Endless, Nameless is Adam Cadre’s latest game. The surrounding text claims that it’s the relic of the bulletin board age, but anyone familiar with Adam’s oeuvre won’t be surprised to know there’s a bit more to it than a retro remake. There’s no way to write a substantive review without addressing the ways in which it takes a twist, though; it’s worth playing enough to find out just exactly how it’s going to be not what you think. So please consider giving it a try before reading on.

So, then. The game begins as a deliberately super-retro recreation of an early text adventure: cod fantasy that starts in a tavern, full of magic spells, incoherent worldbuilding and pointless anachronisms, easy to make unwinnable. There’s an inventory management system involving bulky encumbrances and a pocket that can hold lots of objects but doesn’t stash anything automatically. Trying to go through a door never auto-opens it, trying to open a door never auto-unlocks it, and if you want to manipulate anything you have to explicitly take it first. The whole ecosystem of implicit actions is gone, and you will miss it badly. There’s no conversation system, no giving or showing. There is randomized combat, though, and a hunger daemon (that mercifully doesn’t actually kill you), and a maze, and a big, pointlessly fiddly machine, of exactly the type that Adam has often complained about in games.

The trick is that the writing is good enough, and certain elements polished enough, that you know you are in competent hands anyway. This is no minor trick to pull off, but Adam achieves it.

The first time you die in this world — and it will likely not take that long — you are transported to another plane of existence. This plane is a vacation beach house implemented in excruciating detail (feel free to spend five turns examining carpet and wallpaper in the first room), but with significantly reduced potential. You can’t do anything dangerous. You can’t throw objects. You can’t kill yourself. You can talk to other characters. The implementation is now a parody of new-school IF, though, sadly, it looks like a not-very-good slice of life piece. In the new level, you meet other versions of yourself, other nameless adventurers who have previously tried your quest and given up. You can interact with them for a while. Some have hints about the retro game. When you’re ready, you return to the old-school game world and try again, using the knowledge you’ve gained.

Despite the sometime frustrations, the experience is really pretty good. The magic system is just about complicated enough to be interesting without being overwhelming. The spells are mostly named from verbs in Esperanto, for suitable almost-recognizability (with the exception of OVIDIO, which is presumably named for the author of the Metamorphoses). The Endless, Nameless spells are mostly a silly assortment, but, as in Graham Nelson’s Balances, they have a few cool interactions as well.

The inner game is unfair in various ways, not so much because solutions are really hard as because there are lots of ways to make things unwinnable, miss objects you had a narrow opportunity to acquire, to screw up a puzzle timing. Getting it all right will take many repetitions. But most of the time, the design hit just the right level of pleasurable frustration to remind me of what was fun about old-style puzzle games (yes, even about replaying them) without making me actually walk away. Most of the challenges are not really terribly hard, and with the hints from the framing story, most are pretty doable.

The beach house environment itself is almost puzzle free, by contrast, but it is full of in-jokey bits (books full of starting lines from Adam’s Lyttle Lytton contest, for instance, or — my personal favorite — randomized cocktails named after IF games).

Gradually as you move back and forth between levels, a broader story emerges. It concerns a game rewritten by multiple authors, not yet fully evolved; it is ultimately a story about the IF community’s struggle to elevate the state of the art, with most of the major characters recognizable as avatars of real people.

Some of the game’s most effective moments for me were the ones about upgrades to the game system: I was relieved and very pleased when, halfway through the retro game, the sorceress endows the adventurer with access to a conversation system, where he’d previously had to be mute or just say whatever the game made him say, and she turns out to have quite a lot to talk about. (More than you can actually see in a single playthrough — I think I restored and played her conversation six or seven times to make sure I got it all.) I’m biased here, given how much this ties in with my own work, but I thought that passage of the game demonstrated really effectively IF’s need for characters; and I think this, and several of the endings, were not anti-IF as an art form.

That said, I am generally not a fan of self-referential pieces that exist chiefly to talk about IF genres and the IF community. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with that, but I always feel like it’s kind of a missed opportunity. Art that’s primarily about its own medium tends to feel a bit claustrophobic to me, in-joke-y, exclusive, and quick to show its age. Both Sins Against Mimesis and The Cabal fall into this trap, despite being pretty funny in their way; Being Andrew Plotkin has tinges of it; and the reason I liked the very referential Apocolocyntosis is that it also had something to say about life, and was primarily about that, rather than being exclusively about IF. In my view Endless, Nameless suffers from this somewhat, especially if one doesn’t get the “really won” ending. (More about that in a minute.)

The endgame of Endless, Nameless seems to say that the IF community is most impeded in its progress by a) apathy and b) trolls. While there certainly are some of those things around, I myself have noticed a lot more trouble with c) people having busy lives and d) a lack of active connection with other artistic and gaming communities that would bring in new life and new ideas. What gives anyone — trolls, over-the-top reviewers, authors — a disproportionate significance in the community is when that community is too small and inward-looking, has too little sense of its own place relative to the rest of the world.

Fortunately I also think that things aren’t so dire as Endless, Nameless suggests. On the contrary, the IF community/communities are demonstrably broadening, with more platforms and more types of user and player, and more contact with the literary (see inkle) and indie gaming worlds. Anna Anthropy’s widely read book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form, profiles both Inform as a tool and The Baron as an example of a game that could not have been made by a commercial author, for instance.

