When our mobile camera team knocked on Daniel Ravipinto’s door at his home, he was surprised to hear about the tournament and pleased to learn that Slouching Toward Bedlam had won its first match. He took the time to answer several questions in depth, for which we are very grateful…
Q: Slouching Toward Bedlam is a landmark in large part because of its extremely novel core concept – one that it can be argued is supremely suited to interactive fiction. What was/were the seed idea(s) that went into your original inspiration?
DR: Honestly, there was more than a little serendipity involved. I approached Star with the idea of writing a piece of IF together with nothing more than: “I want to do something weird and steampunk set in London.” I’d just gone on a vacation to England and had wandered around the city and the imagery and sense of it – the weight of all of that history – was still fresh in my mind. I’d seen a hospital that had been a hospital for hundreds of years.
Everything else derived from that opening idea. We did research and found little facts like the original panopticon plan for Bethlehem Hospital, the place’s own strange and tragic history, the statues set atop its entrance and as we went on, everything just began to fall into place.
The elements of steampunk technology, language-as-virus, and secret societies derive from what we’d read and were reading at the time. There’s HP Lovecraft in there, obviously, but also some Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Alan Moore. We bounced ideas off each other, wrote transcripts of what we thought a player’s interactions might look like and it just grew from there.
Q: How long did you and Star Foster work on the game? At what point in the development process did you decide to fold what are normally considered “extra-diegetic” functions into the game itself? Was that idea there from the start or did it come about later?
DR: Gosh. It’s so long ago now, but I remember that it was on a really tight schedule. We wrote and designed for a long time and then Star went on a trip only to return to find I’d implemented most of the base game in a flurry of panicked activity. Originally we’d envisioned the game as a chance for her to learn how to code IF but unfortunately my worries threw that right out the window.
The strangeness in the text from the Logos’ interference as well as the save/restore interface clearly had influences from games like Suspended, Bad Machine, and LASH. Once we’d introduced the idea of multiple characters becoming unstuck in time, the parallel to the IF interface seemed obvious.
The idea of you-not-being-you was there from the very start, I recall. I wrote a version of the opening text that we knew should not include the word ‘you’. This is an office, filled with things. You as a player have no context from before the moment the phonograph begins playing, and so we just let you – like the character – assume things about your identity. We also played with the idea of IF protagonists and the gap in knowledge from their players – the strangeness of a doctor wandering around his own office, asking about things he should obviously already know.
Another element in the design was we knew that conceptually we were biting off more than we could chew in a two-hour game. The world and the backstory contained within it were of necessity larger than the slice that the player had access to.
There’s a fair bit of what Andrew Plotkin once coined as “wedge-chocking”, or closing off options which are extraneous to the plot. We wanted Bedlam and London to feel real and large, but we didn’t have the time (either in terms of development or actual player playtime) to allow you to go anywhere, hence things like the fact that you can only access one hallway of the panopticon, or that the cab can only take you to a few, important places.
The final design came at an intersection of all of the above desires: something replayable, but short, that felt large in scope but with only a small playable portion, and – as I’d asked for in the beginning – weird and steampunk set in London.
Q: The original release was in 2003. Supposing that you were to have the same inspiration today, is there anything that you would change about the story?
DR: There are weaknesses in the design that seem obvious to me, some twenty years on.
One design principle I have come back to again and again is something I heard from Jordan Mechner, designer of Karateka and Prince of Persia: “What is the player doing?” Not their character, not the world – the player. Often games open with huge cutscenes where your character is doing all sorts of interesting things and the answer to Mechner’s question of what the player is doing is “watching a movie.”
The answer to that question for a lot of Slouching is “reading”. There’s a ton of writing in the game and while I’m very proud of it, the first thing you come across is a slightly-interactive cutscene in the form of a very long journal played on a phonograph. In the archives are a set of files. In Clive’s room is another journal.
Lore and backstory are all well and good. They give context to the player’s actions and, in the course of Slouching, they give meaning to their final decision. But I hope that if I re-did such a game now, I’d find a better way to integrate the story and the gameplay.
Then again, perhaps not. Even the Myst series drowns the player in journals. One of my favorite game stories – Marathon – is presented as a bunch of text in terminals.
It’s funny because I recently played a mainstream game – Paradise Killer – that had a very familiar design. You wander a space, learn the facts and details of a mystery and at the end you make a decision (or in the case of PK, a set of decisions) that define what you think happened and who should be punished. Even though it’s implemented as a fully-3D environment, a lot of the investigation is performed by talking to NPCs or through text descriptions. What was I mostly doing? Reading.
Q: The game is at first glance set in the late Victorian era, but there are obvious technological differences between it and real history. Was the intent of creating an alternate history solely to allow the insertion of “futuristic” technology for the era, or did you have other goals in mind? If the former, was there anything specific that kept you from moving the setting to a later era?
