Casey Muratori wrote a series of blog posts on future of Interactive Fiction about a decade ago, and they are some of the most thoughtful views I have read about this little hobby of ours. While the blog has dissapeared down the entropy machine of time, I was able to recover its content using the Wayback Machine. I am posting it here both for archiving and for discussion (since it seems that these never got posted here). I have not been able to contact him, hopefully he wouldn’t mind me posting this here.
The Cave Inside the Terminal
I’d like to take you back for a moment, all the way back to the dawn of human history, when mankind subsisted on gathered fruit and felled mastodon: the late 1970s.
You are in a secret canyon which exits to the north and east.
The plains of rural Massachusetts stretch out to the horizon. The baby Jesus, still clad in Frank-incensed diapers, rides majestically by on a newly-domesticated velociraptor. And there, in the ambiguous space between the dining room and the living room of a suburban home, a tiny three-year-old Casey sits on his father’s lap facing the great hulking frame of a computer terminal.
It is a formidable machine, part cathode ray tube, part tangle of circuit boards, all encased in thick plastic moulding so inoffensively beige that it makes the walls of doctor’s offices seem garish by comparison. Incapable of performing any substantial computations on its own, it is wired to a modem, which is wired to the telephone jack, and so connected it patiently waits to receive single characters from the real brains of the operation: a mainframe at the headquarters of the Digital Equipment Corporation.
The transmission speeds are so slow you can physically see the arrival of each letter on the flickering monochrome screen, and as the letters form words and the words form sentences, Casey’s father reads them aloud so he can understand the predicament he’s gotten himself into…
A huge green fierce dragon bars the way! The dragon is sprawled out on the Persian rug!
OK, essentially what just happened — and I know it will be difficult for you to fully comprehend this right away because your brain will take some time to fully extricate itself from such a lavishly rendered vision — is that you were transported to another place and time by the gentle, rhythmic, linguistic prodding of my carefully-chosen words. These words made their way from the screen through your eye sockets onto your retina and into your optic nerve, where they travelled to your brain and caused electrical signals to do something with like, neurons or something, and then some stuff happened.
Point being, scientists have a technical term for this. They call it “imagination”. You imagined you were back in the Cretaceous period with baby Casey and the terminal, and through the awesome power of language, you felt as if you were actually there. And that is precisely what the interactive fiction genre was all about.
What’s “interactive fiction”? Well I’m so glad you asked. Nobody asks any more. You have excellent manners and frankly it’s refreshing in this day and age when nobody asks. You’re an active listener, and that’s really rare. Thank you. Thank you for being you.
The answer is that “interactive fiction” was the romantic term applied to games perhaps more accurately described as “text adventures”. These were games where the computer printed out some text describing a situation, and the user typed in some text to say what they wanted to do. Originally, this was probably no one’s grand vision of the future of interactive entertainment, but rather just the most natural thing you could make on the computers of the time which often couldn’t do anything except print out text. In fact, on computers that could display graphics, the first games were often graphical, like the seminal Space War and later Pong. But many computers — especially terminals — had no graphics capabilities whatsoever, so text was the only medium for creating an interactive entertainment experience.
In the flashback that opened this blog post, little toddler me was playing the very first computer game I ever played, which coincidentally was the very first interactive fiction title ever created. It was a game known nowadays as “The Colossal Cave Adventure”, even though I think it was called simply “Adventure” at the time. It was one of the earliest computer games (although by far not the earliest), and it invited players to use simple imperative text commands (“get lamp”, “enter”, “climb”, etc.) to navigate a series of rooms in an underground cave.
In these rooms were all manner of fantastic items and creatures. The player would take the items and use them to overcome “puzzles” placed in their path while collecting as many “treasure” items as they could, their score measured by how many treasures they had thus far collected. In one room, as the computer described it, there was a “fierce green dragon” — an obstacle — that sat atop “the Persian rug” — a treasure. What text you had to type to get past the dragon, and get the treasured rug, was something the player had to figure out by logic, trial and error, or most likely both.
