Twisty Little Passages Page 2

  Interactive fiction, that type of computer program exemplified by the text adventure, was a significant part of the early computing experience and has been a major current in electronic literature. Works in this form became the first best-sellers on PCs during the early 1980s, and have clearly influenced software engineering, interface design, online communities such as MUDs and MOOS, and other forms of digital and nondigital media. Authors of interactive fiction include several important literary figures from the non-electronic realm. While the commercial heyday of interactive fiction is clearly over, the supposedly defunct form is still making advances. Today's authors, using free development systems, continue to innovate in the form, pleasing those nostalgic for the works of the 1980s and also attracting new devotees. The potential of interactive fiction is still being revealed-but clearly this potential is great, whether the form is considered only as a puzzling and challenging diversion or also as a new sort of literary art.

  Not everyone will immediately agree with the assertion that a work with aspects of a game, and with a history so involved with the entertainment software market, should be thought of in literary terms. Isn't the pleasure of the text adventure purely a ludic pleasure, or a pleasure related to mastery-one that comes from overcoming mental challenges formed as the verbal equivalent of jigsaw puzzles, with only one set solution? There are in fact other aspects of interactive fiction that prevent an easy affirmative answer to this question.

  For one thing, the puzzles in a work of interactive fiction function to control the revelation of the narrative; they are part of an interactive process that generates narrative. Roland Barthes offered, in The Pleasure (f the Text, an erotic concept of the reading experience. The text reveals itself in a sort of striptease, according to Barthes (1975), and the reader who skips boring passages resembles "a spectator in a nightclub who climbs onto the stage and speeds up the dancer's striptease, tearing off her clothing, but in the same order" as the author would have (11).As jean Baudrillard (1983) wondered, "What could be more seductive than the secret?" (64). (Perhaps there was something, but Baudrillard seductively chose to keep that a secret.) In interactive fiction, the secret is locked away and a different sort of effort-a puzzle solving that manifests itself as actual writing-is needed to unlock it. In text adventures, in part, the "pleasure is in solving them, in learning the secret" (J. Murray 1995, 137). Not only does the "reader" of a work of interactive fiction metaphorically climb up onto the stage and start ripping off clothing-this time in an order that he or she chooses-this person also figures out how to do so in order to proceed. The pleasure involved in interaction is not simply that of reading. Nor is it entirely alien from that of reading; if the component reading and writing processes are arranged using puzzles in such a way that the challenges of an interactive fiction world are hard enough and easy enough, the other elements can enhance, and be integral to, the reading pleasure that is involved. The person who reads and writes to interact is the "operator" of an interactive fiction in cybertextual terminology (Aarseth 1997); in general computing terms, this person is the "user." So as to emphasize that the actions of reading, writing, playing, and figuring out are all involved in such operation or use, the term "interactor" is used in this book to refer to a person in this role, following Joe Bates's Oz Project and other critics (J. Murray 1995, 161) who discuss interactive fiction specifically.

  Even aside from the fact that narrative disclosure can be controlled by puzzles, the combination of an explicit challenge and a verbal literary work has a clear precedent. The most direct counterpart to interactive fiction in oral and written literature is seen in the riddle, in true literary riddles such as those of the Latin poet Symphosius and of the early English text The Exeter Book. By presenting a metaphorical system that the listener or reader must inhabit and figure out in order to fully experience, and in order to answer correctly, the riddle offers its way of thinking and engages its audience as no other work of literature does. Interactive fiction is related to the riddle because the interactor, in facing a puzzle-based interactive fiction, is in a situation similar to that of the riddlee. In an interactive fiction work, the interactor directs a character (the "player character") in the interactive fiction world to enact an understanding of that world. "Riddle" comes from the Anglo-Saxon "raedan"-to advise, guide, or explain; hence a riddle serves to teach by offering a new way of seeing. Here, for example, is a short riddle (the assiduous reader will find the answer in the next chapter) that offers a new way of thinking: "I am the greatest of all teachers, but unfortunately, I kill all my students."

  There is also the sense of exploring a new world or space, independent of the events that transpire in that space and are narrated. The enjoyment related to this aspect is not tied to particular puzzles and their solutions, as one author describes: "In Adventure, much of the pleasure comes from the sense of going deeper and deeper into the cave and discovering unexpected passages. Monsters and treasures aside, it conveys the feeling of exploring a spectacular area" (McGath 1984, 21). Certainly this relates to the pleasures experienced in literary reading of other sorts.