I’ve seen a few laments that an emphasis on outreach has resulted in a trend towards super-accessible children’s stuff that doesn’t build on the history of the genre or any expectation of sophisticated literacy about IF past. I get where that’s coming from — though again, I think the solution isn’t to restrict ourselves to just one type of game output, but to try to provide the critical help, in the form of reviews and essays, so that people who want to understand some of IF’s history and the more esoteric games will find them accessible.

In any case, there is a bit more to Endless, Nameless than those points. There are various ways that the conflict in game levels can be resolved, but the best of them — explicitly the best — is the one in which your nameless adventurer avatar is reborn into the real world and is able to appreciate the infinitely greater richness of the universe “without a shaper”. (For a moment Adam’s interest in Carl Sagan seemed to poke through, as the game lyrically praised a world of infinite possibility and natural wonder.) It’s a leaving-the-cave narrative, condemning escapist fantasies not so much because they foster weakness as because those fantasies are pathetically defective compared to the thing from which one is escaping. But at least good art is closer to life than mediocre art.

Hap Aziz, a doctoral researcher in the use of interactive fiction for education, is creating an educational game about Colonial Williamsburg. The Historical Williamsburg Living Narrative is currently gathering funding through Kickstarter.

Hap was good enough to talk to me about his approach to the educational aspects of the project: why he chose this particular period, the teaching aims of the game, how it relates to other IF he’s encountered, and his wishlist of IF tools for educational gaming.

ES: Why did you pick Williamsburg as your first subject?

Hap: There are several reasons I decided to go with Williamsburg the first time out. The first is my own childhood connection; it was regular a family vacation spot during my childhood years, and then in late high school and early college, I went several times with my best friend who also shared a fondness for the city. Now as a father I have taken my family there several times over the past few years, carrying on the tradition.

But what makes it so attractive to me as a game environment setting is the almost isolated aspect of its geography. The historical part of the city is “set apart” from the entirety of modern Williamsburg, and the majority of the historical part has been faithfully restored to its 18th century splendor. Because so many of the buildings are open to the public, building accurate maps of the various locations down to every detail of appearance should be a fairly straightforward process. When I considered that aspect of the city, it clicked for me that Williamsburg is an ideal location for an Interactive Fiction period piece based on actual history.

ES: What age/grade range of students do you imagine as the primary audience for this project?

Hap: I see the game being something of value for students studying civics content that typically falls around the freshman or sophomore years of high school. Younger students may enjoy exploring the physical layout of the city, but they may not be able to appreciate the narrative aspects of the movement toward American independence.

ES: What sorts of goals are you giving the player? Do you see this primarily as a game, or primarily as a teaching experience?

Hap: Originally I had envisioned the project as being primarily a teaching experience based on exploration and discovery, but I realized that without a plot line for engagement (recalling Seymour Papert’s essay “Does Easy Do It?”), it would have limited appeal. So I envisioned a two-phased approach, in which the result of the first phase would be a teaching experience with a good game play foundation. In the second phase, I would add an additional plot line separate from the historical time line, allowing students or game players to focus on the aspect of most interest to them.

ES: What objectives do you have about the kinds of things students will learn about history? Names, dates and facts? Interpretive strategies? Research skills? Something else?

Hap: One of the fascinating things to me about the events surrounding American independence is that there was so much disagreement and debate regarding whether or not the colonies should dissolve their bonds with England. Much like today, the political landscape in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War was extremely polarized, and passions were strong on both sides. So while there will be a good helping of names, dates, and other historical facts to provide time line sign posts, the main objective is to provide a context for the richness of the arguments on all sides regarding independence so that students will be able struggle with the issues and use their own reasoning to decide for or against separation from England. In fact, one of the key moments of the game (first phase), will have the player participate in the vote for or against independence.

ES: How will the game or supporting materials allow teachers to assess student learning?

Hap: I will be providing a set of assessment materials that will help teachers frame multiple choice or essay tests either around factual data or interpretation or the events that occurred (e.g., “The day of humiliation, prayer, and fasting was organized in support of which colony?” or “What was Lord Dunmore’s intent in offering freedom to the slaves?”).

ES: One of the things I really liked about The Chinese Room (an educational puzzle game about various philosophical topics) was the way it introduced concepts and then made the player prove familiarity with them before moving forward. Voices of Spoon River did something similar at least some of the time, though I felt some of the puzzles weren’t really about literary interpretation.

Do you envision doing something like this where the student player needs to demonstrate comprehension to make progress and finish the game, or do you see it more as a purely immersive experience?

Hap: I love the idea of having students demonstrate comprehension before moving forward, but I’m concerned with the time frame of development. So at this point, my first phase development will likely focus on the immersiveness of the experience, and a subsequent release will add comprehension puzzles. I will be soliciting feedback after the initial release from educators regarding the types of puzzles that would be most effective in this regard. I could be surprised by the Kickstarter effort and end up with funding that greatly exceeds my goal, in which case I may be able to add developers to the project and implement those puzzles sooner rather than later. However, I’m not planning on that.

At some point in the future I would like to be able to add reporting metrics that show the areas of the game in which the students spent the most (or the least) amount of time, where they had conversations with NPCs, and what events they witnessed as a part of their game play experience.

