Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

For gamebook enthusiasts:

The Collector’s Editions are available for Flight From the Dark and Fire on the Water. Paperback version are reportedly forthcoming. Book 1 is expanded with extra entires; I am unsure about Book 2.

The Commonplace Book Project has been bouncing around the Internet. I’ve most recently spotted it here where it led its way to the new post at TIGSource.

Courtesy of Emily Short and Mark Bernstein, it looks like we have our first interactive fiction inter-blog argument going.

How could I resist joining in the fun? To continue from Mark Bernstein’s last post:

But it’s not quite that simple: a character placed in a hopeless situation is neither tragic or dramatic. A crucial point is that the hero must have options. We can see the options, and we can see how the hero cannot see them. But if you are the hero, it’s hard to see and to be blind at once.

My first thought there were all sorts of already existing examples of tragedy in interactive fiction — they simply depend on a crucial moment and reduce player agency at that moment (in a plausable or inplausable fashion depending on the work in question). However, what Mark refers to here is the genre of tragedy (and what I’d really call a sub-genre), with a slow build and obvious destination. Since the genre by definition has lots of “turn-off” points that the characters blindly speed by, there’s no way to render this in interactive form.

I’m going to have to grant this point for the moment, but this is hardly the entire meat and potential of tragedy. Consider Oedipus Rex. Certainly one could argue Oedipus should have stoppped asking questions, but the genuine tragedy had already happened; one could easily imagine an IF structured in this way, where the player is simply responsible for the relevations. (I can even pick a specific IF work structured this way, but I’m avoiding mentioning which due to spoilers.)

Or consider a pick-out-of-multiple-evils tragedy. In this case, no matter what happens someone is going to be unhappy. This kind of structure is unique to IF, but one could imagine Hamlet itself this way — had Hamlet managed a clean kill, so to speak, would he really be out in the clear? So perhaps it isn’t possible to kill off 3/4 of the cast — is that really necessary for a tragedy? (I can pick a specific IF work that models this concept also to an extent.)

Project Aon has the next of the Lone Wolf books up here.

(For quick reference: These are books published in the heyday of CYOA books written by Joe Dever. Project Aon is converting them to electronic format, with permission. They are quite good about respecting copyright and have gone through great pains to contact every artist involved in each project so their art can be used.)

Whilst there has been attention paid in scholarship to the CYOA form, the Gamebook variation gets relatively little attention. I’d say there are mechanics worthy of attention, like structural modifications to fit the constraints of the format (allowing for a companion NPC in one branch but having to kill him off before the branch ends because a player who takes the other branch won’t have met said character), simulation gaming aspects (such as a section in one Fighting Fantasy book which effectively simulates a tank battle) and meta-gaming (if you play GrailQuest without cheating, in one part you have to eat soup to cast a certain spell).

To start things off in my new location, I’d like to reproduce some of the “social verbs” from Nine Princes in Amber.

Does every verb get used in a thorough fashion in the game itself? No, unfortunately, but one has to appreciate the sheer gall of a game that has PROPOSE ALLIANCE WITH ERIC as a sample command.

HOSTILE: accuse, challenge, defy, demand, deny, insult, refuse, reject, shout, snarl, spit, sneer, threaten, yell

FRIENDLY: ally, bargain, calm, compliment, enlist, flatter, greet, help, join, hug, negotiate, offer, placate, support

NEUTRAL: ask, admit, beg, bluff, bribe, confess, discuss, explain, laugh, lie, mention, plan, plead, propose, say, shrug, smile, stall, surrender, talk, tell, wait, wink

RESPONSE: disagree, maybe, no, nod, ok, sure, yes

I refer here to Negotis: Book 1, from the IntroComp 2005, and Emily Short’s review:

I’m fine with the idea that there are many ways to solve a puzzle, some of which lead to better results than others: that’s deterministic, and on careful replaying I could get a good result on my own. There’s a kind of fun in this, if I’m in the right mood. But I see no fun in optimizing the success of a runthrough by saving and restoring until I happen to get the dice roll to come out in my favor.

There is lurking here the awkward relationship to variable simulationism that has always been in IF. Text naturally comes off as a discrete medium compared to a graphical game; the character might be standing in room X, not exactly 200 pixels to the right and 500 pixels forward from the entrance. Failure in a discrete medium invites a limited range of responses compared to a graphical one (where the player may be able to choose to run away in a multitude of directions rather than just ‘out’).

In Negotis, the gameworld itself does is not simulationist enough to maintain a simulationist PC. A discrete task it set before the player: they either succeed or not. A “sneak” skill modelled in, say, Morrowind, would have the sneak fail at a specific location (perhaps in the early first steps, or halfway through, or right as the character is about to reach the exit), meaning even if there is a random roll involved there are numerous ways to fail.

In a human-run RPG, the fun thing about stats is that they *do* give the player a way to customize his experience — by letting him design a character in advance and thus choose what sorts of experiences he’s likely to run into during play. Get rid of the character-design aspect and you’ve lost a lot of the point of having them.

