Planet Interactive Fiction Last Update: Tuesday, 24. December 2024 18:01

23 hours ago

I’m delighted that after more than four years of work by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and myself — we’re co-editors of this book — the MIT Press and Counterpath have jointly published

Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023

Book launch events are posted here and will be updated as new ones are scheduled!

This anthology spans seven decades of computer-generated text, beginning before the term “artificial intelligence” was even coined. While not restricted to poetry, fiction, and other creative projects, it reveals the rich work that has been done by artists, poets, and other sorts of writers who have taken computing and code into their own hands. The anthology includes examples of powerful and principled rhetorical generation along with story generation systems based on cognitive research. There are examples of “real news” generation that has already been informing us — along with hoaxes and humor.

It’s all contextualized by brief introductions to each excerpt, longer introductions to each fine-grained genre of text generation, and an overall introduction that Lillian-Yvonne and I wrote. There are 200 selections in the 500-page book, which we hope will be a valuable sourcebook for academics and students — but also a way for general readers to learn about innovations in computing and writing.

You can buy Output now from several sources. I suggest your favorite independent bookseller! If you’re in the Boston area, stop by the MIT Press Bookstore which as of this writing, has 21 on hand as of actually publishing this post, has 14 copies!

Upcoming Book Launches & Talks

January 13 (Monday) “The Output Anthology at Computer-Generated Text’s Cultural Crux”, a talk of mine at the UCSC Computational Media Colloquium, Engineering 2 Room 280, 12:30pm–1:30pm. Free & open to the public.

January 20 (Monday) Toronto book launch with me, Matt Nish-Lapidus, Kavi Duvvoori, and others TBA at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Culture & Technology, 6pm–7:30pm. Free & open to the public.

March 11 (Tuesday) Massachusetts Institute of Technology book launch with the editors, MIT’s Room 32-155, 5pm-6:30pm. Free & open to the public. Book sales thanks to the MIT Press Bookstore.

March 29 (Saturday) AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) Conference, on the panel “Making a Literary Future with Artificial Intelligence,” Concourse Hall 151, 1:45pm–3pm.

Previous Events

November 11 (Monday): Both editors spoke at the University of Virginia, Bryan Hall, Faculty Lounge, Floor 2. Free & open to the public. 5pm.

November 20 (Wednesday): Online book launch for Output, hosted by the University of Maryland. Both editors in conversation with Matt Kirschenbaum. Free, register on Zoom. 12noon Eastern Time.

November 21 (Thursday) Book launch at WordHack with me, David Gissen, Sasha Stiles, Andrew Yoon, and open mic presenters. Wonderville, 1186 Broadway, Brooklyn, 7pm. $15. Book sales.

December 6 (Friday) Output will be available for sale and I’ll be at the Bad Quarto / Nick Montfort table at Center for Book Arts Winter Market, 28 W 27th St Floor 3, 4pm–8pm.

December 9 (Monday) Book launch at Book Club Bar with the editors, Charles Bernstein, Robin Hill, Stephanie Strickland, and Leonard Richardson. 197 E 3rd St (at Ave B), New York City’s East Village. Free, RSVP required. 8pm. Book sales thanks to Book Club.

December 13 (Friday) European book launch with the editors, Scott Rettberg, and Tegan Pyke. University of Bergen’s Center for Digital Narrative, Langesgaten 1-2, 3:30pm. Free & open to the public, book sales thanks to Akedemika. This event was streamed & recorded and is available to view on YouTube.

2 months ago

This is the second game of Brian Cotton, after Catacombs (1981). Maybe.

I say maybe, because this game is quite a bit simpler; while we’ve had authors write a “beginner game” after their initial stab (see: Pirate Adventure, Mission: Asteroid) this feels simple in a learning-how-to-make-games way. That is, while Catacombs was published first, Goblin Towers may have been written first. While I’m not done yet, unless there’s a major turn of events this will be finished in two posts rather than four.

TO RECAP the story so far: Supersoft, a company founded by Pearl Wellard and Peter Calver in 1978, published one of the first professionally distributed text adventures in the UK, Catacombs; maybe the first. (Since writing that article more missing 1980 games have come up. Some might be vaporware — that is, they may have never truly existed — and the ads for them make them all look like amateur-garage companies, meaning the “professional” moniker still gives Catacombs some distinction. Of course, “professional” is a loose word to be using for the UK market in 1981, so there’s some hand-waving here.)

Goblin Towers was published after Catacombs, still in 1981. The original version was for Commodore PET, which we don’t have, but a C64 follow-up came after which we do have. This is unlike the situation with Catacombs, where no copies of earlier variants are available and we only have the 1986 “Classic Quests” re-issue, which likely added content and text.

The 1983 copy shown above (cover via Lemon 64) has a fair chance of being similar to or even identical to the PET version of the game. This is the version I’m playing, although I also compared a little with the Classic Quests version. To simplify my narrative, I’ll save talking about changes in the re-write for when I’m done with the original.

The premise is that there’s a castle with rumored treasure, and we need to go fetch it all and bring it back to the starting building, getting points for each treasure placed.

Unlike most the games of this sort, I don’t think the most direct inspiration is Crowther/Woods Adventure, or even Scott Adams Adventureland. I think the author was inspired from Zork.

Now, this is a much spicier assertion than it seems because this was written in the UK. Infocom was not common in the country, and in the land of expensive disk drives it was never terribly popular through the 80s. However, in addition to the newspaper giving the same vibe as the leaflet from Zork, and the lunch, there’s combat with a goblin you’ll see shortly which resembles the fight with the troll. There’s not that many forward ramifications — they’re all still pulling from the same original source, after all — but even when looking at the US market, there haven’t been many people inspired by Infocom yet. I’m guessing Cotton’s exposure was to mainframe Zork, not commercial Zork; this game likely was written in 1980 when I don’t think any commercial copies of Infocom had made it over the pond yet.

Another point of resemblance: Crowther/Woods Adventure kicks things off with a grating, and Zork has an early grating but changes it so it must be unlocked from the other side. The same thing happens here; there’s a grating, but even with a key (found later) you can’t open it. The game says it must be unlocked from the other side.

The starting way to enter is instead at a large inviting castle:

Quite early on is a side passage with a goblin combat (which, again, feels a lot like the Zork troll fight).

I died a fair number of times and I thought perhaps I was meant to come back later with a special object or at least more “experience points” helping, but I gave it one more go after eating the packed lunch and was victorious. I guess our hero was just a bit peckish. It’s hard to murder on an empty stomach.

Past the goblin are some stairs going up and down, with two relatively straightforward puzzles associated with both directions.

On the down side, there’s an iron key (I haven’t used it yet) followed by a cell with an emerald (treasure) and a loose block. You’re simply supposed to push the block. This opens a passage to a diamond, and a route to go outside (you’re not trapped, this is just an alternate route out, like Zork).

On the up side, there’s a locked chest, and a room with a message: “Cassim forgot about it but Ali Baba didn’t.” This indicates that to open the chest you need to say the words OPEN SESAME. (Cassim is Ali Baba’s brother who tries to steal the treasure, who forgets the literal words OPEN SESAME to get out of the cave.)

Reversing back to the goblin fight, and heading east instead, first there’s a crystal wand (haven’t used yet, but it does count as a treasure) followed by a straightforward maze, the kind of maze where going east from A to B usually means you can reverse your steps by going west.

The maze has a pearl necklace (treasure) and leads to a ledge which has a “hook”. I have been unable to get the hook to do anything. It feels like the sort of place where a rope would go, but I haven’t seen a rope and the verb TIE doesn’t work.

To recap: Out of the treasures, I’ve found an emerald, sapphire, diamond, and pearl necklace. I’ve found a key which hasn’t gone to any locks yet, a wand where waving it everywhere does nothing, and a hook I have had no luck with. Unless I’m missing a map exit (not implausible) I’ve otherwise explored all the accessible areas. The high score is 160 with score coming in chunks of 5 so we’re not talking an excessively long game, but it is possible Mr. Cotton has ramped things up later.

4 days ago

Around twenty years ago, people would have laughed if you told them that videogames would end up at the Smithsonian, but the Half-Life team really did want to make games that were more than just throwaway toys. The rule against cinematics — which made our jobs much harder and also ended up leaving a lot of my favorite work out of the game — was a kind of ideological stake in the ground: we really did want the game and the story to be the same thing. It was far from flawless, but it was really trying to push the boundaries of a young medium.

— Valve artist Steve Theodore

By 1998, the first-person shooter was nearing its pinnacle of popularity. In June of that year, Computer Gaming World magazine could list fourteen reasonably big-budget, high-profile FPS’s earmarked for release in the next six months alone. And yet the FPS seemed rather to be running to stand still. Almost all of the innovation taking place in the space was in the realm of technology rather than design.

To be sure, progress in the former realm was continuing apace. Less than five years after id Software had shaken the world with DOOM, that game’s low-resolution 2.5D graphics and equally crude soundscapes had become positively quaint. Aided and abetted by a fast-evolving ecosystem of 3D-graphics hardware from companies like 3Dfx, id’s Quake engine had raised the bar enormously in 1996; ditto Quake II in 1997. These were the cutting-edge engines that everyone with hopes of selling a lot of shooters scrambled to license. Then, in May of 1998, with Quake III not scheduled for release until late the following year, Epic MegaGames came along with their own Unreal engine, boasting a considerably longer bullet list of graphical effects than Quake II. In thus directly challenging id’s heretofore unquestioned supremacy in the space, Unreal ignited a 3D-graphics arms race that seemed to promise even faster progress in the immediate future.

Yet whether they sported the name Quake or Unreal or something else on their boxes, single-player FPS’s were still content to hew to the “shooting gallery” design template laid out by DOOM. You were expected to march through a ladder-style campaign consisting of a set number of discrete levels, each successive one full of more and more deadly enemies to kill than the last, perhaps with some puzzles of the lock-and-key or button-mashing stripe to add a modicum of variety. These levels were joined together by some thread of story, sometimes more elaborate and sometimes — usually — less so, but so irrelevant to what occurred inside the levels that impatient gamers could and sometimes did skip right over the intervening cutscenes or other forms of exposition in order to get right back into the action.

This was clearly a model with which countless gamers were completely comfortable, one which had the virtue of allowing them maximal freedom of choice: follow along with the story or ignore it, as you liked. Or, as id’s star programmer John Carmack famously said: “Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”

But what if you could build the story right into the gameplay, such that the two became inseparable? What if you could eliminate the artificial division between exposition and action, and with it the whole conceit of a game as a mere series of levels waiting to be beaten one by one? What if you could drop players into an open-ended space where the story was taking place all around them?

This was the thinking that animated an upstart newcomer to the games industry that went by the name of Valve L.L.C. The game that resulted from it would prove the most dramatic conceptual advance in the FPS genre since DOOM, with lessons and repercussions that reached well beyond the borders of shooter country.

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The formation of Valve was one of several outcomes of a dawning realization inside the Microsoft of the mid-1990s that computer gaming was becoming a very big business. The same realization led a highly respected Microsoft programmer named Michael Abrash to quit his cushy job in Redmond, Washington, throw his tie into the nearest trashcan, and move to Mesquite, Texas, to help John Carmack and the other scruffy id boys make Quake. It led another insider named Alex St. John to put together the internal team who made DirectX, a library of code that allowed game developers and players to finally say farewell to creaky old MS-DOS and join the rest of the world that was running Windows 95. It led Microsoft to buy an outfit called Ensemble Studios and their promising real-time-strategy game Age of Empires as a first wedge for levering their way into the gaming market as a publisher of major note. And it led to Valve Corporation.

In 1996, Valve’s future co-founders Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington were both valued employees of Microsoft. Newell had been working there in project-management roles since 1983; he had played an important part in the creation of the early versions of Windows before moving on to Microsoft Office and other high-profile applications. Harrington was a programmer whose tenure had been shorter, but he had made significant contributions to Windows NT, Microsoft’s business- and server-oriented operating system.

As Newell tells the tale, he had an epiphany when he was asked to commission a study to find out just how many computers were currently running Microsoft Windows in the United States. The number of 20 million that he got back was impressive. Yet he was shocked to learn that Windows wasn’t the most popular single piece of software to be found on American personal computers; that was rather a game called DOOM. Newell and Harrington had long enjoyed playing games. Now, it seemed, there were huge piles of money to be earned from making them. Doing so struck them as a heck of a lot more fun than making more operating systems and business software. It was worth a shot, at any rate; both men were wealthy enough by now that they could afford to take a flier on something completely different.

So, on August, 24, 1996, the pair quit Microsoft to open an office for their new company Valve some five miles away in Kirkland, Washington. At the time, no one could have imagined — least of all them — what a milestone moment this would go down as in the history of gaming. “On the surface, we should have failed,” says Gabe Newell. “Realistically, both Mike and I thought we would get about a year into it, realize we’d made horrible mistakes, and go back to our friends at Microsoft and ask for our jobs back.”

Be that as it may, they did know what kind of game they wanted to make. Or rather Newell did; from the beginning, he was the driving creative and conceptual force, while Harrington focused more on the practical logistics of running a business and making quality software. Like so many others in the industry he was entering, Newell wanted to make a shooter. Yet he wanted his shooter to be more immersive and encompassing of its player than any of the ones that were currently out there, with a story that was embedded right into the gameplay rather than standing apart from it. Valve wasted no time in licensing id’s Quake engine to bring these aspirations to life, via the game that would come to be known as Half-Life.

As the id deal demonstrates, Newell and Harrington had connections and financial resources to hand that almost any other would-be game maker would have killed for; both had exited Microsoft as millionaires several times over. Yet they had no access to gaming distribution channels, meaning that they had to beat the bush for a publisher just like anyone else with a new studio. They soon found that their studio and their ambitious ideas were a harder sell than they had expected. With games becoming a bigger business every year, there were a lot of deep-pocketed folks from other fields jumping into the industry with plans to teach all of the people who were already there what they were doing wrong; such folks generally had no clue about what it took to do games right. Seasoned industry insiders had a name for these people, one that was usually thoroughly apt: “Tourists.” At first glance, the label was easy to apply to Newell and Harrington and Valve. Among those who did so was Mitch Lasky, then an executive at Activision, who would go on to become a legendary gaming venture capitalist. He got “a whiff of tourism” from Valve, he admits. He says he still has “post-traumatic stress disorder” over his decision to pass on signing them to a publishing deal — but by no means was he the only one to do so.

Newell and Harrington finally wound up pitching to Sierra, a publisher known primarily for point-and-click adventure games, a venerable genre that was now being sorely tested by all of the new FPS’s. In light of this, Sierra was understandably eager to find a horse of the new breed to back. The inking of a publishing deal with Valve was one of the last major decisions made by Ken Williams, who had founded Sierra in his living room back in 1980 but was now in the process of selling the business he had built from the ground up. As a man with such deep roots in adventure games, he found Valve’s focus on story both refreshing and appealing. Still, there was a lot of wrangling between the parties, mainly over the ultimate disposition of the rights to the Half-Life name; Williams wanted them to go to Sierra, but Newell and Harrington wanted to retain them for themselves. In the end, with no other publishers stepping up to the plate, Valve had to accept what Sierra was offering, a capitulation that would lead to a lengthy legal battle a few years down the road. For now, though, they had their publisher.

As for Ken Williams, who would exit the industry stage left well before Half-Life was finished:

Now that I’m retired, people sometimes ask me what I used to do. I usually just say, “I had a game company back in the old days.” That inevitably causes them to say, “Did you make any games I might have heard of?” I answer, “Leisure Suit Larry.” That normally is sufficient, but if there is no glimmer of recognition I pull out the heavy artillery and say, “Half-Life.” Unless they’ve been sleeping under a rock for the last couple of decades, that always lights up their eyes.

One can imagine worse codas to a business career…

In what could all too easily be read as another sign of naïve tourism, Newell and Harrington agreed to a crazily optimistic development timeline, promising a finished game for the Christmas of 1997, which was just one year away. To make it happen, they hired a few dozen level designers, programmers, artists, and other creative and technical types, many of whom had no prior professional experience in the games industry, all of whom recognized what an extraordinary opportunity they were being handed and were willing to work like dogs to make the most of it. The founders tapped a fertile pool of recruits in the online DOOM and Quake modding scenes, where amateurs were making names for themselves by bending those engines in all sorts of new directions. They would now do the same on a professional basis at Valve, even as the programmers modified the Quake engine itself to suit their needs, implementing better lighting and particle effects, and adding scripting and artificial-intelligence capabilities that the straightforward run-and-shoot gameplay in which id specialized had never demanded. Gabe Newell would estimate when all was said and done that 75 percent of the code in the engine had been written or rewritten at Valve.

In June of 1997, Valve took Half-Life to the big E3 trade show, where it competed for attention with a murderers’ row of other FPS’s, including early builds of Unreal, SiN, Daikatana, Quake II, and Jedi Knight. Valve didn’t even have a booth of their own at the show. Nor were they to be found inside Sierra’s; Half-Life was instead shown in the booth of 3Dfx. Like so many of Valve’s early moves, this one was deceptively clever, because 3Dfx was absolutely huge at the time, with as big a buzz around their hardware as id enjoyed around their software. Half-Life walked away from the show with the title of “Best Action Game.”

The validation of E3 made the unavoidable moment of reckoning that came soon after easier to stomach. I speak, of course, about the moment when Valve had to recognize that they didn’t have a ghost of a chance of finishing the game that they wanted to make within the next few months. Newell and Harrington looked at the state of the project and decided that they could probably scrape together a more or less acceptable but formulaic shooter in time for that coming Christmas. Or they could keep working and end up with something amazing for the next Christmas. To their eternal credit, they chose the latter course, a decision which was made possible only by their deep pockets. For Sierra, who were notorious for releasing half-finished games, certainly did not intend to pay for an extra year of development time. The co-founders would have to foot that bill themselves. Nevertheless, to hear Gabe Newell tell it today, it was a no-brainer: “Late is just for a little while. Suck is forever.”

The anticipation around Half-Life didn’t diminish in the months that followed, not even after the finished Unreal took the world by storm in May of 1998. Despite being based on a two-plus-year-old engine in a milieu that usually prized the technologically new and shiny above all else, Valve’s “shooter with a story” had well and truly captured the imaginations of gamers. During the summer of 1998, a demo of the game consisting of the first three chapters — including the now-iconic opening scenes, in which you ride a tram into a secret government research facility as just another scientist on the staff headed for another day on the job — leaked out of the offices of a magazine to which it had been sent. It did more to promote the game than a million dollars worth of advertising could have; the demo spread like wildfire online, raising the excitement level to an even more feverish pitch. Half-Life was different enough to have the frisson of novelty in the otherwise homogeneous culture of the FPS, whilst still being readily identifiable as an FPS. It was the perfect mix of innovation and familiarity.

So, it was no real surprise when the full game turned into a massive hit for Valve and Sierra after its release on November 19, 1998. The magazines fell all over themselves to praise it. Computer Gaming World, normally the closest thing the hype-driven journalism of gaming had to a voice of sobriety, got as high on Half-Life’s supply as anyone. The magazine’s long-serving associate editor Jeff Green took it upon himself to render the official verdict.

Everything you’ve heard, everything you’ve hoped for — it’s all true. Half-Life, Valve Software’s highly anticipated first-person shooter, is not just one of the best games of the year. It’s one of the best games of any year, an instant classic that is miles better than any of its immediate competition, and, in its single-player form, is the best shooter since DOOM. Plus, despite the fact that it’s “just” a shooter, Half-Life provides one of the best examples ever of how to present an interactive movie — and a great, scary movie at that.

Half-Life sold its first 200,000 copies in the United States before Christmas — i.e., before glowing reviews like the one above even hit the newsstands. But this was the barest beginning to its success story. In honor of its tenth birthday in 2008, Guinness of world-records fame would formally anoint Half-Life as the best-selling single FPS in history, with total sales in the neighborhood of 10 million copies across all platforms and countries. For Newell and Harrington, it was one hell of a way to launch a game-development studio. For Sierra, who in truth had done very little for Half-Life beyond putting it in a box and shipping it out to stores, it was a tsunami of cash that seemed to come out of nowhere, the biggest game they had ever published almost by an order of magnitude. One does hope that somebody in the company’s new management took a moment to thank Ken Williams for this manna from heaven.

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Half-Life has come to occupy such a hallowed, well-nigh sacrosanct position in the annals of gaming that any encounter with the actual artifact today seems bound to be slightly underwhelming. Yet even when we take into account the trouble that any game would have living up to a reputation as elevated as this one’s, the truth is that there’s quite a lot here for the modern skeptical critic to find fault with — and, Lord knows, this particular critic has seldom been accused of lacking in skepticism.

Judged purely as a shooter, the design shows its age. It’s sometimes amazingly inspired, but more often no better than average for its time. There’s a lot of crawling through anonymous vents that serve no real purpose other than to extend the length of the game, a lot of places where you can survive only by dying first so as to learn what’s coming, a lot of spots where it’s really not clear at all what the game wants from you. And then there are an awful lot of jumping puzzles, shoehorned into a game engine that has way more slop in it than is ideal for such things. I must say that I had more unadulterated fun with LucasArts’s Jedi Knight, the last shooter I played all the way through for these histories, than I did with Half-Life. There the levels are constructed like thrill rides straight out of the Star Wars films, with a through-line that seems to just intuitively come to you; looking back, I’m still in awe of their subtle genius in this respect. Half-Life is not like that. You really have to work to get through it, and that’s not as appealing to me.

Then again, my judgment on these things should, like that of any critic, be taken with a grain of salt. Whether you judge a game good or bad or mediocre hinges to a large degree on what precisely you’re looking for from it; we’ve all read countless negative reviews reflective not so much of a bad game as one that isn’t the game that that reviewer wanted to play. Personally, I’m very much a tourist in the land of the FPS. While I understand the appeal of the genre, I don’t want to expend too many hours or too much effort on it. I want to blast through a fun and engaging environment without too much friction. Make me feel like an awesome action hero while I’m at it, and I’ll probably walk away satisfied, ready to go play something else. Jedi Knight on easy mode gave me that experience; Half-Life did not, demanding a degree of careful attention from me that I wasn’t always eager to grant it. If you’re more hardcore about this genre than I am, your judgment of the positives and negatives in these things may very well be the opposite of mine. Certainly Half-Life is more typical of its era than Jedi Knight — an era when games like this were still accepted and even expected to be harder and more time-consuming than they are today. C’est la vie et vive la différence!

But of course, it wasn’t the granular tactical details of the design that made Half-Life stand out so much from the competition back in the day. It was rather its brilliance as a storytelling vehicle that led to its legendary reputation. And don’t worry, you definitely won’t see me quibbling that said reputation isn’t deserved. Even here, though, we do need to be sure that we understand exactly what it did and did not do that was so innovative at the time.

Contrary to its popular rep then and now, Half-Life was by no means the first “shooter with a story.” Technically speaking, even DOOM has a story, some prattle about a space station and a portal to Hell and a space marine who’s the only one that can stop the demon spawn. The story most certainly isn’t War and Peace, but it’s there.

Half-Life wasn’t even the shooter at the time of its release with the inarguably best or most complicated story. LucasArts makes a strong bid for the title there. Both Dark Forces and the aforementioned Jedi Knight, released in 1995 and 1997 respectively, weave fairly elaborate tales into the fabric of the existing Star Wars universe, drawing on its rich lore, inserting themselves into the established chronology of the original trilogy of films and the “Expanded Universe” series of Star Wars novels.

Like that of many games of this era, Half-Life’s story betrays the heavy influence of the television show The X-Files, which enjoyed its biggest season ever just before this game was released. We have the standard nefarious government conspiracy involving extraterrestrials, set in the standard top-secret military installation somewhere in the Desert Southwest. We even have a direct equivalent to Cancer Man, The X-Files’s shadowy, nameless villain who is constantly lurking behind the scenes. “G-Man” does the same in Half-Life; voice actor Michael Shapiro even opted to give him a “lizard voice” that’s almost a dead ringer for Cancer Man’s nicotine-addled croak.

All told, Half-Life’s story is more of a collection of tropes than a serious exercise in fictional world-building. To be clear, the sketchiness is by no means an automatically bad thing, not when it’s judged in the light of the purpose the story actually needs to serve. Mark Laidlaw, the sometime science-fiction novelist who wrote the script, makes no bones about the limits to his ambitions for it. “You don’t have to write the whole story,” he says. “Because it’s a conspiracy plot, everybody knows more about it than you do. So you don’t have to answer those questions. Just keep raising questions.”

Once the shooting starts, plot-related things happen, but it’s all heat-of-the-moment stuff. You fight your way out of the complex after its been overrun by alien invaders coming through a trans-dimensional gate that’s been inadvertently opened, only to find that your own government is now as bent on killing you as the aliens are in the name of the disposal of evidence. Eventually, in a plot point weirdly reminiscent of DOOM, you have to teleport yourself onto the aliens’ world to shut down the portal they’re using to reach yours.

Suffice to say that, while Half-Life may be slightly further along the continuum toward War and Peace than DOOM is, it’s only slightly so. Countless better, richer, deeper stories were told in games before this one came along. When people talk about Half-Life as “the FPS with a story,” they’re really talking about something more subtle: about its way of presenting its story. Far from diminishing the game, this makes it more important, across genres well beyond the FPS. The best way for us to start to come to grips with what Half-Life did that was so extraordinary might be to look back to the way games were deploying their stories before its arrival on the scene.

Throughout the 1980s, story in games was largely confined to the axiomatically narrative-heavy genres of the adventure game and the CRPG. Then, in 1990, Origin Systems released Chris Roberts’s Wing Commander, a game which was as revolutionary in the context of its own time as Half-Life was in its. In terms of gameplay, Wing Commander was a “simulation” of outer-space dog-fighting, not all that far removed in spirit from the classic Elite. What made it stand out was what happened when you weren’t behind the controls of your space fighter. Between missions, you hung out in the officers’ lounge aboard your mother ship, collecting scuttlebutt from the bartender, even flirting with the fetching female pilot in your squadron. When you went into the briefing room to learn about your next mission, you also learned about the effect your last one had had on the unfolding war against the deadly alien Kilrathi, and were given a broader picture of the latest developments in the conflict that necessitated this latest flight into danger. The missions themselves remained shooting galleries, but the story that was woven around them gave them resonance, made you feel like you were a part of something much grander. Almost equally importantly, this “campaign” provided an easy way to structure your time in the game and chart your improving skills; beat all of the missions in the campaign and see the story to its end, and you could say that you had mastered the game as a whole.

People loved this; Wing Commander became by far the most popular computer-gaming franchise of the young decade prior to the smashing arrival of DOOM at the end of 1993. The approach it pioneered quickly spread across virtually all gaming genres. In particular, both the first-person-shooter and the real-time strategy genres — the two that would dominate over all others in the second half of the decade — adopted it as their model for the single-player experience. Even at its most rudimentary, a ladder-style campaign gave you a goal to pursue and a framework of progression to hang your hat on.

Yet the same approach created a weirdly rigid division between gameplay and exposition, not only on the playing side of the ledger but to a large extent on the development side as well. It wasn’t unusual for completely separate teams to be charged with making the gameplay part of a game and all of the narrative pomp and circumstance that justified it. The disconnect could sometimes verge on hilarious; in Jedi Knight, which went so far as to film real humans acting out a B-grade Star Wars movie between its levels, the protagonist has a beard in the cutscenes but is clean-shaven during the levels. By the late 1990s, the pre-rendered-3D or filmed-live-action cutscenes sometimes cost more to produce than the game itself, and almost always filled more of the space on the CD.

As he was setting up his team at Valve, Gabe Newell attempted to eliminate this weird bifurcation between narrative and gameplay by passing down two edicts to his employees, the only non-negotiable rules he would ever impose upon them. Half-Life had to have a story — not necessarily one worthy of a film or a novel, but one worthy of the name. And at the same time, it couldn’t ever, under any conditions, from the very first moment to the very last, take control out of the hands of the player. Everything that followed cascaded from these two simple rules, which many a game maker of the time would surely have seen as mutually contradictory. To state the two most obvious and celebrated results, they meant no cutscenes whatsoever and no externally imposed ladder of levels to progress through — for any sort of level break did mean taking control out of the hands of the player, no matter how briefly.

