Early Interactive Fiction Part 2: Narrative, Collaboration & Immersion
Fig. 1 - The cover of Mystery House. The graphics in Mystery House looked nothing like this. The cover, instead, makes reference to a number of famous pieces of short horror fiction, like Poe’s "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Black Cat," "The Pit and the Pendulum" and Alexander Pushkin’s "Queen of Spades."
When I was ten, my reader’s imagination helped to immerse me in the text-driven Mystery House (Sierra On-Line, 1980). In spite of Roberta Williams’s masterful stick drawings, her words helped me to visualize richly rendered graphics of my own. As a result, I felt more connected to this interactive fiction game than to graphical action games.
Fig. 2 - A tri-toned stick-corpse in the backyard of the Mystery House
All I needed was that blip of glowing, command line text that shot up from the bottom of my screen telling me that I’d just accidentally started a fire in the dining room, that the basement was moist and covered with algae, or that there was a dead body in the yard—a daisy in his hand. I constructed the details in my mind’s eye, along with a kind of holographic map of the house’s nooks and crannies, its secret passages and rooms, and the thick pine forest that surrounded it.
Roberta Williams’s crude, arbitrarily three-toned line graphics (see fig. 2) helped the narrative in a kind of diagrammatic way, but it was really the words themselves—the written plot, the textual thread of the narrative—that I found riveting. Later, when I played the text-based interactive fiction game Zork (Infocom, 1979), I was delighted and terrified by the line: “It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.” I didn’t know what a grue was—but it was shadowy and slick and mouthless in my mind—it was the living dark.
Here’s an irresistible excerpt from the entirely text-based Zork:
Up a Tree
You are about 10 feet above the ground nestled among some large branches. The nearest branch above you is above your reach. Beside you on the branch is a small bird’s nest. In the bird’s nest is a large egg encrusted with precious jewels, apparently scavenged by a childless songbird. The egg is covered with find gold inlay, and ornamented in lapis lazuli and mother-of-pearl. Unlike most eggs, this one is hinged and closed with a delicate looking clasp. The egg appears extremely fragile.
Sure, it’s not Shakespeare, but as the video game adventurer, I’ve just discovered the bejeweled egg of a childless songbird! What a wonderful little tug at the emotions this is.
Zork relied upon nothing but its written narrative to portray its plot and environment. A visual rendering of the world is left up to the player alone—just as it is in literature. In order to play Zork well, the adventurer must pay close attention to the narrative and imagine it accurately—they’re required to see it happening. Players are further connected to the game because they and the game designers are creating the experience collaboratively. A great interactive experience is as much the audience’s creation as the designers’.
Click here to play Zork:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~pot/infocom/zork1.html
Early Interactive Fiction Part 1: Striving for Literary Narrative
For me, the small, silly terrors that early, home-console games like Atari’s Kaboom relied upon couldn’t hope to compete with the deftly-crafted plot of a good book. Not surprisingly, the interactive graphical adventure game Mystery House was inspired by a mystery novel—Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. (The book was more directly adapted into an interactive graphical adventure game recently in 2005).
When a game has a narrative like a novel, the player’s situation is slowly revealed, the story unfolds and changes occur as if in real time. The player decrypts clues embedded into descriptive details and leisurely—savoring the pleasure of teasing out a well-woven plot—she arrives at the clarity of the end.
This kind of game is a delight to play. It unfolds its labyrinthine story for you; it responds to your actions; and, crucially, it challenges you to think more clearly, to be more curious, to use your imagination and beat the author to the punch. Good interactive graphical adventure games should strive to rival good fiction.
Early Video Games: Immersion and Critical Thought
Fig. 1 - Atari joystick!
The kind of gameplay that Roberta and Ken Williams’s interactive fiction game Mystery House offered me as a kid felt oddly familiar and deeply intriguing. The sense that I was there, in that spooky house exploring and discovering things—and that it would be by my wit that I would survive—offered an immersive feel that Atari’s action games lacked. Even though the game was fantasy, it engaged a skill, the use and honing of which mattered in the real world: critical thought.
The skills developed in Pac Man or Adventure or Space Invaders weren’t something I could take into the world with me. My ability to assess the situation with these games and take actions based on that assessment was little more than meaningless in reality. In Adventure, I was mostly polishing the skill of using the joystick to maneuver a square through a maze with the highest level of dexterity and speed I could manage (see fig. 1).
I knew it was a very stupid thing for my adrenal glands to be reacting to. I was being trained, in a Pavlovian way, to jones after adrenaline rushes and the reward of being released from fear if I mastered the skill of cupping that little black stick in the soft skin between the base of my thumb and forefinger in order to hug the maze turns just right. Don’t get me wrong. Adventure was a helluva good time, but after a while I’d feel hollow and zombie-ish. I certainly didn’t feel uplifted by having achieved something through self-directed insight.
Fig. 2 - Atari paddle!
A game called Kaboom was the epitome of the adrenaline drain. In the game, a convict slid back and forth across a high wall dropping lit bombs that you caught in a bucket of water. Instead of using the joystick, you used the Atari paddle, which turned to the right and left (see fig. 2). The convict progressively dropped his bombs faster and faster. Additionally, the splashing noise the bombs made when they hit the water got higher and higher in pitch as you went. It was a maddening game. I freakin’ loved it.
To be fair, I did experience a good deal of immersion in playing Kaboom. But I didn’t personally identify with those buckets. I didn’t feel proud of myself for having achieved anything. In fact, I personally, was absent from this experience, which is a different kind of immersion. I forgot myself entirely and became fused with the system. The game encouraged me to discard my volition and to, instead, do exactly and precisely what it commanded without fail, or I’d lose (see fig. 3).
Fig. 3 - Watch and listen to this vid of a Kaboom session and you’ll see what I mean about the adrenaline-driven madness.
The interactive fiction game Mystery House was different, though. Mystery House asked me to exercise my critical ability—to move my mind toward creative insight for the purposes of solving a problem. It was a game that taught its players how to think skillfully, how to deduce, how to use curiosity to discover and gain knowledge. Captivating players with their own abilities to think and act creatively is vital for positive, memorable, connective immersion.