Locked Door Puzzle

Interactive Fiction (IF) is the rather fancy term for what I remember calling text adventures back when they were still sold commercially and when a Spectrum was the best computer I could afford. Truth be told I was never very good at them, they fascinated me as they seemed, to my childish eyes, to tell a real story and so I had lots of them in my collection but to be honest I don’t recall ever finishing any of them. At the time I kept this quiet around the playground because I didn’t want to be the kid who was crap at games, but in retrospect it wasn’t so much a lack of skill on my part but a lack of good game design in the cheap Speccy tapes I was buying. Excuses for the mistakes of my youth aside, here’s a question for you. Did you know they still make these games?

I’m going to be posting some Game Focus articles about some of the brilliant modern IF titles so I thought, for the those of you who aren’t familiar with modern IF, I’d give you a quick overview of what it’s all about and why you should care. And if you like good stories in your games then you really should care.

The Lost World

Text based adventure gaming disappeared off our store shelves in the late 80’s amidst a sea of poorly designed titles and an audience being won over by impressive graphic adventures. Like Arthur Conan Doyle’s dinosaurs the text adventures didn’t really die out they just left our game stores and migrated into their own hidden underground kingdom. Tech geeks disassembling classic infocom games eventually led to homebrew tools allowing fans to make their own games. Over the years that community evolved from nostalgic fans trying to recapture the essence of great games they once loved, to surpassing them altogether producing some of the most interesting and exciting mixtures of story and gameplay you’ll find anywhere. In all honesty they’ve earned the term interactive fiction.

You can roughly split the output from the interactive fiction community into three distinct groups, though they might not like me simplifying it like this:

• Classic Adventures - These are games that still largely resemble the old text adventures. Grand epics and adventures filled with puzzles and the same kind of exciting stories you get in mainstream gaming.
• Experimental - Short works designed to play around with what interactive fiction can do. This can be anything from a story and puzzle free art exhibits to deceptively complex single move games.
• Literature - It might be subjective what is and isn’t literature but there’s a lot of modern IF that tries to tell startlingly deep, emotional and meaningful stories with some really accomplished writing.

Some of the classic adventures are great but to be honest it’s the latter two categories that are much more interesting to talk about. It’s with these titles that IF is leaving conventional video game story telling in the dust. Each year some absolutely amazing games are being made and very few people outside the IF community are playing them. To me it feels like such a colossal waste of talent.

Mods vs Rockers

For their part the Interaction Fiction authors, while lamenting the lack of commercial interest in their works, have isolated themselves from the rest of the games industry in a cocoon made of their own intellectual superiority. The community seems driven to produce innovative works and in that they have succeeded. However alongside that I get the impression that graphics, music or any other presentational flourish are perceived at best to be mere trimmings and at worst a distraction from the words. With such high quality material coming out of their small non-commercial community it’s not surprising that they might not think they have much to learn from the industry churning out endless vapid FPS titles.

From our side of the fence most of us pretty much ignore what’s happening with interactive fiction. Video gaming forums are filled with fanboys working themselves up into a moist frenzy over titles like Katamari Damacy and Ico preaching about the virtues of originality and innovation. Free experimental titles like Crayon Physics, Tower Defense and Narbacular Drop spread virally and reach a level of fame in the community,sometimes even being adapted into commercial releases. Sadly interactive fiction barely gets a look in beyond an occasional short article or a quickly dismissed forum post. As much as we might pretend to ourselves we’re all about game play and innovation, we do love a bit of eye candy. We want some shiny graphics and kicking music not a page of text.

My point is that there’s not much interaction between the IF and video gaming communities anymore and this is a real shame. Not because I dream of a perfect world where we all sit around a camp fire together singing hymns. The real tragedy of the situation is that there’s little cross pollination of ideas between the two camps. While video game developers will steal ideas (sorry, take inspiration) from anything from AAA retail hits down to silly flash games they’re not really taking advantage of all the amazing ideas the IF guys have come up. The flip side is just as true, there’s so much more the IF community could add to it’s output if they could harness some of the presentation skills that are pretty much the norm in video gaming.