Adapting to such a paradigm the Quake engine, which had been designed with a traditional FPS campaign in mind, proved taxing but achievable. Valve set up the world of Half-Life as a spatial grid of “levels” that were now better described as zones; pass over a boundary from one zone into another, and the new one would be loaded in swiftly and almost transparently. Valve kept the discrete zones small so as to minimize the loading times, judging more but shorter loading breaks to be better than fewer but longer ones. The hardest part was dealing with the borderlands, so to speak; you needed to be able to look into one zone from another, and the enemies and allies around you had to stay consistent before and after a transition. But Valve managed even this through some clever technical sleight of hand — such as by creating overlapping areas that existed in both of the adjoining sets of level data — and through more of the same on the design side, such as by placing the borders whenever possible at corners in corridors and at other spots where the line of sight didn’t extend too far. The occasional brief loading message aside — and they’re very brief, or even effectively nonexistent, on modern hardware — Half-Life really does feel like it all takes place in the same contiguous space.

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Every detail of Half-Life has been analyzed at extensive, exhaustive length over the decades since its release. Such analysis has its place in fan culture, but it can be more confusing than clarifying when it comes to appreciating the game’s most important achievements. The ironic fact is that you can learn almost everything that really matters about Half-Life as a game design just by playing it for an hour or so, enough to get into its third chapter. Shall we do so together now?

Half-Life hews to Gabe Newell’s guiding rules from the moment you click the “New Game” button on the main menu and the iconic tram ride into the Black Mesa Research Center begins. The opening credits play over this sequence, in which you are allowed to move around and look where you like. There are reports that many gamers back in the day didn’t actually realize that they were already in control of the protagonist — reports that they just sat there patiently waiting for the “cutscene” to finish, so ingrained was the status quo of bifurcation.

The protagonist himself strikes an artful balance between being an undefined player stand-in — what Zork: Grand Inquisitor called an “AFGNCAAP,” or “Ageless, Faceless, Gender-Neutral, Culturally Ambiguous Adventure Person” — and a fully fleshed-out character. As another result of Newell’s guiding rules, you never see him in the game unless you look in a mirror; you only see the world through his eyes. You do, however, hear security guards and colleagues refer to him — or, if you like, to you — as “Gordon” or “Mr. Freeman.” The manual and the intertitles that appear over the opening sequence of the game explain that his full name is indeed Gordon Freeman, and that he’s a 27-year-old theoretical physicist with a PhD from MIT who has been recently hired to work at Black Mesa. The game’s loading screen and its box art show us a rather atypical FPS protagonist, someone very different from the muscle-bound, cigar-chomping Duke Nukem or the cocky budding Jedi knight Kyle Katarn: a slim, studious-looking fellow with Coke-bottle eyeglasses and a token goatee. The heart of the computer-gaming demographic being what it was in 1998, he was disarmingly easy for many of the first players of Half-Life to identify with, thus adding just that one more note of immersion to the symphony. Small wonder that he has remained a favorite with cosplayers for decades. In fact, cipher though he almost entirely is, Gordon Freeman has become one of the most famous videogame characters in history.

The tram eventually arrives at its destination and a security guard welcomes you to the part of the complex where you work: “Morning, Mr. Freeman. Looks like you’re running late.” Passing through the double blast doors, you learn from your colleagues inside that it’s already been a rough morning: the main computer has crashed, which has thrown a wrench into an important test that was planned for today. Mind you, you don’t learn this through dialog menus, which Valve judged to qualify as taking control away from the player. You can’t speak at all, but if you approach the guards and scientists, they’ll say things to you, leaving you to imagine your own role in the conversation. Or you can stand back and listen to the conversations they have with one another.

You can wander around as you like in this office area. You can look in Gordon’s locker to learn a little bit more about him, buy a snack from the vending machine, even blow it up by microwaving it for too long. (“My God!” says your colleague in reaction. “What are you doing?”) All of this inculcates the sense of a lived-in workspace better than any amount of external exposition could have done, setting up a potent contrast with the havoc to come.

When you get bored fooling around with lockers and microwaves, you put on your hazardous-environment suit and head down to where the day’s test is to be conducted. It isn’t made clear to you the player just what the test is meant to accomplish; it isn’t even clear that Gordon himself understands the entirety of the research project to which he’s been assigned. All that matters is that the test goes horribly wrong, creating a “resonance cascade event” that’s accompanied by a lot of scary-looking energy beams flying through the air and explosions popping off everywhere. You’ve now reached the end of the second chapter without ever touching a weapon. But that’s about to change, because you’re about to find out that hostile alien lifeforms are now swarming the place. “Get to the surface as soon as you can and let someone know we’re stranded down here!” demand your colleagues. So, you pick up the handy crowbar you find lying on the floor and set off to batter a path through the opposition.

This was a drill with which 1990s shooter fans were a lot more familiar, but there are still plenty of new wrinkles. The scientists and guards who were present in the complex before all hell broke loose don’t just disappear. They’re still around, mostly cowering in the corners in the case of the former, doing their best to fight back in that of the latter. The scientists sometimes have vital information to share, while the guards will join you as full-blown allies, firing off their pop-gun pistols at your side, although they tend not to live very long. Allies were a new thing under the FPS sun in 1998, an idea that would quickly spread to other games. (Ditto the way that the guards here are almost better at shooting you in the back than they are at shooting the rampaging aliens. The full history of “allies” in the FPS genre is a fraught one…)

As you battle your way up through the complex, you witness plenty of pre-scripted scenes to go along with the emergent behavior of the scientists, guards, and aliens. Ideally, you won’t consciously notice any distinction between the two. You see a scientist being transformed into a zombie by an alien “head crab” behind the window of his office; see several hapless sad sacks tumbling down an open elevator shaft; see a dying guard trying and just failing to reach a healing station. These not only add to the terror and drama, but sometimes have a teaching function. The dying guard, for example, points out to you the presence of healing stations for ensuring that you don’t come to share his fate.

It’s the combination of emergent and scripted behaviors, on the part of your enemies and even more on that of your friends, that makes Half-Life come so vividly alive. I’m tempted to use the word “realism” here, but I know that Gabe Newell would rush to correct me if I did. Realism, he would say, is boring. Realistically, a guy like Gordon Freeman — heck, even one like Duke Nukem — wouldn’t last ten minutes in a situation like this one. Call it verisimilitude instead, a sign of a game that’s absolutely determined to stay true to its fictional premise, never mind how outlandish it is. The world Half-Life presents really is a living one; Newell’s rule of thumb was that five seconds should never pass without something happening near the player. Likewise, the world has to react to anything the player does. “If I shoot the wall, the wall should change, you know?” Newell said. “Similarly, if I were to throw a grenade at a grunt, he should react to it, right? I mean, he should run away from it or lay down on the ground and duck for cover. If he can’t run away from it, he should yell ‘Shit!’ or ‘Fire in the hole!’ or something like that.” In Half-Life, he will indeed do one or all of these things.

The commitment to verisimilitude means that most of what you see and hear is, to use the language of film, diegetic, or internal to the world as Gordon Freeman is experiencing it. Even the onscreen HUD is the one that Gordon is seeing, being the one that’s built into his hazard suit. The exceptions to the diegetic rule are few: the musical soundtrack that plays behind your exploits; the chapter names and titles which flash on the screen from time to time; those credits that are superimposed over the tram ride at the very beginning. These exceptions notwithstanding, the game’s determination to immerse you in an almost purely diegetic sensory bubble is the reason I have to strongly differ with Jeff Green’s description of Half-Life as an “interactive movie.” It’s actually the polar opposite of such a stylized beast. It’s an exercise in raw immersion which seeks to eliminate any barriers between you and your lived experience rather than making you feel like you’re doing anything so passive as watching or even guiding a movie. One might go so far as to take Half-Life as a sign that gaming was finally growing up and learning to stand on its own two feet by 1998, no longer needing to take so many of its cues from other forms of media.

We’ve about reached the end of our hour in Half-Life now, so we can dispense with the blow-by-blow. This is not to say that we’ve seen all the game has to offer. Betwixt and between the sequences that I find somewhat tedious going are more jaw-dropping dramatic peaks: the moment when you reach the exit to the complex at long last, only to learn that the United States Army wants to terminate rather than rescue you; the moment when you discover a tram much like the one you arrived on and realize that you can drive it through the tunnels; the moment when you burst out of the complex completely and see the bright blue desert sky above. (Unfortunately, it’s partially blotted out by a big Marine helicopter that also wants to kill you).

In my opinion, Half-Life could have been an even better game if it had been about half as long, made up of only its most innovative and stirring moments — “all killer, no filler,” as they used to say in the music business. Alas, the marketplace realities of game distribution in the late 1990s militated against this. If you were going to charge a punter $40 or $50 for a boxed game, you had to make sure it lasted more than six or seven hours. If Half-Life was being made today, Valve might very well have made different choices.

Again, though, mileages will vary when it comes to these things. The one place where Half-Life does fall down fairly undeniably is right at the end. Your climactic journey into Xen, the world of the aliens, is so truncated by time and budget considerations as to be barely there at all, being little more than a series of (infuriating) jumping puzzles and a single boss to fight. Tellingly, it’s here that Half-Life gives in at last and violates its own rules of engagement, by delivering — perish the thought! — a cutscene containing the last bits of exposition that Valve didn’t have time to shoehorn into their game proper. The folks from Valve almost universally name the trip to Xen as their biggest single regret, saying they wish they had either found a way to do it properly or just saved it for a sequel. Needless to say, I can only concur.

Yet the fact remains that Half-Life at its best is so audacious and so groundbreaking that it almost transcends such complaints. Its innovations have echoed down across decades and genres. We’ll be bearing witness to that again and again in the years to come as we continue our journey through gaming history. Longtime readers of this site will know that I’m very sparing in my use of words like “revolutionary.” But I feel no reluctance whatsoever to apply the word to this game.

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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.

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Sources: The books Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters by David L. Craddock, Masters of DOOM: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner, Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line by Ken Williams, and Game Design: Theory & Practice (2nd edition) by Richard Rouse III. Retro Gamer 149; the Games^TM special issue “Trigger Happy”; Next Generation of December 1998, April 1999, and June 1999; Computer Gaming World of June 1998, December 1998, and February 1999; Sierra’s newsletter InterAction of Fall 1997; Gamers’ Republic of September 1998.

Online sources include “Full Steam Ahead: The History of Valve” by Jeff Dunn at Games Radar, “The Final Hours of Half-Life 2” by Geoff Keighley at GameSpot, and Soren Johnson’s interview of Mitch Latsky on his Designer Notes podcast.

Where to Get It: Half-Life is available for digital purchase on Steam.

4 days ago

Dannii Willis has been the main developer of the open source tool Parchment for a very long time (has it been 15 years already?). Parchment is a very cool interpreter for parser games, allowing anyone to play the games directly in the browser. Dannii applied in 2023 for an IFTF microgrant, asking the organization to cover the price of acquiring a used iOS device; this would allow him to test the Parchment interpreter on real hardware himself, which would lend itself to faster iterations. Dannii was also in particular very interested to test the compatibility of Parchment on iOS with UserVoice, and try to push the envelope around accessibility features for blind or low-vision players.

We just received his report, which has great detail on the project and the work he accomplished using the iOS device he was able to acquire with our support — work for Parchment, but also on other cool projects! Hope you enjoy reading this!

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Thanks to the IFTF grant I was able to purchase a refurbished iPhone 13, which has allowed me to test and resolve some significant issues with Parchment.

First, some virtual keyboard improvements: mobile phones and tablets are commonly used via virtual keyboards. While on most websites these work smoothly, they pose a problem for an app like Parchment which wants to adjust itself to fit perfectly in the remaining visible screen space, so that the status window etc will still be visible. Unfortunately browsers don’t act the same way with their virtual keyboards, so keeping a consistent user interface for both iOS and Android is difficult. In late 2022 Chrome introduced a meta tag for specifying which behaviour an app wants. Firefox added support for it in 2024, but Safari still doesn’t support it. In addition, while Safari does support the VirtualViewport API, which allows you to be notified when the virtual keyboard is opened or closed, its resize events are quite delayed, up to 700ms, which feels very sluggish. With my iOS testing device I was able to find solutions for these problems, so that Parchment now has a very smooth and responsive interface on all browsers.

The next two projects haven’t been added to the stable version of Parchment yet, but have been shared for testing. As part of a major comprehensive update to Parchment, I have developed a new file system and dialog. Similarly to the general virtual keyboard updates, it needed a little bit of special care to get working in iOS. Second, I have finally added sound support to Parchment! The Glk API that Parchment is built upon supports three sound formats, AIFF, Ogg/Vorbis, and MOD. Unfortunately Chrome doesn’t support AIFF, and Safari doesn’t support Ogg/Vorbis! (None of them support MOD, though MOD files are also rarely used, so for now I’m not intending to support them in Parchment.) I have added a small audio decoding library into Parchment so that AIFF and Ogg/Vorbis can be supported in all browsers.

And I have also used the iOS device for a bonus project: Infocom Frotz! This isn’t part of Parchment, but seeing as I used my iOS test device to work on it, I’ll mention it too: this year I ported Frotz to the web, finally allowing Infocom’s multimedia (sound/graphics) games to be played online. Infocom’s version 6 of the Z-Machine was a big departure from its earlier versions, and so even today it is only supported by some Z-Machine interpreters. Its window model is not compatible with the Glk model that most interpreters now use, and so playing Infocom’s Z6 games has required a stand-alone Z-Machine interpreter rather than the multi-interpreters the community usually recommends (Gargoyle, Lectrote, Spatterlight, or Parchment). But just because the Z6 model doesn’t fit our modern Glk model doesn’t mean that interpreters like Frotz aren’t high quality. Frotz already has an SDL version, and Emscripten, which I’ve been using for years to port the Glk interpreters for Parchment, also supports SDL. So it didn’t take a lot of effort to build Frotz with Emscripten, thereby allowing the Z6 model to finally be supported on the web. It still needed some extra polishing, most notably that Emscripten’s version of SDL doesn’t support mobile virtual keyboards. But I have a lot of experience with that! And of course, there were more viewport issues in iOS.

The test iOS test device helped me accomplish a lot this year that I couldn’t have effectively tested otherwise. Even though the year is over I of course won’t be getting rid of the phone. So you can expect at least one more end of year report from me. Will Safari finally add support for the interactive-widget viewport meta tag? I can only hope so. See you then!

11 days ago

When bad things happen to all sorts of people.

The Tragic Plane Crash and Other Myths

“Tragedy” is a word that gets repeated often in our media. When something horrific happens, it is called a tragedy. Plane crashes, we are told, are tragedies, and so are collapsing buildings. You might think I’m going somewhere pedantic and uninteresting with this, but even if you’re right, bear with me a moment. Yes, “tragedy” is a specific literary genre with many subtypes, and plane crashes aren’t tragic in a literary sense. Pointing out semantic inaccuracies and going no further would be a little pedantic, I admit.

Let’s go further, then.

Distinguishing Characteristics of the Tragic Form

It can be hard to determine what unifies works as different as, say, Hamlet and Antigone. An easy yet unsatisfying answer is that they aren’t comedies. There are bad things happening, certainly: Prince Hamlet’s father has been murdered and Polynices has been denied a proper burial. In isolation, these events are like forest fires or earthquakes in that they lack a narrative context that would afford them significance beyond and above apparent awfulness.

In Hamlet, that narrative framing consists of the title character’s efforts to bring his father’s killer(s) to justice. The play emerges from Aristotelian tradition: Hamlet is indecisive–and a little unlucky, perhaps. He recognizes what has held him back, and faces death. In the wake of his death, the peace of the Kingdom of Denmark is restored under the leadership of Fortinbras:

Let four captains
Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royally: and, for his passage,
The soldiers’ music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.

Antigone, is not about some “great man.” Despite a high body count, the path forward is less clear. Creon, the king whose decisions have led to the play’s many negative events, recognizes his failures and appears to despair. The play nevertheless concludes with an affirmation of the moral and ethical values of Greek society:

Reason is by far the most important part of
Happiness. As for the gods, you
Must take care not to misstep in any way.
A boastful man’s mighty words
Are paid for by mighty blows.
In old age he teaches his wisdom.

While it may not be initially clear what unifies these two dramas beyond “not comedy” and the occurrence of negative events, their attitudes toward the cosmic and ethical implications of the horrific are ultimately quite similar. That is, in both tragedies are framing techniques that transform absurdities into evidence of a morally determinate and orderly world. Through tragedy, capricious disaster becomes comprehensible and–rather optimistically–a step on a path toward social harmony and cohesion. One might object that Antigone doesn’t offer the kind of reconciliation that Hamlet does, but that’s more a matter of mechanism rather than one of effect.

In isolation, these events are like forest fires or earthquakes in that they lack a narrative context that would afford them significance beyond and above apparent awfulness.

In the tragedies of ancient Greece, the social order is represented by the chorus, which editorializes and reacts to events as they occur on-stage. The tragic is thereby elevated to ethical and moral contexts. According to Nietzsche, audiences could experience sympathetic catharsis through the response of the chorus. Nietzsche notwithstanding, the chorus asserted an ethical or cosmic framework that invested horrific absurdity with meaning.

In other words, a unifying feature of the tragic is its ability to reconcile horror with a human-centered view of progression toward some hoped-for ethical or moral end-state. The tragic is ultimately a denial of the absurd. I don’t resist what feels like overuse of the word “tragic” because I like correcting people. I resist it because it sanitizes horror by pretending it is part of some grand trajectory. Tragedy is a constructed thing that reflects an idea about the way our universe works. The absurd is never tragic. Absurdity is, in fact, a joke at tragedy’s expense.

The Concluding Events of Trinity

I haven’t forgotten: this series of thirteen (thirteen!) posts is about Trinity, the Infocom game by Brian Moriarty. Before tying things together, let’s consider the ending of Trinity. Having gathered ruby, bag of crumbs, lemming, walkie-talkie, and lamp, we are prepared to cross into the land of the dead. And cross we do: there is a river, a ferryman, and we are dressed for the occasion.

>enter dory
The dory tips alarmingly as you climb aboard.

The oarsman glances at the burial shroud you're wearing with silent approval, and stretches out his skeletal hand expectantly.

>give coin to oarsman
The oarsman accepts the silver coin and nods at you solemnly.

The ghostly shades begin to converge on the dory. One by one, they step into the vessel, hand the oarsman a silver coin, and take a seat.

The oarsman pushes away from the beach.

Planes of mist close in around the dory, drawing it deeper into the gloom. The only sound is the rhythmic slurp of the oar as it plies the dark, oily water.

A vague outline emerges beyond the helm. It slowly resolves into a spit of sand, damp and cheerless in the surrounding murk.

The oarsman swings the dory around and lands it with barely a jolt. One by one, the shades slink out of the vessel and drift across the sand like leaves on a breath of wind. Something in the oarsman's gaze compels you to follow them.

The Alpha door leads to a place of beginnings: the Trinity test site in New Mexico. The Wabewalker has arrived to… what? Stop atomic weapons from being invented? We can return to that in a bit. A simple answer that will satisfy most players is, as I have said in the past, take everything, go everywhere, solve everything, win. At first, we players are motivated by negatives. There are some wires that we can’t cut, and an electrical box held shut with screws.

Trinity as a mechanical experience is the subject of a future podcast, so let’s focus on the text and its themes for now. Sometimes, interaction and meaning are inseparable; I’ll honor that here when necessary. Anecdotally, I–recalling my play experience thirty years ago–had no idea what my objective at the Trinity test site was. Since a map of the area was included with retail copies of the game, I did assume that New Mexico, 1945 was my destination. There are no other remaining doors, after all (in practice, you can go through the Omega door much sooner, but an unwinnable state is the outcome)!

Once there, the wandering starts. Since the map–I believe this is not only deliberate but clever–emphasizes the McDonald Ranch, players might be motivated to go there first. It’s there that the lemming meets its fateful end. A player’s impression of this geography will largely depend on their answer to a question previously asked here: “Is historicity and aesthetic virtue?” Moriarty has managed to write a great many rooms without relying upon nouns. Most of the space occupying this massive endgame area is sparsely described and frequently resistant to all attempts at interaction. Removed from its context, this geography would almost certainly fare poorly with reviewers as lifeless and dull.

Northwest of Ranch
You're at the northwest corner of a stone wall. A closed iron gate leads in to a dilapidated ranch house.

A paved road bears northwest into the desert. Other paths curve east and south, along the wall's perimeter.

>open gate
You open the iron gate.

>se
Back Yard
This patch of dust lies within the elbow of the ranch house, and is enclosed by a stone wall to the north and west.

An open hallway leads south, into the house. There's also a closed screen door to the east, and an open iron gate in the northwest corner of the stone wall.

If this doesn’t seem too bad, bear in mind that this ranch–not including the rest of the site–consists of a rather incredible 27 rooms. While the road runner is moving around and occasionally doing things, that poor bird has a lot less to work with than Floyd did. It really does seem that the intended appeal or interest is historicity. It’s an interesting and novel strategy, craft-wise. In other media, the genre of period drama largely involves visually lush sets and costumes. That doesn’t work here, because this is an empty place whose most compelling features–mountains and desert–resist interaction entirely. There is a pervasive flatness in which descriptive prose, Trinity‘s most compelling element, cannot thrive. When combined with a general lack of interactivity, I experience New Mexico more as a themed game board than as a place.

A simple answer that will satisfy most players is, as I have said in the past, take everything, go everywhere, solve everything, win.

My impression is that critics feel historical accuracy is enough, craft-wise, for this endgame. Certainly, I haven’t encountered reviews that are particularly critical of these barren landscapes. A podcast about the mechanical nature of Trinity‘s endgame is coming soon, so I won’t spend too time developing my thoughts here. For now, I think it might be enough to say that a lack of vividness left myself as a young player experiencing New Mexico more as a treatment of historical fact rather than as a dramatic, narrative presentation.

The voices emerging from the walkie talkie are a notable exception:

>flip breaker
You close the handle of the circuit breaker.

"Hold on, Able. X just woke up again."

A sigh of relief. "Sounds like a wet line somewhere."

"The kid's keepin' an eye on it, Pittsburg. If it dies again before the sequencer takes over, we're gonna have to scrub."

"Roger, Baker. Lotta crossed fingers up here."

[Your score just went up by 1 point. The total is now 88 out of 100.]

The roadrunner emits a brief squawk.

"Oscillograph check," squeaks the talkie.

In the end, our magically-enhanced sprint around the New Mexico desert yielded some suitably adventure gamey adventure game knickknacks: a knife, a screwdriver, a key, and a pair of binoculars. The Wabewalker, thus equipped, has everything needed to fail to prevent the Trinity test.

Failing Up

“Everything needed to fail” is a strange formulation. This is an Infocom game, after all, and the typical player has been failing a lot. There are 25 ways to die in Trinity. This is a seemingly modest number: Zork I has 26, even though it is less than half the size of Trinity. However, 19 of those Zork I deaths involve jokes, unmotivated actions, or exist only for error handling. That leaves seven. Trinity, by contrast, has only one death caused by unmotivated action (kissing the barrow wight). In total, then, Trinity contains 24 deaths based on “serious” game conditions. The entire Zork trilogy, by contrast, 46. The Zork number involves some duplicate, grue-related deaths, of course.

Compared to Zork (251.3 KB), Trinity (255 KB) isn’t particularly deadly, even after correcting for joke or unfair deaths (by “unfair” I’m referring to things like getting FLOATed by the Wizard of Frobozz while in the hot air balloon). Comparing “zombie states,” conditions that lead to unwinnable play sessions, makes for a closer match. Trinity has 27 unwinnable game states, while the Zork trilogy has 35. What does this mean? Trinity is no Zork Trilogy, that’s for sure, but there certainly are a lot of ways to “evit” a story about inevitability. Any serious effort to assess the ending of Trinity–it’s proven to be rather divisive–must at least acknowledge this apparent contradiction.

[perhaps the real story here is the outlandish deadliness of Zork II, which features 28 “fair,” play-motivated deaths. That’s ten more than those found in Zork I and Zork III combined! You can see all the data here in this Intfiction thread.]

In what seems like a lifetime ago, I wrote about experiencing Deadline in a multiversal sense (my series on Deadline remains one of my favorites). It is certainly possible that a narrative that refers to the game’s concluding events as “quantum steam” might hinge upon the many-worlds interpretation/theory (MWI). The problem with a MWI reading of Trinity is that it narratively asserts a deterministically-constructed present. That is, the destructiveness of the atomic weapons of the Wabewalker’s present day is fixed and predictable. The outcome of Trinity‘s story is stasis: the win state is that the bombs are only as bad as we have always assumed them to be.

The main way we could twist ourselves into a MWI reading of the text is to imagine that in each of the failure states, the bomb is incapable of blowing up New Mexico. Somehow, the Wabewalker’s intervention–separate from their existence generally–engenders a counterfactual potency of atomic weaponry. Let’s think back to the opening:

>examine statue
The statue portrays a carefree little boy playing a set of pipes.
A gleam overhead catches your eye.

Oh, dear. A missile is hanging motionless in the sky.

>examine missile
The missile isn't completely motionless. It's falling very, very slowly towards the Long Water.

Your eyes follow the missile's trajectory downward, where you notice another peculiar phenomenon. It looks like a white door, suspended just above the surface of the water.

A flock of ravens glides into view! They circle over the Long Water and disappear through the open white door.

The missile continues its slow descent.

I believe this is the only in-game moment in which an atomic weapon horses around in this way. Why is it different? This isn’t a purely rhetorical question: it’s clearly dramatic and very hard to miss. Perhaps it is merely Trinity‘s first assertion of surreality, a textual feature that is one of its compelling strengths. The major mechanical and dramatic benefit is that the Wabewalker wouldn’t otherwise have time to gather their possessions and wade to the door if the missile were travelling at, well, missile speed. That seems like a rather boring and rote reading, though. Perhaps, hanging onto the physics for a bit longer, this is a major point of divergence, not whether the Wabewalker lives or not (another divergence) but whether the strength of the weapons has an expected default state or a greatly empowered state that the protagonist must adjust in order to “establish the past” (a phrase quoted from Spellbreaker‘s Invisiclues).

The outcome of Trinity‘s story is stasis: the win state is that the bombs are only as bad as we have always assumed them to be.

The chief shortcoming of such a reading is that it isn’t scaffolded in any way. That is, my experience of it is that it seems like a way to “back into” a reading in hopes of accounting for an outcome. It doesn’t actually describe the in-process narrative, and “feasible” has never been a synonym for “satisfactory.” I think we’ve come too far and worked too hard to stop there.

A third option is that Trinity is an adventure game, and it was convention for adventure games to regularly feature death and unwinnable states. This sounds like a cop-out, I’m sure. Perhaps it comes across as an even worse copout than a many-worlds interpretation… interpretation. It isn’t, though, because Trinity does in fact take pains to make adventure game tropes a prominent and interesting feature of the text. In fact, I’ve frequently mentioned the “adventure game logic” of Trinity, which seems to both utilize and criticize an ethos of taking, using, and winning. This attitude is most directly dramatized in the hut where a map and a “book of hours” recreate the map and transcript elements featured in Trinity‘s own manual. While most critics tend to emphasize its nature as a historical record, thereby suggesting that the player’s actions are historical and therefore fixed, it’s sometimes best to take things at face value.

We are, at present, attempting to solve the juxtaposition of a stated, fixed outcome with wildly unfixed actions and events that exclude that outcome entirely. Why would the book and map make such an assertion of fixed action? Elsewhere, I’ve argued that while persons and individual actions might vary, some forces (like humanity) always find a way. The book is far more interesting as a humorous and darkly ironic comment on adventure games, their protagonists, and, yes, their players.