Much like Wolfenstein 3D ushered in the era of the first person shooter, Colossal Cave Adventure marked the beginning of a multi-year heyday for the interactive fiction genre, one that many saw titles sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies, a dramatic figure for computer software in that day and age.
But alas, unlike the FPS, the golden age of interactive fiction would prove to be rather short-lived.
You have died.
In titles from one of the most prolific interactive fiction companies, Infocom, when you made a particularly-wrong move, the game ground to a halt and you were unceremoniously presented with the phrase, “You have died.”
Well, much like in the games themselves, in the mid eighties, the reign of interactive fiction as a prominent genre came to an abrupt halt. The concept that someone would pay $30 for a game featuring only text went from being commonplace to laughable, and the genre itself went from being the primary form of computer entertainment to being an extremely small niche where non-commercial titles were made by diehard fans for other diehard fans.
Interactive fiction, the genre, had died — if not entirely, then at least commercially.
Now ideally, this would not be cause to mourn. Ideally, the reason interactive fiction died would have been because newer, better ways of making games came about, and these new ways did everything interactive fiction did, but better. That would have been nice. And for a certain read of the history, one could convince oneself that’s exactly what happened. But for some of us — and perhaps particularly for those of us whose first experience with computer entertainment was hearing their parent’s voice read glowing green letters describing a magical world full of magical possibility — that’s not at all what happened.
Which brings us to the topic of our new series of Monday posts: Molly Rocket’s soon-to-be-officially-announced interactive fiction project. The aim of this project is, over the course of several games, to bring back all of the things we as players lost when interactive fiction died. And not just bring them back as they were, but bring them back anew, with the full force of today’s technology behind them.
What are those things, you ask? What did we lose when interactive fiction died? Well that is a very good question indeed. So good, in fact, that it will be the entire topic of the next Molly Rocket blog post.
The Promise of the Blinking Cursor
Look, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but if you roll up to the valet in your sports car, and you have women sitting on top of other women in the front seat, and they end up in the fountain, and you end up buying the hotel, at some point someone’s going to look you in the eye and tell you, “Bruce, it’s not who you are inside, but what you do that defines you.” This was made very clear in the critically-acclaimed documentary Batman Begins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6poX_8CT9kM
Do not despair, though, because as that film deftly demonstrated, if you focus on what is in your heart and let it lead you down a path of hand-to-hand combat and justice, eventually you can redeem yourself by lifting a woman and a small boy up from street level to the roof while an old man plays with your car fob: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e6TU9UsA9M
This is a very important service to the community, because people often find themselves confined to street level with no direct roof access. This is due to a part of the fire code in many metropolitan areas that requires locked fire doors between a building’s main stairwell and its roof. Also, old people are usually retired and don’t have much to occupy their time, so something as simple as a car fob can provide hours of enjoyment and really make a difference in their waning years.
Anyway, I don’t want to get bogged down in specifics. The point here is that it’s what you do that defines you. Rachel Dawes knew it, Batman knew it, and now you know it.
But unfortunately, once you know it, you can’t help but apply it to video games. And if you do that, you come to some rather dismal conclusions about their fiction.
We run, we drive, we shoot.
OK, so here’s a question for you: what is, you know, Grand Theft Auto V about? Or Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare?
In a pre-Batman analysis, where we ignore what the player actually does, you might describe those games in a way that sounds like they’re about their fiction: “Oh, it’s about these three guys from different walks of life who…” etc., etc.
But post-Batman, where what the player does defines what the game is about, the descriptions wouldn’t sound anything like fiction at all: “It’s about driving, running, and shooting.” “It’s about running between two prescribed points while shooting.”
This is what most modern games are “about”, and it’s not an accident. We’ve gotten really good at creating experiences where players do things like move around, attack, even build. If you look at something like Grand Theft Auto V vs. the original Grand Theft Auto, it’s obvious that the intervening years have seen massive improvements to just about every aspect of what the player can do. Every aspect except, of course, the part dealing with the fiction. In these games, the player still — often literally — can’t do anything with the fiction.
And this, in my opinion, is the biggest elephant in the gaming room today: despite advances on nearly every front, if we look at the level of interactivity a player can expect from the fiction in a game, things haven’t really evolved since about 1986.