  The interactor, confronting the riddle of an interactive fiction work, is a reader-and also a writer. Perhaps the interactor's true writerly ability (an ability to literally write and contribute to the text, not to be confused with the form of reading that is metaphorically called "writerly" by Barthes in S/Z) is not great, in existing works, when the amount of text contributed is considered. The interactor's useful writing generally consists of contributions such as go north, jump off the or eat a peach. But such texts are actually understood, within the specific domain of the interactive fiction world, by the work's parser. They are then translated, if possible, into actions. The interactor is not adding marginalia for later personal use or for some other reader's future reference, but is actually contributing writing that is part of the text and serves to operate the program, causing it to produce additional text that is interleaved with that of the interactor and meaningfully responds to it. At best, if we take the perspective of a unilinear narrative, the interactor can use such commands only to control how small-scale episodes play out; determining whole new plots not imagined at all by the author or designer is seldom possible in interactive fiction as it now exists. Even when taking this limited view of interactive fiction, the ability to vary certain episodes in this way is important. Different Greek tragedies that tell the same mythological story demonstrate this. Although the underlying stories are well known and what happens is fixed by convention, the episodic variation and the nuances and excellence of narration provided Greek dramatists with the ability to innovate within boundaries, even without control over what the important incidents of the drama would be. Determining the arrangement of the incidents was enough.

  In the future, interactive fiction may provide even more appealing possibilities for the interactor. It may allow for a more co-authorial role, or it may provide, by serving as a riddle in the richest literary sense, a more profound and responsive type of systematic world. Already, in the short history of the form-a form that has progressed in fits and starts-many interesting works have been executed, and many suggest new courses that could lead to works of greater power.

  Interactive fiction has been through about thirty years of history so far, although closely related forms go back centuries or even, in the case of the riddle, millennia. Interactive fiction began in an academic and research context, with early development seldom being part of any official research project. The form saw a commercial heyday when works were created in the context of game companies. It has been explored recently in new ways by individual authors participating in an active online community. A discussion of the form that explores the literary, gaming, and computing context in which it arose, and the influences on it and currents in it through these different stages of development, is timely. This book seeks to describe some of the intellectual history of the form and its relationship to other literary and gaming forms, and to co
mputing and other computer programs, while critically examining a representative selection of important works and describing their interrelationships. It would be impossible in a book of this size to provide even capsule reviews of all the works of interactive fiction that are of some importance or merit. Work in the form is already far too rich to offer anything but a catalog if an attempt were made to put together a truly comprehensive list. Resources online such as Adventureland (Meier and Persson 2002) and Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive (Muckenhoupt 2002) already provide sizable catalogs, anyway, with continuous updates as new works are released and as new details appear for old ones. This book instead considers trends and currents in interactive fiction and how particular innovations have expanded the conceptual range of the form.

  Text adventure and interactive fiction do not mean exactly the same thing. Despite the use of the term in the title of this chapter to draw a connection between reading pleasure and the pleasures of interactive fiction, the text adventure, however widespread it may be, is not the only type of interactive fiction possible or realized so far. An adventure is some out-of-the-ordinary undertaking involving risk or danger. A text adventure can therefore be described as an interactive fiction work in which the interactor controls a player character who sets out on out-of-the-ordinary undertakings involving risk or danger.Whether the impulse is correct or not, the term text adventure suggests to some people a popular and less literary work, since adventures have been, in contemporary writing, the domain of popular fiction.

  Not all interactive fiction works, and not even all classic works in the form, are text adventures. The third work from Infocom, Marc Blank's Deadline, is not a text adventure but a detective mystery, in contrast to the fantasy adventures of the Zork series and contemporary adventures such as Infidel. The setting is a house, and the entire plan of the house is provided in the documentation. Although interviewing murder suspects may be unusual for the interactor and may involve some danger to the protagonist, the situation is a very ordinary one for the main character, a detective. One could still argue that the intrigue involved qualifies Deadline for the "adventure" label, despite the ordinary setting. But it is difficult to make the case for other interactive fiction works, such as Exhibition by Ian Finley (a work without puzzles, based on observation through multiple perspectives and set in an art gallery) or Galatea by Emily Short (a conversation-based work set in a single room of a museum). It is true that most well-known interactive fiction works-including works of acknowledged literary quality, such as Robert Pinsky's Mindwlieel and Brian Moriarty's Trinity-are unambiguously text adventures, however. In referring to such a work, either "text adventure" or "interactive fiction" can be used. The term interactive fiction is usually abbreviated as "IF" by those who discuss it; this abbreviation is used at tines in this book.

  To those in the IF community today, it may seem exceedingly strange that others would object to the use of the term interactive fiction to refer to the type of work I've just defined. An aficionado of the form might react to such a challenge the way an author or bibliophile would if approached by someone and told, "I think the term `book' doesn't seem very appropriate. We'd prefer that you refer to these things as `bound sheaves.'" Yet, since some academics do look askance at the widely used and accepted term, the case for the term interactive fiction (which has been made before more briefly (Montfort 2000-2001)) is now presented.