I don’t actually want to discard this reading. Trinity is a subversion of narrative expectations of the adventure game genre. It lampoons the idea that every problem is soluble. More seriously, Trinity suggests that a chief problem with humanity is a widely-held belief that we (as represented by the Wabewalker) have a right to think of creation (lemming, skink, dolphin) as a resource we can exploit callously for whatever noble end we might be pursuing. The ironic subversion of “victory,” first explored by Infocom in Mike Berlyn’s Infidel, takes on new life and power here.

The Dearth of Tragedy

Cards on the table: I don’t think that Trinity is a tragedy, by any definition. There have been interesting and thought-provoking efforts to interpret in that way, but they all seem to fall short. Let’s first talk about what works. The tragic in its familiar conceptions is inevitable. Considering Trinity as a tragedy can’t solve the problem of failure states, but it absolutely does assert that “success,” once achieved, was inevitable. This is, I must insist, separate from varied historical details, which are in many cases both important and insignificant. J. Robert Oppenheimer, whom the Wabewalker spies through binoculars, is essential to the story that we have. However, he is not necessarily essential to the invention of atomic weapons generally. We cannot say if he is essential to the attack on London or not, though I believe Trinity suggests that an attack cannot be stopped, details aside.

>cut blue with knife
[the blue wire]

[Your score just went up by 5 points. The total is now 100 out of 100.]

You slide the blade of the steak knife under the blue wire and pull back on it as hard as you can. The thick insulation cracks under the strain, stretches, frays and splits...

Snap! A shower of sparks erupts from the enclosure. You lose your balance and fall backwards to the floor.

"X-unit just went out again," shouts a voice.

"Which line is it, Baker?"

"Kid's board says it's the positive. The others look okay. We're lettin' it go, Able. The sequencer's running."

The walkie-talkie emits a burst of static.

"Congratulations."

You turn, but see no one.

"Zero minus fifteen seconds," crackles the walkie-talkie.

"You should be proud of yourself." Where is that voice coming from? "This gadget would've blown New Mexico right off the map if you hadn't stopped it. Imagine the embarrassment."

A burst of static. "Minus ten seconds."

The space around you articulates. It's not as scary the second time.
"Of course, there's the problem of causality," continues the voice. "If Harry doesn't get his A-bomb, the future that created you cannot occur. And you can't sabotage the test if you're never born, can you?"

The walkie-talkie is fading away. "Five seconds. Four."

The voice chuckles amiably. "Not to worry, though. Nature doesn't know the word 'paradox.' Gotta bleed off that quantum steam somehow. Why, I wouldn't be surprised to see a good-sized bang every time they shoot off one of these gizmos. Just enough fireworks to keep the historians happy."

The cosmic versus the individual is a pleasing duality in Trinity that can be aligned with expectations of tragedy. Antigone, as already mentioned, can be thought of in three parts: the individual, dramatic action of the play, a cosmic response (in this case, the wrath of Zeus at the violation of his law), an outcome that is faithful to its own cosmology (Creon’s despair). Hamlet features similar mappings. The chief difference, content-wise, appears to be the nature–not presence or absence–of cosmic forces.

Trinity is well-aligned with this model for interpretation: narrative as depicted in terms of player action; a cosmic, unstoppable force (humanity), and thematically faithful outcome (irony, futility). It is easy to argue from these features that Trinity participates in the tragic. Even if proponents and detractors have looked at the problem in terms of a great Aristotelian divide, the truth is that there are core factors in both conceptions of tragedy that correspond to the narrative experience of Trinity.

Cards on the table: I don’t think that Trinity is a tragedy, by any definition.

A problem with a tragic conception of Trinity, no matter how promising it might appear, is that it is missing what might be the most important element of tragedy: community. The isolation of the Wabewalker is anathema to tragedy. Tragedy is communal in nature. While many emphasize the fatal flaw of Aristotelian heroes, in my Hamlet example above an equally important consideration is the way tragedy clears a path for communities to come together, heal, and move forward. This is a familiar structure that audiences can anticipate. There is, in fact, something ritualistic about the structures and outcomes of Aristotelian tragedy. The characters and audiences may share a sense of relief, or progress. Such tragic configurations imply a grand, progressive structure of the universe.

Likewise, as suggested above, a community is mirrored more immediately in ancient drama via the reactions of the chorus. Instead of Aristotelian tragedy’s ritualized or rigid templates for character and action, the chorus affirms and dramatizes community experiences. While presentation may differ, both ancient and Aristotelian conceptions of tragedy are centered around the emotional, moral, and ethical lives of a community.

The Wabewalker is not tragic because they are alone. There is no one to react, and there is no community to repair or recover. Trinity, it must be said, is a rather byzantine rendition of a forest fire. Is this loss? As I suggested a few thousand words ago, there is a human desire to make disaster meaningful, to contextualize it within a larger narrative that moves forward and upward. Perhaps horror is not merely a brief and recoverable trip on our climb up the stairs. Perhaps it is as bad as it looks, after all.

Let’s not bowdlerize, excuse, or rehabilitate disaster here. Hard things are hard, and what heroic spirit can endure them? There must be something we can make of this ending, something honest.

Next

Theaters of absurdity and war.

The post The Dearth of Tragedy (Trinity) appeared first on Gold Machine.

8 days ago

The Choice of Games community mourns the loss of Brittany Kiera Martin, known on our Forum as Eiwynn, who passed away very suddenly on Thursday, December 5, 2024.

She was a mainstay of the Choice of Games Forum for many years, where she generously gave countless hours of her time as a moderator, as well as a mentor to many. Her kindness, humor, and patience helped make the Forum a welcoming space, and she worked hard to bring new members into the community.

She was especially noted for her work in fostering new writers. She initiated the Author Support threads on the Forum, where writers could offer each other commiserations, congratulations, and advice on their works in progress. Many authors have said that it was her encouraging advice that enabled them to complete – or even begin – their first ChoiceScript game.

In memory of her life, and in honor of her legacy as a mentor to writers in the ChoiceScript community, Choice of Games has made a donation to 826: National Youth Writing, a charitable organization that strives to strengthen communities across the US by creating local spaces where young people can receive free writing lessons and learn how to expand their creative worlds.

We offer our deepest sympathy to her spouse, friends, and the many many people whose lives she made better through her presence in our community. She will be greatly missed.

12 days ago

Yes, it's winter. We got a dusting of snow, which isn't definitive (ask me about the Halloween snowstorm of 2011). But I've decided that December 8th was "Nighthawk's Solstice":

Therefore, winter has started.

In recent years I've saved up my winter reviews for the January IGF dump. And indeed I played quite a few games for IGF first-round judging. (Including The Thaumaturge.)

However, I'm not on the narrative jury this year. (Don't worry, you'll be quite happy with my replacement...) So I'm okay with dropping my opinions for the games that are already released.

In fact I only played one of today's games during the IGF judging phase.

• Phoenix Springs
• Rise of the Golden Idol
• The Gap
• 49 Keys

---

Phoenix Springs

• by Calligram Studio -- game site

I added this to my list when I was hunting for detective games. Indeed, that's how it starts: a hunt for your little brother through the decaying neighborhoods that he notionally (really? unreally?) inhabited. You hunt clues and interrogate the squatters, with a fine topic-board UI as your Watsonian assistant.

That's just the first-chapter flashback, though, and a much stranger cuckoo is nesting in it. You're on the train to Phoenix Springs, a desert oasis community of entirely uncertain status. Psychological experiment? Simulation? Prison? It smacks of The Prisoner (or Severance if you're much younger than me), perhaps by way of Philip K. Dick. Tripped-out acid-poster animation gives the proper dissociative aura to it all. Ooh, was someone riffing on Scanner Darkly? I didn't think of that until now.

The topic-board remains front and center, orienting the story in the idea of detective work even as the context goes spinning off into neon clouds. Everything you do is solving mysteries -- just not the mystery. You won't find anything even remotely resembling closure; as a Prisoner fan I wouldn't have it any other way. Recommended.

(A note: the "Solution" option in the game menu links to a walkthrough on the developer's web site. Don't feel bad about using it, or other hint sites. The puzzles aren't read-the-author's-mind but they can involve blind clue-hunting in a very large landscape. But, equally, don't play from the walkthrough. It gives a straight-line path which skips a lot of illuminating side investigation.)

Rise of the Golden Idol

• by Color Gray -- game site

I heard somewhere that the Color Gray people were working on a deduction game that wasn't a Golden Idol sequel. And maybe they are, but this one came out first. (I see Netflix snagged the platform rights for the mobile version, so I suppose it was a case of "Netflix's bag of money changed the roadmap.")

They did, at least, think really hard about how to write more Golden Idol without just making more of the first game. To wit:

• We've moved into the (alt-) 1970s.

• The art is weird stodgy hand-painted style instead of weird stodgy pixel art. But still exactly the same style! It's like someone worked backwards from the chiptune version of a song to the original, but now it's on a banjo. This is an impressive achievement, really. Good job.

• The gameplay is deeper: a main story with chapters and scenes within each chapter. Clues sneak up and down between the layers. You have to think about the whole, and what you've previously learned, in order to understand each new part of the game.

• The story holds together better; it has a more intentional shape.

The first game's arc was "what is this golden idol, and what does it even do?" By the end that question was answered. The DLC chapters were just watching more people use the idol, which is why the whole thing felt a little played out. (And why I was hoping for a fresh start in the next game.)

Obviously the designers couldn't repeat that. Instead, they focus on a new use of the idol. A new set of (1970s) characters run into the thing, experiment, make discoveries, make plans... feud, make secret plans, backstab each other... Of course they do. But it starts with a classic X-files-ish rabbit-hole and ramps up to a big climax at the end. With plenty of fun twists and flashbacks and surprises in between.

Yes, it's still all basically squalid squabbles -- none of the characters are likeable in any way. But there's a more consistent core cast and they have recognizable arcs through the course of the story. So it works.

(I think this one was on the IGF list, but I didn't play it then. I bought it after release like a regular schmo.)

The Gap

• by Label This -- game site

A dying man explores the corroding memories of his life to answer the really important questions: "Why was I such an asshole to everybody? And was it worth it?"

This is a nicely done example of its genre: the psychological exploration with a lot of trippy flashback scenes. To be sure, that's a really well-explored genre at this point. You're losing your mind, your wife has left you, there's probably something quantum going on. Diaries, glitchy visuals, and light-weight puzzles.

I am being overly snarky, I know, sorry. (It's not like I haven't written this trope! More than once!) I found The Gap generally satisfying. It doesn't go on too long. The puzzles are of the "do what's in the author's head" type, but almost all of them are well-clued. (Or they put up a notice of the form "You haven't found all the clues for this one" and then you know to back off.) I got stuck and looked at hints a couple of times, but it was near the end and I was hooked at that point.

The future world (2020 through 2050-ish) is well-envisioned, both in the progression of technology and your personal timeline. The art direction is great; sharp environments and distinctively surreal dream-worlds. The story, well, I didn't feel like the characters really came alive. You-the-protagonist are a two-note figure: "I love you!" vs "Go away, I'm working myself to death." Everybody else spends the game reacting to that. The voice actors give it a good solid effort, and indeed any single scene works fine. I just never got to the point of rooting for anybody.

If you're interested in the psychological-walking-sim genre, this is worth looking at.

(Disclosure: I played a free review copy for IGF judging.)

49 Keys

• by Michele Buonanno -- game site

Look, it's a puzzle game about alchemy which is within epsilon of being a text adventure. And it's a computer adaptation of a puzzle book (49 Chiavi). Of course I played it.

There's not much to 49 Keys but it's an interesting construction. I wish I could read Italian, because I'd love to compare this to the book. The puzzles I played are not obviously suited to puzzle-book form. This game is much closer to a classic parser game: USE KEY ON LOCK or PUT INGREDIENT IN BEAKER. You're figuring out combinations of ingredients from contextual clues. And the navigation is exactly what you'd expect if you asked a text game to add a clickable map.

I thought some of the alchemical-assocation puzzles were underclued, and others were basically filler. The whole game is really just three major puzzles. And the UI is a bit janky. (More modal than it needs to be.) But it's nicely illustrated with a creepy occult vibe. Worth killing an evening with.

14 days ago

This is a continuation of the history started at the game Korenvliet.

To recap, Korenvliet was a game from the Netherlands entered into the catalog of the P2000 Computer Club. Unknown to most people after, it was a translation of an English game called Stoneville Manor (up to the point someone recently re-translated the game back to English, without realizing English was the original language!) The same catalog has Piratenavontuur, Pirate Adventure, but it was a little more obviously a translation of Scott Adams. Those two are not the only adventure games in the catalog.

This early 1983 issue of their newsletter lists all their games up through the end of 1982.

Hans Pennings’s game Schatzoeken (“Treasure Hunting”, sometimes used as the term for modern Geocaching), is not a title that immediately suggests an adventure game, and might be more like a top-down arcade action game. In fact, there is an undated Spectrum ZX81 game with exactly that concept.

However, the P2000 version is an adventure games of the type seen with Gold or Explore: just walking around rooms and making a map, with essentially only movement commands available. Just for the record, since the catalog is nice enough to include dates, the ones given are

(30 June 1982) Schatzoeken
(6 September 1982) Piratenavontuur
(23 December 1982) Korenvliet

that is, the two other translations ports came later. (When I first wrote about the two ports, I had no author, but I can tell now due to this catalog they are also the work of Mr. Pennings.)

There’s a VIC-20 version of Schatzoeken; it has a title screen by an entirely different author, F. E. Leene. The internal date of 12 November 1982 indicates it was written later.

Just to keep things messy, the version I played is a revision from 1983, since I don’t have the one in the catalog from ’82. It comes from a P2000 archive where many of the games were updated within the last year, meaning there are likely un-indexed games floating around; some of the un-investigated titles sound vaguely adventure-like.

Hans Pennings was fairly active in the Dutch software scene in the 80s, producing a big list of P2000 games on top of the ones I’ve mentioned like Marco Polo Jr (a trading game akin to Taipan) and In de ban van een ring (a quasi-RPG based on Lord of the Rings).

I have not checked his entire output so it’s possible there’s another adventure lurking out in ’83 or ’84 but it looks like he mostly stuck to strategy and board games after finishing Korenvliet.

Just like Korenvliet, this turns out to be just another translation, this time going way back, to Roger Chaffee’s game Quest. There are some changes to the game logic so I’ll show the playthrough.

YOU ARE NOW OUTSIDE THE CAVE. GO SOUTH TO ENTER.

There’s a funny message up that can be found by wandering the forest and trying to go up a tree:

NOU, DAAR ZIT U DAN: BOVEN IN EEN BOOM WAT GAAT U NU DOEN? EEN EI LEGGEN?

WELL, NOW YOU ARE UP HERE IN THE TREE WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO? LAY AN EGG?

It’s worth going through the steps of the original before the new version (it’s not like most of you reading this will remember how original Quest went!). To summarize:

a.) the player goes in a cave and past a lair of a “gnome king” that is out

b.) the player finds the treasure at a “guillotine” area

c.) the player is blocked trying to get out the front because the gnome king arrives

d.) the treasure gets stolen by the pirate

e.) the player finds the treasure inside the maze, in one of the “dead ends”

f.) the gnome king still hasn’t left so the player needs to find an alternate exit; there’s a set of “labyrinth rooms” where the player eventually finds a “black hole” room; going south then leads to a lab which teleports the player, but if the player goes down instead they’ll make it to the exit.

For this game, to start, there’s no “gnome king”, but rather a troll king instead:

There’s a message that says BILBO WAS HERE that gets changed to KILROY WAS HERE, matching the meme dating back to WW2.

YOU ARE IN A DEEP GAP. HIGH ABOVE YOU SOMEONE HAS WRITTEN ON THE ROCKS

KILROY WAS HERE

The treasure is not at the guillotine but instead in a spot that used to have a “stalactite”; the room called Xanadu gets moved there instead, and the gold is right next to it.

You are in the ashram. There is a heavy smell of incense and all directions look the same.

GO SOUTH

You are in Xanadu. Below you flows the sacred river Alph through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea.

YOU HAVE FOUND THE TREASURE

Are you taking it with you?

Just like the original, the exit is now blocked (but by the troll king rather than the gnome king)…

…and a pirate will eventually filch the treasure back.

Suddenly the pirate jumps out of the darkness and takes the treasure from you, he shouts “you’ve found it, I’ll hide it better now!” He takes the treasure and disappears into the darkness.

Rather than the treasure moving to the maze, it moves to the guillotine (where the treasure gets hidden at the start of the first game).

The troll still blocks the starting entrance as the first game, but it is now possible to get through over to the “labyrinth” from the original although the layout is slightly different.

Once arriving at the “black hole” room from the original if you try to go into the place where the original teleports you, here you just get ejected because you don’t have a pass.

There is no pass. You just go east (not down as in the first game), fall into a hole, and make your way to the exit.

Since the only verbs were navigation, despite the map being almost identical to the original this still took some work to beat due to the changes. I’m not sure what the logic of the author was other than simply wanting to put their own flair. My guess is Xanadu seemed like too remarkable a location to waste (it otherwise just is randomly in the path you follow, as opposed to having a treasure). However…

Remember that VIC-20 port I mentioned? That one is not not a port of the Pennings version! It instead is a translation from the original, which is why the “Quest” shows up in the title screen. I don’t understand why the “Schatzoeken” would still be there; my guess is the author (Leene) saw the P2000 game, wanted a VIC-20 version, discovered some difficulties porting from P2000, so went back to the source instead. The gold is back up at the “guillotine” from the start, rather than getting moved to Xanadu. The “kabouter-king” (gnome king) is in, as opposed to the troll king.

So both authors were referring to the July 1979 issue of Byte where the original Quest source appears, but one was doing changes while the other was not.

Coming up next: some naughty games.

15 days ago

The Thaumaturge is an adventure-RPG set in a slightly alternate 1905 Poland. The alteration is thaumaturges: people with a familiar spirit (a "Salutor") and an interesting mix of psychic powers.

(Disclosure: while The Thaumaturge is high-end for an indie production, it showed up in the IGF lists and I got a free review copy to play.)

The game starts in a remote farming village. "Oho," you might think, "this is a Witcher riff -- a lone monster-slayer stomping around the Polish countryside." Nope! Your talents are far better suited to sniffing around a crime scene (which the village obligingly provides). You can track someone's psychic imprint on physical objects, glean their motivations, and -- in extremis -- give their thoughts a nudge. Okay, extremis happens pretty often.

Farm life isn't your milieu anyhow. The prologue ends with a telegram at the train station. Your father is dead back home, and home you gotta go. (All great fantasy has trains!) Welcome to fin-de-siecle Warsaw, a stew of Polish aristocrats, Tsarist soldiers, gang leaders, rabbis, revolutionaries, journalists, whores, pączki vendors, and on and on. And other thaumaturges, to be sure. (Your father was one.) Not to mention your travel companion, Grigori Rasputin his own fire-eyed self.

In fact the game is much more a Disco Elysium riff -- though not a simple one. A thaumaturge is connected to their familiar through a Flaw: a hole in their mind that allows the unseen world to leak in. Your Flaw is Pride, and Pride is a key stat in navigating the game. Certain dialogue choices feed your Flaw; act haughty and your pride increases. Other choices are gated on having too much (or too little!) pride.

It's not the same as Disco Harry's splintered head-daemons, but it provides a similar tension. You can decide how to treat people, with arrogance or empathy, and this naturally affects the course of the story. But you're also choosing whether to feed your familiar -- and thus level up your supernatural powers. It gives the familiar "are we an asshole today?" dialogue branches a lot more oomph.

Sadly, the game doesn't carry this premise as far as I'd like. Your Pride winds up being rather disconnected from your RPG stats, which are a bag of four generically-named concepts. Pride comes from and affects dialogue choices. The other stats come from XP, which you gain from the usual mix of plot threads and side quests. And the other stats are primarily used in fights.

Yeah, there's a lot of fights. You're an arrogant overdressed rich boy nosing into people's business all around Warsaw. Guess how people react to that. The fights are moderately challenging but not all that varied -- unless you get tired of the mechanics, as I did, and set the game to easy mode. Then the fights are same-y and trivial too.

Occasionally you get into a supernatural boss fight, which represents trying to absorb someone's Flaw and thereby bind the spirit which haunts them. Thus you spend the game acquiring more and more Flaws. In theory this should keep adding more dimensions to the choice/personality model. Pride, then Vehemence, then Recklessness... But in fact this doesn't happen. It's single-axis, Pride the whole way through. Once you've acquired a spirit, it's just a bundle of combat powers.

I can see why the designers thought they needed a combat system. The XP loop and your menagerie of spirits have to be good for something. But, as I said, it all feels disconnected from the storyline. Yes, some investigation challenges depend on your stats, and the fates of certain spirits are crucial to the plot. But if there's one Disco Elysium innovation which should be copied by absolutely everybody, it's the complete disregard of combat mechanics. All these spirits and your multiplying Flaws should be integral to the story model!

Because the plot is juicy. Oh yes. If there's a comparison to the Witcher series, it's the absolute whirlwind of plot threads, side characters, and social scenes which you can dig into. You explore Warsaw from its dockside to its fine townhouses, with all the markets and parks in between. Not to mention the streetcars, the jail cells, the synagogues, and the brothels. It would be overwhelming if it weren't firmly grounded in your own family and friends: your sister, your boyhood friend, your father's associates and enemies. Plus, of course, the designers' tangible love of Warsaw and its history.

(Side note: I visited Warsaw for real a couple of years ago. I walked those same streets of Powiśle and Śródmieście. Of course the game's rendition of 1905 doesn't look anything like what an American tourist sees in the 2020s. But I felt a connection anyhow. Plus, the game has people pronouncing "Powiśle" and "Śródmieście" correctly, something I never managed in real life.)

The bulk of the game action is investigation -- big mysteries and small ones -- via your psychometric powers or old-fashioned shaking-down of witnesses. (Fights are frequent, as I said, but they just space out the quest threads.) Now, the investigation gameplay doesn't have much to it, gameplay-wise. You follow the magic sparkles to a clue, or a character; if the character won't talk then you find more clues. Repeat until solved. But the point is the stories you discover, and the choices you are thrust into as you progress through them. The choices are sharp and the writing is really good. Every single clue is thaumaturgically freighted with thoughts and memories and personality. The game must have hundreds of these crisp little paragraphs -- a constant stream of character notes for the people around you. It's the best of environmental storytelling without awkwardly requiring a city full of diary-writers.

I loved all the characters. Including the assholes. (It's not just you. Your pal Abaurycy is magnificent.) The designers are very serious about portraying the diversity of their city. A Romany king, multiple rabbis, a Tatar doctor... it's easy to write lists. But when I walked in on one Jewish character who was singing, not in Hebrew, but in Yiddish... a delightful moment.

The stakes are both high and low: this is a pivotal moment in Poland's history, and a pivotal moment in your fictional family's history as well. (Your twin sister, the cranky chain-smoking goth businesslady: also magnificent.) I really struggled with some of the choices, which is the sign of a game that's hooked me. Small spoiler: trying to collect every Salutor in the game is a Prideful approach! Consider your options well.

I put in about 28 hours. That was obsessively scraping all the side quests. Honestly, it would have been even better as 20-hour game with all the fights removed. And the mechanics could have used another pass. Or, more likely, a more ambitious design got trimmed down in development? I would absolutely believe that the Flaw system started multidimensional and the designers cut everything but Pride in order to ship.

I'm glad they shipped. Highly recommended. The Thaumaturge isn't a category-buster like Disco was, but it's a successful modest-sized RPG-adventure and a thoroughly enjoyable romp through historic Warsaw.

17 days ago

I am back.

I am Alex Warren, the original creator of the textadventures.co.uk site, and the Quest 5 and Squiffy text adventure systems.

I handed over all of these in 2017, and I am very grateful to Luis and Andy for keeping things running for the last few years.

Recently I noticed that a few things around the site had stopped working, so I quietly dropped in to fix a few issues with Squiffy.

Well, things kind of escalated from there, and it turned out now was a good time to transfer ownership of things again. So I’m happy to announce that I am back in charge of textadventures.co.uk, Quest 5 and Squiffy once more.

There’s a whole bunch of things I want to do to revive and modernise things, and I’ve made a good start on each of them…

• rebuilding (and maybe rebranding) the textadventures.co.uk site.
• a major new version of “Quest 5”, using Blazor and WASM to make things work super fast, in browsers and across platforms. This will need a new name (as there’s already a Quest 6), so I am referring to this new version as “Quest Viva”.
• a major new version Squiffy, built with TypeScript and with the editor implemented as a PWA.

Work is well underway on all of these, and I’ll announce more details as they come closer to fruition.

In the meantime, I have opened up GitHub discussions for textadventures, Quest and Squiffy, and there’s a new official Discord Server you can join. Hope to see you there!

18 days ago

I guess it's not "the" media any more, it's just media. Anyhow!

I recently guested on Topic Lords, Jim Stormdancer's podcast about topics. Along with Ben Wilson, I am featured in episode 266: "Voronoi Cookies". (My title drop, may I say.) A very random conversation, as is the podcast's brief.

Baking; leaving crosswords on the street; a year isn't 52.0 weeks; Leila Chatti; fidgeting in Zoom; Things of Science.

---

Less random: A Conversation with Andrew Plotkin on The Digital Antiquarian!

Jimmy Maher has been running through the early history of videogames in intensely-researched detail for, oh, let's not say how many years. Of course many of his early posts were about interactive fiction, but now he's up to the mid-1990s so Infocom is gone and graphical adventures are trailing off.

But guess what happened in the mid-1990s? IFComp! And then my years as a hot young IF auteur. That's what the article is about. Runs from my early encounter with Adventure to the present (NarraScope, etc).

And yes, this is the interview where I admit that I skipped Plundered Hearts on launch because it looked girly. (I played it when the LTOI collection came out.)

Enjoy.

18 days ago

The IFComp has been a central fixture of the interactive fiction community since 1995, and before that, there was the AGT (Adventure Game Toolkit) contest that ran from 1989 to 1993, and even before that, a single contest in 1986 was dedicated to the predecessor of AGT, GAGS. You could consequently argue contests have been an essential fixture of the text adventure form since 1986. (Jimmy Maher has written more extensively about the contests here and here.)

However, there was a major contest which started even earlier! In 1983, 1985, and 1987, the company Falsoft, publisher of Rainbow Computer magazine (dedicated to the Tandy CoCo), had an adventure game contest culminating in the winners getting published in a book.

These were genuine contests with judging and a winner and a runner-up and so forth, but since the first contest showed up in 1983 I am going to wait on most of the details until then. Here’s an excerpt from Lawreuce C. Falk (editor of the first book) just to give a sense of what was going on:

The idea for The Rainbow Book Of Adventures began before there was even a Rainbow. Thanks to Scott Adams, Byte magazine and those wonderful people who brought you the original Adventure on the big mainframes.

“Wouldn’t it be nice,” dreamed I one day, “if there could be a whole book of Adventures just for the Color Computer?”

I had just finished reading Byte’s Adventure issue of December, 1981, and seen one of Scott Adams’ famous Adventures on an Apple computer at my not-too-friendly local computer store. Just the day before I had discovered how to get by the snake in the Colossal Cave. But I wanted to play an Adventure on my CoCo.

None to be had. So I wrote one. Just to see whether I could do it. Name: Vampire! Play time: Around 30 minutes. But I did learn how to move things around, including myself.

(I know, you want to know what happened to Vampire! So do I. I let a friend market it for me and it sold, I think, about three copies. Besides, working on the thing late at night was scary, anyway.)

…

Well, yes, it would be nice if we could have a book of all Color Computer Adventures. But there weren’t many out there, so we began publishing a magazine called the Rainbow instead. (This isn’t exactly how it happened, but it is close enough.)

As the Rainbow grew, we started to get some Adventure submissions, and, pretty soon, started an Adventure contest. We decided that each winning entry would be published in a book. And here it is.

There’s some 1982 business to check in on, as a pair of articles showed up by Jorge Mir about how to write adventures for the Tandy CoCo.

