Words, Words, Words

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
-- Rudyard Kipling

Faced with the prospect of eight actual days of vacation, I faced a familiar conundrum: what to play. Since this vacation is the biennial trip to the in-laws, console games were out. I knew before I even packed it that my DS would be monopolized by cousins most of the time, so this left laptop games.

My first thought was Gametap. Thanks to Gametap, my laptop already has countless old-school games, and I'm behind on Sam & Max episodes. But the problem with Gametap remains its connectivity requirements, and the in-law compound features spotty wireless coverage poached from the neighbors. But then a friendly email to the Conference Call mailbox mentioned text adventures.

Which cued this conversation on AIM:

GWJRabbit: So, favorite text adventure of time?
Certis: Um. None?

The problem with text adventures is that they're dead. Just as video killed the radio star, that first King's Quest (or it's ilk) and an ill-fated business move by Infocom killed the commercial genre for good. At the time, this wasn't necessarily a bad thing; Infocom games had become very hit or miss as the company went into its death throes. Because of this well-documented, well-understood, and perhaps well-deserved death, I hadn't considered playing one in at least a decade.

First stop on the trip down memory lane was my favorite Infocom game of all time. Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy has been rehashed a dozen times, and most recently was resurected with a very thin layer of illustration by the BBC. An hour's play reminded me why the game is so brilliant -- if you've read the book, it lets you re-live the story from a new perspective. It's like re-reading a classic written in a different voice (something brilliantly done by Orson Scott Card in his alternate "Ender's Game" story, "Ender's Shadow").

Stop two was Leather Goddess of Phobos. Tongue firmly in cheek, it remains a blast to play. The game begins by forcing players to choose genders, and despite the lewdness of the plot line, the free-wheeling nature of writing for an adult audience made the prose itself worthy of reading. Unfortunately, playing today on Gametap (or one of the countless abandonware sites) robs players of the best part of the game: the DRM scheme. The original box (which, sadly, I lost in a move somewhere in the big-hair era) contained a 3d comic book and a scratch-and-sniff card which were required in order to get all the way through the game. (Thankfully, you can skip this with the help of online hints).

A few hours between the two titles, and I passed through the nostalgia-barrier and ran into reality. While these are both brilliant games, they suffer from Infocom-itis -- an excessive reliance on constructive puzzles, and in general, length. Text games require significant mental commitment. There are no maps, no convenient clues, no journals one click away to remind you where you are and what you've done. On firing up a text adventure from a save game, you either need notes or a very good memory to remember all the potential clues that have come before. Unlike Phoenix Wright, there's no inventory of conversations and flavor text that might yield the answer to some stumping puzzle. In other words, text adventures are ultimately most effective when played in a single sitting.

Thankfully, what survives of the genre, in the form of a small but productive "Interactive Fiction" subculture, understands brevity. The IF community revolves around an annual competition, the IF Comp. The rules of the IF Comp have a critical requirement, which is that judges may play a game for no longer than two hours before assigning a rating. Consequently, the small band of writers who keep the genre alive write short games, and some of them are flat out brilliant. (A separate award system, with different rules, is run by the XYZZY webzine.)

My first exposure to this new breed was Adam Cadre's 9:05. 10 minutes later, I was done, and realized I'd missed something. I played it again. Different ending, realized I'd missed something. I played it again and I got goosebumps. This incredibly short game is an object lesson in the true power of the medium -- the power of writing in the second person. And in realizing that, I had to face another reality -- text based adventures are, more than anything, works of literature. Not necessarily good literature, but then again, crappy romance novels are in the fiction section of Borders alongside Mark Twain and Herman Melville.

In the world of bookstore literature, the second person "You walk down the hall ..." is unknown, with a few minor, experimental exceptions. But it's the default of every Infocom game, and almost video game -- text based, 3d whizbangery, MMO and everything in between. Done well, this locks the player/reader into the roll of the protagonist. Every First Person Shooter, while putting you in the first person perspective visually, actually addresses you in the second person. Half Life to Gears of War has the action happening to the player, and therefor the games implicitly address the player as "you." A script for Gears of War might read "You shoot the bad guys." As the protagonist in Oblivion or LOTRO or WoW, dialog is addressed to the player in the same way: "Thanks, I really appreciate you killing those 20 bears. Here's your 12 silver."

When you remove the barriers to imagination (the shiny graphics and aggressive soundtracks) and replace them with the simplicity of the written word, the impact of being forced into the role of the hero, villain or victim is much more powerful. Combined with the genre's discovery of brevity, the IF community has reinvigorated the very idea of the short story, and the results can be startling. Vespers, a game by Jason Devlin and winner of the 2005 IF Comp, is my stumbled-upon icon. Set in a small setting (a monastery) the game succeeds where most horror fiction fails -- it's truly horrifying but maintains a pacing that borders on the laconic. It creates a sense of personal connection and inevitability which left me shivering in the 100 degree poolside heat of my vacation. Vespers is so compelling that, ironically, a project is underway to illustrate the game with a hybrid 3d graphics/text adventure engine (which to me seems contrary to the whole point).