Now, the nice part about something like Grand Theft Auto is it doesn’t really matter that the fiction isn’t interactive. That’s not why you’re playing it. The fiction provides context for the experience, and your desire to interact with the game is satisfied by the fact that physical things in the game are interactive: driving cars, shooting guns, running, etc. Each year, the world simulation underlying games like this improves, providing greater levels of interactivity, so the experience really does become more rich even if the fiction itself remains non-interactive. Batman-wise, the game is still about driving and shooting, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
However, this poses a very real restriction on the types of games that can be developed using this style. It requires that you have some large set of physical interaction sequences sufficient to satisfy the player’s desire to actually play something, because otherwise you have nothing off of which to hang the fiction. And that is not such a good thing for the medium as a whole.
There’s a reason they’re called “walking simulators.”
In recent years, developers have tried to move past these limitations by skirting them. Games like Dear Esther and Gone Home have explored the possibility that non-interactive fiction can be presented without intervening action. While the success of titles like these is great from the standpoint of opening up more ways to tell stories on computers, it still fails the Batman test just as completely as anything else — in terms of what the player does, Gone Home isn’t about a girl and her family. It’s about walking around.
Which leaves us with only the modern, direct-if-distant descendants of interactive fiction itself — games that might bear the visual novel tag on Steam, or the comparatively small portion of the playtime in RPGs like Fallout or Mass Effect where the player choses dialogue options. These games still try to make it appear as if the fiction is interactive, but by nature of their construction, it is all too obvious to the player that this interaction is very limited, like a glorified choose-your-own-adventure. Even in what people generally consider to be the most interactive game of this flavour, The Walking Dead, the player’s biggest “choices that matter” are actually just binary decision points so obvious that the game actually displays a screen comparing your binary choices to other players’ choices at the end of each play-through.
So truly, at present, we really don’t have any such thing as a game that features real, deep interaction with the fiction. We either have a) games where non-interactive fiction is intercut with interactive action, b) games where non-interactive fiction isn’t really intercut with anything at all, or c) games with coarse, superficial fictional interaction.
Subjectively this might not be considered a problem, because plenty of players enjoy all of these types of games. But in the objective sense, it’s definitely a problem, because it means we have a big huge gaping hole in our space of possible creations. We have no idea what it would even look like to have a game where you can actually interact with the fiction. And we definitely don’t know what kind of wonderful new experiences we might be able to build if we did.
Now at this point you’re thinking, “Casey, that’s all fine, but what does this have to do with the bygone era of so-called interactive fiction? Surely if you’re saying that something like The Walking Dead was barely interactive, then you’d have to say the same thing about the average Infocom game from the eighties.”
And you’re totally right. But there’s one crucial point that this overlooks, and I wouldn’t be doing my job as a random person who writes a blog if I didn’t tell you what it was.
With a blinking cursor, anything could have been possible.
What the player could do in an interactive fiction game era was, almost universally, quite abstract and varied. A few things were common, such as the ability to navigate between “rooms” and manage an inventory of items, but beyond that, almost all other actions were specific to the fiction.
A typical interactive fiction game set up situations that could be about almost anything, and your interactions with those situations would see your character doing just about anything. In one game, you might find yourself handing a magic pigeon perch to the knight on a living chess board, while in another you might find yourself cutting the chalk lines of a pentagram to escape a Lovecraftian summoning ceremony.
Now to first approximation, these actions were nothing more than the great grandfather to today’s quicktime events. Most interactive fiction sequences involved a rote series of steps that you had to do, and no matter what other actions might have seemed logical or plausible, the game was only going to let you do the specific steps the designer had programmed.
But, unlike quicktime events, which specifically tell the player what gamepad combination they must perform to continue the action, the interface to an interactive fiction sequence was literally just a blinking cursor. The instruction to do each step had to come entirely from the player’s own brain, and it was in that specific moment — the moment when the player is considering all the possibilities and choosing to try one of them — that interactive fiction really differentiated itself as an experience as compared to anything we make today.