July 1982 had “Rainbow Adventure”, essentially a sample game, and he expanded on the technical details for his August 1982 template he called ADVMAKER.

The sample game, Rainbow Adventure, is not terribly impressive, but keep in mind the context here is like the Ken Rose articles, where the point is to explain how adventures work.

What I am going to talk about this month is writing an adventure. And, next month, we will be giving you an outline of an adventure generator that will help you write your own adventures. It is a sort of help for those who will be entering the RAINBOW Adventure Contest.

This was the era where the programming was the big roadblock; design could wait.

The player starts on a “Kentucky Street” (Rainbow was out of Prospect, Kentucky) with no real direction what to do. This is one of the sorts of games where you find out the final objective when you get there.

There is a very slight amount of maze-iness around the start, with two “winding road” rooms and the player starting with no inventory so not having a way to distinguish between the two (or even knowing there’s exactly two). I nabbed a “shiny object” from a dead end (turns out to be a key) and a sign at a pawn shop explaining you can sell jewelry there, and used those two items in order to confirm the map below.

The shiny object, as already mentioned, is a key, not jewelry, so you can’t sell it. Finding what you can sell is the most curious part of the game, and is interesting in a theoretical-ludic sense. Near the Pawn Shop is a Clothing Center with a mirror. The mirror informs you that you have a watch.

You don’t otherwise see the watch in inventory, and can’t READ WATCH or the like. I first thought the watch might be used to track some kind of timed puzzle, but no. Once learning you are wearing a watch by seeing it in the mirror, you can sell it.

With the watch sold you have money, and you can go over to a computer store. There (using the key to help open a case) you can obtain a computer and a tape, and then use the very specific parser commands LOAD TAPE followed by RUN COMPUTER to learn about a bus.

With this powerful increase of knowledge, you can go over to a BUS STOP, hop on a bus, and end up a a post office. There you can open a mail box and find a copy of Rainbow Magazine, winning the game.

I wonder if anyone had come across the game without realizing it was meant to be a sample programming game; it feels very slight otherwise. Fortunately for posterity, we will see Jorge Mir again: he entered the first contest, with two fairly extreme programming specimens, one being an expansive adventure in 4K and the other being a one-room adventure in 32K. The latter is the first example we have of a “room escape game”.

But that will wait for 1983, which we are inching closer to! Honest! Next up: the last of the Charles Cecil games written for Artic Computing.

a day ago

(Continued directly from my previous post.)

I was, as I guessed, rather close to the ending. What I did not guess is that grammar played a major part in my downfall.

Not orthography like with Circus. This was something worse.

As I suspected from last time, my initial issue was simply a missing exit. At least the author was trying to be actively deceptive and it wasn’t just me overlooking a simple chunk of text. At the far east of the maze, you can go UP.

Given the giant is peaceful and I had a limited number of verbs to work from, I quickly narrowed down to GIVE probably being the most useful thing. Except: the game did not seem to understand my commands like GIVE WAND. After fussing for long enough I eventually realized I needed the syntax GIVE WAND TO GIANT. (This is not the death-by-grammar moment but it gives a clue of the issue.)

As I was using a save that hadn’t tangled with the goblin yet, I had the lunch in inventory, and it turned out to be the correct use.

Hmm, so my fortification with calories was not the right way to defeat the goblin. Let’s put a pin in that, and nab the rope, as it clearly went to the hook.

Note that TIE isn’t even recognized as a word by itself — this is grabbing the whole phrase TIE ROPE TO HOOK here and the command isn’t otherwise comprehended by the parser. Clearly the author’s Zork influence is coming into play, but with a negative effect (since TIE ROPE ought to be understood, and even the Infocom parser would have taken it! but the author wants to include the feeling of full-parser commands).

The section after straightforwardly allows you to scoop up two treasures; the trip is one way since you have to drop down from the rope, but the other side of the grating is available. You just need to make sure to bring the iron key, otherwise you’re softlocked.

Now, the iron key is past the goblin, so that second screenshot means I got by the goblin somehow without eating the lunch first.

I did, and this is the spot of the game that is horrifying. In fact, we may have a new grand champion for most deceptive parser message ever, and honestly, I don’t think anyone is ever going to beat it.

You see, despite the response indicating you are trying to “stab” the goblin, KILL GOBLIN is interpreted an entirely different way than KILL GOBLIN WITH SWORD. If you just KILL GOBLIN, you’re trying to stab it with … your hands, somehow? KILL GOBLIN WITH SWORD is the way to specify you’re using the sword, and if you do that then the battle runs along cleanly and you can win.

Primal screaming isn’t enough to represent how infuriating this is. I can see how it happened: the author, enamored with a multi-word parser, wanted to have the two commands be different, but forgot to convey to the player that the two commands might be, in any sense, different.

To be clear, this isn’t somehow conveying the superiority of two-word parsers: it just means that as layers get added, the author needs to start being more and more careful about the potential for deceptive responses.

I did promise a look at the Classic Quests version of the game, and strangely enough, it matches this one almost exactly! You start in the cottage rather than inside it, and the description is written differently. There’s also a loft, and I have no idea why the author added it.

There’s a little more text added, like instead of just stating you’re lost in a forest, the game says:

You are lost in a forest of pine trees, the ground is covered in thick undergrowth making movement difficult.

There’s not nearly as many textual changes as you might think, given the improved DOS capacity. It’s quite possible that Classic Quest Catacombs is closer to the original than I first suspected.

Note that structurally, everything is the same! There is one other very, very important difference.

You are in a small side passage leading north-south. The walls are very pitted here as if somebody had been hacking at them with an axe or something. There is an extremely fierce Goblin here, he is brandishing an evil looking axe.
The goblin sees an opening in your defence and strikes you in the chest. You have fully recovered from your wounds.
>KILL GOBLIN
(with sword) You nick the goblin’s arm with your sword. The goblin lands a blow leaving a gash in your sword arm.
>KILL GOBLIN
(with sword) You nick the goblin’s arm with your sword. The goblin launches a fierce attack and you stagger back under a hail of blows.

Yes, the game automatically applies the sword if you type KILL GOBLIN, and even lets you know if you are doing so. At least Brian Cotton was learning!

3 days ago

Thinking our way through despair.

Almost Tragic

In a previous post, I attempted to find a way to read the ending of Trinity. There are a number of challenges for the reader. The question of inevitability, for instance, is a vexation. If the “final” failure of the game’s “win” state cannot be avoided, then how can the Wabewalker die on the way there? Similarly, one might wonder how causality would permit, as only one example, the player to throw the bag of crumbs into the pond, rendering the game unwinnable. Rather than answers, I could only offer ideas. Perhaps, given the ending’s explicit mention of quantum mechanics, this duality can be experienced in terms of the many-worlds interpretation. Another possibility is that Trinity calls attention to itself as an adventure game, and failure was an expected convention of the form in those days. It is often as simple as that in this particular field of criticism.

Considerations of inevitability spilled into a discussion of tragedy. Certainly, tragedy can be experienced as a kind of poetics of the inevitable. While critics have invested in the idea of a tragic Trinity, I have argued that the formulation simply doesn’t work. In terms of its themes, there are some shared components with both pre-Aristotelian and Aristotelian forms of tragedy. The best way to see this is to strip tragedy of content and examine it in terms of its machinery. While I won’t restate my argument, one particular feature of tragedy is irreconcilably absent from Trinity: community.

The Wabewalker’s journey doesn’t affect a community. The Wabewalker, in fact, has no community. They know a terrible secret that nobody can know. The “communities” (Kensington Gardens and Nagasaki) we players see are vaporized. Another problem is that the tragic tends to assert an orderly world that operates according to human principles: law, justice, various community values, and so on. Humanity as dramatized by Trinity, on the other hand, is a force of cosmic lawlessness.

I think there is a relatable reason for mislabeling dark or negative events, be they fictional or real, as tragic. The tragic is inevitable, yes, but it is also a way forward. In its wake, communities come together to connect, to empathize, to make progress. How reassuring! Who wouldn’t want an alternative to confronting the possibility of a capricious and uncaring universe? Unfortunately, denying us such comforts is what Trinity has been up to all along.

To say all is futile is a hard saying. Who can bear to hear it?

Is There An Easy Way Out?

Without the resolution and human connectedness afforded by tragedy, the ending of Trinity feels quite dire. Apparently, the Wabewalker is trapped in a cycle: they must repeat the ending of the story again and again in order to maintain the “limited” destructiveness of atomic weapons as we know it. This is a bit like a particularly nasty episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s hard to imagine, for instance, encountering the dolphin an infinite number of times. The easiest possibility–for both the Wabewalker and us–is to imagine that the grip of causality is not so firm after all.

I’ve repeatedly asserted that individuals are not always important in Trinity, despite its paratext’s constant insistence that such details mean a lot. Critics seem to agree. However, I hope this series has convinced a few readers that it is instead the movement of humanity as a cosmic force that is significant. As an example, I’ve suggested–to wide agreement–that atomic weapons would have appeared even if J. Robert Oppenheimer had been a tax attorney. Someone else would have led the way instead. Perhaps that is true of the Wabewalker, too. Someone must sabotage the test, because it is a necessary element in Humanity’s upward climb into greater and greater destructiveness. It is not clear, however, that the someone must be our protagonist. The Wabewalker could quit or die. Perhaps they could find a bomb shelter in London. Who’s to say that wouldn’t happen? After all, those boots in the crypt belonged to some dead person before the Wabewalker claimed them. Somebody else will do it!

That doesn’t work. Forgive my lack of technical terminology here, but the vibe of Trinity is all wrong for that kind of escape. This entire text and all the hours we’ve spent playing (and reading this series!) never even hint at the possibility that anything can be escaped. There are no branching paths and no alternative solutions to problems. The ending falls on us with all the implacability of a curse. Readers who hope to resist the despair of Trinity‘s ending will have to seek out other options.

If I had to Do It All Over Again

Some readers have invoked Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence as a way to get beyond the apparent despair of Trinity‘s ending. It is, I feel, a better strategy then casting about for narrative loopholes. Instead, the Wabewalker (and we readers, too), can confront the paradoxical cycle of causation with existential courage.

While this is not a philosophy paper, I should say that Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence first appeared as a kind of thought experiment in The Gay Science. The basic question that it asks is whether one would happily repeat their actions across eternity if time operated as an endlessly repeating series of identical cycles. The implications are suitably horrific, and yet there is a rightness about appealing to the sufficiency of existential courage. Only joy in life and individual authenticity–even in the moments when life is miserable–can render eternal recurrence tolerable.

However, the question it asks isn’t the same one that Trinity asks. How could we players ensure that the Wabewalker is existentially authentic? Perhaps more important, what choices do they actually make? It might be that, on a meta level, the player might regret finishing the game, but the story itself is not framed in terms of decisions or existential courage. The word I’ve used repeatedly is “inevitable,” and, perhaps oddly, eternal recurrence is not particularly focused on inevitability in that sense. Rather, its question is what the individual would will to be inevitable. What matters is whether or not a person is willing to commit to and affirm their decisions, even if they had to repeat their actions forever.

Trinity ultimately isn’t that kind of story. The only thing we know about the Wabewalker is that they are the kind of self-involved citizen that plagues American civic life. Running through a magical door to escape an ICBM is never presented as a character-defining choice, for example.

My other objection to this reading is that it doesn’t acknowledge the horror of the situation or of a horrified subjectivity.

Repetition and Interiority

A third possibility might be Kierkegaard’s concept of repetition. While it isn’t adapted to the sort of cosmic time prank we experience at the end of Trinity, it does present an idea of subjective interiority that can reconfigure the boredom and sorrow of the repeated cycles as something reflective and deep. The Wabewalker knows nothing about the situation or even their own objectives (a recent informal poll at intfiction revealed that players did not realize that they were meant to sabotage the bomb) initially, but what will they know on repeated cycles? Even if events cannot change, the subjectivity of the Wabewalker certainly will. Although the description of the park does not change at the end, we players see it differently. Presumably, the Wabewalker does, too.

By emphasizing personal growth and subjective experience, the Kierkegaardian repetition offers more hope than Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. However, it also seems inadequate. While interiority can yield up a way to persevere in such adverse conditions, it seems too fragile and exhaustible to endure across infinity. A Kierkegaardian concept of repetition also falls short because, like eternal recurrence, it emphasizes the individual in ways that Trinity does not.

Kierkegaardian faith might fare better as a “way out,” but the world of Trinity offers no such comforts.

Absurdity as a Negation of the Tragic

Perhaps the way is not out but in. What if the player and Wabewalker alike could “learn to stop worrying and love the bomb?” Having come this far, you may be already convinced that Trinity is not a tragedy. Rather, as I have said, it is a cosmic horror, and despite the puzzles, the Wabewalker witnesses rather than acts upon its events, managing only to work their way up to zero (a bomb that doesn’t destroy New Mexico). It’s an ending that surprised many readers: asking around at intfiction, I found that almost every respondent expected the Wabewalker’s actions to have a positive outcome.

I don’t think Infocom’s earlier Infidel could have taught players to experience Trinity‘s ending differently. While Infidel‘s protagonist is not tragic, either–though perhaps some communities are better off without him–his fate indicates that bad things happen to bad people. In an Aristotelian sense, the protagonist of Infidel is most certainly flawed and he has his moment of recognition. Infidel is utterly unlike Trinity, in other words, because its proximity to tragedy implies a world of justice, first of all, and moreover because it focuses on the subjective reality of its protagonist.

Beyond the borders of the ethical or moral, there must be something. I have used the term “horror” repeatedly. A plane crash is a disaster; it can be explained via narrative or science, but it is too nonsensical to be tragedy. We haven’t talked about the roadrunner, or the colors of the boots. They’re a bit silly, don’t you think? The wisecracking editorializer who says things like “Gnomon is an island.” What a strange tonal maneuver!

Atomic weapons are an absurdity. Their horrors–cosmic beyond reckoning–cannot be made sense of. They are beyond the individual. They have gone beyond history, in the sense that their power resists our narrative capabilities. Their mere existence is an argument against the possibility of a moral and reasonable universe. The Abrahamic God never granted anyone–not even David–such powers. How many animals died over the course of the several atomic tests in the Marshall islands? It must be a number that defies reason. It isn’t possible to imagine the semi trucks or circus tents they would fill. If we seated every child maimed or killed by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in movie theaters, I wonder how many theaters they might occupy. It is impossible, for me, to picture it. I would not be brave enough to sit with them and watch some well-liked film for children.

This is the absurd: beyond narrative, beyond history, beyond morality, beyond hope, beyond faith.

Theaters of Absurdity and War

“Whoah, Drew,” you might say, “it’s dark, sure, but let’s not get crazy.” As I’ve already said, there is no honest way to get out of the ending of Trinity. I believe it offers only two outcomes. These outcomes, curiously, are as much for readers as they are for the Wabewalker. The first possibility is despair. We imagine the Wabewalker’s subjective experience–it is never described–as miserable resignation. They are trapped in a hopeless and brutal cycle, unable to die or stop. It is hard to imagine that a debilitating trauma or mental health event can be held off forever.

Beyond the cycle itself, the factor most damaging to the psyche of the Wabewalker is likely to be hope or an ability to imagine something better. The only way forward is to relinquish hope altogether and embrace the absurdity. A philosophical model for this turn can be found in Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. The work is based on the mythological figure Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to forever roll a stone up a hill. Once the top was reached, the stone would roll back down. The cycle would repeat endlessly. We players ought to be familiar with this sort of futility, shouldn’t we?

What would it mean to embrace the absurdity of the Wabewalker’s reality? They and we alike would have to love the experience of it. According to Camus, such an “absurd man” would find joy in the drudgery of repetition. This reflects what I feel is a potent combination of Nietzschean existential courage and Kierkegaardian interiority. In other words, a Sisyphus-inspired reading allows for a protagonist who, by virtue of embracing the absurd, can experience the repetition as something that deepens and enriches.

Camus insists that one must imagine that Sisyphus is happy. Is it possible to see the Wabewalker in the same light? Ultimately, Trinity is like a meditation. We are called to imagine the Wabewalker in Kensington Gardens for the second, third, and fifty-seventh times. It is impossible to imagine, and yet there remains, despite Trinity‘s constant negative insistences, a lingering idea of the heroic. It is hard to say where it comes from, irrational as it is. Perhaps the heroic is merely a feature of adventure games generally–even Arthur Dent saves the Heart of Gold–that we simply anticipate without much thought or reflection. It might be empathy for the one who must kill the skink again and again, as horrific as it must always be.

In Camus’s formulation, the absurd person is a kind of hero. This may be the only heroism we can honestly afford the Wabewalker. They are too alone to be tragic and too mundane for knighthood. Their heroism, should they possess any, is that of joy and courage, of themself. It is ultimately a question for we players, whether or not we can imagine the joy of the Wabewalker. Even if we cannot have it, perhaps we have the courage to imagine it.

Or not, of course. We can despair, or resent Trinity for its despair, and no one could be blamed for doing so. Trinity is unapologetically disastrous and absurd and, like humanity itself, would rather run us over than change our minds. To play it is to take a test, to respond to a call.

As is often the case in art, the important thing is the act of answering and not the answer.

Afterword

This is the last in a thirteen-part series of essays about Brian Moriarty’s Trinity, a 1986 game published by Infocom. I’m confident that this is the longest series about it that focuses on the text itself. Jimmy Maher has written quite a bit about it too, and I always look to his work. I consider him a sort of “critic of record” for Infocom games. We ultimately disagree on several points, but he raises the bar for writing about Trinity. It’s very difficult–impossible for me–to be serious about it without engaging with his discussions of tragedy and philosophy. I owe him a debt of thanks for that.

There’s only one other game that I’ve written so much about. Regulars must already know that I mean A Mind Forever Voyaging. I’ve grown frustrated with a general tendency to assert a favorite when one or the other is mentioned. It’s a bit like preferring apples over screwdrivers, isn’t it? What do those two games even have to do with one another?

Trinity, as I’ve said, came not to destroy the Zorkian but to fulfill it. It is the highest expression of that classic “cave game” design. Higher–please don’t be upset!–than Beyond Zork or Zork Zero. I think this design, combined with its literary ambitions, makes Trinity a truly special Infocom game, utterly unique in the catalog.

I’ve said more than once that I dislike the endgame of Trinity. It’s true! I really dislike it. Other than my critique of historicity earlier in this series, I have reserved commentary for a future podcast. With this final post, I can get to work on that. I’m excited to think and talk about its design in a wider context. That conversation will resume with a short discussion of Vampire: The Masquerade Swansong, a point-and-click inspired graphical game. Even if you don’t play such games, I think the design discussion will be interesting to parser game players. A second episode concerning Trinity‘s efficiency problem in the New Mexico desert will follow.

The next game on the list is Leather Goddesses of Phobos, a welcome shift in mood for many, I’m sure!

Thanks for everyone’s patience. This series was a long time in the making, but I hope I was able to engage with the work in a way that feels meaningful and productive, recognizing its special place among 1980s narrative games.

The post Trinity Final: Theaters of Absurdity and War appeared first on Gold Machine.

4 days ago

DEAR SIR,

IT IS WITH GREAT REGRET THAT I MUST INFORM YOU OF THE MOST UNFORTUNATE PASSING OF YOUR UNCLE, SIR HENRY VANDERBILT. IT IS ALSO MY DUTY TO INFORM YOU AT THIS TIME THAT THERE WILL BE A READING OF THE WILL OF YOUR UNCLE’S ESTATE IN THE ISLAND PROVINCE OF BURMESIA A WEEK FROM TODAY AND IT IS REQUESTED THAT YOU BE THERE.

We return now to Peter Kirsch and the Adventure of the Month series through Softside (see previously: Menagerie). By October he has essentially taken over, having no outside submissions for a while. Even when these games have had issues they’ve always had premises far outside the norm for 1982, and I find it exciting to see early stabs at various genres.

This is arguably Kirsch’s most ambitious game yet, with multiple plot twists.

The Deadly Game invokes not even just a genre but a sub-genre of the thriller/horror movie: the house where you have to stay the night to get (some amount of money) but (your relatives/spooky ghosts/traps left by the antagonist) are trying to kill you. See, for example, Bring Me the Vampire (1963) and No Place Like Homicide (also 1961), although the latter is a comedy. (There are also two movies called The Deadly Game but they seem to have no relationship to the genre overall or this particular game.)

Probably the most famous variant is House on Haunted Hill (1959) with Vincent Price, where people can earn $10,000 by staying one night in the titular house.

I have all three versions this time (TRS-80, Apple II, Atari) but I went with Apple purely because my last game was on Atari. (Foreshadowing: I should have picked TRS-80 instead, but I’ll get to why later. For someone looking for the download, it’s on SoftSide Magazine Adventure Superdisk 5.)

1 ‘ THE DEADLY GAME
BY PETER F. KIRSCH ** VERSION 14.4.1.3 **
SEPTEMBER 1982

We are informed our super-rich uncle has passed, and you arrive at the reading of the will to an “ENSEMBLE OF RELATIVES THAT YOU NEVER THOUGHT YOU’D SEE AGAIN AND WISH YOU HADN’T”.

The will, then, is read: a sum of ONE MILLION DOLLARS to be divided equally amongst the relatives, except everyone must spend one night first, and the money will be divided — the will says this explicitly — “AMONG THE SURVIVORS”.

ALL OF YOU ARE GREEDY AND UNDESERVING OF ANY OF MY MONEY. WE SHALL SEE WHO CAN PASS THE TEST OF SURVIVAL TONIGHT.

You then land in a bedroom and immediately someone is trying to kill you via gas.

Here is where we reach one of the first things rather different about this game compared to prior Kirsch output: there’s a stronger emphasis on having indirect objects be included in the game. The right commands are to LOOK BED and notice a PILLOW and BLANKET, and then to PUT BLANKET; the game asks IN WHAT? and you need to respond IN CRACK, referring to the crack that the gas is escaping from.

This scene is followed by a persistent “PSSST!” message which only clears up when you LOOK WINDOW and find a woman underneath, after which you keep hearing the phrase DIAMONDS ARE A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND.

The room is still locked up, and it took a fair amount of time for me (maybe 20-30 minutes?) to get out, giving the impression this was almost a single-room game. Extra details are included by the game also allowing LOOK UNDER and LOOK BEHIND as commands (mentioned by the HELP command but not by the main game’s instructions); you can LOOK UNDER the chair and find some gum, and LOOK UNDER the bed and find a key made of bronze. To reach the key you need to use the portrait off the wall (it’s described as “long”); behind the portrait is a safe but you can’t open it yet.

The bronze key can then go to the top drawer of the dresser, which has a “BOBBY PIN” and a “KEY MADE FROM ZINC”. The key doesn’t go to the lock but you can PICK LOCK which will allow the bobby pin to work on the door leading out from the guest room.

That sounds fast narrated out, so let me be fully clear it took a while to get to this point; the LOOK UNDER mechanic wasn’t originally clear, the zinc key seemed like it ought to go somewhere (it didn’t yet), trying to use the bobby pin to pick locks of the dresser (there’s a middle and bottom too) makes it seems like it can’t be used to pick locks at all, the woman under the window messages are bizarre and I spent a long time trying to communicate or at least get her to stop from saying the same words over and over again, and I also spent a while noodling with the safe behind the portrait in case it was possible to be opened early. (It isn’t — you need to get three combination numbers from elsewhere in the house.)

Getting back to the action, we can now explore the house somewhat more freely, although a quick check through the open guest rooms on the floor we’re at reveals various cousins have already expired.

That’s three out of five cousins dead already. The other two guest rooms are locked so we are unable as to inquire as to their health.

From this floor you can go downstairs or upstairs. I started by going upstairs. (Well, to be honest: I started by being horribly stuck, as GO UP, CLIMB STAIRCASE, UP, TAKE STAIRCASE and many more variants failed to be understood. I ended up needing to check Dale Dobson’s walkthrough for GO STAIRS, and it has to be phrased exactly that way.)

I’ll be hopping in the elevator in a moment, but first a mention on the maid’s room: you can LOOK UNDER / UNDER BED and find out THERE’S NOTHING UNDER THERE NOW, BUT IT LOOKS LIKE A GOOD HIDING PLACE. The broom goes over to those closing-in-walls although I took the route jumping into the elevator first:

The ground floor consists of a living room (divided into a 3 by 3 grid), some side rooms including a kitchen, a front door that’s locked and that is a concern later, and a cellar door that requires the zinc key from back at the start.

Heading by the kitchen, you can find an “axe” and “nails” in a cabinet (LOOK CABINET, it gives confused parser messages if you try to OPEN it) and then the killer seems to be repeatedly trying to throw something sharp.

In reality the above scene is meant to be “do the right action to defend yourself” but the author decided here not to make it “right action or die”, but simply to pause the moment while you figure out what that right action is. You can grab the pot lid and it gets used as a shield. You then get the message DEFLECTED BY THE POT LID and the invisible killer leaves you alone after that. The thing being thrown was a rock, which happens to have part of the safe combination on it.

Heading down to the cellar, there’s a fuse box that can be fixed by the gum (from way back at the starting room, when you LOOK UNDER / UNDER CHAIR), along with some acid, turpentine, and a garden hose.

Before being able to escape upstairs to test the light switch now (and apply the broom which still hasn’t been used yet) there’s a rattlesnake blocking the way.

With the snake out of the way via garden hose impersonation, we can first block the closing walls with the broom, nabbing the gold key. The gold key can be used back at the dresser to a second key, and that key unlocks a door to find yet another unfortunately expired cousin, and a paper with a second part of the safe combination.

If you’ve been counting, that’s four out of five cousins. That means the fifth must be the murderer, right? Well, no. Applying the axe to the last locked door:

So rather than the cousins fighting each other in a Battle Royale (as the expired Uncle may have expected) they’re all dead via someone else’s hand. Even more intriguingly, working out what’s going on can actually help a little with a soon-upcoming puzzle; a golden situation where solving a puzzle is equivalent to “solving” a plot that doesn’t happen often in this era (it came up earlier this year twice when playing El Diablero). Unfortunately, The Deadly Game doesn’t stick the landing quite as securely, but let’s fiddle with some last lingering elements first —

Once you have visited all the dead cousins, any attempt to go downstairs is fatal, as the unseen killer finally decides on a more efficient killing method than a rock (“A lone shot kills you”). So we’re now stuck on the second floor and top floor until we can figure out how to survive getting shot.

Given the fusebox has been fixed, now is the time to try to turn on the light switch (in the same room as one of the bodies). This is deadly: you get electrocuted. You need some gloves.

To get them, you have to

a.) throw acid at the window that was unable to be opened; it gets dissolved

b.) pour turpentine on the portrait, then do the most absurd action in the game, WIPE PORTRAIT, using the pillow; this reveals the third safe combo number

c.) enter the numbers into the safe; as is typical for these games, trying to figure out the right syntax is a pain in the neck (you have to specifically type DIAL 31R76L33R; that is, you concatenate one long string and use it as the noun)

d.) with all that done, you can throw the diamond down to the woman who has been singing about diamonds this entire time, she’ll toss back a key which coincidentally opens the last locked drawer of the dresser

e.) the dresser has the gloves

Now the light switch can be turned on safely. This reveals a hammer in the room. Yes, all that was to get a hammer.

So we’ve collected a saw, some nails, a hammer, and have some boards. Why do we need all these things? Well, if you try to go back upstairs, there’s been some sabotage done:

We can SAW BOARDS and with the other items in hand the player now has a STEP, and then FIX STAIRS works while holding this step. This amount of item-fiddling can feel correct in a tomb searching for ancient treasure, but a building project whilst a murderer is roaming around feels a bit off-kilter.

Now, the whole point of going back upstairs — do you remember the hiding place under the bed? There’s a gun there now.

Now things get very strange from here. You might think to take the gun with you to have a showdown, but the Uncle’s Lawyer magically appears to stop you.

