Game vs Story...

Linkdrop.

http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/games&narrative.html

science fiction and the booker prize

Link-drop: two articles of interest. Read this one first, and then a blog post commenting on that article. I am all for the de-marginalisation of, well, marginalised genres. I don't quite take the same view that Kim Stanley Robinson does about sf - sure, some science fiction is about the "new", the "leading edge", but those are easily misunderstood, and mean different things to people. Perhaps what science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, fictions "in which things happen that are not possible today" - what all of that is, is simply exactly what "general fiction" or "literary fiction" is as well, only expressed with the aid of the unfamiliar. The same themes come up, again and again. All the time. Always. Perhaps the more generic, the most pulpy of science fiction (and what gives science fiction and fantasy such a bad name in the literary community, including prize judges) throws in the unfamiliar/alien/fantastic gratuitously, for the sole purpose of escapism; but the best of science fiction uses this unfamiliar to emphasise the familiar. What better way to explore the depths of what it is to be human than be placing said human in completely inhuman territory? Even the great philosophers do it. What if everything were a dream? What if I could put my brain in a vat and then radio-communicate my body into the bowels of the earth and then it failed completely down there, leaving me sightlessly soundlessly abandoned in earth core and/or glass vat?

But I grudgingly admit that even the barest acknowledgement of science fiction's value (Naughtie saying Robinson "may well have a point") edifies my appreciation of the genre. I somehow find myself compelled to agree with the literary community's consensus that science fiction is pulp for the masses, and feel like I indulge secretly in it - although I can honestly say that I still don't understand what it is that's so fascinating about Harry Potter, or the Twilight series. It is true that if publishers don't put forward their science fiction to the Booker prize, not much will change. It can't be all the fault of the publishers though. It's a vicious cycle pretty much ruled by demand, supply, and the compulsion to classify everything into neat genres.

Favourite science fiction book of all time? The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. Closely followed by A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller Jr.

Galatea

Scenes (and writing) like this demonstrate how interactive fiction doesn't have to rely on its interactive devices to be a satisfying experience.

>ask galatea about life
"What do you know about life?" you ask her. (General questions: you can almost always find ones that haven't been anticipated.)

"Nothing," she says, "except what I saw of his; and that seldom made any sense to me. He told me that people are born, and that they die, and that there are stages in between-- childhood, adolescence... I asked him why he didn't carve me as a child so that I could grow up." There's a pregnant pause. "I never heard him laugh so hard as when I asked him that. And he said that I certainly had the brain of a child."

There's a moment of stillness.

>_

Galatea, by Emily Short.

Hamlet - the Text Adventure

Stumbled across this while following links from IF blogs around the internets: Shakespeare's Hamlet adapted as IF, by Robin Johnson*. It's pretty solid as a game; the puzzles are almost all (with exception of a Macbeth-related one, which is the most I'll say about it) deductible with a bit of logic, and the parser is - pleasantly - intelligent. The interweaving of actual events in Shakespeare's play(s) with the puzzles is very neat, as well. The only complaint I have is that as a story, it was mediocre: the only highlight was recognising the references to the plays, and anything and everything else seemed to exist for the sole purpose of holding the puzzles together. Not that that's entirely a bad thing, but because the gameplay was so solid, the one-dimensionality (does text have dimension?) of the characters and clear unrealisitc absurdity of the world (Bosworth Field is a few steps away from Dunsinane) stood out all the more. It's pretty much obvious "Hamlet" was intended as a sort of pastiche of Shakespeare's work rather than an adaptation, but I still felt that the characters could have had a little more substance to them. Almost every NPC occupies only one room and speaks a limited number of lines in the game; they don't enter, nor leave the room, and barely react to the PCs actions.

Still; an interesting work, and at least good entertainment for a while.



*Note: not the same Robin Johnson as the Robin Johnson who wrote the Alice in Wonderland text game. I might talk about that Alice game some day, actually. It was my very first text-based adventure game, and it took me a good seven years to finish - because of one puzzle that by the Cruelty Scale is very definitely rated "cruel", i.e. "can get stuck by doing something which isn't obviously irrevocable (even after the act)."

SPAG 'zine, and immersion

The latest issue of the SPAG (The Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games) newsletter is out. My experience with SPAG only covers early issues where content consisted entirely of game reviews - this one on the other hand has interviews with the top three IFComp 2008 finishers, several articles about a new game, and a handful of other reviews. What caught my fleeting eye (and it was fleeting, because the bibliography for the Thesis is due tomorrow) was the Editorial section, which briefly covers a few interesting points about the current state of IF. I certainly agree that IF is in its infancy - there's a lot that can be developed and explored in terms of new IF stories/games, although that's not to say the current library of IF work is inadequate in any particular sense. I suppose what I'm doing with the Thesis is pretty much what SPAG stands for - the promotion of text-based adventure games as more than merely an outdated mode of geeky entertainment. As ambitious as it all sounds, I'm certainly am hoping to see text games viewed as serious literature, and if there are arguably no Nabokovs or Prousts or Woolfs of the IF world, existing works show the _potential_ of what IF can do and can become... and also its limits. Which is all really good for the Thesis: limits can be almost as interesting to consider as anything else.

The idea of IF being "immersive" is also something I'd like to explore, when I get the time to sit down and have a think about it. The immersive aspect may very well extend beyond the single-player text experience - perhaps it's directly related to the reading experience, much like how easy it can be to find oneself utterly absorbed in a book and be reading until well past midnight. It would certainly explain my experience with certain MUDs (multi-user dungeons, or text-based MMOs).

Something involving the "limits of the text" or the "borders of the word", to be pretentiously fancy about it, is coming to mind. Does IF, with its empty spaces and command-line/caret feature, remove the frame that holds the reader in the narrative world when he or she reads a book? Or is the frame still there, just made invisible? How much is the interactivity in IF a mirage?

Introductory - and thesis statement!

Hi, and welcome to Intfickery, a collection of notes and wips for an Honours in English Literature thesis on interactive fiction and text-based adventure games.

It'll be as informal as they come, and while the main purpose behind setting this thing up is for me to have a way of organising my research effectively, visitors and comments are all very welcome. I'll be posting anything from reviews of IF works/games already played to notes on games I'm working through at the moment, to general theories and links to other sites of interest. I make no promises about type of content nor regularity of updates - I only hope to gradually work my way toward a 15,000 word essay by the end of the year 2009, that:

a) proves that IF and text games are much more worthy of attention, critical as well as popular, than they receive now, and

b) demonstrates just how much fun you can have playing these things.

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Feel free to explore! (We're all adventurers here.)