ES: That’s an interesting point, and the desire for those types of assessment tools is something I’ve occasionally heard put forward by other teachers. Have you looked at all into hooking into the functionality of Parchment, which can keep track of player transcripts online, and maybe doing something with extending that?

Hap: I’m intrigued by the extensibility of Parchment, and I’m curious enough to want to know if I could use Parchment to develop a dashboard of sorts that provides user statistics for the game in order to give teachers some indication as to what’s happening inside the play environment. I could see utility in saving transcripts especially for assignments that might involve having students engage NPCs and “mine” for specific information.

Another possibility that I like is to use Parchment as the framework for a collaborative version of the game. Players could engage other players as well as NPCs, but from an assessment standpoint imagine a mechanism whereby teachers could actually get inside the game and observe what their students are doing or even interacting with the students as part of the assessment process. This sends my thoughts down the path of an IF version of the movie The Matrix.

ES: Are there extensions or tools (for assessment or for other purposes) that you wish existed that would make it easier to build educational IF or make IF more accessible to teachers?

Hap: Oh, yes, certainly. I think that one of the great challenges to bringing more gaming into the classroom is the fact that there is such a high barrier to creation in terms of time and expense resources. Teachers need tools that will allow them to create content quickly and inexpensively so that the results can be integrated into the curriculum on an as-needed basis. Few tools allow that now (especially with a low threshold of technology experience on the part of the teachers). Inform 7 is one of the most accessible tools in my opinion, but I’d love to see a GUI front end in which the physical layout of a game, including inventory items, can be laid out in a graphical way, drag and drop. The initial environment set up could go so quickly, and the process of designing the map would actually result in an executable version of the game world.

In terms of assessment, I’d like to see a way of (more) easily mapping in-game puzzles back to particular assignment grades. So for example, if a student were unable to solve the “Hidden Chamber Door” puzzle in a game, a grade might be able to be assigned based on the complexity of the puzzle, the closeness to the solution reached by the student, and so on. This, however, would require a game environment in which none of the puzzles were linearly dependent on any other puzzle.

ES: Will the results be suitable for self-teaching and/or homeschooled students?

Hap: Yes, I think so (it’s certainly one of my hopes for the game). If the students are aware of the assessment materials before beginning the game so that they may frame their thinking during play, that will enhance the game’s effectiveness as a teaching tool. However, as long as they follow through with the first phase plot, there will be value in terms of realized educational outcomes. I see the home schooling market as a very good potential audience for the game, using it as supplemental material to a solid American history lesson plan.

ES: You mention you’re planning to show the students the “events leading up to the Declaration of Independence” — is this something you’re planning to implement as a plot line in the story?

Hap: The first phase version of the plot will place players in the role of a representative in the Virginia House of Burgesses in the early 1770s, and the game will follow a timeline leading up to July 4, 1776. The key events that occurred in Williamsburg during that period of time, as well as numerous minor events in Williamsburg and news of events from the other colonies will play out with historical fidelity.

Throughout, players will witness and be able to participate in many of the events while interacting with NPCs that provide their interpretation of the significance of everything that goes on. One of the key moments of the game involves players being able to cast their vote regarding the motion for independence (and this is one of the areas in which there could be some deviation from historical accuracy). The depth to which the player wants to become involved with the events of they day will be a matter of preference (and possibly one of assigned requirements).

After having done a fair amount of research already regarding the history of the Revolutionary War and of Williamsburg in particular, I feel strongly that the narrative around the actual occurrences is compelling on its own, and will provide a wonderful foundation for an engaging story line.

ES: When you say there might be some deviation from historical accuracy, does that mean you’re going to let the student divert the course of history and explore what might have happened if some linchpin events had gone differently? I can see that potentially being both really appealing and a huge amount of work.

Hap: Certainly in the first release version, I’m going to tightly control the historical aspects, and there won’t be any outcomes different than what actually occurred, other than the actual vote and the name of the player character. Since I don’t want the player to simply walk through the life of one of the citizens of Virginia, the character played will be entirely fictional, though in keeping with appropriate historical characteristics. However, a pivotal moment in the game will come during the vote of May 15, 1776, in Williamsburg that instructed the delegation at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia to vote for independence. Historically, that vote in Williamsburg was unanimous. But since the player has a choice to vote either way, the game outcome could possibly be one short of unanimous.

The “what-if” aspects are very interesting to consider, though, and if possible, I could see working in what-if outcomes in the possible conversations that the player might have with NPCs. So what the actual outcome of other events would not change, the player could still appreciate the impact of different courses of action. (“What if we don’t have our day of humiliation, prayer, and fasting?” the player asks. The random merchant in the tavern responds, “Why, we must support our sister colony to the north in this way! If the Crown feels the ability to trample on our freedoms unrestrained imagine the potential for even further curtailment of our ability to trade equitably…” and on and on.)

ES: Are there other works of IF that you see as examples of the kind of educational experience you want to offer, or is this project really distinct from things you’ve seen before?

Hap: Interestingly, the answer to this question comes back to you to some degree. There was an early version of a game I played called Major Charles Boulton and the Northwest Rebellion Interactive Historical Fiction by Shawn Graham that started my mind working in the direction of using IF as a classroom resource. I read an article some time ago in which he stated that he wanted to have his NPCs behave as more than sophisticated chatterbots, and that your title Galatea was a model for him.