The key thing to realize, or at least look up and rationalize on behalf of the author (it’s not very rational) is that the maid doesn’t count as one of the five dead cousins so is the murderer, and the gun is hers, so we can LOOK GUN, find there’s a bullet, and take the bullet out, making the gun now be safe. But somehow– then with this task down, when we go downstairs, the maid has teleported past us to pick up the now-unloaded gun, and then teleported in front of us to try to fire the shot on the first floor.

There was a much better version of this in Jack the Ripper (same author). In that game, there’s a part where you discover the killer’s medical bag and his murder weapon, and you can swap his murder weapon with a fake one, but you have to be careful to close the bag (otherwise you’ll have given away something weird has happened). Later in the night you have a confrontation and the previously dangerous weapon is now inert because of your prior preparation. That seems to have been the goal here but the teleporting maid just makes so little sense I stared baffled at the screen a couple minutes after having this scene.

The curious thing is that in a way the bullet trick is much more “fair” in a gameplay sense — the ramification happens right after the action so failure on the player’s part is more immediate (unlike Jack the Ripper, where you have multiple scenes in between when you make the setup and the punchline). Yet the long-term planning is what gives the action both its story punch and its, well, being an actual logical plot beat. This is an instance where optimal gameplay practice and optimal story practice clash.

You can drag the maid over to a phone and CALL POLICE (look, I was just checking the walkthrough by this point, I thought we were supposed to hang out the entire night you know the whole premise of the game?) and then we can meet them at the front door and then there’s not only one twist, but two of them.

However, if you’re referring to Dale Dobson’s version of the story, the game is already over.

The game loads a totally different file for the ending! I imagine Mr. Dobson (calling it just a “coda”) thought it would be just some text congratulating us on our riches, but the game isn’t over yet. The only platform I could find the ending portion is TRS-80, so we’re swapping over to there.

For those counting, this is a second plot twist: the police are here to kill us. (This admittedly patches one issue these plots sometimes have, which is why law enforcement seems apathetic to the game of death going on, or the very public ad about “surviving a night” in a house and people mysteriously dying.)

The game removes our inventory and we can’t run, so this isn’t a terribly hard puzzle since resources are low. The red carpet mentioned in the description is our savior.

We can then nab the revolver, and the policeman starts to pull a backup weapon, so the inevitable results:

What is not predictable at the end is the third plot twist right after, which makes no sense whatsoever.

Keep in mind, the opening of the game had the main character clearly shocked and surprised at receiving an invite to the reading of a will.

a.) so that whole opening section was the player lying to themselves somehow?

b.) also how did the player know things would play out the way they did, given they didn’t come to the event armed?

c.) what was with the lawyer magically appearing when we were holding the gun?

d.) what. I mean what

Curiously, we haven’t run into that many broken story moments in All the Adventures. There generally just hasn’t been coherent enough story for that to happen! Even Kirsch’s games have had a by-the-moment sort of plotting; while there’s Arrow One, which had the biggest plot wrapper (and the “Adam and Eve” ending), the Kirsch games mostly have had self-contained moments (like Robin Hood being a series of vignettes, or the individual passengers rescues on Titanic). Around the World in Eighty Days managed to be coherent by sheer dint of plot simplicity: the whole thing that connects the various episodes is that “time passes compared to the last scene”.

The Deadly Game proves that to strive for the full span of genres, authors really needed to start mastering traditional story beats in addition to juggling gaming norms. Just: this game came out more as a negative example.

Coming up: what will likely be the last game of 2024, as we return to Brian Cotton, one of the first authors to be commercially published in the UK.

5 days ago

Chandler Groover is an interactive fiction author, known for his influential games such as Eat Me, Toby’s Nose and Midnight. Swordfight., as well as his contribution in Fallen London’s storylines. He recently released The Bat, which won the 2024 IFComp.

Can you tell us a bit more about yourself and how you found Interactive Fiction?

About myself? That’s a can of worms! I suppose the basics are: I was born in Georgia (USA), moved to New York City in my twenties, always wanted to write for a living. At first, I was thinking traditional fiction: novels, short stories. But then I discovered interactive fiction, and I pivoted.

My friend Adam Bredenberg (who is also a writer and game developer) was the first person to recommend a text game to me. I’m pretty sure it was a Kitty Horrorshow game, but I can’t remember which one. I didn’t quite “get it” yet. Then he recommended howling dogs by Porpentine. When I played that, it blew open my mind and changed my life.

This was in 2014. After I played howling dogs, I was ravenous for more. I found IFDB. I would play one or two games each morning before work. That pace has slowed down a little, but I still play more text games than video games to this day.

In that same year, you published your first game: HUNTING UNICORN. Can you tell us a bit more about it?

After playing more text games, I got the urge to write one. Like an itch. I’ve been fascinated with unicorns for a long time (I watched The Last Unicorn a lot as a kid), and I had been toying with a unicorn-themed short story for a few years. But it never quite gelled. As a branching narrative, though? When I pictured it that way, it suddenly made sense.

I wrote the game with Twine because Twine seemed like The Way To Write Text Games. I was unfamiliar with other authoring tools, and I must confess that the code for this game is needlessly cumbersome. It uses no variables because I didn’t know how to implement variables. Nowadays, if I were writing something similar, I would program it much differently.

A design challenge that’s always on my mind is: “How do you build a game with multiple endings without making the player feel obligated to collect all the endings?” HUNTING UNICORN has multiple endings, but most players seem to reach one and then stop — which is perfect! That’s a bit of structural finesse that I’m still very pleased with.

It wasn’t long before you started participating in competitions, with Down, the Serpent and the Sun for the ParserComp. How was transitioning from a choice-based/hypertext format to the more classical parser IF?

I wasn’t aware that I was making a transition, to be honest. I didn’t know that “classical parser IF” was even a thing! It was all just interactive text to me.

Inform 7 was pretty easy to learn. About as easy as Twine, I’d say. But I certainly hadn’t mastered Twine when I picked up Inform! I figured out both programs well enough to produce a game, but the code for Down, the Serpent and the Sun is even worse than the code for HUNTING UNICORN. It hangs together, it’s playable, but it’s not pretty.

The gameplay is not great either. I was vaguely aware that Inform 7 games were supposed to have puzzles, so I tossed in a few puzzles. The whole game is haphazard. It was basically a coding exercise that I made up as I went along, but I entered it into a contest — because I was oblivious!

Why the ParserComp as your first competition/game jam entry?

I put a lot of work into HUNTING UNICORN, but it got almost no attention. I had released it (obliviously) during IFComp. Since all the games in IFComp were getting played while mine got ignored, I fell under the impression (partially mistaken and partially not) that people would only play my games if I also entered a contest. ParserComp was simply the next one on the calendar.

By the time I learned about ParserComp, though, it was only a few weeks away. And it apparently had this rule: only parser games were allowed. So I would have to make a parser game if I wanted to enter. When I went looking for tools, I found Inform 7. Down, the Serpent and the Sun was my crash course.

Do you still feel the same way about that impression, that people would only play games if entered in a contest?

A little, yeah. You’ve got outliers like Superluminal Vagrant Twin, which had a cold release and shot to the top of the charts, so to speak. But I still feel like entering a contest is the most reliable way for new authors to attract eyeballs. Once you’re on the radar, dynamics can change, but getting on the radar is the challenge.

After the ParserComp, you entered Toby’s Nose in the Spring Thing, which happened pretty quickly after. Was the process of creating the game as fast-paced as Down, the Serpent and the Sun?

I entered Spring Thing for the same reason I entered ParserComp: it was next on the calendar. But I had a longer runway to design a game.

I wrote Toby’s Nose in roughly two months, and the whole thing was planned from the start. I plotted out the mystery ahead of time. I knew all the suspects, all the major clues, and how everything would connect. Then I just had to discipline myself to sit down each day and fill out the descriptions for the aromas. Each aroma is coded as an object; there are hundreds; I went down the list methodically until I was done.

With Toby’s Nose, I had way more control over the story, the mechanics, and the code. I actually knew what I was doing, in contrast to the Serpent where I was throwing stuff at a wall to see what would stick. Even though two months is still a tight timeline, the design process wasn’t nearly as rushed.

Speaking of your first SpringThing game, you not only won the Main Festival Ribbon, but also XYZZY nominations. How did you experience this reception of your game?

I still didn’t understand how the “awards circuit” worked in the IF world. I remember someone contacting me after Spring Thing and telling me that, if I had waited to submit Toby’s Nose to IFComp, it might’ve won IFComp. At the time, I thought: “Why would that matter? What difference does it make?”

In my mind, all these contests were equal. They were just a way to distribute my games to potential players. Winning the Spring Thing certainly bolstered my confidence as a designer, but I didn’t appreciate what it really meant until more time had passed.

Do you feel like you were on people’s radar before this year’s IFComp?

Before 2024? Oh yeah. I think Toby’s Nose put me on the general IF radar. I still have to work to stay on it by releasing new games. But I gained enough momentum in 2015 to receive job offers from quite a few studios. I’ve been earning my bread and butter as a narrative designer since then.

For the next three years, you created dozens of games which were submitted to different Competitions (namely the IFComp, Spring Thing and EctoComp) and Game Jams. Is there an event that you liked best?

EctoComp is my favorite. Sorry, Spring Thing and IFComp! I’m just biased toward horror games. EctoComp is also less stressful. With Spring Thing and IFComp, you feel that something is on the line. With EctoComp, it’s all in good fun.

Even though EctoComp has lower stakes, it still produces incredible games. Lime Ergot, one of my all-time favorites, was an EctoComp game.

Do you still feel like these contests are equal?

Not anymore. When I first stumbled into the IF world, I didn’t know the history of the different contests, but IFComp certainly has the most weight. It earns the most media coverage. It’s the oldest and most prestigious. Participating in IFComp eventually started to stress me out, but the first time I entered in 2015, I was still rather oblivious — for better or worse.

Your next major title was your first time entering IFComp. Midnight. Swordfight. had very peculiar gameplay and garnered quite a bit of attention, reaching 3rd place in the IFComp and also winning your first XYZZY for Best Implementation. Can you tell us a bit more about this game?

When I wrote Down, the Serpent and the Sun, I was flailing. When I started developing Toby’s Nose, though, I had a more focused intent. By that time, I had played enough parser games to understand what worked for me and what didn’t. I wanted to do something with Toby’s Nose. I wanted to tell a story via telescopic descriptions.

I had more mechanics in mind for Midnight. Swordfight. I had played a few one-move games, couldn’t get into them, and wanted to implement the one-move concept differently. That’s usually how my design process goes. I’ll start with a mechanic. I’ll ask myself: What story does this mechanic tell? And then I’ll write that story.

So the one-move mechanic — that was the start. But the game grew in strange directions. I had outlined Toby’s Nose, but I didn’t outline Midnight. Swordfight. Whenever new ideas occurred to me, I’d graft them onto the game. It’s a game with multiple endings, which meant it could accommodate much grafting.

I still don’t think people have found everything in that game. Some reviews on IFDB claim to list all the named endings, but these reviews don’t take into account that different endings might share the same name.

I think I was in a “sweet spot” when I wrote Midnight. Swordfight. I had learned how to program parser games confidently, but I didn’t feel beholden to parser conventions. I felt like I could do whatever I wanted — and I pretty much did!

Is there a particular ending or path that you liked working on the most in Midnight. Swordfight.? Or that you have a fond memory of?

You can change many things about Midnight. Swordfight., including the ending, but this flux allows things that don’t change to stand out. I was writing the game loosely, allowing my inspiration to take me anywhere, but when I got to Matilda, that’s when everything clicked together. The scene at the fountain is the heart of the story.

I’m also fond of Dmitri. He’s one of my best NPCs. The player-character’s relationship with Dmitri is the game’s emotional backbone; it’s something else you can’t change.

That year, you didn’t just submit Midnight. Swordfight., but also Taghairm, written in Twine, which is a completely different vibe from the former. What was your goal with this game?

Taghairm is historical fiction. It presents a real magical ritual to the player. Not a ritual invented for a story, but a ritual that people actually performed in the 17th century.

It’s also a horror game. Rather extreme horror. In the same company, in my mind, as films like Begotten. I thought it would be appropriate to release around Halloween, and I entered it into IFComp because contests still seemed like the best way for games to find an audience. I knew some players would dislike it, but when people called it a “troll” entry, that caught me off-guard. It took months to develop. I thought the effort would show.

People have called it a
complicity tester, which I think is inaccurate. Well, it might be accurate for them. But the game, gruesome though it may be, works best if you’re on board. Once you get on board, that’s when it can start to do its thing, whereas the label “complicity tester” frames the getting-on-board part as the main point.

I thought Taghairm was my best game when I released it. I replayed it recently for the first time in years, and I still think it might be my best.

What did/do you wish people would see in Taghairm?

There’s no way to answer this question without sounding like a snob. People will see what they see, but it’s beautiful to me. Beauty and terror are closely entwined in my mind. Even synonymous, sometimes. I try to produce certain effects with my games, and Taghairm is the most pure experience that I’ve managed to achieve. Even if people dislike the game, though, I wish they would at least see it was made with care.

Your first entry at the EctoComp, Open That Vein, landed you in the first spot of the La Petite Mort category (for games created under 4h). How was your experience creating a game in such a short period of time?

I got the idea for Open That Vein in the shower. The whole game, down to specific word choices and mechanics, popped instantly into my head. As soon as I got out, I sat down to write it. My hair was still wet!

Sometimes writers talk about “taking dictation,” as though some outside voice or entity is feeding words into their mind and they’re just transcribing the words. That’s how writing Open That Vein felt. I barely even thought about the game. Suddenly, it was just there.

Do you have any advice for creators looking to attempt this Speed IF competition?

Steal someone else’s code. Seriously.

I stole Joey Jones’s code from Danse Nocturne. His code is open source, and I credited Joey Jones in Open That Vein, but it was still theft. Blatant and unapologetic theft!

Open That Vein is another limited parser game, but its limitations are actually Danse Nocturne‘s limitations. I lifted out Danse Nocturne‘s mechanical skeleton and added my own flesh. This probably saved me an hour. With EctoComp’s tight deadline, that’s a huge chunk of time.

In 2016, you returned to the IFComp with two new entries, Mirror and Queen, made with Inform, and The Queen’s Menagerie, made in Texture. How did you come up with these two?

Mirror and Queen is a retelling of “Snow White” from the Evil Queen’s perspective. This concept had been on my mind for years.

I love fairy tales. I love villains. I do not love when fairy tales are retold from the villain’s perspective and the story is wildly altered to make the villain more sympathetic. This seems, to me, to defeat the purpose. If you’re trying to understand the villain, but you have to change the story to get a grip on the villain’s motive, then you haven’t really understood the villain.

Mirror and Queen attempts to delve into the Queen’s mindset within the original fairy tale’s parameters.

As for The Queen’s Menagerie, the idea for that one came to me when I was considering how to use Texture’s drag-and-drop mechanic. I asked myself what you might drag and where you might drop it; with consumption on my mind (as usual), I realized that you could drag food through a zoo and drop it into an animal’s enclosure.

Are there other fairy-tales you’d like to explore through interactive fiction?

Not necessarily. Maybe I’ll get another fairy-tale-inspired idea. Maybe I won’t. Even if I did want to explore more fairy tales, though, I feel like mentioning anything specific would almost guarantee that it wouldn’t get made. I’ve done that before: spoken about future plans, only for the future plans to fizzle. Better to keep a lid on things. Let the concepts ferment and the pressure build.

Do you have any advice for authors thinking of submitting more than one game to the IFComp?

Go for it! There’s no downside that I can see.

Of course, you have to manage your production timeline. If there’s too much on your plate, the quality might suffer; you might feel crunched; you might not be able to beta-test properly. That’s no good. But if you have an idea for more than one game, and if you have enough space on your calendar to make it happen, I’d take the plunge.

There’s nothing wrong with submitting a game to another comp like Spring Thing, though, if the IFComp deadline proves too tight.

Let’s talk a bit more about Eat Me, your most rated and most awarded game. How did you come up with it?

I initially wanted to write a game called Bag where “bag” was the principle command. You would play as Morgan le Fay. You would have a bottomless magical bag. You would start the game imprisoned in Camelot, and you’d gain your freedom by “bagging” objects — your chains and manacles, the door to your cell, the prison guards — moving from small to large until, finally, you “bagged” the castle itself. This was partially inspired by Katamari Damacy.

But then Katherine Morayati released a game called Take with similar mechanics (an excellent game, by the way, that I highly recommend). The verb “bag” was basically just the verb “take,” and I didn’t want to write another take-based game on Take’s heels. So I shelved the concept — until Ryan Veeder and Jenni Polodna had me on their podcast Clash of the Type-Ins. We briefly discussed candy dungeons. I realized that I could reconfigure Bag with “eat” as the main verb instead, and Eat Me was born.

The game has since become a favourite of the community. Did you expect such a reaction to the game?

I certainly hoped players would enjoy it! That’s what you always hope when you design a game, I suppose. It’s a funny game, in my opinion.

Is there a comment or review about your work that has stuck with you?

Whenever I learn that one of my games introduced somebody to IF, that makes me feel like, Okay, yes, I can go to the grave in peace. This medium isn’t something from the 1970s or 80s for me. It’s not nostalgic. I discovered it in the 2010s, and it opened my eyes right there in the 2010s. I hope it’s still exciting for new generations in fifty or a hundred years. And when people are inspired by my games to make their own — that’s really all you can ask for.

While most of your publications were solo-authored, a couple of games were released in a group. NotablyCragne Manor, a group-authored tribute to Anchorhead. Can you tell us a bit more about this experience?

Dirty little confession: I’ve never played Anchorhead. I don’t much care for Lovecraft, and Lovecraft-inspired media is a hard sell for me. But everyone was contributing to Cragne Manor. I thought it would be fun to work on such a massive “exquisite corpse” project. And it was! There was a group chat for all the authors to coordinate. The positive energy was infectious. But the room that I wrote for the game is fairly small. I wanted to keep it short and simple, to make it easier to stitch into the collaborative quilt.

Another dirty little confession: I’ve never played Cragne Manor. I helped beta-test some rooms during development, but the finished game is so long, and Lovecraft is still a hard sell…

Did you have a specific inspiration for your room in Cragne Manor? Or a set idea/puzzle ahead of coding?

I was assigned the “Outside the Meatpacking Plant” room. I had the sense that Ryan and Jenni assigned me this room because “meatpacking” is a gross horror-adjacent topic, and I had been writing gross horror-adjacent games. So I tried to live up to my reputation by writing something gross and horror-adjacent. Based on what I’ve heard about the other rooms, however, I’m not sure that mine even ranks very high on the scale!

How was working in a group/team compared to your solo projects?

The group chat with the other authors was fun, but writing a room for Cragne Manor was still mostly a solo effort for me. Ryan and Jenni were very loose with the parameters. My room needed to be called “Outside the Meatpacking Plant,” and it needed certain exits to connect with other rooms, but apart from that? I basically had a blank canvas.

With so many people working on the game, we had a built-in beta-testing pool. So that was a little different. Beta-testers were right there to tap. No need to go searching and schedule anything.

Most of my client work involves collaborating with a team, though. It’s a slightly different skill set — rather than developing my own stories, I’m usually writing with a predetermined theme or mechanic as the central kernel. But I’ve always loved narrative collage. Borrowing material from elsewhere, disassembling and reassembling it into something new, is one of my favorite little tricks. So when a client has a concept for a game, and it’s my job to bring it to life, that falls right into my “narrative collage” wheelhouse.

One thing that’s important with collaborative projects is to carry and pass the baton. If I’m writing for Fallen London, for instance, and I need to mention a dockside pub in a story, I probably won’t invent a new one. Instead, I’ll use one that another author has already established, like the Syphilitic Parrot. But if I do invent something new, I try to leave room for other authors to pick it up and run with it too.

Two years later, you released JELLYand Deus Ex Ceviche with Tom Lento. How did those projects come to be?

Tom is a good friend. I can program text games pretty well on my own, but I’m not a hardcore Programmer with a capital P, and Tom is. We had talked about collaborating on a game for years, and then we finally did!

JELLY and Deus Ex Ceviche both lean way more heavily on programming shenanigans than my solo games. The ASCII map in JELLY — that’s all Tom. The game won Spring Thing with a “Best Twine Abuse” distinction, and also got nominated for Best Innovation at the 2020 XYZZY Awards; those accolades are really his.

Deus Ex Ceviche was partially modeled on Fallen London. By the time we made that game, I had done a lot of work for Failbetter, and Tom and I were dabbling with ideas for similar card-based stories. He built the system with Unity. I wrote the text. We wanted to make a magical game that was forward-looking. Not something based in the past with medieval trappings, which is common for the fantasy genre, but something that resonates with the present and points toward the future.

JELLY was inspired by Grease, and Deus Ex Ceviche by SpongeBob SquarePants.

Let’s talk about The Bat. Why do you think it was an exception to your other projects (in terms of the length of time needed to make the game)?

My career as a professional developer had taken off by 2020, and I simply didn’t have as much time to focus on personal projects. It’s still hard to squeeze things into my schedule. Game design is now my full-time job.

What inspired you to make The Bat?

One day, I asked myself, What if Batman literally acted like a bat? I had an image flash into my mind: a man in a tailcoat, hanging from a chandelier, and then jumping onto a buffet table to attack the hors d’oeuvres. I held on to this image for years, and the game gradually crystallized around it.

Mechanically, the game is inspired by old-school parser conventions, particularly compass navigation. I typically dislike compass navigation, both as a player and as a designer. But I took it up as a challenge. I wanted to feature the compass as a centerpiece and see what I could do with it.

I’ll often have a few game ideas marinating in my head at any given time. The Bat was one of many. The reason I prioritized it, back in 2020 when I started writing, was due to the political climate in the USA. As the years passed, it felt more and more relevant. Now, in 2024, it feels like the most important game I’ve written.

Could you expand on this last point?

To put it bluntly: The Bat is an anti-fascist game.

All of my games are political in one way or another. Which isn’t to say that they’re only political; they have many layers. Sometimes, perhaps they’re too layered for their own good. Most people seem to have missed the “consumerism” angle in Eat Me, although I didn’t think it was subtle. On the other hand, a game like Rape, Pillage, Makane! is sledgehammer-like with its message, and The Bat is equally blunt.

The USA is currently in a very dark political place. That’s due, in no small part, to the country’s culture. When people are in pain, where do they look to find a hero? To the billionaire class, apparently.

The superhero genre has normalized “heroic billionaires” for decades, but the very concept of a “heroic billionaire” is a poisonous oxymoron. The Bat is my attempt, small though it may be in this niche corner of the world, to inject pop-culture with an antidote. It’s not enough to criticize billionaires, or kings, or dictators. The criticism doesn’t stick. People still worship the money, the power; and if they can’t have it, they try to ally themselves with it; they want to enjoy it vicariously, by association. It must be pulled down, stripped bare, and revealed as ridiculous, petty, and weak. People should flinch and recoil, as they would from an infected wound.

Right now, it’s not hard to imagine a future in which games like The Bat are suppressed. But it won IFComp. It will stand, at this moment in time in the history books, as a slap in the face to our own “heroic” billionaires who are anything but.

Is there a specific scene/puzzle/action in The Bat that you enjoyed creating the most? Inversely, was there something that you particularly struggled with making the game?

Learning how to move Bryce Wyatt with the compass. That’s probably the best puzzle in the game. It’s one of the main reasons I wrote the game — just to include that puzzle!

The climatic rooftop sequence, however, which also requires you to move Bryce Wyatt with the compass, was the hardest part to get right. When I play games with compass directions, I’m often disoriented; I end up bashing my way around the map randomly. I wanted this rooftop sequence to mimic my own experience, so that other players would feel my disorientation. But I still wanted it to be fun. The idea was: “Slam Bryce Wyatt around anywhere! Chaotically stumble into success!” In practice, however, many players seemed to only experience the disorientation without the fun. I added a ton of nudges during beta-testing to clue the player about what to do. But some players wanted this to be a methodical puzzle, where they could study the map, pinpoint the landmarks, and make calculated decisions about how to navigate — which would have directly opposed my own design goals.

With more time, perhaps I could’ve finessed this rooftop sequence better. Considering the four-year development period, “more time” seems like a preposterous thing to need. But I only learned about this sequence’s deficiencies during beta-testing. By that point, with IFComp on the horizon, I only had a few months to adjust, which wasn’t long enough to iron out all the wrinkles.

What were things you learned while creating those games? A fun fact about a topic?

I learned about casu marzu when I was writing Midnight. Swordfight. It’s a cheese filled with live maggots, considered a delicacy in Sardinia. Dmitri talks about it. His dialogue covers a wide range of topics, from the Toba eruption to garden hermits, but this cheese is something special.

It might be a wrong observation, but it seems your parser games are more mechanically focused, while the Twine/choice-based ones seemed to have the story more in the centre of it all. Is there a particular reason for this?

I’m not sure this is the case. HUNTING UNICORN is story-focused, but that was my bridge from traditional fiction to text games. But for a game like The Queen’s Menagerie, the mechanics came first. Ditto Bring Me a Head! and Rape, Pillage, Makane! and JELLY and Deus Ex Ceviche.

The Griffin and the Minor Canon is another story-focused game, but that was adapted from a story.

In general, though, it is easier to just start typing text into a Twine game. With a parser game, more implementation is required for basic functionality, which may put an emphasis on the mechanics.

Horror is a common genre in your early games. What about it inspires you so?

I’ve always been drawn to the horror genre. I feel like it allows you to confront the world’s ugliest aspects in a safe, controlled context. And not just confront them, but study them, process them, and learn from them.

Horror also tips into the fantastic. Ghost stories are my favorite horror sub-genre, and ghosts, well, they’re neither here nor there. Are they real? Are they imaginary? Even if you meet a ghost, you may not know! They haunt the threshold, and that’s where the magic happens.

Another common theme or mechanic in your games is the highlight on the senses – whether it is to smell (Toby’s Nose) or taste (Eat Me). Why do you think it is recurring?

I’m not sure, to be honest. I suppose it’s just a basic component of writing. We experience the world through our senses; therefore, writing about the senses can help bring a story to life for the reader.

Sight gets a lot of attention, but perhaps taste and scent are more neglected? So when I use them, they stand out? I don’t consciously try to emphasize them, but they are linked to consumption, and consumption is one of my major preoccupations. Perhaps, by dealing with consumption as a theme, these senses get pulled along for the ride.

You say consumption is one of your major preoccupations. How so?

It’s one of the Great Themes, like Death and Love, if you can forgive the portentous uppercase letters. In this era of human history, driven by the marketplace, which is driven by consumption — of goods, resources, labor, land, data, attention, time, people — it might even be The Theme. But it’s universally resonant. Drill down deep enough through every hierarchy, every culture and religion and philosophy, and you’ll find the eater and the eaten. This hard-coded power imbalance, baked into biology’s bedrock, is constantly on my mind.

In less grandiose terms, it’s also on my mind because intestinal ailments run in my family. My own stomach almost killed me when I was a teenager. One day, it might finish the job!

How does your production timeline usually look like for a game? Or more generally, how would you describe your process of making IF?

It’s different now that I do so much client work. Deadlines are external. Mechanics and themes are often predetermined.

When I’m working on a personal project, though, I’ll usually start with a mechanic that I find interesting. The mechanic itself will generate the surrounding narrative. I’ll draft a rough outline — very sketchy, with pen and paper — to diagram the game. Then I’ll start coding and follow the outline, writing the story mostly in order.

It might take me a few weeks or a few months to write everything. Depends on the scope. Beta-testing for a parser game probably adds another two months to the process, on average.

The Bat was a significant exception. That took me closer to four years. I kept having to start and stop, working on it between other projects whenever I had spare time. Not ideal. Sometimes I would forget what I had been doing, and I’d have to wrestle with the code to reacclimate myself. I prefer shorter development periods.

Being a game designer now, are there knowledge/processes/lessons you’ve incorporated in your personal projects?