Perhaps it's the complete lack of commercial viability that keeps the genre alive. Like modern art, it can be hard to know what to make of the current crop of Interactive Fiction. Some of it is Infocom derivative, relying on mechanical puzzles. XYGGY's 2006 award winner, "The Elysium Enigma" is in this camp. In order to "win" the protagonist needs to solve highly irrelevant "collect these three things and do something inobvious" puzzles. But it's worth playing anyway because the act of discovery is itself interesting enough to skip through the puzzles with the help of the hint file.

This kind of discovery-without-puzzle is where the genre works the best. In Cadre's 9:05, discovery and exploration is all there is. In many ways this means there is no game -- there is no score, there is no winning, there is simply finishing. 9:05 can be played through in 5 minutes, and certainly won't last longer than 15 even if you explore every piece of the, um, game.

When put in the context of text, a five minute game seems no more irrelevant than a sonnet or a 5 minute song. Put in the context of text, two hours exploring Vespers is as moving and terrifying as a well made film. While 9:05 and Vespers aren't Shakespeare, they do compress a tone, an image, and a sense of being into a tight package. And by relying almost entirely on IF's signature feature -- second person -- they lock you into the role of protagonist, and most importantly, refuse to let you go.

And that, ultimately, is the whole point of gaming -- to be someone else for a while.


A Note on Access

Because the current generation of IF lives on the very fringes of gaming, literature, and geek, it can be an exercise in frustration just to access the games. Half a dozen standards exist for interpreting the games and presenting them on nearly any computing device you can imagine. While the IF archive contains all the pieces you might want, the servers for most of the IF community seem to be dirt-slow and poorly organized PDP-11s appropriate to the era from which the genre came. The Brass Lantern is probably the best resource for getting your feet wet, but I've packaged up half a dozen better game files and interpreters here for folks looking to explore.

Comments

If you don't mind the full-length Infocom-style games, Christminster, by Gareth Rees, is my very favorite. I think it's better than any of the Infocom games. The writing is just delicious.

Wow. Nice work, Rabbit.

Nice work! You could have tried some of the 7 day rogue-likes while you were out there, too. I particularly like DoomRL, myself.

Thanks for the zip, will check it out.

An IF article not by KaterinLHC? Who'da thunk it?

And yet I don't get any mention for my 3rd place IF Comp win in 2003? *sniff* I thought we were bros, rabbit. You gave me your brain and everything.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

An IF article not by KaterinLHC? Who'da thunk it?

I know; the apocalypse is near! Still, I think rabbit did quite well on this one - even if he didn't mention that I was the one who pointed him toward Vespers.

Share Quintin!!!

And Yes, Sorry, I should have tossed mucho love Kat's way. She's the queen bee on this topic, i am but a follower.

Wow, after that great article rabbit, one almost says to oneself, 'Self, do you really need an X-box' . The answer is: Of course you do now that you got a big HD TV to play on. However, at the same time I am drawn to try out some games in the forgotten genre of the text based game. Oh well back to work... The time limitations imposed by life actually end up dictating what can and can't get played. Games you can play and finish in a single session currently do have great appeal.

I miss playing MUDs.

1) You called?
2) Nice reference.

I still love Eric the Unready.

But I can't imagine any standard homo sapian actually playing through a text adventure in one sitting. Perhaps some strange perversion or other deviation from the species.

Buzz, buzz.

wordsmythe wrote:

1) You called?
2) Nice reference.

I still love Eric the Unready.

But I can't imagine any standard homo sapian actually playing through a text adventure in one sitting. Perhaps some strange perversion or other deviation from the species.

Buzz, buzz.

Depends on the game. Modern IF is not the same beast it was back in the Infocom era. Some games don't even require a map!

Plus, you can always save your game.

rabbit wrote:

Share Quintin!!!

Scavenger. Fans of Planetfall seem to enjoy it.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Depends on the game. Modern IF is not the same beast it was back in the Infocom era. Some games don't even require a map!

Plus, you can always save your game.

Well, my comments were coming from someone who can't devote the time or attention to play a game longer than an hour at a stretch most of the time. I used to be able to stay up all night on a game, but that was when I was younger. I think I tend to assume younger people are all mutant freaks. I should probably work on that.

Mixolyde wrote:

Nice work! You could have tried some of the 7 day rogue-likes while you were out there, too. I particularly like DoomRL, myself.

Now that DoomRL is mentioned I feel necessary to plug Monsterland because it is more textmode Doom than DoomRL can ever hope to be.

