Interactive Fiction

Zork.

Does that conjure any associations for you? A white house? Caves? "Take key"? Oh, for me, a computer nerd when computers had no hard drives, an amber screen was high-tech, and you couldn't find a computer that didn't have the monitor attached to the CPU, Zork calls up the same feeling as bringing home a thick fantasy novel when you're a pre-teen:

the prospect of a long, fantastic immersion in something other than the day-to-day. I played a number of these games--although, come to think of it, it's probably true that I never finished one. Hmm. But they were inspiring and engaging, and the first real computer game with any real depth. There were video games--Pac Man and Space Invaders were released in 78-79--but for a bookish guy like me, these text based adventure games were books come alive, literature you could crawl into. They feel similar to my memories of Dad's "pencil tree" stories, of vast spaces to be explored, of strange experiences, puzzles to solve, heroic deeds to be done.

So that was the early 80's, when Infocom was releasing its brilliant text games, and now, this genre-- called interactive fiction--has a almost exclusively non commercial life on the internet, with a bunch of afficionadoes designing and giving away their story/games for the sheer love of the form. It's one of these totally useless, in conventional terms, endeavors that just fills my heart with a childish joy. I suppose its the same joy I had early on with films, although my love for films has gotten more mature and complex over the years, but my love for IF has not. There's something just intrinsically funky about the whole art/craft of making these games. They really are like nothing else I can think of; there's a simplicity and innocence, and range of possibilities that is not possible in virtually any other medium. There's no novel or video game that, when you try something stupid, is going to directly admonish you for it, with something like, "Trying to lift that house? Ok, now you're carrying a hernia, knucklehead."

These games do not have the openness and hyper-responsiveness of modern video games (like Halo, for instance); you have to acclimitize yourself to the logic and syntax of the game, and by doing so, it's as if you're entering another culture. You get the pleasure of learning an articulated world and worldview, that at its best coherantly responds to you with unfolding discoveries of itself. There's a logic and limitation to the genre which, because of these limitations, make success that much more exhilerating. The constraints make the performance that much more enjoyable.

The only game I wrote as a kid was Whack that Skeleton, on an Apple 2e, when I was maybe 14. And I just wrote the second IF game in my life, a Christmas gift for Heather entitled Heather's Big Adventure. It was totally delightful to sit at her elbow, watching her explore this impossibly silly version of our home life, and getting to hoot together at shared in-jokes. And to let her in on the nefarious plot our landlord is engaged in, explaining what's in all those boxes in the locked basement downstairs.

Viva la if! Viva absurdite!