Electronics

Interactive fiction: games that put the player in the middle of the action

The latest computer trend lets the user become a detective, or a treasure hunter, or....

Steven Levy

A locked door. A dead man. And twelve hours to solve the murder. -- slogan for Deadline

The hottest mystery story of 1983 was not available in hard-cover or paperback. Nor was it optioned as a major motion picture or television series. No, if you wanted to test your powers of ratiocination, you had to go to your local software vendor and purchase a computer program stored on a floppy disc. Thousands of people popped it into their computers and prepared to spend around fifty hours (about one hour for each dollar they paid for the disc) trying to solve the murder (or was it suicide?) of industrialist Marshall Robner, found dead in his library of a drug overdose.

The name of this program is Deadline, and though the software industry classifies it as a computer game, it bears as much resemblance to Pac-Man, Space Invaders and The Earth Dies Screaming as it does to a tax-calculation program. Some have called it one of the first successful ventures in a genre known as interactive fiction, wherein the reader is also a participant in the action. When you read a mystery novel, you might take a guess at who the murderer is, then read on (or peek at the end) to see if your guess is correct. When you play Deadline, you become a detective. Like any good shamus, you interview suspects, sneak around for clues -- anything from secret letters to fingerprint samples -- and then confront the suspects with hard evidence to jar them into giving more information or even a confession.

You do all this by typing instructions, in English, into the computer. It takes a while to understand the limited format for addressing the machine, but once you do, the program allows you to assume another persona. Here is an excerpt from a recent session of mine:

Player: Enter house.
Computer: The door is closed.
Player: Knock on the door.
Computer: You hear footsteps inside the house. Mrs. Robner, dressed in black, opens the door and greets you. "Hello," she says. "I'm afraid I really can't be of much help to you. As I said...you may look around here, but you must be out by eight o'clock at the latest."
Mrs. Robner leads you into the house and closes the door behind you.
Player: Mrs. Robner, tell me about Mr. Robner.
Computer: "I loved my husband, no matter what you may think. I am very sorry to have lost him." The speech is almost a set piece, and not too convincing.

You get the idea? While the prose is kind of creaky, the Deadline experience can be exhilarating, as you poke around the Robner mansion, uncover clues, send Sergeant Duffy to the lab to analyze strange white powder, and flirtatiously interrogate the mysterious Miss Dunbar. You are there.

The mind-boggling implications of all this have not escaped Marc Blank, the bookish twenty-nine-year-old computer author and corporate vice-president who wrote Deadline. Blank's company, Infocom, is the most successful publisher of this form of computer games, and Blank has been involved in interactive fiction almost since its inception in 1977.

Unlike real novels, the interactive computer novel has an undisputed granddaddy -- the original Adventure game, created in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab by computer hackers Don Woods and Will Crowther. Adventure firmly established a Dungeons and Dragons scenario as the genre's prime setting. Though Adventure accepted only two-word commands and didn't develop its characters very deeply, it presented a fresh, literary, puzzle-solving challenge unprecedented on the computer. Blank, while a student at MIT, joined his friends in solving the game and then writing a more complex sequel called Zork.

When Blank and other MIT alumni formed Infocom, their first product was the microcomputer-based Zork. This program, Blank estimated, has now sold over a quarter of a million copies at $39.95. Nine Infocom products have appeared since, and each one has been on the Softsel distributing firm's "Hot List" of best-selling computer games. But Blank is careful to note that the term game is an inadequate label for them.

"We call what we do 'interactive fiction' to distinguish it from mere games," says Blank, sitting at a picnic table outside the complex of Infocom's campus-style Cambridge, Massachusetts, headquarters. "It's interactive in that you are the main character."

Another Infocom author, thirty-four-year-old science-fiction writer Michael Berlyn, concurs. "In any piece of fiction, there's involvement and identification. We do classic storytelling in that we manipulate the reader by building expectations in a linear fashion. But here, there's a degree of personal involvement you can't get with books or movies. Take something like Raiders of the Lost Ark, where a character is about to open a door and you know something horrible is behind it. You think, "Don't open that door." With our games, you can act on that impulse."

