaver Now can snore Six more minutes Than before By using Burma-Shave

Awkward, right? But 1929 also saw what feels like the first "correct" jingle.

Half a pound For Half a dollar Spread on thin Above the collar Burma-Shave

Burma-Shave never stayed entirely in one lane, but by 1932 the majority of jingles used the four-lines-five-signs format. Although I have to quote this masterpiece, which unifies the final line without losing the prosody:

If harmony Is what You crave Then get A tuba Burma-Shave

I have accordingly updated my Burma-Shave definition page to five-line form. I can't believe I got it so wrong.

Five short lines Iambic pace It's like Haiku But for your face Burma-Shave


And that brings us back to limericks, the only true five-line verse form.

(No, not really. I can google "cinquain" as well as anybody. It's a segue; go with it.)

The one thing absolutely everybody knows about limericks is that they're five lines long. Only that's wrong! Edward Lear didn't write them that way. (He didn't call them "limericks" either; the term came later.)

There was a young lady of Harwich Who built a remarkable carriage; It held just one hundred -- so everyone wondered -- And cried ‘Gracious me! What a carriage!’

There was an Old Person of Philæ Whose conduct was scroobius and wily; He rushed up a Palm, when the weather was calm, And observed all the ruins of Philæ.

In fact this 1861 edition of A Book of Nonsense stuffs a limerick into two lines on the title page.

The title page of _A Book of Nonsense_ by Edward Lear. It depicts a short fat man in old-fashioned clothes handing a "Book of Nonsense" to gleeful children.

There was an Old Derry down Derry, who loved to see little folks merry; So he made them a book, and with laughter they shook, at the fun of that Derry down Derry!

Nobody was thinking about five-line verses at all in those early Lear collections.

If you recite a limerick, it's... is it four lines or five? This isn't obvious! Let's go back to W. S. Gilbert:

My name is John Wellington Wells, I’m a dealer in magic and spells, In blessings and curses And ever-filled purses, In prophecies, witches, and knells.

If any one anything lacks, He’ll find it all ready in stacks, If he’ll only look in On the resident Djinn, Number seventy, Simmery Axe!

A glass revolving door leading into a boring modern glass building lobby. The number 70 is visible next to the door. Number 70, Simmery Axe, courtesy of Google Street View. I hope they have a plaque or something about the song.

The chorus of the song is two limericks. I don't think I ever noticed this, despite having the song stuck in my head all last week.

(I just read The Portable Door by Tom Holt, entirely by coincidence, I had no idea Burma-Shave research would lead me down this hole. The book involves the descendants of J. W. Wells, you see. Thus the earworm. The book was okay, but I like his K. J. Parker stuff better. If you want more Wells, check out The Incredible Umbrella by Marvin Kaye.)

Where was I? Limericks. Of course the song isn't written in 5/4 time or anything. You sing it in four evenly-spaced lines, with a solid beat of silence at the end of three of them.

My name is John Wellington Wells  (boom) I’m a dealer in magic and spells  (boom) In blessings and curses and ever-filled purses, In prophecies, witches, and knells.  (boom)

And that's how you recite a limerick, right?

There was a young lady named Bright  (boom) Who travelled much faster than light  (boom) She set out one day In a relative way And returned on the previous night.  (boom)

Whether the third line is broken up on paper, it flows rat-a-tat in prosody. You only have time for the barest fraction of a pause. Whereas the first two pauses are thunderous, and the last one --

Does it even make sense to talk about a pause on the last line? You've finished the poem! But there is a pause there, and it's intrinsic to the limerick form. That's the beat where the audience gets it. Boom! This is why limericks are comic verse. They have perfect comic timing built right in; you can't screw it up.

Note that Edward Lear's verses don't do this. Lear very distinctively ends his last line by repeating the first, rather than rhyming with it. The comedy comes in the third (/fourth) line, which goes nonsensically off the rails, allowing the final line to bring you comfortingly back to earth.

There was an Old Person of Anerly, Whose conduct was strange and unmannerly; He rushed down the Strand, with a Pig in each hand, But returned in the evening to Anerly.

If I knew why Lear thought this was best, I should know a great deal more about nonsense than I do.