Another game that I enjoyed, especially from the historical perspective was 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery by Peter Nepstad. The game is pretty impressive in scope and attention to detail, and there is great enjoyment in the exploration of the environment. But I’m hoping that after the addition of my second phase of content (interweaving a second plot line through the historical setting and original objectives) will bring something unique to the marketplace.

ES: One of the things that really deepened the sense of setting in “1893″ was Peter Nepstad’s use of period photographs. Do you also plan to have illustrations? Supporting maps?

Hap: While the game itself will be a traditional text-only IF title, I will be providing supplementary photographs as well as a basic map of 18th century Williamsburg stretching from the Governor’s Palace to the Capitol Building. In addition, since a large part of my research materials will be publications from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, I will likely provide a list of those materials for educators and other interested parties to obtain copies for their own use.

ES: Your production schedule looks quite ambitious, and you’ve mentioned you’re looking for collaborators to help you write NPC content. How are you planning to coordinate this process? Will your collaborators be working from outlines of the educational content you want included, or will they also be researching and producing their own content?

Hap: This is part of the process that I plan on settling during the remainder of the Kickstarter funding period. In terms of research and the development of educational content, I’ll be doing the majority of that directly or working very closely with a small team of people who are familiar with my vision for the game (which might just come down to my lovely wife helping here). For collaborators on NPC behavior and interaction, I may recruit from a pool of game design degree students and graduates that have experience in Inform 7. I’ve built game design courses and programs for several colleges, and I’ve taught game design for quite a few years. As a result, I have a fairly extensive network of eager freelancers that might be willing to contribute their time and talents to the project.

ES: What are you hoping will come out of this in the long term?

Hap: Ultimately, if I see some moderate interest in this game, I’d like to expand the idea to other historical locations such as St. Augustine, Florida, Charleston, South Carolina, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and so on. Some places may be better suited to specific events and tighter timelines (such as Gettysburg), while other locations might have several events spread over centuries from which to choose.

My attention is on the Williamsburg project now, though, and my hope is that I will be able to do justice to the historical story that’s already there to be told.

—

See more at Hap Aziz’s blog for the project, or, of course, at Kickstarter.

For practical purposes, the British PC industry lagged about three years behind the American. It wasn’t that it was impossible to buy a modern American machine. Commodore alone sold some 45,000 PET systems in Britain in that platform’s first three years of availability, and, while they were less common, you could certainly buy imported TRS-80s, Apple IIs, and Atari 400s and 800s if you had the money. But it’s that last part that’s key here. At a time when the pound was worth around $2.50, even the most bare-bones PET system would set you back at least £650, while an Apple II system of the type that was pretty much the expected standard in America by 1981 — a II Plus with 48 K, a color monitor, two floppy drives, perhaps a printer — would quickly climb to around the £2000 mark. To fully understand just how out of reach these prices made computers for the average Briton, you have to understand something about life there in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The British economy hadn’t really been good for quite some years, suffering along with the rest of country from a sort of general post-empire malaise punctuated by occasional embarrassing shocks like the Three-Day Week (1974), when chronic energy shortages forced the government to mandate that business could only open three days in the week, and the Winter of Discontent (1978-79), when strikes across a whole range of industries brought the economy and, indeed, daily life to a virtual standstill. The latter events were sufficient to ensure the election as Prime Minister of perhaps the most polarizing figure in postwar British political history, Margaret Thatcher, on a platform that promised to drag Britain into the modern age, if necessary kicking and screaming, by rolling back most of the welfare state that had been erected in the aftermath of World War II. Yet nothing got better in the immediate wake of Thatcher’s election. In fact, as the government imposed harsh austerity measures and much of the country’s remaining industrial base collapsed under privatization, they just continued to get worse. By 1981 unemployment was at 12.5%, entire cities were reduced to industrial wasteland, riots were becoming a daily reality, and Thatcher was beset by howling mobs virtually everywhere she went. It felt like something more than just a serious recession; it felt dangerous. That summer The Specials summed up the mood of the country in the apocalyptic, chart-topping “Ghost Town.” Things would get slowly, painfully better after that low point, but it would be nearly a decade before unemployment shrunk to reasonable levels and the modern economy Thatcher had promised really took hold with the beginning of the era of “cool Britannia.”

Suffice to say, then, that most Britons would not have been able to afford American computers even if they were priced in line with what Americans paid for them. While PETs were sold to businesses and TRS-80s and Apple IIs to the handful of wealthy eccentrics who could afford them, a parallel domestic industry arose to serve everyday users at prices they could afford. It began in 1978, three years after the Altair in North America, with a handful of do-it-yourself kits that let hobbyists solder together contraptions of toggle switches and blinking lights. The British equivalent of the trinity of 1977 then arrived, right on schedule, in 1980.

So many characters from the early PC era are larger than life, and their photos seem to say it all about them. You’ve got, for example, Steve Jobs, the glib, handsome charmer whom you wouldn’t quite trust with your daughter.

You’ve got Jack Tramiel, who (Jewishness aside) looks like he should be sitting behind a mound of spaghetti mumbling about breaking kneecaps.

