Fig. 1 - The IBM 286. (Ain't she a beauty?)

In 1984, when I was twelve and my dad bought us an IBM 286 (Zowie!), I was a little peeved that he refused to get us an accompanying game to play on it.  Clearly bored to death, I got curious about some BASIC and BASICA programming language tutorials that were strewn about near that big, pale, beige pile of plastic and glass.  With them, I got the whirring beast to do some neat color tricks and to generate an oddly fulfilling cascade of repeating text.  But that kind of kid/computer interaction couldn’t really compete with Zork’s interactive text-based knife fight with a thief….

So, I went back to reading for fun—even majored in Lit.

The next time I was truly dazzled by a video game was a decade later in 1994.  The 286 (which I’d taken with me to college—yes, the computer really did last ten years) didn’t have a CD-ROM drive.  It couldn’t handle Mosaic or Netscape Navigator.  My copy of Wordstar (word processing software) didn’t even have italics!  (Guffaw.)  Seriously, my computer might as well have been constructed with squirrel bones and wood.

It was at this low moment in my digital life that fate intervened.  Somehow, somewhere, I was exposed to a screenshot and a vague description of Robyn and Rand Miller’s revolutionary interactive adventure game Myst.  That tiny whiff of Myst was all I needed to pack the 286 into a closet and make a bee-line for my first Mac PowerPC tower with its handy-dandy CDROM drive.  Soon to follow was my copy of Myst.

When that yonic fissure cracked open on my screen and I saw the stars of the heavens in that opening QuickTime movie—holy effin’ Hannah.  I just about crap myself.

A silhouette of a man slowly tumbles into a fissure in time and space.  As he falls away, the worn, hardbound book he’d been holding falls toward you.  The calm, wise voice of Atrus reads from the last entry in his journal:

I realized the moment I fell into the fissure that the book would not be destroyed as I had planned.  It continued falling into that starry expanse, of which I had only a fleeting glimpse. I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, but I must admit that such conjecture is futile.  Still, questions about whose hands might one day hold my Myst book are unsettling to me.  I know my apprehensions might never be allayed, and so I close, realizing that perhaps the ending has not yet been written.

See the opening of Myst here:

The euphoria of seeing advanced graphics coupled with immersive sound in an interactive virtual storytelling environment had me clicking around the richly rendered Myst island for long, entranced hours.  The sound of wind and ocean water!  Oh and the gears, all the gears turning and locking into place!  The story’s delivery medium—a simple slide show of high-resolution (for its time) graphics mixing with well-placed QuickTime movies and sound effects—took interactive graphical adventure gaming, along with the art of storytelling, into a new, mind-blowing dimension.

Fig. 1 - John Tenniel's illustration of Alice meeting the caterpillar (from LambertvilleLibrary.org)

Okay.  So, typing the command “KILL THIEF WITH KNIFE” in Zork because some shady, muttering bastard is trying to kipe your bejeweled egg might not have been as enriching an experience as reading about Alice in Wonderland facing off with a giant, hookah-smoking caterpillar who’s asking her THE philosophical question.

Alice in Wonderland (as it was and is for many) was the first novel I read and has never been demoted from its spot as My Favorite Book.  Still, Zork’s text-based adventure had something Lewis Carroll’s book lacked: interactive narrative engagement.  Sure, I could imagine the scenes in Alice—but I couldn’t affect them.

More significantly, these were Alice’s adventures, not mine.  She was blonde.  I was brunette.  She was British.  I had a thick New York accent.  And I wouldn’t have been caught dead in that kooky Sunday dress she wore all the live-long day.  Fahgedd’aboudit.

In Zork, I wasn’t just a pre-teen from Long Island imagining I was the adventurer—I was the adventurer!  I was a small brunette, wearing jeans and a blue hoodie.  Climbing down into that dungeon with my lantern lit, I was ready for that grue!

The universal ambiguity of naked text and the use of second person singular in Zork allows players to seamlessly imagine themselves in the role of the adventurer.  The narrative warns: YOU are likely to be eaten by a grue.  The grue is not at all interested in the taste of Alice on its tongue—it’s after you.  In other words, the experience is exceedingly “personalized.”