I still do so much client work that any knowledge/processes/lessons largely flow the other way: from my personal projects into my professional work. The Bat is the only “100% me” game that I’ve managed to release in years. I would really like to write more of my own stuff — I have so many ideas — but finding the time is not easy.

I would say, however, that I have a better understanding of the “winning formula” of game design. After writing so many commercial games, I can sense which subjects or mechanics or narrative structures might appeal to people the most. I’ve developed a sort of instinct for it, and I wrote The Bat by following that instinct.

What do you think is the “winning formula”?

Calling it a formula is probably overselling it. It’s not scientific like that. Definitely more of an instinct. But there is a little science, in a way. You release a game. You see how the audience reacts. You release another game, with tweaks. Repeat. Repeat. I’ve made something like 20 commercial games at this point. The Exceptional Stories for Fallen London alone have provided a massive testing pool. You need to really listen when players say: “This is how X felt for me.” Don’t argue. Accept and analyze. Even if X doesn’t feel that way for you, it does feel that way for players, and you may need to adjust your design.

I’d say humor is one of the main ingredients for success. A dead-serious game is always fighting an uphill battle. You can smuggle something serious into something humorous, though, like a Trojan Horse, which might truly be the best way to reach people. You want layers to peel away, so the player is always discovering something new. And there shouldn’t be much space between each interaction-point. Players like to press buttons. If there’s too much text, they will skim it just to press the next button. (Leave room for exceptions, of course.)

That doesn’t really touch upon subject matter, though, which is what I was thinking about at first. Sometimes a premise for a game just has more potential. It’s dramatic in the right way. Weird enough to grab someone’s attention, but familiar enough to provide a foothold into the weirdness. This is the thing that I’ve learned how to sense over time. A story like HUNTING UNICORN might appeal to me, but it won’t appeal to a wide audience. Not in the same way as The Bat.

8 days ago

(This post contains content that may not agree with your workplace.)

While we’ve had bawdy content before at All the Adventures, it has tended to be on the free mainframe games not intended for commercial distribution; games like Library and Haunt.

The exceptions have been

Odyssey 2 (which has an “easter egg”)

City Adventure (which still explicitly advertised itself as “rated PG” and only put the naughty content “after the game”)

Sultan’s Palace and to a lesser extent Sleazy Adventure (both games published the Atari APX catalog, back when they were absolutely desperate for content and didn’t care about quality)

Softporn Adventure (the big one, only available because Sierra On-Line had marketing muscle, when the author tried to sell it on his own he couldn’t get advertising)

The difficulty in marketing Softporn is important here; while it was not impossible to advertize (Softcore Software, a company we haven’t looked at yet, managed to pull it off) it certainly was more difficult.

The Dirty Book (Vol 2., No. 1) printed some rejection letters of their attempts to advertise in mainstream computer magazines:

I regret that I must send back to you your recent insertion order for your client “The Dirty Book”. Also enclosed is your check in the amount of $233.24. Our publisher feels that at the present time, Recreational Computing magazine is in the process of expanding its audience and he would prefer to take a rather conservative attitude toward the many, many new subscribers we have taken on just within the last month.

The same book was intended as an outlet for games to advertise who were unable to make it to print otherwise (they also did reviews, and were disappointed by Sultan’s Palace). One of those ads was for Bawdy Adventure.

This is a short but cryptic game and strongly reminds me of the APX content. Strongly enough that I suspect the author must have played some of them; the APX standard is to block exits with a message

SOMETHING IS IN YOUR WAY

while this game says

YOU CAN’T GO THAT WAY YET

with a similarly cryptic result.

I’d like to go on and say this was a rogue Atari employee who decided this game was too much to publish in even the APX catalog, and “Peter Constantine” could easily be a pseudonym, but it doesn’t nail quite closely enough for that.

The starting room already is cryptic, with EAST getting that “you can’t go that way yet message” and down just resulting in you “FALLING DOWN A BOTTOMLESS PIT”. The key here is to look at your inventory, and find a TALKING BANANA, which you can then DROP (“FREE ME”).

The pickaxe (described as MADE IN WAR-TI-TAE) can be applied with SWING PICKAXE to make it out of the opening room.

The next room, a “womb-like tunnel”, also has blocked exits. The only way to proceed is to pick up the “old miner’s jockstrap” in the room and wear it. It is unclear why this allows passage.

Eventually the path (with plenty of “YOU CAN’T GO THAT WAY YET” in various directions) leads to a “diving platform” with a leather whip. CRACK WHIP gives the message that exits have opened, and the map finally is mostly accessible.

There’s lots of references that make the game feel bawdy (like the “well-hung stalactites”) but it really is just a random surreal cave for the most part. The most obvious is the “magic phallus” that you can pick up; in addition there’s a “cricket with fishy breath”. Some of the exits lead to a “red muff river” which appears to have no way out, although you can dive and get a $5 porno novel from the bottom.

It seems to be impossible to get out, but this is where the “magic word” reference from earlier comes into play. The pickaxe’s word WAR-TI-TAE almost counts as a magic word; upon saying it the game claims

SDARAWKCAB S’TAHT

You instead need to say EAT-IT-RAW and then you’ll get teleported over back to the diving platform (where the whip was). This allows escaping the river.

With the novel extracted, you can go over to a “vending machine” and drop it in to get an outhouse with suspenders.

The outhouse can then be worn (really!) and for some reason that’s enough to allow you to dive back at the platform.

Here I was quite puzzled, because going east heads back to the regular part of the map, so there didn’t seem to be any reason to go through all that. I started playing with all my objects, and I found if I dropped the cricket and rubbed the phallus I won the game.

Yeah, I’m baffled I managed to beat this too. Every step was absolutely cryptic and I only did something because there was nothing else to do; there’s no reason cracking a whip would open exits, just the whip seemed to be the only item available so I might as well use it? The cricket thing has to be done at the room I was at; that was absolutely pure luck that I tested it there, as NOTHING HAPPENS if you attempt the deed elsewhere.

I really have to wonder who this was targeted at; someone who was looking for an erotic game wouldn’t get very far, and by the time I puzzled my way to the end it came off as a bizarre logic problem rather than anything genuinely bawdy. I still vaguely suspect someone at Atari amusing themselves in their off-hours was involved but I don’t have any particular evidence of that at the moment.

Before checking out I should plug the historian Laine Nooney, who after 10 years managed to find Vol 2. No. 2 of the Dirty Book. I didn’t use it at all for this post, but it was still good to crosscheck (and to know they made it that far as a publication!) Also, thanks to Atarimania who pointed me to the game quite recently being found.

10 days ago

We were fervently hoping to release Hunter: The Reckoning — The Beast of Glenkildove next week, but after careful consideration we’ve decided to delay the release until January.

A January release will ensure that we have time to fix bugs we’ve found in the beta process, and, as a bonus, it will give us time to add more character portraits to the game.

If you’re excited about The Beast of Glenkildove, please wishlist it on Steam! The more wishlists we get, the better the game will do on Steam on release day.

And be sure to sign up for our newsletter for the latest news on The Beast of Glenkildove and our other interactive novels!

13 days ago

The best ending is not the ending.

Depraved Indifference as a Cosmic Horror

For the past handful of posts, I’ve maintained the position that humanity is, separate from humans as individuals, a kind of inexorable force, a destructive tendency or eventuality visited upon the earth. In fact, I’ve consistently preferred the term “creation” over “earth” or “planet” because I think that ultimately the scope of atomic devastation is more than ecological, just as it is more than ethical.

I think there is a general impulse to see the development and future use of atomic weaponry in purely human terms, and the discourse surrounding Trinity supports this idea. Sometimes, it seems that Trinity is just a collection of dioramas, a snapshot gallery of human actions and human achievements. It affords, one might think, an opportunity to reflect on the achievements of great men, to imagine them crossing in giant steps a grand proscenium of historical narrative.

Trinity, in my opinion, says the exact opposite: humanity in the cosmic, atomic sense is like bad weather, or asteroids. Earthquakes and plague. We can say how these things happen; we can trace their steps. There is a narrative thread that leads to every event, but a thread is not a reason. Likewise, causation has no moral dimension. It may in fact have no ethical significance either, depending on one’s philosopher of choice.

Consider the process by which life has evolved on Earth. It has been going on for billions of years. If mutually assured destruction befell creation, what would happen to this process? How many hundreds of millions of years might be undone, and what would be the path forward be? Humans have only been around for six million years or so. There goes the neighborhood! Some readers might have wondered why I have emphasized damage to creation over the cost of human lives posed by atomic annihilation. One reason is that so many treatments of nuclear war (including some readings of Trinity) present it in purely human terms rather than considering a complex and surprisingly fragile system of which people are a small part.

I haven’t emphasized the effects of atomic warfare in terms of people because we hardly need to be told to think about them. Us. I think that’s one element of the cosmic horror posed by humanity: humanity sees itself in everything. Its thoughts are mostly of itself. Attitudes regarding climate change, for instance, seem fueled by a rather immediate and short-sighted utilitarianism.

I believe that depictions of animal life in Trinity are, as I’ve said, synecdoche. That is, the Wabewalker’s encounters with animals are parts that represent a greater whole. Creatures are often either obstacle or opportunity, and our adventure game protagonist sees them as keys or locks as the case might dictate. What about people, though? Beyond the Mars door, where and when the American military dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, lies the only productive (or survivable) encounter with a human being outside of Kinsington Gardens.

Falling into Nagasaki

Stepping through the Mars door is a bit of a terrifying thrill.

>enter door
You pass the threshold of the white door...

... and step into empty air.

Thin Air
You're fourteen hundred feet above a small city, falling straight down at a velocity of seventy miles an hour.

A white door is dwindling away in the sky overhead.

Why so high? The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs had an ideal detonation elevation of 1,800 feet. Forgive this fumbling explanation: one idea is that buildings and terrain can block or reduce force and thermal radiation from a ground blast. Since the doors always lead to ground zero, that means we players have to find our way down and back again. Fortunately, we have a way (assuming we picked it up after our perambulator ride in Hyde Park).

>open umbrella
The umbrella snaps open and nearly flies to pieces in the fury of your descent. But a sympathetic breeze fills the cloth panels with air, and your death-plunge slows to a leisurely drift.

The city below draws closer. You glimpse a river, railroad tracks, streets busy with horses and bicycles, a playground...

Crunch.

Playground, in a sandpile
A set of children's swings moves slowly back and forth in the humid breeze. Behind them stands a long building, its windows hung with flowers and birds folded from colored paper.

Mounds of dirt are heaped around a dark opening to the east. It appears to be a shelter of some kind.

Several small children are happily chasing dragonflies north of the swing set. Turning south, you see a group of adults (schoolteachers, by the looks of them), wearily digging another shelter like the first.

Somewhat shaken, you rise to your feet in a child's sandpile. In the pile you see a bag of crumbs, a small coin, a piece of paper, a splinter (providing light) and an umbrella.

Unless we haven’t been playing long–the umbrella is available from the beginning of the game–we already know that this place will soon be bathed in fire and radiation. The construction of the scene, contrasting depictions of idyllic play with the exhausted and ominous labors of nearby adults, invites us to wonder who–children or adults–are making better use of their time. We players will likely have more to show for our visit. Certainly, we have this opportunity–rephrasing the opening of the game-to “soak up as much of that authentic… ambience” as we can, but we also have whatever adventure game business there might be to do here. If there were nothing to do or get, after all, we wouldn’t be here.

One thing to do presents itself rather quickly. Since we can only be here if we possess the umbrella, we are equipped to begin.

A little girl is crouched in the sandpile. She leaps to her feet as you appear.

At first, you're sure she's going to scream. Her eyes dart back and forth between you and the teachers; you can see a cry forming on her lips.

Suddenly, the umbrella in your hand catches her eye. You watch her expression soften from fear to curiosity.

It seems we have no choice; this is a key to a lock. More sympathetically: why would we deny the girl this, knowing what’s coming?

>give umbrella to girl
The girl's mouth opens into a little "o" at the magnificence of your gift. She humbly accepts the umbrella, smiles shyly and descends into the shelter with her prize.

Yes: this is the woman at the very beginning of the game. A gust of wind blows her umbrella–this umbrella–into a tree. We take it, go back in time, and give it to her. She loses it in a tree, and so forth.

There's an old woman under the tree, struggling to open an umbrella. The stiff east wind isn't making it easy for her.
 
>examine woman
Her face is wrong.
 
You look a little closer and shudder to yourself. The entire left side of her head is scarred with deep red lesions, twisting her oriental features into a hideous mask. She must have been in an accident or something.
 
A strong gust of wind snatches the umbrella out of the old woman's hands and sweeps it into the branches of the tree.
 
The woman circles the tree a few times, gazing helplessly upward. That umbrella obviously means a lot to her, for a wistful tear is running down her cheek. But nobody except you seems to notice her loss.
 
After a few moments, the old woman dries her eyes, gives the tree a vicious little kick and shuffles away down the Lancaster Walk.

The experience of recognizing the child is a powerful one. This time loop precedes the paradoxical conclusion of the entire work and may be more satisfying in terms of its internal logic. Our sight of the girl, disfigured, seems to suggest that our efforts will be in vain: we can’t escape the park without the umbrella! On a more vital and empathetic level: this girl carried that umbrella with her for forty years. There’s something terrible about it: not “terrible” as in its most familiar sense of “bad,” but as in something capable of inducing awe.

As unsettling as this all is, we must be on our way! But how can the Wabewalker get back to the door? If they give the girl the paper (from the folded bird in the park), she will fold it into an origami bird. Speaking personally, I would have rather found a way without her, but I suspect that relying on her is meant to pinch in the same way that our interactions with animals do.

>give paper to girl
The girl's eyes brighten with surprise when she sees the piece of paper. "Origami," she squeaks, accepting the piece of paper with a gracious bow. Her fingers explore the creases in the paper, bending them this way and that. Then, with a few deft maneuvers, she refolds the sheet to its original shape and hands it back to you.

The paper stands out as a loose thread: why was a note with foreknowledge of the Soviet attack on the United Kingdom floating around in a pond? Where did it come from? Unlike the umbrella, it has not made a long trip over decades and ocean to find the Wabewalker vacationing in London. Whatever the case might be, the bird is magical, and it transports the Wabewalker, alone, back to the door.

What was that all about, anyway? A shovel. There was a shovel in the shelter. An adventurer’s friend if there ever was one!

The Good Ending

After several days asserting the primacy of “adventure game logic” as a representation of humanity’s relationship with creation writ large, it may not be necessary for me to reiterate my conception of depraved indifference. I’ve taken pains to separate humanity–a cosmic force–from humans. Individuals and groups of individuals are, after all, ethical subjects. They are actors on history’s stage, certainly. However, individuals are not inevitable in the way that humanity is. What happens to the girl is lopsided and unjust: humanity can maim her, but no individual can reciprocate.

What about humans, then? In a sense, I’ve been talking about humans all along. Humans are animals; they are part of creation. I think one of Trinity‘s more uncomfortable assertions is that in the end being members of our species offers no special protection, even though I think we sometimes believe it will. That, I suppose, is the humanity talking. The girl, rhetorically, is another representation of doomed blamelessness, and she is individuated as a representative of the people of Nagasaki generally. I felt a great deal of sorrow writing about her. This is a hard game! Empathy toward the girl is the engine driving Trinity‘s one good ending. I don’t mean this ironically, as it is the only end-state that feels like success in the entire game.

All at once the shelter is lit by a terrifying flash of light. You dive to cover the screaming girl, and feel the earth shudder beneath a crushing blast wave.
 
Your body absorbs much of the deadly radiation that might otherwise have reached the child. Years later, she recalls to her grandchildren the tale of a mysterious stranger who shielded her life at Nagasaki.

Sadly, causation can’t permit it, and, besides, that’s no way to win an adventure game.

Next

The dearth of tragedy.

The post Suffer the Children (Trinity) appeared first on Gold Machine.

14 days ago

(This continues from my previous post, which is needed to understand this one.)

With help from ItsMe in my last post who found a hint guide, I was able to get to the end of the game. Before I get to that, I want to drop by another document found by commenter Rob, in the August 19, 1981 version of the newsletter Buss, for Heathkit computers (which Software Toolkit Adventure runs on).

Specifically, Walt Bilofsky wrote an essay about Adventure; one of his points being that it teachers players how to use their computer (the control of a parser being close to the metal, akin to the command prompt on the CP/M operating system). Relevantly for us, he goes on to write a small manifesto explaining what good adventure game interactions look like.

Adventure has been extended and imitated, sometimes well, sometimes poorly. It has been done best when the following rules were followed:

Be consistent. Similar commands should produce similar responses unless there’s a good reason. Similar phrases in messages and descriptions should mean similar things.

Be informative. Especially, make sure that when the user types a meaningless or incorrect command, he gets a message that makes sense, and perhaps gives some hint as to the proper command.

Be rewarding. When the user figures out how to do something, make sure he is rewarded with smooth, reasonable, productive behavior on the part of the program.

I always appreciate when authors this early try to reach for some sort of guiding principles, even if they don’t quite hit their ambitions (see Clardy with Probe One: The Transmitter for another example). I will first play through the rest of Adventure 375 and then compare after to see how close Bilofsky got to his ideal.

Let’s get to the sword first, because that’s quicker to explain:

You are in a large room with medieval furnishings. Two bleached skeletons are hanging on the wall in iron cuffs. The room is dominated by a huge white boulder near the west wall. A tunnel in the east wall turns quickly out of sight. A dark hole in the floor was apparently once covered by a grating or trap door.

A very rusty sword with a ruby-studded hilt is embedded in the boulder!

This puzzle is also, I’ll admit, mostly fair. The idea behind the mechanism is that the sword goes into the boulder, and holds open some kind of latch that holds open the door and allows escape. The sword is described as a treasure, but the rusty blade does not seem to be contributing to the treasure-aspect, so if you could just take along the ruby hilt you’d still have a treasure. It is as simple as BREAK SWORD:

Weakened by rust, the blade gives way and the hilt breaks off in your hand.

When on the ground:

There is a ruby-studded sword hilt here!

There’s still some meta-concern here with the puzzle. While the rusty part does not seem to be contributing to the item being a treasure, as anyone who has watched the horrified look of a Antiques Roadshow host knows, sometimes “cleaning up” a historical item causes it to lose rather than gain value. There’s also the uncertain aspect of transforming a (!) marked treasure into another (!) marked treasure; while we’ve seen non-treasures turn into treasures, this is the first time a state change has happened between two treasures. This is at the very least a puzzle using abductive reasoning rather than iron-clan logic, but it is a good example of the form since it doesn’t take that long to experiment with BREAK SWORD.

The other secret portion I missed is much fussier. It was implied by the magazine that there was something under the troll bridge, but I could not get the game to acknowledge my commands.

You’re on SW side of chasm.

A rickety wooden bridge extends across the chasm, vanishing into the mist. There is a large rusty hook on the bridge’s handrail. Lying on the bridge is a sign which reads “Stop! Pay Troll!”

Step one is taking the sign. Mind you, in all other cases, items that can be taken are separated from the main paragraph, so knowing to do this violates one of the game’s established norms.

You take hold of the sign, but the wood is old and full of splinters. You drop it in the middle of the bridge and spend a moment picking wood out of your fingertips.

Now we’ve got an empty hook: what to do? Normally a kind of rope would be in order, but there is no rope in Original Adventure nor this game. Something that I have long-visualized in one way should be (according to the authors of this game) visualized another way. (See, analogously, my experiences with a bean bag in Asylum II.) The chain that is a treasure and is used to lead the bear is meant to be long, long enough to substitute in for a rope:

HANG CHAIN

The chain is now dangling from the hook down into the chasm.

That’s also not the easiest parser command to find! Hang on to your hats, everyone, it gets worse.

At the bottom of the chasm, there’s no apparent exit, but you can now JUMP to the other side even though a jump was impossible from the top.

You are on a narrow ledge near the bottom of a chasm running SE/NW. Above you the chasm is filled with mist. A rushing stream completely fills the bottom of the chasm. Across the stream is a dark opening in the chasm wall.

I can see why the chasm would be shaped differently farther down making a jump now possible, but the description doesn’t reflect that!

Moving in further is a room with a desk, which can be opened with the keys.

You are in a squarish, dusty room with a good passage SE as its only exit.

There is an ancient roll-top desk in the room.

OPEN DESK

The desk opens, revealing an old, dusty glass inkwell, and a bundle of old yellow papers, tied with a faded velvet ribbon. The inkwell is half full of dust and old dried-up ink. The papers teeter and fall out of the desk, raising a fearful cloud of dust. Sneezing, you read through tearing eyes that these are early certificates of Colossal Gold Mines, 333 Ltd., now one of the giants in the field! The spaces on each share marked “Shareholder’s Name” are all blank.

Again, the norms are no longer being followed here: the inkwell is particularly important. You’re supposed to get the inkwell going again (POUR WATER toted in via the bottle), then use it to sign the documents (although SIGN isn’t understood, you need to use WRITE). But sign with what?

The cheerful bird that chased away the snake has a second purpose.

The bird flutters to a higher perch, letting out an outraged squawk in buzzard dialect (I didn’t know he spoke buzzard)! Translation: “You’ll have to catch me first, pinion plucker!”

Feathers are not described as an object that can be referred to separately on the bird, you just have to take the leap they’d be there. The bird needs to be caught (or re-caught) in the cage before feather extraction happens, and then the feather can be used as a quill. Additionally, there’s some steps omitted going from feather to quill.

POUR WATER

The water splashes into the inkwell, turning the dried-up residue in the bottom into ink.

DIP FEATHER

The tip of the feather is full of ink.

SIGN CERTIFICATES

I see no sign here.

WRITE

Your name is now written as the owner on each stock certificate.

This sequence hit a whole bunch of design issues in a row:

a.) having an object picked up mentioned in the main text rather than a separate line, breaking norms

b.) using the chain in a way that can easily run counter to previous visualizations

c.) being able to jump what seems like it ought to be the same distance, and the description doesn’t make clear the distance is shorter

d.) needing to refer again to an item in the main text, rather than one mentioned separately

e.) needing to extract a non-described feather back at the bird, and somehow immediately it is usable as a quill

f.) tough parser commands along the way like DIP and WRITE

I think, arguably, you could say it meets the “rewarding” and “informative” conditions, but fails on “consistent” with points a and d — it might be consistent in the “author’s bubble” of puzzles, but it isn’t consistent with the game as a whole.

The larger issue is that the points don’t really encompass all the advice needed: parser commands should have reasonable synonyms, the text should not leave anything ambiguous in term of visualization, and there certainly shouldn’t be a brand new noun (feathers on the bird) that the player needs to guess at. In a big-picture sense, the authors were trying for a puzzle more ambitious than the parser was able to handle.

With the two treasures the ending is more or less identical, except you get prompted for the desired name on the certificate and get a password to go with it. I imagine this is to prevent sharing, but someone could have a save very close to the end and just generate another name.

As you release the hat, a cloud of sandalwood-scented smoke appears, out of which steps the Grandmaster of the Colossal Cave Lodge 437 of the Wizard’s Guild. He is wearing a long blue velvet robe, a long, pointed bejewelled hat made of solid platinum, and love beads. He carries a three foot long rod with a star on the end, all of solid gold. His eyes twinkle behind thick gold-rimmed spectacles, and he smiles benevolently as he says,

“Congratulations, young Adventurer. By your ordeals in the Cave you have proven yourself worthy of admission to the rank of Journeyman Wizard in the Wizard’s Guild.” He places the gold Wizard’s Hat on your head and, bending, asks,

“How do you want your name spelled on your Certificate of Wizardness?”
….

Jason Dyer

“All right, young Wizard, your personal Wizard Password is ‘Wyktut’!”

The Wizard waves his wand, and the cave bear and little bird appear in a puff of orange smoke, grunting and twittering their congratulations. You leap onto the bear’s back, and, with the bird fluttering in a circle overhead, you ride out of the building, through a crowd of cheering elves, and into the sunset.

You scored 375 out of a possible 375 using 442 turns.

All of Adventuredom gives tribute to you, Journeyman Wizard and Adventurer Grandmaster!

There is no higher rating! Congratulations!!

16 days ago

(This continues from my previous post.)

As mentioned in my last post, Don Woods started editing Crowther’s game in March 1977. He was not working entirely solo; he got ideas from when people at Stanford were trying things out (“oh yeah, I could put a message in for that”), and from his friends. Bob Paraiso, Don’s roommate for part of that period, had what Don calls a “twisted sense of humor” and came up with the clam/pearl and narrow passage puzzles.

It did not go straight to a finished product; it has an intermediate version I’ve been calling “Adventure 250”, based originally on this recollection:

I’m relying solely on memory which tends to be fallible (see above: the dwarf ‘vanishes’, not ‘disappears’) but my best recollection is that ADVENT.EXE first appeared on the PDP-10s at ADP (the old First Data in Waltham, Mass.) in 1977. It was an incomplete version which only had about 250 points worth of treasure. I seem to recall that there was nothing past the troll bridge but an ‘under construction’ sign or some such. I believe our copy came from WPI, but word at the time was it was developed at Stanford. Two or three months later we got the full 350 point game.
— John Everett

I was uncertain of this account until I encountered Dave Lebling’s map of Adventure, the one he made prior to starting Zork. It has the exact signature described by Everett of having “under construction” at where ought to be the troll bridge. There also is no notation for an end game.

The content is otherwise nearly identical.

By mid-1977, Woods had added the portion past the troll cave and the endgame, leading to the “canonical” version of Adventure at 350 points, finished by June 3rd, 1977. (Zork already started development by then, but remember they were looking at the 250-point version!) The first “altered” version, Adventure 366, was out by the 15th of July. It added a small area outdoors and a “palantir” which allows teleportation:

You are in the gazebo. The dust is deep here, indicating long disuse. Ancient elvish runes here describe this as a place where one may see many things. Another, more ancient inscription reads “PKIHMN”.
There is a palantir(orb) here.

Relevantly for today’s game, Don Woods had discussions early about the potential for commercializing the software. From Lester Earnest, manager of the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) he was at, in June 1977 (that is, the same month the game was “finished”):

One general rule that you should beware of is that Stanford facilities (including this computer) may not be used in support of private business transactions. Under certain circumstances, is IS possible for Stanford to sell software, even if it was developed under a research contract. It is conceivable that a sale could be arranged in which contract you might share, but it sounds a bit hairy.

(There’s another fun message from Les being upset about someone managing to sneak on and play Adventure past the server capacity limit. These systems all were expensive to run and time was valuable! The messages all come from the SAIL message system and credit goes to Ethan Johnson for finding the material a few years ago.)

The general perception of software up to this point was often it was not something “intended for sale”, but the mid-70s this was starting to change, so it is a mistake to think at least Woods felt comfortable just having his work be “freeware”. However, the fact it was created on a massively expensive Stanford computer essentially precluded any direct commercialization. Certainly people treated it as public domain, and in an interview with Jason Scott, Don Woods alludes to the fact the people who got the source from him for the game were selling it; when he created a 430-point version which could be thought of as the “master quest” edition of the game (where only recently has anyone been able to manage to get a full 430 points!) he was much cagier about distributing it.

In the same interview, Don Woods discusses Software Toolworks, which came around in 1982; the company wanted them to endorse the game as the “official version”:

Don Woods mentions in the interview that he tested the program over at Will Crowther’s house; they found that there were additional treasures added, so they could not do the endorsement of saying it was exactly the original. Eventually, this was smoothed over, and you can read their “certification letter”.

It was also possible to get a letter signed from them if you beat the game (similar to the certificate upon beating Wizardry 4), but none have surfaced. (We incidentally do know what the Wizardry 4 certificate looks like, thanks to Carl Muckenhoupt managing to beat the game when it was new.)

Today, I’m playing the CP/M version from February 1982, the one with the extra treasures that kept Crowther and Woods from saying it matched the original. I have some more detail here about Jim Gillogly and Will Bilofsky, whose names are on the port. Importantly, Walter Bilofsky (of Software Toolworks) was scrupulous about his first product, a C compiler, and tried to contact the original author so he could charge $80 and split with the author 50-50; the author was not interested due to having the early hacker ethic of just wanting to spread the Gospel of C, so Bilofsky just cut the price in half instead. It makes sense he would look for a way to eventually get some royalties over to Crowther and Woods for their game (unlike Microsoft or anyone else who was selling it).