And you’ve got the man history remembers as the first to bring affordable computers to the British public, Sir Clive Sinclair. He looks like a mad genius inventor who should be making gadgets for James Bond — or maybe Maxwell Smart. If you left him alone at your house you’d probably return to find the cat on fire and the daughter’s hair turned blue.

Despite having absolutely no formal training, Sinclair graduated from gigs writing for electronics magazines in 1961 to found Sinclair Radionics, a firm with the perfect name for a mad scientist’s workshop. After years spent selling kits for making radios, amplifiers, test equipment, and the like to hobbyists, Sinclair Radionics started a consumer-electronics line, for which, as (once again) befitted any proper mad scientist, they produced groundbreaking gadgets with absurd design flaws and about the worst quality control imaginable. There was the Sinclair Executive, one of the first calculators small enough to fit in a pocket, but which had an unfortunate tendency to explode (!) when left on too long. And there was the Microvision, a portable television. Unfortunately, Sinclair had neglected to ask just who the hell really wanted to watch TV on a 2″ black-and-white screen, and it was a commercial flop.

But the stereotypical — or satirical — Sinclair product was the Black Watch.

On the plus side, it was one of the first digital wristwatches. On the negative side — gee, where to start? The Black Watch was chronically unreliable in actually, you know, keeping time, never a good feature in a watch; it was apparently very susceptible to climate changes, running at different speeds in different seasons. Batteries lasted for a solid ten days if you were lucky, and were almost as hard to replace as the watch had been to assemble in the first place. (Like many Sinclair products, it was available as a do-it-yourself kit as well as in pre-assembled form). It had a tendency to literally fall to pieces all at once as the clips that held it together fatigued. But even that wasn’t the worst possible failure. In what was becoming a Sinclair trademark, the Black Watch was also known to explode without warning.

Released in late 1975, the Black Watch fiasco combined with the onslaught of cheap calculators from Japan marked the beginning of the end of Sinclair Radionics. Britain’s National Enterprise Board bought a majority interest in 1977, but quickly found Clive to be all but impossible to deal with, and found the hoped-for turnaround a tough nut to crack. The NEB finally pulled the plug on the company in the wake of Thatcher’s election; this sort of mixing with private business was of course under Thatcher’s new paradigm exactly what the government should not be doing. By that time Clive had already started another company on the sly to wriggle free of government interference with his management decisions. He named it Science of Cambridge to keep its guiding hand at least somewhat under wraps. This was the company that would start the PC boom in Britain.

For an exaggerated but entertaining picture of Clive Sinclair the man, I’ll point you to the show whose title I stole for this post, the BBC one-off Micro Men. He was a genuinely talented inventor with a flair for the art of the possible and a determination to bring out products at prices that ordinary people could afford — a populist in the best sense of the world. He was also stupefyingly stubborn and arrogant, one of those supremely tedious people who love to talk about their IQ scores. (He was chairman of British Mensa for almost two decades.) In a typical interview for Your Computer magazine in 1981, he said, “I make mistakes, everyone does, but I never make them twice.” Someone of more average intelligence — like for instance your humble blogger here — might beg to differ that his history of exploding products would seem to point to a man who kept making the same mistakes over and over, thinking he could avoid the perspiration of polishing and perfecting through the inspiration of his initial brilliant idea. But do what I know?

Sinclair had been involved with some of those blinking-box computer kits I mentioned earlier, but he first entered the computer market in a big way with the release of the ZX80 in early 1980, the £100 machine I mentioned in an earlier post as Jack Tramiel’s inspiration for the Commodore VIC-20. Indeed, there are some similarities between the two men, both egocentric executives who were forced out of the calculator market by the cheaper Japanese competition. Yet we shouldn’t push the comparison too far. Sinclair was, to use the British term, a thoroughgoing boffin, filled with childlike enthusiasm for gadgets and for technology’s social potential. Tramiel, however, was all businessman; he would, to paraphrase one of Steve Jobs’s most famous pitches, have been perfectly happy to sell sugared water for his entire life if that gave him the competition he craved.

The ZX80 was, once again, available as either a semi-assembled kit or, for somewhat more, a completed product ready to plug in and use. With its tiny case and its membrane keyboard, it looked more like a large calculator than a computer. Indeed, its 1 K of standard RAM meant that it wasn’t good for much more than adding numbers until the user sprang for an expansion. Its standard BASIC environment was bizarre and seemed almost willfully unfriendly, and it was beset by the usual Sinclair reliability problems, with overheating a particular concern. (At least there were no reports of exploding ZX80s…) The design was so minimal that it didn’t even have a video chip, but rather relied on the CPU to generate a video signal entirely in software. From this stemmed one of its most unique “features”: because the CPU could only generate video when it was not doing something else, the screen went blank whenever a program was actually running, even momentarily every time the user hit a key. But it was a real computer, the first really within reach for the majority of Britons. Sinclair sold 100,000 of them in less than eighteen months.

Science of Cambridge was not the only British company to make a splash in the burgeoning home-computer market in 1980. Another young company, Acorn Computers, released its own machine, the Acorn Atom, later that year.