If you didn’t have the pleasure of living through the era of interactive fiction, you may never have experienced this, but trust me, the feeling of staring at a blinking cursor, thinking about typing your next command, is unlike anything we’ve been able to reproduce since. It was the perfect moment of fictional immersion. It felt like you were choosing what your character did next, even if you really weren’t. Your imagination was running wild and you really did believe you were the character in the story.
And not just a story that had to work within a gamey-action context, but any kind of story. Sure, it could be about gaming staples like magic or futuristic robots or a space marine, but it could also be it about a diver in a run-down seaport, or an Englishwoman kidnapped by pirates or even just a guy trying to change his address with the bank.
Thus the typical interactive fiction game, much more so than anything I’ve played in recent memory, delivered a unique experience where the actual things you did in the game were closely tied to the fiction itself. Blissfully unaware of any requirement that games be about well-defined, repetitive actions, interactive fiction titles were free to set games anywhere, with any kind of character, and involve any kind of activity. They were truly on-par with other mediums in their ability to engage any subject matter directly.
But sadly, the blinking-cursor moment was always short-lived.
However, as anyone who has played a lot of interactive fiction games will attest, at the core of the genre was always a critical flaw that ensured it could never truly fulfil the promise of its blinking cursor. And that, my friends, will be the subject of next week’s post.
The Cat and the Dragon
I’d like to start off with a fable I’m sure you’ll all recognise.
Once upon a time, in a medieval sort of storybook kingdom or something, there lived a village of people and it all got burned down. When the smoke finally cleared, the survivors gathered around and said, “who has done this to our village?” One of the town elders said, “Right before the village burned down, I saw a cat knock over a pot of highly flammable oils!” at which point the town dragon said, “That was almost certainly the problem. I’m glad we got to the bottom of that!” He burped a fiery burp, and they considered the matter settled.
By now of course you recognise this story, the famous episode of “The Cat and the Dragon.” It’s a cautionary tale about the readiness of people to place blame on things which have little or nothing to do with their ultimate problems. The cat, in this case, may have had some small role in exacerbating the fire, but it was almost certainly the dragon who caused the village to burn. After all, that’s what dragons do.
I chose to open the post with this timeless yarn because it fits the topic perfectly once you realise it is a metaphor, a term literary scholars use to refer to an author’s substitution of something they’re trying to describe with either a cat or a dragon, or in this case both. This is not to be confused with the closely related term simile, which is when the author merely says something is like a dragon or a cat (but not both — that special case is called a gerund).
But enough with the advanced grammar lesson. Back to the interactive fiction situation.
SPOILER ALERT: Interactive fiction is the burned village.
In last week’s post, I talked about how interactive fiction had a little bit of magic in it, magic that we’ve never really managed to recapture. But that magic was largely illusory, and it remained that way until the genre faded into obscurity.
So the question naturally becomes, why? Did developers not know what the magic was? Did they not know what was necessary to fully realise it? Did they not have the technology to do so? What?
Well, thanks to 30 years of interceding history, we are at least in a position to make an educated guess by looking at what happened to the genre and its descendants.
First, the presentation of the genre transitioned from textual to graphical. This was typified by games like the Sierra line of graphical adventures, such as the famous King’s Quest series. These were almost exactly the same as the original text adventures, in that you still typed text into a command line to do things, but they now had pictures of the world accompanying them and a character which you could move directionally.
Next, the interface of the genre transitioned from textual to graphical. This shift was exemplified by the LucasArts series of “point-and-click” adventure games, where the command line input of Sierra’s titles was replaced with a cursor-based interaction model.
Finally, the abstract world representation central to the genre was replaced by concrete, rule-based designs, and one might say that at this point there was nothing really remaining that one could call “interactive fiction”. The classic example of this sort of game would be Myst, and of course a more timely example comes out in just a few short weeks.
There is a ton of stuff I’m glossing over here, but for the sake of keeping this blog post at a reasonable length, that’s the high-level summary (for the low-level summary, check out Jimmy Maher’s amazing history of interactive fiction).
SPOILER ALERT: The parser is the cat.
If you listen to people talk about the problems with interactive fiction, one thing gets said over, and over, and over, and over: the parser was awful.