A detail you might not know about classic Adventure:

Welcome to Adventure!! Would you like instructions?
NO

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.
SCORE

If you were to quit now, you would score 5 out of a possible 375.

Where did the 5 points come from? Well, you start the game with them. If you request instructions (that is, type YES at the start) your score goes down by 5.

For my playthrough, given this is now something like the 142nd time I’ve played Adventure, I just referred to a walkthrough early in order to snag all the standard game treasures, keeping an eye out for anything unusual. There was only one obvious difference. Y2 contained a dictionary:

Baggins’ New Dwarvish-English Dictionary
Publ. TA 3005, Imladris
Reformed Spellings

-%&-^~~& (v.t.): to excavate a new side
passage through soft rock
-%!”! (n., fem): small warm granite stone

… These words are hurting my throat. I quit!!

There’s a “magazine” that gets used for the “Last Lousy Point” of the game — it gets dropped at Witt’s End. Importantly, the magazine has always stated (when you attempt to read it) that it is written in Dwarvish. With the dictionary in hand, it comes off different:

Most of these have been damaged by water, but here’s one I can read:

Spelunker Today
Vol. 1 Number 3
We regret to announce that our associate editor was lost while taking two consultants on a tour of Colossal Cave. One consultant returned, his hair and eyebrows turned white from the ordeal, and was able to mumble only “The Dark-room … the Dark-room…”
…
One of our contributing correspondents reports the Troll to be in exceptional good humor; snickering sounds have been heard issuing from beneath the troll bridge.
…
(Advertisment)
CERTIFICATE OF WIZARDNESS
… serially numbered and suitable for framing, may be obtained absolutely free by writing to The Software Toolworks, 14478 Glorietta Drive, Sherman Oaks, CA 91423. Only available to Journeyman Wizards. You must include the Wizard Password which is revealed to a new Journeyman Wizard when he/she has earned the maximum number of points.
…
The rest of this magazine is too damaged to read.

I went through the entire map and found no new passages. Generally speaking modifications to Adventures have fallen into two categories:

a.) adding a random set of rooms “in the open”

b.) trying to secretly hide the new rooms and keep things otherwise consistent

This game goes with (b.). Eventually I turned to the magazine which was the only different material to look at, and took a whack at the dark room that gets mentioned:

You’re in Dark-room.

A massive stone tablet imbedded in the wall reads: “Congratulations on bringing light into the Dark-room!”

This is the place where you have to say PLOVER to get in while also holding a lamp (a puzzle I wrote about when I first played 350-point adventure; it required a lateral leap of faith). Without much else to mess with, I tried PUSH TABLET, and hit new content:

The tablet silently swings open to reveal a small opening to the north.

N

You are in a large room with medieval furnishings. Two bleached skeletons are hanging on the wall in iron cuffs. The room is dominated by a huge white boulder near the west wall. A tunnel in the east wall turns quickly out of sight. A dark hole in the floor was apparently once covered by a grating or trap door.

A very rusty sword with a ruby-studded hilt is embedded in the boulder!

GET SKELETON

I’d really rather not desecrate the remains of these two intrepid adventurers.

DOWN

You are in a very tight foul-smelling hole with damp walls. There is a room above you.

It is not a large section; here the entirety of the map:

The sword in the boulder can be pulled quite easy; this isn’t the “Excalibur” scenario we’ve seen before. The catch is that pulling the sword causes the tablet to shut behind the player, locking the secret room.

You heave on the sword with all your might. Little by little it scrapes out, until finally it comes free.

There is a muffled crash in the distance.

Dropping the sword causes it to return to the boulder and the passage to re-open. Dropping the sword in the room below the Medieval Room will cause the sword to “bounce once” and then return to the boulder, again re-opening the passage. There doesn’t seem to be a way to keep the passage open while holding the sword, and I’ve tried dropping in substitutes and jamming the entrance with no luck.

There is a way out: while the cave-closing countdown will not start if the player has all the “standard treasures” from the original game, the sword is sufficient to put things over the top, and there will be standard closing message followed by a teleport after waiting enough turns:

The sepulchral voice intones, “The cave is now closed.” As the echoes fade, there is a blinding flash of light (and a small puff of orange smoke). . . . As your eyes refocus, you look around and find…

You are at the northeast end of an immense room, even larger than the Giant Room. It appears to be a repository for the “Adventure” program. Massive torches far overhead bathe the room with smoky yellow light. Scattered about you can be seen a pile of bottles (all of them empty), a nursery of young beanstalks murmuring quietly, a bed of oysters, a bundle of black rods with rusty stars on their ends, and a collection of brass lanterns. Off to one side a great many dwarves are sleeping on the floor, snoring loudly. A sign nearby reads: “DO NOT DISTURB THE DWARVES!” An immense mirror is hanging against one wall, and stretches to the other end of the room, where various other sundry objects can be glimpsed dimly in the distance.

However, the sword does not come with the player, and it doesn’t get registered back at the building as one! I can still report the gameplay to the end, though.

In the original, there are two endgame rooms; the second has some special rods, and if you drop one in the NE room, drop it, move to an adjacent room, and type BLAST, it will blow open an entrance to cheering elves. This time things go a little differently:

BLAST

There is a loud explosion, and a twenty-foot hole appears in the far wall, burying the dwarves in the debris.

You are at the SW end of the repository. Debris and broken pieces of mirror are strewn everywhere, burying everything that was stored here. At your feet, partly visible through the rubble, is a large steel grate, next to which is a corroded brass plaque, half obscured, reading “Treasure Vau… Keys in Mai…”

The grate is locked.

A whole has blown open to a “Main Office” which is a new room.

You are in the Main Office of the cave. A large jagged hole in the north wall opens into the Repository. Along a side wall is a large glass display case containing magic rods belonging to great wizards of the past. Another wall is covered with yellowed autographed glossy photos of well-known dragons and trolls. On a bulletin board are many charts and notices, marked “Dragon Duty Roster”, “NOTICE: Workdwarves’ Compensation Rules”, and the like. Through an archway in the south wall daylight can be seen.

Lying to one side is a ring with two large identical keys on it.

The keyring can go over to the treasure vault.

You are in a narrow vault with heavy walls constructed of large stone blocks. Dim yellow illumination glows through a square grate overhead.

A tall pointed wizard’s hat, made of solid gold, and inlaid with moons and stars carved from precious jewels, shimmers in midair!

Suspended a few feet off the ground is a wizard’s robe of blue velvet.

The grate is open.

The hat straightforwardly counts as a treasure, and the robe magically follows you around.

The robe rises gently, swirls about you, and settles around your shoulders. Evidently you have earned admission as a Probationary Apprentice in the Wizard’s Guild.

You can then head outside through the Main Office, walk over to the building, deposit the golden hat, and win.

As you release the hat, a cloud of sandalwood-scented smoke appears, out of which steps the Grandmaster of the Colossal Cave Lodge 437 of the Wizard’s Guild. He is wearing a long blue velvet robe, a long, pointed bejewelled hat made of solid platinum, and love beads. He carries a three foot long rod with a star on the end, all of solid gold. His eyes twinkle behind thick gold-rimmed spectacles, and he smiles benevolently as he says,

“Congratulations, young Adventurer. By your ordeals in the Cave you have proven yourself worthy of admission to the Wizard’s Guild in the rank of Apprentice Wizard. If you divine the remaining mysteries of the cave, you shall be rewarded with the rank of Journeyman Wizard.”

The Wizard waves his wand, and the cave bear and little bird appear in a puff of orange smoke, grunting and twittering their congratulations. You leap onto the bear’s back, and, with the bird fluttering in a circle overhead, you ride out of the building, through a crowd of cheering elves, and into the sunset.

You scored 345 out of a possible 375 using 448 turns.

Your score puts you in Master Adventurer Class A. To achieve the next higher rating, you need 1 more point.

Hence I’ve “won” but I’m still quite curious about the sword treasure and if there’s yet another hidden treasure somewhere. The only hint I can think of is about the reference to the troll being amused in the magazine, but prodding at both the troll and troll bridge have revealed no new actions I can find. It is possible the sword is really the only thing left to bring the score to maximum.

I’d normally try prodding at the source but there’s encryption going on (like the Dian Gerard games). I realize some of y’all are keen on that sort of thing, so I have files here to make the game easy to play. Run the RUN.BAT file, type B: to switch to the Adventure disk, and type ADVENT to run. I left my save files you can look at with DIR, and typing ADVENT SAVENAME will boot a saved game.

17 days ago

increment body count

Another Pull at an Old Thread

Recent discussions have attempted to bolster a few, key ideas. The first and most controversial, given the present critical landscape, is that while historical detail informs our understanding of humanity, it isn’t, in and of itself, a theme or interpretive “code wheel” that can unlock the meaning of Trinity. Instead, I think Trinity asserts that the details often do not matter. They might offer up an illusory sense of exhaustibility or reinforce ideas that equate mastery with knowledge. As the old song goes, “I shouted out ‘Who killed the Kennedys’ / but after all, it was you and me” (Jagger/Richards). Trinity isn’t a polemic against the United States government, or the state of New Mexico, or J. Robert Oppenheimer. In fact, individual action generally comes off as futile in the face of the cosmic inevitability of humanity’s tendency to overreach, to under-empathize, to mistake power for justification.

In order to get at the idea, Trinity features many encounters between the Wabewalker and non-human animals. Animals appear to us players as complexes of significance. They are doomed, as a matter of fact, with the possible exception of the roadrunner. The ducks and geese in Kensington Gardens are presumably vaporized. The many lemmings on the Siberian tundra–should they not make it to the cliff’s edge–die as well. Dolphin and rattlesnake alike: destroyed. The skink–today’s topic of discussion–is well on its way to a similar fate before we players intervene.

Let Them Have Dominion

Considering this fairly populous (by Infocom standards) menagerie of ill-fated creatures, what can we players deduce or discover about or in the text of Trinity? I believe that the animals have a synecdochical function. In plain terms, they are a part of the world that is meant to represent the whole. Humanity’s treatment of animals in Trinity reflects its disregard for the wider world including its inhabitants and ecological welfare.

Another key element of Trinity‘s presentation of devastation generally is an implication of blamelessness. It is crucial to note that the animals are blameless. They have no involvement in our conflicts or exercises in techno-destructive overreach. The same can be said of the young girl from Nagasaki (more on this next time). There are at least two implications of blamelessness in Trinity. The first is empathy.

In my series on Steve Meretzky’s A Mind Forever Voyaging, I claimed that one of its defining characteristics was empathy. It doesn’t just provoke empathic reactions in players. In fact, I argued that it was concerned with empathy as a crucial part of the human experience. Today, games with emotionally potent narratives are a familiar part of the gaming landscape, but it wasn’t something players were used to at the time. Trinity aims for–and lands–some punches of its own. Without declaring one better than the other–a hard thing to resist, apparently–I’m impressed with how both games approach empathy differently. In AMFV, empathy is resolved. It is an optimistic work, and better things are likely coming to those we empathize with. Empathy in Trinity is usually painful. This pain is often a consequence of hopelessness or inability to affect a situation. The protagonist may want to save the dolphin, for instance, but there is no hope of that.

The other outcome of perceived blamelessness is culpability. Whatever suffering we encounter in Trinity, you can be sure that humanity is its author. There are no earthquakes or tornadoes behind the white doors, only people and their gadgets. Sometimes, the culpability is not so general. We feed the terrified lemming to the snake, for instance. Some players will feel a pinch, there!

Hard Luck Lizard

The central mid-game puzzle of Trinity involves mixing spell ingredients in a cauldron. We discover both recipe and cauldron in the same shack where the book and map are located.

The magpie croaks, "Awk! Milk and honey, fresh whole lizard."
...
"Awk! Fresh whole lizard. Awk!" squawks the magpie.
...
"Awk! Killed in the light of a crescent moon," screeches the magpie.
...
"Awk! Crescent moon. Awk!"
...
The magpie says, "Awk! Mix 'em with a pinch o' garlic. Awk!"
...
"Awk! Then stand back! 'Cause it go BOOM. Awk!"

The lizard seems a rather extravagant request, particularly the bit about the crescent moon. There is a skink beyond the Pluto door, though it is–quite reasonably, as it turns out–afraid of the protagonist. It can be cornered with correctly placed lighting:

The skink scrambles out of the lighted crevice, slips between your legs and scurries away into the east tunnel. A moment later it reappears, blinking helplessly from the glow of the lantern.
With no place to hide, the flummoxed skink runs in circles at your feet.

Considering the entire Infocom catalog, we players are well on our way to shattering previous records for killing frightened animals. The skink’s story ends in what is, in my opinion, the most dramatic and visually striking scene of Trinity. Beyond the Mercury door lies the vacuum of space. The Wabewalker can survive–briefly–if they enter while encased in a soap bubble.

>enter door
You squeeze the soapy film through the white door.

Earth Orbit, in a soap bubble
You're five hundred miles above a sea of ice, hurtling in profound silence over the Arctic atmosphere. Layers of crimson and violet describe the curve of the horizon, blending imperceptibly into a black sky crowded with stars.

The soapy film around you freezes instantly, but remains intact.

The white door drops away behind you.

You watch helplessly as the white door dwindles to a distant speck, vanishing at last between the horns of the rising moon.

Provided the player plans correctly, the Wabewalker can kill the skink before getting back to the door. It will be unpleasant for what I hope will be most players: I personally cast about for alternatives, even though I knew that Trinity was not the sort of game where players can get out of killing small animals.

>kill skink
The tiny lizard writhes in your grasp and claws at your fingers, its pink mouth gasping for breath. You squeeze harder and harder until your fist trembles with the effort.

The skink stops squirming.

The episode further illustrates the adventure game ethos discussed in a previous post: take everything, use everything, go everywhere, win. It is a world in which nothing is more than its utility. Is humanity a kind of cosmic adventurer? In any case, the Wabewalker’s encounter with the skink engenders feelings of empathy, culpability, and also, yes, inevitability. The only alternative to killing the skink, after all, is quitting the game entirely.

All that remains is to throw the body in a pot resting–quite appropriately–near the map and book of hours. Casting a spell is, after all, a way in which Trinity participates in traditional adventure game design: this is a treasure hunt. The items in the shack speak to us–not the Wabewalker–as players familiar with adventure games. Whatever the moral or cosmic implications of the Wabewalker’s quest might be, we players know how to deal with a treasure hunt. In the end, Trinity‘s design fulfills, rather than abolishes, the cave game.

I think that must be the point.

By the Light of the Moon

A last detail bears mentioning. This outer space adventure takes place in a future. I say “a future” because in Trinity the so-called “Star Wars” antiballistic missile program was a success. The atomic relevance–each mushroom represents an atomic detonation–of this vignette is a confrontation between a satellite and a missile. Since Trinity is concerned with past explosions, it must take place in this hypothetical future.

Why is this important? Atomic warfare, in Trinity, cannot be stopped. In fact, in its future setting, it has already happened.

Next

Suffer the children.

The post Now I Am Become Death (Trinity) appeared first on Gold Machine.

18 days ago

For some of you, Andrew Plotkin will need no introduction. The rest of you ought to know that he’s quite an amazing guy, easily one of the half-dozen most important figures in the history of post-Infocom interactive fiction. By my best reckoning, he’s written an even dozen fully realized, polished text adventures in all, from 1995’s A Change in the Weather, the co-winner of the very first IF Competition, to his 2014 Kickstarter-funded epic Hadean Lands. While he was about it, he made vital technical contributions to interactive fiction as well; perhaps most notably, he invented a new virtual machine called Glulx, which finally allowed games written with the Inform programming language to burst beyond the boundaries of Infocom’s old Z-Machine, while the accompanying Glk input-output library allowed then to make use of graphics, sound, and modern typography. Over the last ten years or so, Andrew — or “Zarf,” as his friends who know him just a little bit better than I do generally call him — has moved into more of an organizing role in the interactive-fiction community, taking steps to place it on a firm footing so that its most important institutions can outlive old-timers like him and me.

Andrew was kind enough to sit down with me recently for a wide-ranging conversation that started with his formative years as an Infocom superfan in the 1980s, went on to encompass some of his seminal games and other contributions of the 1990s and beyond, and wound up in the here and now. I hope you’ll enjoy reading this transcript of our discussion as much as I enjoyed chatting with Andrew screen to screen. He’s refreshingly honest about the sweet and the bitter of being a digital creator working mostly in niche forms.

One final note before we get started: Andrew is currently available for contract or full-time employment. If you have need of an experienced programmer, systems architect, writer, and/or game designer whose body of work speaks for itself, you can contact him through his website.

---

Perhaps we should start with some very general background. Have you lived in the Boston area your whole life?

No, not at all! I only moved to Boston in 2005.

I was born in 1970 in Syracuse, New York, a place that I don’t remember at all because my family moved to New Jersey when I was about three. We lived there for a couple of years, then my father got a job in the Washington, D.C., area. I went to primary school through high school there.

And when and where did you first encounter interactive fiction?

It must have been around 1979. My father’s company had a “bring your family to work” day. A teletype there was running Adventure. My father plunked me down in front of it and explained what was going on. I thought it was the best thing in the universe. I banged on it for a couple of hours while everybody else was running around the office, although I didn’t get very far.

For the next few months, Dad was playing it at work, illicitly — that was how everybody played it. He would bring home these giant sheets of fan-fold printer paper showing his latest progress. As I recall, I suggested the solution to the troll-bridge puzzle: giving the golden eggs to the troll. That was great, the first adventure-game puzzle I solved.

When did you first get a computer at home?

Around 1980, we got an Apple II Plus. We acquired the first three Scott Adams games and Zork, which was newly available, plus Microsoft’s port of Adventure to the Apple II.

That started my lifelong attachment to Infocom. I played all the games as they came out. I begged my folks to buy them for me. Later, I spent my own money on them.

You played all of the Infocom games upon their first release?

Pretty much, up until I went off to college. I remember that I did not play Plundered Hearts when it came out.

That one was a hard sell for a lot of young men — although it’s a brilliant game.

Yeah. I didn’t play it because I was a seventeen-year-old boy.

I also didn’t play Zork Zero or the [illustrated] games that came after it because I had gone off to college and didn’t have the Apple II anymore. But I did catch up with all of them a few years later.

You mention that you did get some adventure games from other companies when you first got the Apple II. Did that continue, or were you exclusively loyal to Infocom?

Well, I was haunting the download BBSes and snarfing any pirated game I could. I played Wizardry and Ultima. I didn’t play too many other text adventures. I knew they existed — I had seen ads for Mike Berlyn’s pre-Infocom stuff — but I didn’t really hunt them down because I knew that Infocom was actually better at it. I remember that we had The Wizard and the Princess, which was just clunky and weird and not actually solvable.

I know that you also wrote some of your own text adventures on the Apple II in BASIC, as a lot of people were doing at this time.

Yes. The first one I did was a parody of Enchanter. I called it Enchanter II. It was a joke game that I could upload to the BBSes: “Look, it’s the sequel!” It was very silly. It started out pretending to be an Infocom game, then started throwing in Doctor Who jokes. The closing line was, “You may have lost, but we have gained,” the ending from the Apple II Prisoner game. It was terrible.

But I did write it and release it. Unfortunately, as far as I know it’s lost. I’ve never seen it archived anywhere.

I did Inhumane after that. That was another parody game, but it was meant to have actual puzzles. It was inspired by the Grimtooth’s Traps role-playing books. I liked the idea of people dying in funny ways.

Inhumane is obviously juvenilia, but at the same time it shows some of what was to come in your games. There’s a subversive angle to it: here’s a game full of traps where the objective is to hit all the traps. That’s the way I play a lot of games, but inadvertently. Here that’s the point.

Were you heavily into tabletop RPGs?

No. Tabletop role-playing I was never into. I get performance anxiety when I’m asked to come up with stories on the fly. I just don’t enjoy sitting at a table and being in that position. It’s not my thing.

But I was interested in role-playing scenarios and source books. First, because of the long-term connection to [computer] adventure games, second because they had so much creative world-building and storytelling, just to read. So, yeah. I was interested in tabletop role-playing games but not in actually playing them.

A surprising number of people have told me the same: they never played tabletop RPGs much but they liked the source books. For some people, the imagination that goes into those is enough, it seems.

So, you go off to university. Why did you choose Carnegie Mellon University?

I got rejected by MIT! It was second on the list.

Were you aware that Infocom was connected so closely to MIT?

No. I knew that they were in Cambridge because I subscribed to the Status Line newsletter. There was a running theme of them mentioning stuff around Cambridge. And I’d played The Lurking Horror. But I didn’t have the full context of “these were MIT students who made Zork at MIT.”

I guess it would have made the rejection even more painful if you’d known.

At university, you’re exposed to Unix and the Mac for the first time.

Yes. And to the Internet. And I started learning “real” programming languages like C.

Did you also play games at university?

Yes. I ran into roguelikes for the first time.

Which ones did you play?

I played a fair bit of Advanced Rogue, but I never got good at it. There were people playing NetHack, but it was clear that that was a game where you had to put in a lot of time to make any serious progress. Rogue was a little bit lighter.

Yeah. I never was willing to put in the hours and hours that it takes to get good at those games. Now especially, when I write about so many games, I just don’t have the time to devote 200 hours to NetHack.

You’ve since re-implemented one of your own programming experiments from university, Praser 5.

That was not originally a parser-based text adventure. It was a puzzle stuck inside the CMU filesystem. Every “room” was a directory, connected by symlinks. You literally CDed into the directory and typed “ls,” and the description would pop up in the file listing. Then you would type, “cd up,” “cd left,” whatever, to follow symlinks to other directories. It was an experiment in using the tools of a shared computer system to make an embedded game. The riddles were a matter of running a small executable which was linked in each directory. I used file permissions to give people access to more things as they solved more puzzles.

Much later, after I had learned Inform 6, I did the parser version.

What did you do right after university?

I graduated in 1992, but I wanted to stick around the Pittsburgh area because a lot of my friends hadn’t graduated yet. I got a job in the CMU computer-science department and shacked up with a couple of classmates in a rundown apartment.

That was great. I bought my first Macintosh and started writing stuff on it. That’s when I started working on System’s Twilight. I figured it was time for me to get into my games career. I decided to write a game and release it as shareware to make actual money. So, I bought a tremendous number of Macintosh programming manuals, which I still have.

System’s Twilight has the fingerprints of Cliff Johnson of Fool’s Errand fame all over it.

Yes. It was an homage.

When did you first play his games? Was that at university?

Yeah. Those came out between 1988 and 1992, when I was there. I had a campus job, so I could afford a couple of games. I played them on the campus Macintoshes.

I remember very well being in one of the computer clusters at two in the morning, solving the final meta-puzzle of The Fool’s Errand. I had written down all of the clues the game had fed me on papers that were spread out all over the desk. Every time I used one of the clues, I’d grab the piece of paper, crumple it up, and throw it over my shoulder. When I finished, the desk was empty and I was surrounded by paper.

We had an amazing experience with The Fool’s Errand as well. My wife fell in love with it. It was our obsession for two weeks. When I talked to Cliff Johnson years ago, my wife told me to tell him that he was the only man other than me that she could see herself marrying. I wasn’t sure how to take that.

What were your expectations for System’s Twilight?

I intended to make some money. I didn’t know how much would show up or whether it would lead to more things. It was just something I could do that would be a lot more fun than the programming I was doing in my day job.

Now that you had your own Macintosh and a steady income, I guess you started buying more commercial games again? I know you have a huge love for Myst, which came out around this time.

I was actually a little bit late to Myst. I didn’t play it until 1994, when everybody was already talking about it.

But when you did, it was love at first sight?

Yeah. The combination of the environment and the soundscape was great and the puzzles were fun. It felt like someone was finally doing the graphical adventure right. I’d never gotten into the LucasArts and Sierra versions of graphical adventures because they were sort of parodic, and the environments weren’t actually attractive. They were very pixelated. They just weren’t trying to be immersive. But Myst was doing it right.

As long as we’re on the subject: I guess Riven absolutely blew your mind?

Yes, it did. It was vastly larger and more interesting and more cohesively thought-through than Myst had been. I played it obsessively and solved it and was very happy.

At what point did you get involved with the people who would wind up being the founders of a post-Infocom interactive-fiction community?

In 1993 or 1994, someone pointed me to an open-source Infocom interpreter. I hadn’t really been aware of the technology stack behind Infocom’s games. But now you could pull all of the games off of the Lost Treasures disks and run them on Unix machines. That was kind of interesting.

I don’t remember how I encountered the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup. But when I did, people were talking about reverse-engineering the Infocom technology. I wrote an interpreter of my own for [Unix] X Windows that had proportional fonts, command-line editing, command history, scroll bars — all the stuff we take for granted nowadays. I released that, then ported it to the Macintosh. That was my first major interaction with rec.arts.int-fiction.

It must have been around this time that Kevin Wilson made a very historically significant post on Usenet, announcing the very first IF Competition. You submitted A Change in the Weather and won the Inform category. Did you write that game specifically for the Comp?

Let me back up a little bit. In early 1995, I got an offer from a game company in Washington, D.C, called Magnet Interactive, to port games from 3DO to Macintosh. So, I moved to Washington — I was very sad to leave Pittsburgh behind — and rented a terrible little rundown apartment there. I was also making some money from System’s Twilight, and had started working on a sequel, which was to be called Moondials. It was a slog. I had some ideas for puzzles, but the story was just not coming together.

So, when Kevin Wilson said, “Hey, let’s do this thing,” I said, “I’m going to take a break from Moondials and write a text adventure very fast.” The process started with downloading Inform 5 and the manual and reading it. I think I blasted through the manual five times in a week.

The start of the Competition was a little weird because we didn’t yet have the idea of all of the games being made available at the same time. Kevin just said, “Upload your games to the IF Archive.” So, all of the games trickled in at different times. For the second Comp, we settled very firmly on the idea of all games being released at the same time because the 1995 experience was not very satisfactory.

I know that it’s always frustrating to be asked where ideas come from. But sometimes it’s unavoidable, so I’m going to ask it about A Change in the Weather.

I think I was drawing on the general sense of being an introvert and not making friends easily — being separated from people and feeling alienated from my social group. My college experience wasn’t solidly that. I was an introvert, but I was at a computer college, and there were a lot of introverts and introvert-centered social groups. I had friends, had housemates after college, as I said. But I still struggled somewhat with social activities. It was a failure mode I was always aware of, that I might end up on the edge not really talking to people. I drew on that experience in general in creating the scenario of A Change in the Weather.

That’s interesting. From my outsider perspective, I can see that much more in So Far, your next game. It really dwells on this theme of alienation and connection, or the lack thereof. That also strikes me as the game of yours that’s most overtly influenced by Myst. Just from the nature of the environment and the magical-mechanical puzzles. It’s not deserted like Myst, but you can’t interact in any meaningful way with the people who are there — which goes back to this theme of alienation.

I wasn’t thinking of Myst specifically there, but it was part of my background by that point. The direct emotional line in So Far was breaking up with my college girlfriend. That was a couple of years in the past by this point. That had been in Pittsburgh. A lot of the energy for working on System’s Twilight came from suddenly being stuck at home after that relationship ended. I channeled my frustrations into programming.

But then I tried to drop it into So Far as a theme of people being separated. None of the specifics of what had happened were relevant to the game — just the feeling.

By the time of So Far, you were as big as names get in modern interactive fiction. Your next game Lists and Lists was arguably not a game at all. What made you decide to write a LISP tutorial as interactive fiction? Do you have a special relationship with LISP?

Yes! I hate it! I had taken functional-programming courses in college and learned LISP. But I just did not jibe with it at all.

That’s ironic because Infocom’s programming language ZIL was heavily based on LISP.