The Atom cost about 50% more than the ZX80, but was still vastly less than any of the American machines. The extra money bought you a much more usable computer, with a proper keyboard, twice the RAM (even if 2 K was still sadly inadequate for actually doing much of anything), a display that didn’t flick on and off, and a less, shall we say, idiosyncratic interpretation of BASIC. The competition between Sinclair and Acorn was personal. The head of Acorn, Chris Curry, had been for some twelve years Clive Sinclair’s right-hand man. The two had parted ways in late 1978, ironically because Curry wanted to produce a new microcomputer that Sinclair did not (yet) see the potential of. Curry went on to form Acorn with a partner, Hermann Hauser, and barely a year later — Sinclair having suddenly gotten the microcomputer religion — was going toe to toe with his erstwhile boss and mentor.

The following year, 1981, would prove a pivotal one. Sinclair, who changed the name of his company that year to Sinclair Research in the wake of Sinclair Radionics dissolution, introduced the ZX81 in March, an evolution of the ZX80 design that further reduced the price to just £50 in kit form, £70 fully assembled.

Amongst other modest improvements, the ZX81 could run in “slow” mode, in which enough CPU time was always reserved to update the display, eliminating the screen blanking at the cost of dramatically slower CPU throughput. And it could handle floating-point numbers, an impossibility on the ZX80. Of course, it was also a Sinclair product, with everything that entailed. The 16 K RAM expansion didn’t quite fit into its socket correctly; it would occasionally fall out of place with disastrous results. Actually, most of the connections had similar if less acute problems, forcing one to tiptoe gingerly around the machine. (Presumably those living near train tracks were just out of luck.)

The Commodore VIC-20 also arrived that year, at an initial price of about £180. Very much a lowest end of low-end machines in North America, the VIC-20 with its 5 K of RAM and color graphics capabilities was considerably more capable than either the unexpanded Sinclair or Acorn; thus the comparatively high price.

In North America, we saw the emergence of a commercial software market in 1978, as hobbyists like Scott Adams began packaging their programs on cassette tapes in Ziploc baggies and selling them. True to the three-year rule, a domestic British software market began to emerge in 1981, with a similar do-it-yourself personality of hand-copied cassettes and improvised packaging. (One could hear the creators’ children playing and similar background noises on some of these “data” tapes.) Software of course largely meant games, and a big part of games was text adventures.

A very good candidate for the first homegrown British example of the form is Planet of Death, a game for the ZX80 and ZX81 released around June of 1981 by Artic Software, a company formed by two university students, Richard Turner and Chris Thornton, the year before. Unlike the earliest American text-adventure coders, Turner and Thornton had plenty of examples to follow, thanks to their Video Genie computer, a Hong Kong-manufactured clone of the TRS-80 Model 1 that became more popular than the real thing in Britain. (In fact, they did their coding on the Genie, which shared the Sinclair machines’ Zilog Z-80 processor, and transferred their work to the more primitive Sinclairs.) The Artic adventure line, of which Planet of Death was the first, shows a marked Scott Adams influence, from the instructions insert that calls the player’s avatar her “puppet” to Artic’s system of numbering its adventures to help the devoted assemble a complete collection. (One difference: Artic used letters instead of numbers. Thus Planet of Death is Adventure A.)

Planet of Death doesn’t cut a very inspiring figure as the first example of British ludic narrative. Mostly it makes you appreciate its inspiration; whatever his other failings, Scott Adams always finished his games before he released them. Planet of Death plays like something you might find sloshing around the bottom of one of the modern IF Competitions, albeit without the built-in technical competency modern IF languages like Inform bring to the table. It’s as if Turner and Thornton ran out of memory and simply stopped where they were — which, come to think of it, is likely exactly what happened. You’ve got bugs galore, a maze that’s doubly frustrating because it ultimately leads nowhere, red herrings and half-finished puzzles, all wired up to an unusually obtuse two-word parser that thinks “with” is a verb. Yet, just as the ZX80 and ZX81 were real computers, however limited an implementation thereof, Planet of Death was a real adventure game, the first most of the British public had seen, and it sold well enough to spawn a whole line from Artic. It stands at the origin of an adventure-game scene that would become if anything even more vital and prolific than that in the U.S. — one we’ll be following in later posts.

In an important signifier of the growing acceptance of PCs in Britain, the omnipresent High Street newsstand chain WH Smith began selling the ZX81 in its stores with the arrival of the 1981 holiday season, billing it as “your first step into personal computing.” Just as the arrival of the VIC-20 in K-Mart stores in North America signaled a similar paradigm shift there, mainstream British stores would soon be stocking not just Sinclairs but also Acorns and Commodores. Within a few years British computer sales would surpass those in the U.S. on a per capita basis, as Britain became the most computer-mad nation on Earth. We’ll get back to that. For next time, though, we’ll return to the U.S. to look at the last major computer introduction of 1981, and the most long-lived and important of all.

Frankenstein, written by Dave Morris and implemented by inkle studios, is an iPad app retelling Mary Shelley’s original tale in a new interactive format.

Morris’ Frankenstein follows the essential plot of Shelley’s, with a couple of key deviations. Victor Frankenstein’s experiments take place in revolutionary Paris rather than at the university of Ingolstadt; the narrative frame of the original story is peeled off, so that it no longer begins with Frankenstein meeting a shipful of adventurers in the north Atlantic, and the meeting on the ice occurs only at the end.

Removing the frame gives the story a certain immediacy. Victor’s experiments are told in the present and the horror of them is more directly present than they would have been via flashback; and flashback is notoriously tricky in interactive narrative because it often makes the reader question how she can possibly be affecting events that are, from the point of view of the frame narrative, already in the past.