You forgot to mention the best thing about text adventures - you can play them at work without getting busted. A command prompt is a lot more stealthy than a screen full of polygons.

The first program I ever wrote (other than a hello world script) was a text adventure in Basic on an Apple II.

It was simple stuff, but I still sometimes think about writing another one, as I absolutely loved the medium.

Man, it sux that I can't remember those ...

The 327th Male wrote:

You forgot to mention the best thing about text adventures - you can play them at work without getting busted. A command prompt is a lot more stealthy than a screen full of polygons.

This is very true. I never played more text adventures than when I was at my crappy previous job. It helped dull the pain and boredom.

Mordiceius wrote:

I miss playing MUDs. :(

Yeah, I used to play a mud based on the Discworld series of books by Terry Pratchett. Hell, I even was a Creator there for a little while. Still am, afaik, though I haven't been active in ages. Ah, good times...

Ah Leather Goddesses of Phobos...I got that game from a friend and played it on my Apple IIe.

I wasn't able to complete it, but I also didn't realize there was additional material (a comic book, etc.) to help with progression.

I was also a kid back then, and was entertained by this "adult" content in a computer game.

I also want to mention : great article Rabbit!

I will try to remember to check out your links at home sometime.

I've never been more "addicted" to a game than I was to ABER MUD's

In this category, I would highly recommend Photopia which won the IF award in 98.
It's more interactive fiction than puzzle, but its a very moving story that can be read in about half an hour where the interactive format is incredibly affective.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photopia

Good article! I was a big IF fan back in my formative years, starting with Colossal Cavern and moving on to Zork I (still my favorite in the genre), and then most of the other Infocom games. I don't think its true that graphics killed IF. Easy access to clues and walkthroughs via the internet did. Part of the appeal of IF is the slowly unfolding story, which you -ideally- solve by yourself or a few friends gathered around the CRT monitor.

There are a few adventure games I replay from time to time just because the story was so compelling (Sanitarium, Grim Fandango, yes Zork) but I'd have to have NO internet access in order to enjoy new ones as much as those. I'm weak that way.

Running Man wrote:

I don't think its true that graphics killed IF. Easy access to clues and walkthroughs via the internet did. Part of the appeal of IF is the slowly unfolding story, which you -ideally- solve by yourself or a few friends gathered around the CRT monitor.

It's a nice theory, and certainly that contributed to the downfall of the adventure genre in general, but with regards to IF specifically, there's the issue of timing. The Internet didn't attain widespread, easy-to-access use until, what, the mid-90's? By that point, IF had long been dead, at least in a commercial context. Infocom, the largest produced of commercial text adventures and certainly the company most closely associated with the genre, closed its doors for good in 1989, only after several years of financial struggles and a buyout by Activision. (Shameless plug: You can read more about the story of Infocom here. ETA: There appears to be a problem with the archived link that cuts off a good portion of the first page of text. You'll have better luck with the PDF version of the archived article... if I knew how to find that after the revamp. :))

I'd actually argue that the Internet did more than anything else to save the interactive fiction genre, through the IF Comp, which rabbit has mentioned (and - shameless plug again! - you can read more about that contest's history here) and, more importantly, through the rec.arts.int-fiction/ rec.games.int-fiction Usenet communities. If it weren't for the Internet, TADS, Inform, AGT, and all the other various languages that authors use to write IF would never have been distributed; and without the Internet, there would be no way for the games themselves to have been distributed, either. So while, yes, it's obvious that the Internet has had a profound effect on the way adventure games are played, that effect - at least in the case of IF - isn't quite what you've argued.

Corwin wrote:

In this category, I would highly recommend Photopia which won the IF award in 98.
It's more interactive fiction than puzzle, but its a very moving story that can be read in about half an hour where the interactive format is incredibly affective.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photopia

Just make sure you have a box of tissues nearby. A large one, preferably.

KaterinLHC wrote:

Just make sure you have a box of tissues nearby. A large one, preferably.

Haha, you know Kat, that can be read two different ways.

Quintin_Stone wrote:
KaterinLHC wrote:

Just make sure you have a box of tissues nearby. A large one, preferably.

Haha, you know Kat, that can be read two different ways. :)

Um, I meant the crying way. The other way is icky, especially when you consider the game is about a little girl.

Yay TADS! I bought it and wrote my senior project in college using it. It related to implementing a plot graph using directed acyclic graphs. TADS' object oriented technology made it possible.

I just downloaded it from the RAIF archive and will update the file names and formats. Reading through the paper is like opening a old and dusty chest in the back attic of my brain. I actually refer to other papers related to IF that I wrote before it. Time to go find those documents and bring them up to date too. (New file formats, etc.)

It's the plotdag.zip file in the TADS 2 examples section here.