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An analysis of interactive fiction as literature

Originally published on Gamer-girl.org in 2005

Posted on January 8th, 2008

by Lord Dimwit

West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

>

The minimalist, famously blasé sentences, the simple, stark forms, the language itself leaving everything to the imagination, and then the command line, the payoff, the desire, the plea for a response to the output—it’s recognizable by anyone who grew up attached to the exploits of tiny pixelated men working their way through a world of girders and ladders as the opening scene of Zork, a now-ancient game that exercised a power so paranormally kinetic that it could make middle-school students and middle-aged accountants alike risk retinal damage by whiling away the night trying to get the thief to surrender his stiletto or roaming through a coal mine whilst fending off malevolent vampire bats. Compare this old standby, now, to the opening scene of Andrew Plotkin’s Hunter, In Darkness:

Nearly -- nearly. The animal stink is rank and close. You raise your crossbow, try to peer beyond dark, wet stone.

>examine beast
You can see nothing of it; only a sense of movement, back and forth, in the depths of the cave ahead.

Something shifts in the darkness ahead, a great silent bulk. Your prey.

>shoot beast
You steady your aim; steady your breath; squeeze the trigger; wait for... nothing...

You stifle a snort of wry laughter. Weeks of practice -- and when you come to the moment, you forget to cock the crossbow. This game is an extremely old one, older even than Zork itself. It’s Hunt the Wumpus, an ancient text adventure game in which you can do only two things: move and shoot. Wander into a pit—or the claws of the diabolical Wumpus—and you die. Cadre’s introduction to his game—a classic cave crawl unpacked in a decidedly unclassical manner—reduces the player to the same binary simplicity that the archetypical Wumpus game did, but the situation has been reawakened, recreated through narrative. The genre has grown up; it’s been reworked from simple verb-noun command pairs and turn-the-dial-to-the-right-number-before-the-ogre-eats-you puzzles to works that experiment with all manner of not only puzzles, environments, and characters, but also with the very means by which a story is told and how the reader interacts with it. It’s even got a new name—interactive fiction, or “IF” for short.

What’s most unusual about the rise of IF is its shift of focus from the “puzzle” aspect of the text adventure (nobody played Zork because they thought the story was gripping; they played it to puzzle through and figure out what to do in that wretched coal mine) to a new emphasis on the tale being told, and the effect that it can produce on the reader. IF has puzzles (in fact, many of them are far more devious than anything in Zork), but you don’t do them just because they’re a sort of chore; you do them because of how they’ll advance the narrative, because each one is an essential part of the plot.

This, naturally, creates a narrative that the player must actually work to unfold, a digital text that can be extraordinarily difficult to read. At times the difficulty can transcend what you’re accustomed to getting from a game. Remember that last video game you played, the one that made you want to smash your controller into little bitty pieces, then stomp on those pieces until they’re reduced to dust, then pack that dust into a bomb and blow your game system to kingdom come? Harder than that. Much harder. It’s not just because it’s oftentimes extremely easy to lock yourself out of victory without realizing it (you might accidentally drop a seemingly useless giant rock down a well during the first scene of an IF game, then not realize that you need that rock to bash open the final door in the game until the very end, thus forcing you to restart the whole thing just so you can preserve that damn rock), but also because the game forces you to think in nonlinear manners. In a game like Halo, you pretty much just shoot bad guys, and if you get stuck on a particular section, you’re probably not shooting quickly enough, aiming accurately enough, or dodging effectively enough. In other words, if you keeping doing the same thing that you’ve been doing, you’re eventually going to get through it. If you keep trying the same thing over and over again in IF, however, all you get is a headache:

Bedroom
Your entrance disturbs the air. The flame undergoes a struggle and the furniture and walls stagger and billow. Mad shadows scurry across the room leaping from the bed to the night-table and back again, until finally settling in the folds of swaying curtains.

>examine lamp
A kerosene lamp fixed into a sconce above the bed tosses dense shadows everywhere. Mounted on the lamp is a glass funnel.

>get lamp
The sconce's grip around the lamp is tight. For a moment you stare at each other; it will never let go.

>get funnel
You wince as you touch the hot glass.

>touch lamp
Hot, velvety and furious with the motion of atoms.

>kill lamp
Curse you, lamp, curse you! From Gehenna's lake of fire I stab at thee! - you exclaim, shaking your fist at the wicked lamp. (from Gamlet)

No matter how badly you want that lamp, it’s clearly not going to succumb to your ownership if you keep typing the same lousy phrases over and over. How do you get it? Are you just missing the right combination of commands or do you need a special item or something else? Can you even get it? Is it important at all? IF takes netting red herrings to a level never dreamed of by traditional fiction; you can make even innocuous items in a good novel mean something to you, but that damn lamp just isn’t important to the plot (or... is it?).