Let Them Eat Cake

It would be easy to paint the IF community as a bunch of snobs clinging to their text parsers as they produce what they believe to be great works of literature and scoff at our silly violent Gears of War. It’s unfair though, the authors of modern IF all have to be an unusual hybrid of a decent programmer and a talented writer to create the titles they do. So expecting them also to be designers and musicians who can take advantage of what graphics and sound can add to their creations is asking a lot. If you look at the key IF websites out there few if any display sophistication in their presentation but the content is solid, which I think belies where the talents of these people rest. For that reason I think the plain text nature of most modern IF is born largely from technical restrictions and later justified in retrospect as being the best approach.

Browsing the popular IF newsgroups it’s clear that the community is well aware of its limitations: Games require a separate bit of software to run them, first time players have to learn the esoteric language used to interact with the games, games are stored in a vast archive with little to help a newcomer to distinguish titles of interest, and a lack of any real marketing outside of the community. If anything they seem resigned to their position as niche and non-commercial and are just happy to be part of it.

Personally I don’t want it to be this way. There’s a lot of great games being made here that people aren’t finding out about, and I know there’s a lot of intelligent gamers out there who’d really enjoy them if they heard about them. Some of this stuff deserves to be reviewed on gaming websites and in magazines alongside Halo 3 and Heavenly Sword but I don’t see that happening. So for my part I plan to cover IF in this blog as best I can, picking out some exceptional titles and looking at what they do well.

Experimental Titles

To tide you over until I get around to writing some of these promised articles about more substantial works, here’s a quick run down of some quirky little experimental pieces. These are all pretty short and will give you some idea of the inventiveness that I’m talking about. I’ve included links to Baf’s excellent IF index for each game and on some of the pages you should find a handy ‘play online’ link, for the rest you’re going to have to download an appropriate parser for your computer to get them running. It’s not brain surgery to get this stuff going though and if it’s beyond you then I doubt you’ll enjoy these games anyway.

Aisle

Shopping in a supermarket you see a brunette haired woman standing in front of you. What do you do next? That’s all this game asks, you’ve got a single move to react to this scenario. Do you stare at her, try to kiss her, take off all your clothes, or just break down into tears. Over and over again you play a single moment in time, seeing how each choice plays out differently leading to it’s own tragic or comic repercussions. It’s beautiful, it’s simple and there’s almost nothing else like it.

The Space Under The Window

This short piece is an incredibly experimental approach to story telling. You start with a brief description of the starting scene, and instead of issuing the typical commands that are staple of IF interaction you instead choose words from the text. The story expands or contracts based on the words you choose, adding more detail, revealing inner thoughts, or taking the plot down a different path.

Rematch

Another one move game but from a totally different angle. You and your friends are about to die, you’ve got one move to stop it from happening. It’s a puzzle and a shockingly complex one at that. Not everything is exactly the same each time around in this groundhog moment and to solve this conundrum you’ll need to discern patterns in the chaos. The final solution is also possibly the most complex command you’ll ever have to issue in an IF title.

Whom The Telling Changed

Based on the epic of Gilgamesh in this game interactive fiction is the story itself. As a camp fire teller relays a story both the player and a rival both attempt to affect the tale being told. It’s a really interesting look at how stories can change to suit their audience which is pretty much what this whole blog is about really.

Photopia

A lot has been written within the community about this notable little title. It’s a very personal piece of drama following a story from a variety of different perspectives, initially seeming unrelated but leading to a highly emotion point of convergence. It’s not actually very interactive which has been the main source of detraction for the title, but it does something different and does it well.

That’s all you’re getting for now. I hope you take some of this on board and check out some of the titles I’ve mentioned above. If you like them, get your friends to play them too. More people need to know about this stuff.