Interactive experience designers make gargantuan efforts to create immersive, emotionally connective, interactive experiences by devising complicated, cookie-heavy, database-driven personalized experiences.  That’s not to say these massive efforts don’t work.  But I’m finding a simple, powerful lesson in unadorned text and that faceless, second-person pronoun.  Ambiguity, ironically, is highly emotionally connective.

Fig 1. ADVENT, later Colossal Cave Adventure, being played on an Osborne mini-computer around 1982 - http://bit.ly/4hl0Xp

The very first interactive fiction game was called Advent or Adventure, and later was widely known as Colossal Cave Adventure.  The game was written in 1975 by Will Crowther, a cave diver and programmer, who wanted to enjoy it with his two young daughters.  (The game is based on a cave that Crowther knew well, Bedquilt Cave in Kentucky.  Apparently, there’s a cave called Colossal Cave nearby; however, the details of the game are based on Bedquilt.)

Colossal Cave Adventure (entirely text-based) quickly spread across ARPAnet in 1977 and galvanized the first generation of video game designers.  It inspired Infocom’s text-based Zork along with Atari’s graphical version, Adventure.  It was only after playing an errant copy of ADVENT (found on developer Ken Williams’s work computer) that Roberta Williams was stirred to write and draw Mystery House.  (The game development duo would later create the popular King’s Quest series.)

Although it was text-based, Colossal Cave Adventure was the catalyzing spark behind a new creative genre: graphical adventure games. (See Wikipedia on Colossal Cave Adventure.)

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

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.

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.

In the early eighties, just after the Pac Man arcade game had chomped its way into the pizza place around the corner from my house, my next door neighbor’s parents got her an Atari 2600 console.

Pac Man.  In the home.  Yes!  For a ten-year-old, this—was progress.

I.  Loved.  Atari.  But my parents wouldn’t let me watch TV, much less play video games.  So, I played Pac Man and Space Invaders in my neighbor’s basement whenever I could.  My favorite of all those little fat black Atari cartridges was Adventure.

Adventure was the very first graphical action-adventure video game.  It was published in 1979, a few years before I got my hands on it in ’82.  The graphics in Adventure were pretty hilarious, but in the early eighties, I was dazzled by them.  For hours, dragons shaped like ducks made of big, boxy pixels floated relentlessly after me: a small square (see fig. 1).

Fig. 1 – Want to see Adventure in action? Take a gander at this vid of gameplay (difficulty level 1).

Not too long after my introduction to Atari, my early-adopting neighbor got an Apple II.  And it was on that computer that I played my first text-driven interactive fiction game.  It was Roberta and Ken Williams’s Mystery House (Sierra On-line, 1980).

An interactive fiction game is story-driven, rather than action-driven.  The earliest interactive fiction games, like Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork , were text-only games.  A player typed moves into a command-line interface and received the results in the form of textual description (see fig. 2).

Fig. 2 – Zork screenshot: text-based interactive fiction at the command line.

Sierra On-line’s Mystery House was the first interactive fiction game with graphics (see fig. 3).  Now, let me clarify that by “graphics” I mean there were stick dead people that you knew were dead because they had Xs in their eyes.  In spite of Mystery House’s (coff) visual accompaniment, I thought this text-driven game was a massive step up from Atari’s action games.

Fig. 3. Mystery House screenshot. Check out those x’s!

Honestly, I didn’t care how bad Williams’s corpse illustrations were.  (It’s not like she had Adobe CS4 on hand.)  As a pint-sized game player, all I was interested in was exploring the environment—an interactive story!—and piecing together the plot with hints (and bodies) dropped by the author as I went.

Instead of the game running me through a maze like an adrenaline-crazed rat, Mystery House adapted to my internally directed behavior.  Instead of forcing me to do the will of the machine, it was human-centered.  Instead of using technology to drive the players’ experiences, Roberta and Ken Williams let players’ behaviors drive their experiences.  Arguably, Roberta and Ken Williams were one of the first user-centered, immersive, interactive experience design teams.