Likewise, even the notion of the static text is eliminated in IF; the above exchange, if observed by some hidden camera in the room and faithfully transcribed in a physical text, it would be phenomenally pointless: some poor sap tries to pick up a lamp for about five minutes, then eventually wanders into the dark without it and gets himself killed. The story is only as dramatic, suspenseful, and altogether effective as you allow it to be; you are, in essence, invited to become a co-writer of its story. If you want, you can jump off the balcony at the very beginning of the game, or wait until the end and then stab yourself with a sword—it can be different every time.

In the Taco Junta
You've been in about a hundred thousand Taco Junta franchises over the years; you even have friends that work there. This one looks exactly like every other Taco Junta you've ever seen: same menu board hanging over the counter, same trash receptacles, same day-old tacos racked up in the back. The only difference is that this one's emptier: there are no customers.

The one server working today is lounging behind the counter, chewing gum.

>x tacos
The tacos were prepared quite some time ago and have been waiting patiently for someone to order them. They'll be waiting for a while.

>x girl
She looks like a typical Taco Junta server: fifteen years old, far more interested in the gum she's chewing than in dealing with customers, with no idea that there's such a thing as a $2 bill.

>ask girl about tacos
“Sometimes you just feel like a taco,” she says, with no enthusiasm whatsoever.

>cry
The countergirl looks alarmed. “Hey, don't cry,” she says. “It's okay. Here. Happy Thanksgiving.” She hands you a taco and looks quite pleased with herself.

>ask girl about gum
“Gum?” she says, perking up. “Do you like gum? I like gum! Wow, we both like gum! That's cool.”

>kiss girl
You kiss her on the cheek. The server takes a step back, looks you over, and spits out her gum. “Okay, let's go,” she says. The two of you make out for a while, till the countergirl gets bored and pops a new stick of gum in her mouth. (From I-0)

Now, in a “normal” game, you’re only able to interact with the girl behind the counter in a very unilateral manner; you walk up and talk to her and she sells you swords or ammo or hot dogs or something. If it’s a Final Fantasy game, there’s probably an elixir or something hidden in the dresser. If it’s a Grand Theft Auto game, you can probably rob or shoot the girl too. In I-0, however, you’re able to do pretty much everything with the girl that you would expect to be able to do in real life, including bombarding her with pepper spray (this, interestingly enough, causes you to lose the game). A seven-button controller just can’t compete with the range of possibilities suggested by a keyboard. Likewise, a static paper book, no matter how obscure, can’t mimic the variation of interactive fiction. No matter how many times you read Moby-Dick, Ahab is never going to decide that the White Whale isn’t such a nasty creature after all and instead go home and learn to play the cello.

This is not to say that each IF work provides a “code” that must be sorted through in order to get to what the game’s hiding from you. Adam Cadre’s Photopia is an IF game that’s impossible to lose. Even if you do something outlandish and stupid, the game nudges you gently in the right direction. It only takes about twenty minutes, even if you’re really no good at interactive fiction. There aren’t really any puzzles, and there are plenty of hints to guide you through those non-puzzles. What Photopia does have, however, is a story told well enough, mysteriously enough, and altogether engagingly enough to make it worth running through multiple times. It’s clearly not designed to be a game per se; it’s designed to be a story, but it’s a story that requires input from the reader to be told.

Interestingly enough, this new form of narrative hasn’t gone unnoticed by academics, who are often stereotyped as somewhat out of touch with what’s going on in the “real world.” University of California Riverside included IF as part of its intensely trendy “(dis)junctions” Conference in 2005. Is this a sign of increased academic attention to IF? Nick Montfort’s "Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction,” attempts to provide, if not a comprehensive theory, at least a means of discussing IF in the same codified manner as one would address a complicated work of literature. Monfort is probably the academic figure most involved in the study of IF, with at least a couple of books to his credit.

The primary innovation that Monfort has hit upon, I think, is that it’s extremely difficult to wrangle IF into any given critical scheme. You can look at it from a literary standpoint, from a computer science standpoint, even from a cinematic standpoint. Since the genre is so wide-reaching, since we have works like Photopia and Curses side by side, it’s virtually impossible to invent a set of rules that can apply to everything equally.

However, to what extent can IF works be considered “literature” in the traditional sense? Certainly they do not conform to the codes that we think literary works should obey: they don’t have any real materiality, no binding, no pages, nothing but pixels, they can’t just be “read” from beginning to end without the reader doing at least something, even if their interaction (as in Photopia) is minimal, they aren’t assigned as reading (if you can call it “reading”) in college classes, they almost never cost anything, and they’re even composed by people who we don’t really think of as writers in the traditional sense, at least not writers who deal with publishers, editors, and the other small army of people who stand in the way of anyone wanting to write My Very First Horror Novel. You need some basic coding skills and at least some grasp of the English language to turn out an IF piece, and then you can stick it on the Internet for everyone to see!