Computer RPGs have the additional effect of the pleasure of seeing a character build. There are some computer RPGs with minimal character creation that justify their stats merely in that the player can build them up in the course of the story. Robert DeFord might have similar notions in mind, but the arc here unfortunately is not large enough to sustain any real feel of customization. (This is, of course, also merely an intro, so things in this aspect might turn out for the best.)

I also find (in its present state) the sheer process of character building simply isn’t strong enough to work here. I am reminded of the “strength building” in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness wherein if a player was not strong enough to perform a particular task, they found a box and pushed it back and forth a couple times until their skill magically increased.

Computer RPGs can suffer from the same problem, but they do at least give more an illusion of gradual development while possibly adding drama to a repetitive task. For example, the strength increase in Nethack for pushing a boulder requires pushing around 100+ times while the player is danger of being attacked and is running out of food.

So, jumping puzzles: ack.

To be more specific, back in the days of Super Mario Brothers, it was ok to fall in holes a bit, because anything bad either killed you or was a step away from death. The system was consistent.

However, that same mechanic was transported to games (such as Rastan) where you had a great deal more “health” and while one could take 10+ “hits” a fall into a pit still killed instantly. It’s jarring in this context because the player has to deal with two gradations of failure, one that allows a (relatively) large number of mistakes and one that does not.

To summarize: failure can be swift if a mistake is made (large gradation) or gradual with an accumulation of mistakes (small gradation).

IF (if it has it at all) tends to be focused on instant failure. If something goes wrong
*** You have died ***
rather than the situation becoming slightly more complex or difficult to handle. (Which is essentially what happens if one is “hit” in a platformer — the character has less health points, or is off balance, or is in an awkward position.)

In the early days of IF, small gradation happened to a degree because of resurrection. Players could sacrifice a number of points for a revival. Once scoring systems because less fluid, UNDO was introduced and players reached for the RESTORE command more, this practice died out.

In modern works with no scoring system, it would be possible to design a work of IF with built-in gradual failure. These failures would essentially be plot branches, perhaps presenting an extra difficulty in a puzzle. For example, a character might set off an alarm while sneaking into a house; rather than sending a *** You have triggered the alarm *** message, the character may just have more guards to deal with later. Of course, one might expect players to RESTORE and rectify the situation, but if the puzzle in question is difficult enough, the player may decide it is worth skipping the puzzle and dealing with the guards instead.

Let it be said: multiplayer puzzles are hard. Back at my first post I discuss how a puzzle where two players push buttons simultaneously is changed into a natural action.

However, sadly, such a setup is often presented as a puzzle. Surely, multiplayer puzzles can be more interesting than “everyone perform action X in multiple locations”. (To be technical, I’ll call them symmetrical puzzles.)

The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventure presents some excellent multiplayer puzzle design. A brief overview: the style is 2D action-adventure, like Zelda in the SNES days; there are four characters or “Links”, each a different color; each can be controlled by a different player. I find three major principles:

1. Asymmetrical puzzles.
This is similar to the simplistic puzzle of requiring all players to find places and push a button, but in this case different players need to perform different actions (example: one player holds open a section of wall while another shoots through it with an arrow).

2. Uniqueness.
The Links each can carry only one item, so the game has player-selected temporary uniqueness. One Link may be carrying the hammer and another may be carrying the feather; with both required to pass a certain puzzle, multiple players are required.

Note that uniqueness can be intrinsic (that is, permanent uniqueness), in the same way different characters in an RPG have different “powers” that make up a team. In Four Swords this is done in a fairly simplistic manner by matching certain devices with certain colors (so only the player of the right color can use them).

3. Dependency.
Uniqueness can create a condition where two Links are cojoined in proximity; to be specific, sometimes one Link needs to carry another. (For example, the Link with the feather may need to carry the Link with the hammer to get to where the rock should be destroyed.) These moments create a greater sense of teamwork (since if one Link falls, the other does as well).

Quiz time: what game is being referred to in these quotes?

In essence, the animals would do to each other anything that they could do to or with you. So we would constantly have animals interacting in ways that had never been progammed or envisioned.

Also . . . you could interact with the animals in ways we’d never thought of. So people would constantly be writing to us telling us they’d done things that we never thought of, and didn’t realize the game was capable of.

STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, perhaps? Or possibly The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion?

Nuh-uh. These quotes are from Veronika Megler in an interview on the site L’avventura è l’avventura.

They are referring to The Hobbit, first published in 1982.

It wasn’t a poor seller (over half a million copies sold in Europe). However, it seems to have fallen out of the gamer consciousness.

Certainly, if one pokes about at the various histories, Beam Software (the developer) and Melbourne House (the publisher) make it in. However, most details I’ve seen (on those companies specifically and in general) tend to be on the companies themselves, rather than innovations in game mechanics. There’s a lack of material on the actual content of games, so a student looking for a particular element needs to start from scratch; there’s an intimidating number of works to plow through if someone is searching for a mechanic rather than a plot theme.

I find a real need for the sort of history work done with art and music history, with details about content that go past “in the old days, there were more mazes than there are now” so a future scholar can pick out that obscure game from 1980s that advances his or her point.