  In tracing the origins of the term interactive fiction,Aarseth (1997, 48) has correctly pointed out that "interactive" has been used as a commercial catchword, to promise vague technological enhancements and improvements. Hypertext author and critic Michael Joyce (1995, 132) also finds the term risible, stating that the only truly interactive system he can think of is a pacemaker. Historically, "interactive" has been used with precision to distinguish computer processes that respond to user input during execution (as interactive fiction does) from batch processes (such as print jobs or fully automatic programs to create stories) that are completely configured beforehand and run without any user intervention. In computing, "interactive" is as specific and meaningful a terns as "kernel" or "compiler." Used in that sense, of course, the term interactive is very broad, but the phrase interactive fiction has its own history. It was apparently coined by Robert Lafore and popularized by Scott Adams of Adventure International more than twenty years ago (Liddil 1981; Lafore 2002), and was then used widely by Infocom to designate its canonical works and to refer to a work of exactly the sort discussed in this book. "Interactive fiction" is also used to designate the two Usenet newsgroups where these works are discussed: rec.games.int-fiction (where hint requests are fielded and announcements of new works are made) and rec.arts.int-fiction (for more theoretical discussion and requests for programming help). The annual Internet-wide competition for short works of this form is also called "The Interactive Fiction Competition."

  Certainly, the term interactive fiction has been used in many contexts to mean many different things. For example, chapter 7 of Jay David Bolter's Writing Space, called "Interactive Fiction" in both editions of the book, deals mainly with works more often classified as hypertext fiction, as do several articles from the early 1990s that have "interactive fiction" in their titles (Howell and Douglas 1990; Moulthrop and Kaplan 1991). (An early article titled simply "Interactive Fiction," however, is about exactly the types of works discussed in this book, "works of fiction which explicitly call upon the reader to interact with them by means of queries or replies" (Niesz and Holland 1984, 111).) I have also used the term in a more expansive sense, employing it to designate certain print literature, hypertext fiction, and conversational characters along with the form that is the focus of this book, textual interactive fiction (Montfort 1995). The different meanings of the term in different contexts do not present a real problem, though. The words "program" and "poem" have also been used, after all, to mean many different things; used carefully they still serve well. Broader categories than interactive fiction (as it is discussed here) can be indicated by other good terms such as "computer literature," "electronic literature," "cybertext," and "digital art." When discussing works that have text adventure-like interfaces and simulated settings while allowing works without adventuring motifs to be included, as in this book, the best term still seems to be that used by those who create works in this form: interactive fiction.

  "The history of interactive fiction in the twentieth century has yet to be written," Graham Nelson, IF author and creator of the Inform development system, states in introducing the most comprehensive historical survey of the form so far, a twenty-two-page chapter in his Inform Designer's Manual (2001b, 342). Important individual works have, fortunately, had historical articles written about them, and Adventure and Zork get frequent mention in popular histories of computing. Parts of two books have been devoted to a detailed study of Deadline (Aarseth 1997; Sloane 2000), a Ph.D. dissertation has been written on Adventure (Buckles 1985), and Zork has been treated in sections of one book and one Ph.D. dissertation U. Murray 1997; Laurel 1986). Dennis Jerz's recent annotated bibliography (2001a), an invaluable resource, joins a wealth of online information about the details of interactive fiction's past. Discussion on newsgroups has also helped to clarify many aspects of early IF works and their development, and reviews of works have made it easier for interactors to select those of most interest without weeks of interactive effort. There have also been numerous books about programming interactive fiction on hone conputers.Yet a book or book-sized resource on interactive fiction's history and implications-one that considers how the form came into being and how it developed through the decades, with basic theoretical discussion of the nature of the form and at least an introductory critical discussion of important works-has never been published.

  The more recent form of hypertext fiction has been either a major topic in, or the sole subject of, more than a dozen books. This bodes well; all those interested in the future of the word on the computer should applaud that this
branch of electronic literature is beginning to be taken seriously, is the focus of criticism and analysis, and is progressing toward much-deserved acceptance within academic and literary communities. Hypertext fiction is still relatively neglected, and additional, thoughtful study should certainly be undertaken to investigate it and to call attention to its promises and merits. More important, authors should continue to create challenging and thoughtful works of hypertext fiction and should try to bring them to readers inside and outside the university.

  It is unfortunate, however, that while hypertext fiction has gained some acceptance in academic and literary circles, interactive fiction has usually been dismissed as a triviality. Even worse is the fact that hypertext fiction authors and critics have often quickly joined in its dismissal, sometimes without ever experiencing interactive fiction or after only slight exposure to the form.To see one reason why a solid treatment of this form needs to be written, one need only consider this selection from the single page that mentions interactive fiction in Ilana Snyder's Hypertext: The Electronic Labyrinth (1996):

  The precedent was Adventure, developed in the 1960s at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). The program was conceived of as an experimental game. A computerised version of role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, Adventure comprises a series of descriptions of fictional locations inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy The Lord of the Rings (1954), and set in the surrounding Californian mountains. (87)