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