Right. It was an MIT thing, but it was not my thing. Nevertheless, the concept of building it into the Z-Machine with a practical limit of 64 K of RAM — or really less than that — seemed doable. And I had written a LISP interpreter as a programming exercise during my first or second year in college. So, I was aware of the basics. Doing it in Inform wasn’t a gigantic challenge, just a certain amount of work.

Were you already starting to feel restless with the traditional paradigm of interactive fiction? Right after Lists and Lists, you released The Space Under the Window, which might almost work better if it was implemented in hypertext. It’s almost interactive poetry.

I wasn’t bored with traditional games, but I did want to try different things and see what could be done. And writing in Inform was simple enough that I could just whip out an idea and see whether it worked. That was inspiring the whole community at this point. That was the lesson of the first IF Comp: you can just sit down and try an idea, and a month later people will be talking about it. There was a very rapid fermentation cycle.

Yes. It led to much more formal experimentation. Before the Comp came along, everybody was trying to follow the Infocom model and make big games. But if you have an idea that’s more conceptual or avant garde, it’s often better suited to a smaller game. The Comp created a space for that. If you do something and submit it to the Comp, even if it’s highly experimental, it will get played and noticed and discussed.

Now we come to The Big One of your games in many people’s eyes. And I must admit that this applies to me as well. Spider and Web is such a brilliantly conceived game. I’m in awe of this game. So, thank you for that.

You’re welcome. It’s always tricky to have a game which is so purely built out of a single idea because then, when you try to write another game, you think you have to come up with another idea that’s as good, and it’s never possible.

Was this idea born out of any particular experience, perhaps with other media?

I don’t think it was. I was prying into what we would now call the triangle of identities — prying into the idea that what the game’s text is telling you is a point of view that might have biases behind it. There is a dialog between what the player thinks about the world and what the game thinks about the world, and there can be cracks in between. That led to the idea of using the storytelling of the game to tell a lie, and that there is a truth behind it which can be discerned.

I started with that kernel and started coming up with puzzle scenarios. Here is an outcome that is verifiable. But there’s two different versions of what happened that could have led to that outcome. I’m going to tell one, but the other is going to be the truth. I strung together a few different versions of that. Then I said, okay, if we’re lying, then the introduction of the game has to introduce the lie. So I folded that in from the start. I knew that I wanted a two-part structure: you learn what’s going on, then you make use of all of the information.

The moment of transition between the two is often referred to as simply The Puzzle. It’s been called the best single text-adventure puzzle ever created. Did you realize how special it was at the time?

No. I figured it would be a puzzle. I didn’t understand how much of an impact it would have. I knew that I wanted to surprise players by having a possibility suddenly become available. Here’s a thing that I can do, and I will do it. Any kind of good puzzle solution is a surprise when you think of it. Afterward it seems obvious. I knew I had a good combination of elements to make it work, but I wasn’t thinking about the way that it would reorient the entire history of the game in the player’s head in one fell swoop. I don’t know. Maybe I had an inkling.

What I love is that the game is called Spider and Web. Suddenly when you solve that puzzle, those two categories get reversed. Who is really the spider and who is caught in the web?

The reason I called it Spider and Web was actually the old idiom “What a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive.” The notion of deception was meant to be part of the title, and the spider was there just to go with the web. But yes, it’s multi-valent.

I know you’re a big reader of science fiction and fantasy. I wouldn’t picture you reading a James Bond novel. What made you decide to go in the direction of spy fiction here?

Honestly, I thought of it as science fiction. The spy fiction was merely because the story was about deception, and somebody had to be fooling somebody. But conceptually, I had it pinned as a science-fiction scenario from some kind of dystopian cold war, but with magically advanced technology.

You entered Hunter, in Darkness into the 1999 IF Comp. It’s a riff on Hunt the Wumpus, which is about the most minimalist imaginable text adventure, if you can even call it that. Your game, by contrast, is a lushly atmospheric, viscerally horrifying fiction. Were you just being cheeky?

Yeah, I was. I just wanted to put in all the stuff that Wumpus didn’t have, without getting away from the core concept. I thought it would be a funny thing to do. I worked really hard on the claustrophobia and the creepy bats. I remember crawling under a chair to try to get the feel of being in a narrow passage and not being able to move around — just to get the bodily sense of that.

Then we have Shade from 2000, which is another of my favorites of your games. Even more than Hunter, in Darkness, it has a horror vibe.

Yes. I leaned into it harder in Shade.

There are all kinds of opinions about what is really going on in Shade. I know you like to let people draw their own conclusions about your games, so I won’t press you on that…

I don’t think there’s a lot of disagreement on the main point, that you’re dying and this is all a hallucination.

Yeah, that was absolutely my take on it, that you’re dying of thirst in the desert. I saw it pointed out in a review that everything you’re trying to do is the opposite of the real problem you have. You’re trying to get out of your apartment in the hallucination, but your real problem is that you are out, lost in the desert. Was that something you were consciously doing, or are we all reading too much into it?

Well, neither. I don’t think I was consciously thinking that way, but that doesn’t mean that you’re reading stuff into it. It’s deliberately ambiguous. I had a lot of images in my head that I threw out at random. I did have the notion that this environment in your apartment was from your past. You really had packed up your apartment and called a taxi and gotten out, and reiterating it was… inappropriate but real. It was in your head while you were having this terrible experience, and it was being replayed by your brain in a broken way. You’re in a place of blinding light — it’s very hot — and the experience you’re replaying is very dim and dark, except that when light occurs it’s painful.

Although your games of the 1990s are fondly remembered and still played, you were also making major technical contributions. Probably most important was the Glulx — sorry, I can’t say that word! — virtual machine to let Inform games expand beyond the strictures of Infocom’s old Z-Machine. How did that come about?

No one knows how to pronounce it!

I started to think about it in probably 1996, when Graham [Nelson] came out with version 7 and 8 of the Z-Machine. Version 8 was big — big enough for Graham’s Jigsaw — but it was still just a stopgap. It was only twice as big as Infocom’s version 5. There were all kinds of things that didn’t scale. It seemed worthwhile to make a fresh design that would be 32-bit from the start. I just didn’t want to deal with more incremental changes. And being able to jettison all of the weird legacy stuff about the Z-Machine seemed like a win too — being able to rethink all of these decisions in a technological context that is not 1979.

One of the things I wanted to do was to separate out the input-output layer. I had already written Z-Machine interpreters for X Windows and Mac that used Mark Howell’s ZIP engine with different interface front-ends. When TADS went open-source around 1997, I made an interpreter for that. So, now I had this matrix, right? I’ve got an X Windows front-end and a Mac front-end, and they both slap onto the Z-Machine and the TADS virtual machine. In a pretty clear way, these things are just plug and play. All the virtual machine does is accept text input and generate text output. I mean, yes, there’s the status line, maybe sound and graphics, but fundamentally that’s what it’s doing. And the front-end presents that text in a way that suits the platform on which it’s running. I was doing the same thing that Infocom did, just slicing it into more layers. Infocom had an interpreter and a game file. I said, we’re going to have an interpreter engine and an interpreter front-end. Thus there will be more flexibility.

I designed the front-end first, the Glk library. I made an implementation for Mac and for X Windows and for the Unix command line. Then I started thinking about the virtual machine. I ripped apart the Inform 6 compiler so it could compile to Glulx from the same game source code.

As I recall, the Glulx virtual machine is bigger than the Z-Machine — for all practical purposes, its capacity is infinite — but also simpler. There’s less of the hard-coded stuff that Infocom included, like the object tables.

Yes, exactly. I figured the more generic and simple I could make it, the better. It would be simpler to design and simpler to implement. It adds complexity to the compiler, but the compiler already needs code to generate object tables in a specific format. It would still be doing that, but there wouldn’t be any hardware support for them. I’d just have to include veneer routines to handle object tables in this format. Then, if we ever need to change the format, no problem. We just change the compiler. We don’t need to change the virtual machine.

When did you publish the Glulx specification?

April 1, 1999.

Were you still living in Washington, D.C., at this time?

I had moved around a lot, actually. The job in D.C. only lasted about a year and a half. After the porting project I had been doing finished up, the company dropped me onto a project to do a Highlander licensed game, which we had absolutely no concept of how to do. This would have been like a 3D action game. That project got canned.

Then I worked for a document company in Maryland for a while. Then I moved back to Pittsburgh and worked for a startup. The startup got acquired by Red Hat, and they moved us down to North Carolina. That was from like 1999 to 2000. Then Red Hat fired us and I moved back to Pittsburgh. From 2000 to 2005 I worked for a filesystem company in Pittsburgh.

You took a break from writing interactive fiction for a few years after Shade. Then there was a little bit of a shift in focus when you did come back in 2004 with The Dreamhold. Your earlier games don’t try too hard to be accessible. When you returned, you seemed more interested in outreach and accessibility. What was the thought process there?

Only the obvious one. It’s true that all of my previous games were written very much for the community. They were written for people who knew how IF worked. But The Dreamhold was specifically an outreach game. I wanted to try to expand the community. We’d been doing this for about ten years at that point, and it was kind of the same crowd of people. I thought to create an outreach game as a total wild-ass experiment to try to bring in people from other parts of the gaming world. I didn’t know whether it would work, but I figured it was worth a try. So I designed a game specifically for that purpose, built around explaining how traditional interactive fiction worked to people who didn’t know how to play it.

That meant doing some wacky stuff. There are some rooms in The Dreamhold that you enter by going north, but to go back you have to go east, because I figured, this is really uncomfortable, but people are going to run into this if they get into IF, so they should be familiar with the concept. I’ll try to introduce it as smoothly as possible by putting messages like, “The corridor turns as you head to the north.” Then put in the [room] description, “You can go back the way you came, toward the east,” to try to make it more tangible. But I wanted to introduce complicated maps and darkness and all of the hardcore stuff that the community was used to. And also make it fun.

There were a number of these outreach efforts at the time. Some people were taking IF games to more conventional game jams. There were cheat sheets of “how to play IF” going around. My impression is that these efforts weren’t super successful. Is that your impression as well?

Yes, it is. None of it actually worked. It’s great that we made the on-ramps and it’s good that we still maintain them, but there was not a huge influx of new people coming onto the scene at that point.

My impression is that the community didn’t really start to grow until it opened itself up to non-parser-driven games: the Twine games and ChoiceScript games and so on. Presumably some percentage of those players became willing to try the parser games as well.

Yeah, but that was a little bit later, after 2010 or so. There was still a gap. I decided, well, The Dreamhold didn’t make an impact, so I’m just going to go back to writing wacky puzzle games.

Of course, in 2007 Inform 7 came out. I would say that drew people into creating games, because it was much more approachable for people who were not C programmers. There was a bit of a revolution there. It was just harder to see because it was new authors rather than new players.

The time around 2010 was an exciting one for you personally as well as the community. In addition to the ongoing buzz about Inform 7, Jason Scott released his Get Lamp documentary, and you launched a Kickstarter to make a game called Hadean Lands soon after.

Yes. In 2010, Jason Scott premiered Get Lamp at PAX East. He had interviewed me two or three years earlier — probably in 2007.

Yeah, he worked on that movie for almost ten years.

Exactly. It’s kind of funny to look back at 2007 and see me talking about releasing commercial interactive fiction.

But in 2010, all of the old Infocom guys showed up at PAX East. I was on that panel, sitting with Dave Lebling, Brian Moriarty, and Steve Meretzky. I was going… [genuflecting]

I’m not worthy!

Exactly.

Jason Scott brought Get Lamp to a game class at Tufts University a few weeks later. Since I was living about half a mile away, I came in and said, “Hi, I’m in this movie.” Afterward, I went up to Jason and said, “You know, people are talking about interactive fiction for the first time in fifteen years outside of our little community. Do you think I should do a Kickstarter for a giant IF game?” And Jason looks at me like I’ve got bananas growing out of my ears and says, “Yes, you should!”

He’s the most enthusiastic person in the world.

Yes. And of course, he’d just done a Kickstarter for the Get Lamp release. This was early for Kickstarter. There had been gaming Kickstarter projects before, but no really gigantic ones. So, getting $30,000 for an IF Kickstarter was kind of a big deal in 2010. So I went to the boss at my day job and said, “Well, I guess this is it for us. I’m quitting.” I knew that $30,000 wasn’t actually going to last me very long, living in Boston. But of course, I’d been in the software industry for decades by this point, so I had a fair amount of savings cushion built up. And I had a pile of Red Hat stock which was worth some money. I could live on it while I found my footing as an indie developer.

The Dreamhold had taken me nine months. I thought Hadean Lands would take me a year. Ha! It turned out that writer’s block is a hell of a thing. Hadean Lands kept getting sidelined. I got totally knocked over by the idea of doing a hypertext MUD. I spent a year writing that. That was Seltani, which was hugely popular for about two months in the Myst fan community; I did it as a Myst fan game and presented it at a Myst convention. Everybody loved it. But I wasn’t writing Hadean Lands, and eventually my KickStarter backers started to get upset about that.

I did slog through it. I got Hadean Lands done [in 2014]. I don’t feel like the story is hugely successful, but I’m very happy with the puzzle structure and the game layout.

As you know as well as I do, there’s a whole checkered history of people trying to monetize IF. A few years ago, Bob Bates of Infocom and Legend fame released Thaumistry. I was a beta-tester on that game. The game was very good, but these things just never work. It’s always a disappointment in the end. Nobody has ever cracked that code.

If you look at the Thaumistry Kickstarter and the Hadean Lands Kickstarter, you see that they made almost the same amount of money from almost the same number of backers. It’s the same crowd showing up: “Yeah, we still love ya!” But they’re not enough to make a living from…

The problem is getting outside of that crowd.

It’s no wonder that people like Emily Short have long since decamped, saying, “I have to work on different kinds of games with a larger reach.”

What about you? Do you think you will ever return to parser-based interactive fiction?

That’s a fair question. I’ve had a lot of starts toward things that I thought might be interesting. I started working on a framework for a kind of text game that’s not parser-based but also not hypertext in the sense that Twine is. It’s more combinatoric. I got two-thirds of the way done with building the engine and one-third of the way done with writing a game, then I kind of lost it. But I still think it’s interesting and I might go back to it. I don’t think it would go big the way Twine did, but it might reach a different audience. It’s a different way of thinking about the game structure.

Would you care to talk about your partnership with Jason Shiga to turn his interactive comic books into digital apps? I have played Meanwhile, the first of those.

Sure. I’d been aware of Jason Shiga ever since I started hanging out with Nick Montfort at MIT after I moved to Boston. Nick had a bunch of his early self-published stuff. He had the original printing of Meanwhile, as a black-and-white hand-cut book. I thought it was really neat.

Totally by coincidence, Meanwhile got picked up by a publisher just before that 2010 PAX East we talked about. A nice big hardback version of it was published. It was being sold at PAX East. I thought, man, this is great, I’d really love to do an iPhone version. This was 2010; iPhone games were big.

A little later, I did the Hadean Lands Kickstarter and quit my job. I needed to have more projects than just one text adventure, so I wrote to Jason Shiga and said, “Hey, I’m a big fan. I’d love to do an app version of your book.” Jason was amenable, so we had the usual conversations with lawyers and agents and signed a contract. I worked on that at the same time that I was planning out Hadean Lands. The iPhone app came out in 2011.

So, the finances of making a go of it as an independent creator of digital content without a day job didn’t quite pan out for you in the end. I feel your pain, believe me. It’s a hard row to hoe. What came next?

After Meanwhile and Hadean Lands, I felt very stuck. Jason [Shiga] was off working on non-interactive comics, so there wasn’t anything to do there. I bummed around for a while trying to find something that would make any kind of money at all, but I was not successful.

I’m skipping over huge chunks of time here, but in 2017 Emily Short and Aaron Reed were working on a project to do NPC dialog as a commercial product. It was essentially taking Emily’s old ideas about threaded dialog in parser games and turning them into a plugin which game designers could use in any game to have interesting multi-threaded conversations. I spent a couple of years working on that project with them. But it turned out that management at that company sucked and everybody bailed.

Since then until this year, I’ve been working for big and small games studios, working on the dialog parts of their games.

Coding dialog engines or writing dialog?

I’ve been a software engineer, working on the coding part, but working with the writers.

Also during this period, Jason Shiga started writing what he calls “Adventuregame Comics,” which are shorter Meanwhile-style books. I’ve started porting those. The Steam port of The Beyond and the iOS and Steam port of Leviathan are available now. The iOS port of The Beyond will be coming later.

Since Hadean Lands, you’ve stepped into more of an organizing role in the IF community.

Yes. I’m very proud to have transitioned from being a hotshot game writer to someone who is doing community support, building structures and traditions and conferences. I never wanted to be a person who was only famous for writing games, especially after I started writing fewer games. I really didn’t want to be a person who was famous for having been a big game writer in the 1990s. That’s a sucky position to be stuck in. There needs to be a second act.

It’s maybe a maturation process as well. When you get a little bit older, you realize that some things are important in a way you may not have when you were a young, hotshot game writer.

Yeah. I slowed down writing games because I started to second-guess myself too much. When you’ve written a lot of games that people got really excited about…

Then you’re competing with your own back catalog.

It doesn’t feel good. I’ve had trouble getting away from that.

You’ve done most of your organizational work in the context of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, so maybe we should talk about that more specifically. I’ll give you my impression of the reasons for its founding, and you can tell me if I’m right. You and some other people decided it would be wise to institutionalize things a little bit more, so that the community is no longer so dependent on individuals who come and go. With a foundation and a funding model and all of these institutional aspects, hopefully you set up the community for the long haul, so that it can survive if a server goes down or someone goes away.

Yeah, that’s exactly where it started. We’d been running for decades on people just setting up a server somewhere and saying, “Hey, I’ll run this thing!” That was the original IF Archive, the Usenet newsgroups, IF Comp, the Interactive Fiction Database, the IF Forum. It was workable, but everything was being paid out of somebody’s pocket. There wasn’t a lot of discussion about who was doing what or how much it cost. There was no fallback plan and no thinking about what would come next if somebody stopped doing something. Like, there was a long period when IFDB wasn’t getting any updates because Mike Roberts had a day job. Some things about it were clunky and hard to use, but you couldn’t fix them.

So, in 2015 or early 2016, Jason McIntosh, who was running the IF Comp at that point, had a conversation with somebody who said, “Why don’t you have a non-profit organization to support the IF Comp? Then you could get donations from people.” And Jason started running around in circles with a gleam in his eye, saying, “Yes! We should do this! We should do this! Whom do I know who can help?” He started talking to other people who were longtime supporters of things in the community. That included Chris Klimas, who had been supporting Twine for three or four years, and me — I’d been supporting the IF Archive for a while. Then Carolyn VanEseltine and Flourish Klink joined. Flourish was the only one who knew how to set up a non-profit. They had run a Harry Potter fan conference as a teenager, and, being excited and not knowing things were hard, had just done it.

We got into contact with the same lawyer Flourish had used. The lawyer told us what we needed: forms, bylaws, etc. Jason was the first president, I was the first treasurer. We went down to my bank and opened a business account for the organization. Then we wrote to the IRS to become a 501 C3 non-profit. We set up a website, found someone to give us a basic Web design and a logo. Then we announced it.

At the start, we just did the IF Comp; we collected about $8000 that first year for a prize pool. But over the course of the first couple of years, we added Twine and the IF Archive. The IF Forum was the next big addition. Then the IF Wiki and IFDB. Today each has its own steering group. And we have a grants committee now.

The NarraScope conference is another IFTF project. Would you like to tell a bit about that?

That was my idea. I’d always been keen on the idea of having a narrative-game-oriented conference. I’d been going to GDC for many years. GDC has a sub-track, a narrative-game summit, which is where people like Emily Short and Jon Ingold hang out. But it’s a very tiny slice of what GDC is. And of course GDC is expensive, so it’s hard to bring in the hobbyists and the indie people and the people who write IF Comp games. They just can’t afford GDC. I wanted to provide an alternative that was more approachable and affordable and friendly.

Once we as an organization had steady members and contributors and could bring in money, I said, “It’s time to think about a conference. Our first de novo project.” So, I talked to people I knew who had been involved in conferences, like the Myst fan conference, which is a very tiny thing that happens every year, like 100 people. But it’s been going for years and years. And of course Flourish had run a fan conference.

In 2017 or 2018, I went to GDC with a bunch of business cards that said, “We want to run an interactive-fiction, adventure, and narrative-oriented game conference. Want to help us?” I handed one to everybody I talked to. I found a bunch of people who were interested in helping. Nick Montfort said he could get us a space at MIT for the event relatively cheap. We put up a call for speakers, a website, etc. We were coordinating with the IFTF Education Committee, which is run by Judith Pintar, who goes all the way back to Shades of Gray.

Yeah, I had a great talk with Judith some years ago now.

I had strong opinions about how a friendly conference should feel. We had to bring in lunch so people would sit around and have conversations rather than splitting up and running all over Cambridge. I wanted long breaks between talks so people would have space to socially interact. I wanted badges that didn’t distinguish between speakers and attendees; we’re all here, and we’re not going to have superstars. I wanted an open and honest tone.

We made sure to have a keynote speaker who wasn’t an old fart. We didn’t want somebody like Scott Adams coming in and talking about what it was like back in the 1980s.

You didn’t want to become a retro-gaming conference.

Right. And we deliberately made the scope larger than just interactive fiction as found in the IF Comp or the IFDB. We didn’t want to limit the conference to those topics. We kept the admission price down to about $85.

That was 2019. We had about 250 people, and everything miraculously went perfectly. The worst disaster was when the Dunkin’ Donuts guy was dropping off coffee and hot cocoa. One of the urns blew its spout and dumped gallons of cocoa all over the floor. Someone said, “I know where there’s a mop,” and went and got the mop and cleaned it up. Great, let’s have the rest of the conference!

Local game companies made contributions, maybe $500 or $1000. Between that and the registration fees, the conference broke even. I admit that I threw in $2000 myself to make it balance, but that was because we splurged out and rented a bar on Sunday night. I said, okay, I’ll cover that, so that everybody can go out and have pizza and beer.

It was a huge success. We said we would do it again next year. But of course next year was 2020. You know how that story goes.

But it was exciting enough that we wanted to keep going anyway, so we had an online event in 2020. We skipped 2021, then came back in 2022 with an online conference. Then we had a hybrid model for 2023 in Pittsburgh and 2024 in Rochester. And that’s the history of the thing in a nutshell. By now I’ve become just an advisor, which is a great relief.

How many people have attended the later conferences?

It’s very easy to attend an online conference, so about 500 or 600 people signed up for those. But in person in Pittsburgh, there were about 100, either because people didn’t want to travel in the pandemic era or because we were offering an online option, so a lot of people who could have showed up decided to stay home and watch the stream instead. This year was a little higher, like 120.

You were at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester this year?

Yeah. The space was spread out, which turned out to be a win, because we had to walk through the museum and walk past all the cool exhibits. People were jumping out between talks to explore the museum. It was a really neat space — but unfortunately more expensive than a university.

And there will be another conference in 2025?

There absolutely will. It’s going to be in Philadelphia at Drexel University. NarraScope has not yet become big enough to replace GDC, but we’re optimistic. [smile]

I don’t think you want that. It becomes very bureaucratic and soulless.

Yeah, obviously. But Justin Bortnick, who is the current IFTF president, has been talking to GDC about booth space to present IFTF on the show floor. The Video Game History Foundation had a booth there this year. We thought, we’re educational too! We could do that! It may actually happen.

Maybe we can wind up this conversation by talking about the current status of the IF community itself. For many years, it seemed to be quite stagnant in terms of numbers. We already talked about the outreach efforts that took place around 2005 and largely did not succeed. But about five years later, the hypertext systems started to come online. There was a big jump at that point. If you look at the number of games entered in the Comp, they actually trend down through the 2000s, then suddenly there’s a big spike around 2010 to 2012. They’ve stayed at quite a high level since then. Do you have a sense of whether these new, presumably younger people are jumping over to the parser-based stuff as well?

There are new faces on both sides. There is now an active group of retro-fans interested in parser games. That is, people who are excited about making new games and running them on Commodore 64s and the like. We had to update Inform to fix the support for the version 3 Z-Machine, which had been broken over time as everybody was writing bigger and bigger games. Now people want to write small games again.

And there is more interest in hybrid systems, intermediate models which are neither pure hypertext nor pure parser. For years and years, there were no new parser tools. I thought the last great parser development systems had already been implemented; people would stick with TADS 3 and Inform 7 forever. Then a parser system called Dialog appeared, which is a little bit different from them.

But there is certainly more energy on the hypertext side, especially because a lot of us old farts have drifted away. I’m not writing games anymore, Emily Short isn’t writing text games anymore, Jon Ingold and Aaron Reed went off and did their things, Adam Cadre went off to work on film scripts. There are new people writing new games, but I think the pool is going to shrink over time. But that’s okay. Everything that Jon Ingold has done at Inkle Studios is informed by the early text games he worked on and how he wanted to expand that to reach a bigger audience. Everything Sam Barlow has done — Her Story, Telling L!es, Immortality — is informed by his experience writing text games. The same goes for Emily Short. It’s still part of the conversation. It’s just not the center of it anymore.

Yeah. This is a discussion I’ve had from time to time since I started this site. My opinion is that when our generation dies that will probably mark the end of parser-based text adventures. You can say that’s tragic if you want to. At the same time, though, nobody’s writing plays like Shakespeare anymore, but Shakespeare’s plays are still out there.

And there’s still theater.

Yeah. Trends in interactive media, just the same as others forms of entertainment and art, come and go. They have their time, and then their time is over. I’m quite at peace with that.

I’m sort of handicapped by the fact that I haven’t played IF Comp games in quite a while.

I haven’t either. To be honest, I’ve played almost nothing made in the last ten years, just because I have so many old games on the syllabus for this site. Having too many games to play is not the worst problem to have, but it’s made me kind of a time traveler. I live in the past in that sense.

I do know that this year’s IF Comp winner was by Chandler Groover. I don’t think he’s our age. Ryan Veeder is younger than us.

I do look at the Comp website sometimes to see what’s going on. I’ve noticed that it still seems to be a parser-based game that actually wins the thing most of the time. That’s a sign of something, I guess.

Yeah. Maybe it’s a sign of old farts hanging on too long? But seriously, I think there is a new generation of parser-game authors. Whether it’s big enough to sustain itself after you and I are doddering in a nursing home, I don’t know.

There’s been so much progress with computer understanding of natural language. A lot of it is associated with large language models, of course, which is a fraught subject in itself. But I could imagine a system — a front-end — that could take natural language and translate that into something a traditional parser could more readily understand, then funnel it through even an old text adventure. I’m kind of surprised I haven’t heard of anything like that.

Someone did do that as an experiment and posted about it on the forum. Experimenting both with using LLMs on the input side to translate natural language into parserese, and also on the output side to translate generic room descriptions into more flowery, expanded text. I’m more interested in the input side because I like hand-crafted output, but that’s getting into the whole question of AI.

Yes, I have no interest whatsoever in reading AI-generated text in any context.

I think there wasn’t a lot of uptake on that idea just because the kind of people who are excited about AI aren’t excited about parser games in the first place. There have been several attempts to make an AI-generated text adventure, but they’ve all been by people who were not good at text adventures and didn’t know what they wanted out of it. There’s AI Dungeon, which uses an LLM to pretend to be a parser game. But because it’s all AI generated, it doesn’t really produce anything interesting.

The people who are interested in making parser games are mostly old-fashioned artisans who want to hand-craft everything and are not motivated to dive into AI as a shiny new pool. It might be different if someone who was an established parser-game author jumped in and wholeheartedly tried to make it happen. Revolutions are the result of one person getting involved and building something that takes off. Someone has to actually do the work. And to this point, nobody has done that. It’s very possible the whole AI thing will collapse in six months anyway.

I think that’s a very good possibility, but I think that if it does, it will leave behind some pieces in the rubble that are actually useful. Maybe a solution to our parsing problems can be one of them.

But I’ve kept you long enough. Thanks so much for the talk!

Thank you!

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