Both Blank and Berlyn admit that the interactive-fiction form is relatively primitive, though they boast that the Infocom "parser" -- the part of the program that translates the player's English commands into a form the computer can understand -- is the best around. For the most part, interactive-fiction programs are indelibly wedded to the puzzle-solving form -- the player must be motivated by some goal. Also, while the Infocom games allow you to deal realistically with objects (if your character arrives at a creek, you can fill any vessel you carry with water, be it a cup, a canteen or a hat), the kinds of discourse it allows with your fellow characters are much less varied than those in real life.

Right now, no computer program can simulate a real, no-holds-barred conversation with an imaginary character. Still, once you take the leap of faith and adhere to the rules of communication established by the program, incredible things can happen. You not only act through your computer persona, but you must figure out what kind of behavior will get you successfully through the game.

In Michael Berlyn's latest game -- the search for a lost pyramid, called Infidel -- the player assumes the role of a ruthlessly ambitious treasure hunter. "The character turned out to be not a nice person," Berlyn admits.

"One of the people testing the game complained, 'I've just insulted an entire race, ransacked and pillaged a national shrine, bilked a woman out of her life savings...and the game says, "You're a rich man! You live happily ever after!'"

Welcome to NSRT center.
Your clearance: top secret.
Your mission: extremely hazardous.
Your chance of survival: minimal.

After this introduction, the computer screen changes to show a control room in full color. A television set in the room is full of static, and the player must take the paddle attached to the computer and fiddle with it until the screen shows a clear shot of a jungle scene. The camera pans across what is obviously the campsite of an expedition team. Bodies are strewn, Jonestown-style, over the landscape, and tents are burning. Then a face appears -- a painted native warrior. He comes closer to the camera, filling the whole screen. The screen goes blank. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to go deep into the Amazon and find out what happened to that team.

The game is called Amazon, and it is indicative of the latest trend in interactive fiction. New software publishers feel that interactive fiction, like regular fiction, is best handled by big-name authors like Michael Chrichton (The Terminal Man, Congo), who's the creative force behind Amazon.

"We called him up, and it turned out that he had already been working on a computer game," explains Seth Godin, brand manager of the Trillium series made by Spinnaker Software. Best known as a publisher of educational software, Spinnaker is attempting to train top science-fiction writers to create interactive fiction. "There's a high correlation between computer owners and science-fiction readers," says Godin, who claims that science-fiction authors are far more qualified to turn out this kind of product than the "engineers" who do it at other companies. "Science-fiction writers are masters at building characterization through plot," he says. That's the key to good interactive fiction, circa 1984.

Crichton agrees. He had seen some of the early adventure games on the Apple, and even got hooked on some of the Hi-Res Adventures (interactive fiction with pictures) put out by a company called Sierra On-Line. But he became impatient with what he called a "debugger's mentality" within the game, and thought that with his background in novels and movies, he could do better.

Working closely with a programmer, Crichton spent a year and a half refining Amazon, eliminating things that drove him crazy about previous games. For instance, the Amazon adventurer never gets stuck in maddening mazes. "I hate to get stuck -- it makes me feel stupid," explains Crichton. Also, his game does not recognize the command "kill," as many games do -- an admirable pacifistic gesture marred by Amazon's arcade-type game-within-a-game, where you gun down Huni warriors, skeet-shoot style.

'When a character in a movie is about to open a door and you know something horrible is behind it,' says Berlyn, 'you think, "Don't open that door!" With our games, you can act on that impulse.'

Crichton found that despite the differences between interactive fiction and books, "you can't get away from telling a story." Also, to Crichton's disappointment, by the time he had finished designing his game, other companies had already matched some of the advances he had made in the genre. For example, one Amazon feature is the relationship between the player-protagonist and a sidekick he adopts along the way, a smart wisecracking parrot named Paco. In the interim, Infocom came out with the game called Planetfall, where the player's partner is a friendly robot named Floyd. So it goes in the high-tech fiction race.