Nonetheless I found I did miss that structural support. The frame narrative in the original serves as a kind of guarantee that Victor’s story is not the raving of a madman, because the man recording his story has observed the monster in the extreme reaches of Arctic ice; it provides, too, a tension about what is to come. Perhaps neither of those functions is so necessary to Morris’ version as to Shelley’s, since everyone reading Morris’ story will know that the monster is real and that Victor is not a lunatic. All the same, the tense anticipation of how the story will resolve to that desperate chase on the ice was a strong motivator in the original novel, and losing it costs Morris something.

Placing the story of Victor’s early experiments in revolutionary Paris rather than in Ingolstadt adds a more overt political setting to the opening phases of the story. It is a context probably more familiar to the audience than Ingolstadt would be, and perhaps more familiar to the author as well. One of the few bits of setting that rang actually false to me was a reference, later in Morris’ text, to “Germany,” phrased in a way that suggested (at least to me) more unity of state, culture, and language than existed in the late 18th century. The Bavarian city of Ingolstadt might have required too much parsing for both reader and author.

In choosing Paris of the terror instead, Morris furnishes Victor Frankenstein with a source of politically charged body parts (the heads and limbs of those killed by guillotine). The French Revolution is the obvious type of a nobly-motivated idea with grotesque consequences; the execution of Robespierre lines up narratively with Victor’s repentance about having made the monster, for greater effect. This decision makes more obvious to the modern reader a context of political and social turmoil that did not need any sort of introduction in 1818 when Shelley published.

Even where the text keeps to the plot of the original, the style is modernized. Many aspects of characterization that are only narrated in the original are here shown more fully. Morris has retained some of Shelley’s more striking images and amusing jokes, such as the disquieting dream Victor has about kissing Elizabeth and having her head turn into that of his own dead mother; or the obnoxious professor Krempe who is distracted from praising Frankenstein only by the opportunity to deliver “an eulogy on himself.” In other places, however, the characters are fleshed out in a way that assigns less universal knowledge to the narrator, hints at a greater diversity of human experience, and brings them more in line with modern tastes. Morris develops Professor Waldman’s Jewish faith, a past relationship between Justine Moritz and Victor, some hints of a homosexual devotion in Henri Clerval; all with a fairly light touch, as though restoring colors to a faded original. In the acknowledgements, Morris writes, “For all my grumbling about her avoidance of scenes and tendency to tell rather than show, I’ve come away with a greater respect for the author” — and this sentiment is evident both in the scenes he chose to develop and in the way he avoids doing too much violence to the characters of the original in the process.

To my mind only Elizabeth Lavenza comes off significantly the worse for this treatment, and it may be because her angel-in-the-home characterization in Shelley’s original is nearly impossible to cast in 21st century terms. Shelley endows her Elizabeth with a strength that consists most of all in denying her own pain in order to be a support to others, cheering them up in times of family grief. It is a personality that seems rather one-sided or perhaps unhealthy from a modern perspective — what does Elizabeth truly feel? What are her own motives? — but by allowing Elizabeth to be a bit weaker and more envious, and yet refraining from giving her any special interests not assigned to her by Shelley, Morris creates a character who is often a cheerless embodiment of duty-driven affection.

All of these choices — to familiarize the setting; to take away the distancing effect of the epistolary frame narrative; to make the characters seem more lively and more accessible to modern ideas of motivation; to expose the political concerns about equality and fraternity that colored the age — all these support the work’s primary interactive agenda, which is to demand of the reader again and again, “what do you think of all this?” And the reader must know enough, and care enough, and have sufficiently complicated feelings, for “what do you think?” to be a meaningful question.

For the majority of the decisions in Morris’ Frankenstein are what Alexis Kennedy would call reflective choices. Where do your sympathies lie? Do you trust this character, or that one? Do you approve or disapprove of this choice? Do you have some regard for the monster, and would you call him a monster at all? The questions despised as trivial in Anne Baddeley’s Observer review — do you read this letter first, or that one? — are questions of sympathy and priority. They ask the reader to choose which character he cares about most, or which theme he wants to concentrate on. Sometimes the choice directs the action, but more often it changes nothing obvious about the events, only the way and the order in which they are narrated —which is itself significant, of course.

For most of the book the text addresses the reader as “you”, with “you” understood as a kind of imagined companion to Frankenstein or even an aspect of his own conscience. Only in the passages from the monster’s perspective does “you” become a character — the monster itself. (Unlike Baddeley, I didn’t find the use of persons or the change of viewpoint characters at all confusing; there are really only two viewpoints, fewer than one encounters in the original.)

To Frankenstein you are a disembodied judge, companion and advisor, but to the monster you are the self — up until the moment when it first kills, a moment that you cannot prevent but also are not required to select for yourself. Perhaps this is simply meant to emphasize the monster’s humanity by identifying it more closely with the reader than Frankenstein himself is identified.

In both cases, however, the choices focus on attitude and interpretation more often than anything else.

I admit I found this kind of reading required an unexpected exertion. There were no puzzles, no points at which I could have gotten the narrative stuck, but the constant demand to identify a view or a side to be on was significant — especially since Morris’ Frankenstein is not a short book, and these questions appear sometimes as often as every paragraph or two.