DR: It literally came out of ‘weird and steampunk’. We both liked the genre and I had re-read Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine at some recent point. There were also some of the serendipities I’ve mentioned. Bedlam’s original panopticon plan, for example, was fun to implement. The archives would obviously exist, but what’s the weirdest way we could build them out?
There were also elements that were completely original and we just wanted to include. I’d had an idea for an NPC companion from something I’d seen in the opening cutscene of a 1997 Playstation game called Elemental Gearbolt: a piece of luggage that floats behind a character that only shows up in a framing story. This became a little black box on wheels – Triage, who ended up becoming one of the most popular parts of the game.
Triage, in fact, saved a part of the design. I’d put all this work into building this complex cypher that I somehow expected players to sit there and decode. Star looked me right in the eye and said “No one is going to do that.” She was absolutely right, of course, but I really, really, liked the idea of the puzzle.
Triage ended up saving it. The cypher ended up being the reason for having Triage in the game.
Q: The game is often lauded for its wide variety of qualitatively distinct endings depending on the choices made by the player. Did you have all of the endings worked out in advance as part of the original story concept, or did some emerge while writing, coding and/or testing? Why did the two of you consider it important to provide such a large number of endings? Were there any endings that you considered but didn’t make it into the game?
DR: We tried to be as complete as possible. That idea of allowing the player to end the game in any way that seemed valid seemed important to us. So we tried our hardest to work out how many ways the story could end.
We covered a lot of bases. Any way that the player could end up dying had to be covered, and we specifically put in some to give that as a hint to a way of ‘solving’ the issue of the Logos. We kept track of the spread of the disease and who was infected, which created a whole bunch of variants.
The only one we didn’t catch, if I remember correctly, was the window. One of our testers – someone who didn’t really play IF – almost immediately typed “jump out window,” while playing around with what the parser could do. And that revealed one of the deepest possible endings to the whole thing.
Q: After winning 1st place and the top Miss Congeniality award in the Comp, the game went on to win both Best Game and Best Story in that year’s XYZZY Awards. It has subsequently been featured in the Interactive Top 50 of All Time across multiple editions spanning from 2011 to 2023. Have you been surprised at the way your game has developed into a touchstone of the form?
DR: Very much so.
The awards it won were, I think, a bit of a shock for both of us. It had been a labor of love and we hadn’t really thought much beyond getting it done on time and out for the competition. Everything that’s happened since then has been ever more of a surprise.
For me, also, the game has become very important with how interlinked it is with Star’s memory. I feel as if I and the rest of the world were cheated terribly by her loss. I think sometimes of all the things she might have written or made and how happy I would be to read or play them. And all that beyond the mere chance to spend more time with her.
The fact that there’s this one part of her creativity that has gone on makes me very happy.
Q: Most everyone who writes interactive fiction hopes for a result as good as yours. What advice would you give to aspiring authors? In your opinion, what is it about Slouching Toward Bedlam that gives it such broad appeal?
DR: I suppose there’s two parts to this – what would make good interactive-fiction (or really any game or interactive experience) and what would make good art, period.
Good IF is rigorously thought through. Who is the player? What are they experiencing? What can they do? Have you tried covering as many seemingly minor interactions as you can think of? What can they look at? Has this minor description become a red herring? Does each part make them more curious to keep playing or can you drop it?
A lot of good game design is simply iterating through playtesting. Get an ugly, quick, but feature-complete prototype as quick as you can and test, test, test. Listen to the people who play your game and hear what they’re trying to tell you. Writing in general – but most particularly game writing and design – is creating software for the variable hardware known as the human brain. Different people will bounce off your work differently. Try to learn from that.
Be prepared to change things and be more than willing to kill your darlings. IF is fantastic for this. No cutscenes to render, just type some more text. Your tests will not be the beautiful experience you imagined in your head. That’s fine. Maybe that thing could never exist in the real world.
From the other side of things, I am of the opinion that art – like people – is at its best when it knows what it is.
Have a thesis. An idea. A point of view. Have something to say. There’s been so much art – interactive and otherwise – that I’ve experienced, gotten to the end of, and gone “…and?”
Even if you find people disagreeing with what you’re saying, at least say something.
I think perhaps the reason Slouching works as well as it has is that it sets up what I hope is an interesting mystery and then supports you as well as it can through. There are strange things to see, places to wander. There’s a whole world implied just beyond the range of where you can go, with its own history and horrors.
And then, in the end, I think it does what the best of interactive fiction – whether literally a piece IF, or a TTRPG, or a video game – does. It asks: given this particular set of constraints and events, what will you do? And then it tells you the consequences.