“The parser” — the part of the game code that tries to figure out what you wanted to do based on the words you typed in — has always had an awful reputation, and deservedly so. Natural language processing is a difficult thing to do correctly even with today’s extensive research and extraordinary levels of computing power, never mind thirty years ago on computers with, you know, 64 kilobytes of memory. So even though the later interactive fiction titles (most notably those by Magnetic Scrolls) did a significantly better job understanding what you wanted to do when compared to earlier games like Colossal Cave Adventure, there were still tons of parsing problems. Humans are excellent with language comprehension and computers were (and still are) not.
For those who never played text adventures, a typical “parser problem” might be something as simple as the computer saying, “You are standing atop a tall rock spire, with exits to the east and north,” to which you respond, “look at rock spire,” and it says, “I do not know the word ’spire’.”
I know it sounds stupid, but that’s literally the sort of thing that would happen. If the programmers didn’t actually code recognition for all the words they used in the prose, then merely using those words in a command would immediately cause a failure case. And things got worse from there. If the grammar you used was a pattern it didn’t know, it didn’t matter if it knew the words or not — typing, “I want to look at the rock spire” would completely confound the parser, even though it’s much more natural English than the kind of command it could actually handle, “examine spire”.
So this was awful, and I would never argue otherwise. But if you recall the brief history I gave in the previous section, hopefully you can see why blaming the parser for our failure to develop the magic in interactive fiction amounts to blaming the cat for burning the village: subsequent revisions to the genre removed the parser entirely, but the genre still became commercially unviable.
SPOILER ALERT: The simulation is the dragon.
In truth, though, I wouldn’t actually say that people complaining about the parser are wrong about the main problem. Rather I just think they are complaining about more than just the parser. Because even though “the parser” is a very specific thing that deals only with mapping natural language input to game world operations, the results that people see from their use of the parser are based on the entire round trip.
And that round trip is really where the problem is.
Interactive fiction — especially of the text adventure variety — effectively promised the player a complete world of possibilities limited only by their imagination. When the game said you were “standing on top of a giant rock spire”, you imagined a world with you standing on top of a giant rock spire, and everything that implies. You wanted to know about the rocks, and the moss, and the grasses, and could you take the grasses, might they be medicinal grasses, could you light them on fire, are there bugs in them, what kind of bugs, etc., etc., etc.
The game engaged the power of your imagination and took full advantage of it to create a rich game world, but in terms of the game simulation, almost none of the things you imagined actually existed. There wasn’t any grass on the rock spire because nobody had programmed that. There weren’t any bugs in the grass because nobody had programmed that either. In fact there may have been literally nothing at all beyond just an empty node in a graph with the text, “You are standing on top of a giant rock spire.”
And this created a deep, irreconcilable mismatch between the game you thought you were playing and the game you actually were playing, and you were repeatedly and unceremoniously reminded of that fact not by the parser, which certainly did fail often, but by the lack of simulation, which almost always failed to provide the interactivity your imagination expected from the text with which you were prompted.
This, I believe, is the fundamental reason why interactive fiction titles were so frustrating, and continued to be frustrating through numerous revamps. Changing from textual to graphical made it clearer what the scene was like in detail, sure, but it remained almost entirely non-simulated: most of the doors couldn’t be opened, most of the objects were just pixels that you couldn’t pick up or interact with, etc. And even those objects you could interact with still retained the problematic property that the only interactions that actually worked were the specific ones the designer wanted you to do to progress through the game.
Unfortunately, nobody ever solved — or even attempted to solve — this central problem. There are really only two types of modern descendants to interactive fiction: ones that have exactly the same limitations and problems (e.g., any game from Telltale), and ones that have removed the core game mechanic of objects and world simulation and replaced them with something concrete and easier to directly perceive, like the “clickable state machines” of Myst or the “path tracing” of The Witness.
So where does that leave us?
If you’re sitting there thinking, “Game over, man, because, like, there’s no way we’re going to be able to simulate everything a human can imagine,” don’t despair. We may not need to solve such a hard problem to still solve the part that actually matters to the playing experience. And that part, as you may have guessed, will be the subject of next week’s post.
continued in the comment below