Other Trillium software authors are very hot names in science fiction. There is Arthur C. Clarke, with a computer version of his Rendezvous with Rama. There is Ray Bradbury, with a follow-up to Fahrenheit 451. (Though enthusiastic about the project, the veteran author actually had little to do with it, "I'm just coming into the twentieth century," he says, "I just got a word processor last week!") Robert Heinlein is also represented, though, unfortunately, his classic Stranger in a Strange Land is too complex for the computer. "We can do an intelligent, wiseass parrot," admits Seth Godin, "but not Michael Valentine Smith," the charismatic Stranger protagonist.

Another company relying on science fiction is Baen Software, named after its founder, Jim Baen, a veteran sci-fi book editor. He's managed to get such notable authors as Fred Saberhagen, Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven to help create programs that will be distributed by Simon and Schuster. The games will combine action and text, and Baen envisions a software package that will also include the novels on which the games are based.

Then there is Synapse Software, a company mainly known for its fast-action computer games. The firm plans to release a series of ten "electronic novels" -- text-only adventure games in which the player's attitude in addressing the game's fictional characters will determine how the characters react. "For example," says Synapse's Jon Loveless, "you come across a panhandler. You can't get rid of him unless you act the right way." Loveless is frank in explaining why Synapse is delving into a more literate form of software than shoot-'em-ups: "There's much less interest in hard-core action games than in the past. Now there's significant demand for the mind game as opposed to the joy-stick game."

Even former LSD-poselytizer Timothy Leary is getting into the act. Lately, he's been circulating a proposal for an interactive-fiction program called The Adventures of Huck Finn -- 100 Years After. It would have the player rewrite the characters of Huck, Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher and the runaway slave Jim. For instance, you can turn Jim into Joan! Throughout the game, you keep changing the characters and settings in Mark Twain's classic to your specifications until Twain's vision yields to yours. Within minutes, Twain's great American novel could resemble a prime-time situation comedy.

"steven, snap out of it," cries tip randall, bursting into your laboratory. "The alert signal is on!"

You look up from your plans for the Scimitar, a top-secret submarine that's still being tested. You notice that the alarm bell is ringing. Someone's trying to reach you over the videophone neetwork of Inventors Unlimited!

"Okay, Steven, what do you want to do now?"

It is no coincidence that the above passage is reminiscent of the books by Victor Appleton II, the nom de pulp of a conglomerate of authors who turned out countless Tom Swift Jr. books in the Fifties and Sixties. It was written by Jim Lawrence, the author of dozens of Tom Swift Jr., Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew novellas. He coauthored the new Infocom game, called Seastalker, the first in a series of "junior level" computer adventures. Kids can now cut their reading teeth on words appearing on computer screens, and enter the dramas as characters. This game assigns the player's real name to the protagonist. And to help young undersea explorers along, Seastalker is more generous with hints than other games in the genre. It now retails for fifty dollars, but kids will first have to hit their parents up for a thousand dollars or so to buy the computer and disc drive required to run it.

One wonders, though, if the identification that the young players of Seastalker develop with their eponymous heroes will be as strong as the one that kids forged with Tom Swift Jr. Even a kid with almost nothing in common with young Tom -- a well-off blond know-it-all who could invent state-of-the-art weaponry -- could easily fire his imagination so that he would, in essence, be Tom.

As the slogan for Jim Baen Software reads, "The Future Is Now." Interactive fiction is here, and as it gets better, it might well deliver some of the pleasures of its wiser, deeper, big brother -- the book. As it stands, the better interactive fiction on the marketplace is engrossing enough to keep players staring at the screen and racking their brains for ways to save cryogenic societies or eliminate forces of evil in enchanted lands. The passion that players bring to these games comes from the same source as all fiction-induced pleasure -- the projection of self into another world and the desire to learn what happens next as the adventures unfold. Only in this case, it's up to you to determine what happens next. And that can be a lot more challenging than turning a page.

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