Perhaps because of these schisms, IF has always had a complex, slightly troubled relationship with the edifice of capital-L Literature. Graham Nelson, the venerable author of the Inform language, which allows the production of IF with an interface resembling that of Zork, is probably the figure who’s addressed the problem most directly:

Unreal City
This is a city side street, but as if seen through the grey of despair. People stream by, some of whom you almost recognise, as if dead. The street runs east-west, and to the north is a doorway into a grubby tenement building.

There is a brown fog about, like a winter dawn's. (from Curses)

Even a high-school literature student will be able to identify the scene as ripped directly from Eliot’s The Waste Land; the fictional landscape becomes real. There are many other more subtle references to Eliot in Curses as well:

Shadowy Hallway
This shambolic flat, extending to the east, shares a filthy hallway with the one upstairs. To the south, passers-by pass by along the street. Peeling-away posters have been stuck up on top of each other on the walls, in such a way that you can only read the most recent.

>x posters
“Bateaux Phlebas - toujours le dernier mot.” You briefly wish you had a dog called Toto, so as to be able to say “Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in England any more.”

>get poster
You hastily tear down the poster, but there's nothing interesting behind it, only painted graffiti: “Shantih Shantih Shantih.”

Later on in the same segment of the game, you’ll find yourself interacting with one of Eliot’s own hollow men, who, unsurprisingly, proves rather unresponsive at times, and refuses to steer his boat in any direction you might want it to go:

On board the Phlebas
A tourist river-boat, glass-roofed. You can climb out to the shore to the east. At the helm is a very strange man, at times almost a straw dummy, almost perhaps a hollow cut-out made of paper. He (or it) turns the wheel and casts his eyes to windward.

The hollow man mechanically says: “Where to, guv'nor? Me with my big mouth, I gone and done it again, calling you the guv'nor. I was down Margate Sands way once, had a bloke come on board, he thought any old destination would do, like a real place, like anywhere was real... We are the hollow men, I says, he didn't like that... Hurry up, please, it's time.”

There’s a minor puzzle to be solved here as well, one that, like many in Curses, requires you to think along unorthodox lines (and, like “The Hollow Men,” Curses ends—deliberately—not with a bang but with a whimper). Elsewhere in Nelson’s games, you’ll find yourself taking the position of Ariel in The Tempest and swilling absinthe whilst (indirectly) helping Proust to piece together A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu in Jigsaw. Nelson is probably the most traditionally “literary” IF author out there (in his other life, he’s a professor at Oxford), but the phenomena is hardly isolated. Echoes of Castiglione can be found in Cadre’s Varicella and hints of Faulkner in his Shrapnel; Gamlet is a bizarre Hebraic reworking of the Hamlet story (sort of); Slouching Toward Bedlam contains numerous Yeatsian themes; Anchorhead is intensely Lovecraftian... the list goes on. There is surely an effort, in some of the best IF out there, to ally the interactive fiction with the traditional fiction, to draw authority (or at least atmosphere) from great writing of the past. This is highly suggestive of connections between the two entities.

But IF, even with the new critical attention being paid to it, is studied far, far less than anything we usually consider literature. Why is this? The issue is not necessarily one of quality, because far worse things than the works I’ve mentioned in this article are published daily around the world. Nor is it an issue of access, because anyone with a computer (everyone has a computer) can get them, and they never cost anything. It’s not one even of difficulty; even setting aside works like Photopia, where difficulty isn’t factored in, we have little trouble regarding dense books as great literature (some would say it’s a required component of literature). The people producing many of these things have been doing it long enough, and writing about other people doing the same thing, and have spent enough time just thinking about the concept of the genre as a whole to grant it at least some measure of legitimacy. Hell, even Pinsky, our former poet laureate, has an IF game (called Mindwheel — look it up) in his past.

In the past month, fulfilling my duty as an English graduate student to squint angrily at people giving papers and ask them rather cranky questions, I’ve heard papers given on Barbie dolls, tattoos, dollar bills, rock bands, and lord knows what else. These are all categories that nobody really considers “literary,” but are nonetheless being apprehended in very literary manners. So, I’d like to ask whether we ought not to give IF more attention. What’ll happen as the genre continues to grow? What’ll happen if our most accomplished authors start writing interactive poems? What’ll happen if paper, as some tech-fanboy e-rags suggest, becomes obsolete and everyone is reading Literature on tiny little electronic books? Shouldn’t we, instead of (or at least in addition to) trying to read everything like a text, think about what the text of the future is going to look like?

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