I don’t think this is a bad thing, necessarily, and perhaps Morris’ Frankenstein is well served by being an application on a device ideal for interrupted reading, because I did set the app aside more often than I would have done with a book of similar length.

If Morris’ Frankenstein has a primary flaw as a work of interactive literature, it is, I think, that it casts too much of a veil over the effects of the player’s choices, especially the longterm effects; and this may lead some reviewers and players to misunderstand the depth of the intended experience.

There is quite a lot of different text to see on a second reading. The major events — the major deaths of the book — cannot be avoided, but a number of the minor incidents can be skipped or played out in different ways; there are entire sections concerning the death of Clerval, especially, that the reader can miss depending on his approach.

More often, a change in approach yields different explanations, different perspectives. Sometimes the revolutionary terror of Paris reads lightly, and on other paths there is much more attention to the constant threat and danger of the place. Sometimes the “don’t tread where man is not meant to go!” moral rings out very clearly, and sometimes it is muted in favor of other themes. But it would be easy not to realize this on a single pass, and Frankenstein is a long book to reread, especially to reread immediately.

I also had the impression that some choices were closed off in some readings due to earlier decisions; this is hard to verify without transcripts, however, and at no point does the inklewriter framework show you a path that is currently locked. Frankenstein does not easily expose to the reader the might-have-beens, the possibilities that would have existed if we’d made some different choice earlier. Unlike Frankenstein’s monster, it has an opaque skin and does not reveal its anatomy to the casual onlooker.

Since so much of the meaning of an interactive work lies precisely in the rules — the structure of how one choices opens or closes another — the relative lack of clarity about Frankenstein‘s structure makes it harder to evaluate as a whole. Morris’ work brings to the front some of the concerns of Shelley’s own time (such as the revolution, the rapidity of scientific change, the question of what makes someone human), and repeatedly it demands the reader’s opinion on these topics; but what does it have to say in Morris’ voice to his own contemporary audience?

To me perhaps the most notable thing about Morris’ take is the issue it refrains from exploring.

One of the primary points of Frankenstein, and one that Morris’ text frequently comes back to, is the idea that the monster is misjudged in large part because of his physical appearance, and Victor’s revulsion from his own creation is the motivating cause of much that follows. Again and again the story comes back to the question of appealing vs unappealing appearances, and one passage, in which Victor considers several severed heads as a source for the monster’s voicebox, explicitly explores the idea of how people are not what they appear to be.

And yet this remains one area that the choices rarely touch in any significant sense. The reader is not invited to choose whether to put aside questions of appearance; Victor never reconsiders his instinctive categorization of people based on how pretty they are. In other places, the story branches but holds this form of prejudice immutable. In the passage about constructing a mate for Frankenstein, the story can go at least two ways that I saw: either Victor creates a woman as ugly as the monster, in which case she is so horrified by the realization of her own appearance that she commits suicide at birth; or he studies anatomy more closely and produces a beautiful woman but then is so disgusted by the thought of this lovely creation embraced by the monster that he destroys her before she is finished.

Even the monster at the very end, speaking of his crimes, emphasizes that one of them is to have killed the innocent “and lovely.”

This left me with a curious sense of exclusion at the end of the text.

Concerns about being beautiful, and appearance as a marker of goodness and class structure — from media-enforced standards of female beauty to racial profiling to dehumanizing assumptions about people with disabilities — are very much on the contemporary radar. So I realize that this topic could have run away with the story if given full play — just as it’s possible to drown the story of Lysistrata by putting on a production that’s too much about whatever war is happening at the moment. But the question of how we judge people based on how they look is there in the story, without any special injection of contemporary mores; it’s just that the interaction mostly shies around this point. Had Morris’ Frankenstein been a static work, Victor’s obsession with physical perfection and even the monster’s own susceptibility on this point might have appeared to be one more issue raised for the reader’s consideration. But in Morris’ story so many of the reader’s intended reflections are, as it were, already built in — questions of the essential nature of man, the proper bounds of scientific research, the importance of affection or duty, etc. — that the relative absence of choices about appearance-based prejudice had a dampening effect.

All the same, Morris has breathed new life into an old monster, to make it attractive, to render it accessible and modern; to take away the long overwrought narration and replace it with more vivid and immediate scenes; to open up the story to a more richly motivated Henri, Justine, Elizabeth; to engage the reader insistently and interactively with its central questions; and of course to bestow on it the glamor of being an app.

inkle and Morris’ Frankenstein is beautifully produced, illustrated with contemporary anatomical drawings and landscape scenes. Especially pleasing is the visual metaphor they use for reading the work: sections of text appear on scraps of paper, and at each choice point the reader is presented with several new scraps of paper to read, with only the headings visible. When the reader chooses, the new paper scrap appears to be pinned with a straight pin onto the existing text, while the scraps not chosen fall away. The effect is good for usability, because it helps the reader easily keep his place and remember which bits of text have been newly added. It also suits the story, suggesting a text that has been sutured together from scattered parts just like the monster itself.

It’s a pretty significant achievement that Morris’ Frankenstein does all that, but I felt that to stand on its own as a separate work of art it might need a touch more passion peculiar to Morris. As it is, all the fire of the story is still Shelley’s.