With his own two works now out of the tournament, author Brian Rushton agreed to answer some questions in recognition of The Impossible Stairs’s upset win in Round 1. Here’s what he had to say when our mobile camera team found him in the stands…
Q: The Impossible Stairs beat 4x4 Archipelago, which was 9 places higher in the seed rankings for the tournament. Your own review of your game’s opponent was positive overall, with a 5-star ranking and the most agreements of any review for the game on IFDB. What do you think was/were the factor(s) that gave The Impossible Stairs the edge in the tournament?
BR: It’s hard for me to see my own game from ‘outside’ effectively. I think that people liked the subject matter, because it’s really about family and loss and memory, which several games in the competition have been about.
Also I think it’s part of a larger trend in this competition; on average choice-based games have been losing more matches than parser games.
Q: You are uniquely positioned within the IF community (and quite probably the world) as the person with the most experience with interactive fiction as a form. As of this writing, you have reviewed almost 1/4 (23.2%) of all games listed on IFDB; nobody else is even close. What is it about interactive fiction that drives you to devote so much of your life to it as a topic of study and criticism?
BR: The things I like about interactive fiction the most as a field of study are that:
- It is (largely) free. I have had very little spare money in the last decade.
- It feels large enough that there’s always more to play but small enough that knowing it all feels almost obtainable.
- Many of the people that make IF are nice to talk to.
- There’s a lot of IF without strong profanity or sexuality.
I’d love to say there’s something about the medium itself that draws me, but all artistic endeavors are about sharing a piece of yourself with others, and a painting or movie could do that as well as IF. But a lot of movies have content I just can’t watch, and there are more books written every month than I could read in years. IF is manageable and nice.
Q: The definition of interactive fiction is a topic that can be contentious. Based on your own experience and insights, how do you define the form?
BR: I think interactive fiction is any game or story that allows for some agency from the player (even if it’s just the timing of clicks) and where it would remain largely the same even if all visuals were stripped out.
But no definition is perfect; for instance, visual novels are clearly IF (even without pictures you can follow the stories) but they are so much more prolific and popular than the IF we do that it would overwhelm the database and the competitions if the two communities merge. So, in a way IF is ‘whatever gets entered into the competitions that people like’.
A third definition for me would be based on what made IF easy for me to play. I played IF as a young father with a stressful job, and I needed something I could pick up and put down and multitask with and play at my own pace. So text that I can read as fast or slow as I want (no timed events), games that I can stop at anytime to do something else, apps that can fit in a window for multitasking, no video or sound that can wake up a baby or disturb others. That’s why I very much dislike timed text, for instance. This is a selfish ‘definition’ of IF that is basically “IF is what is convenient for me to play”.
Q: With 25 published games listed on IFDB, it’s clear that you’ve experimented with multiple tools, but over 2/3 of them list “Inform 7” as their development system. What is it about Inform that keeps you coming back to it as your tool of preference? Why did you choose it over others when you were first getting started?
BR: Inform is a game in and of itself. You type in natural sentences, but only some are recognized, so you have to choose the sentences that will achieve your goal. It’s the greatest game, because anything is possible.
I chose it when I started because I was emulating Emily Short. I found her code for Glass and reworked it to be my game. I was really confused at first; I thought, ‘this is a great description for code, but where is the actual code? There is a room called ___? Great, how do I code that?’ Discovering the truth was really fun.
I stick with Inform because each language guides the author towards what it was intended for. Inform really likes creating systems of interactions, and scenes, and I like both of those things.
Q: Who are the IF authors that you consider to be most influential to your own work? What lessons have you learned from them?
BR: Ryan Veeder is probably my number one inspiration. While I like his games pretty well (many in my top 10%) none of them are my favorites, but his writing style and humor are things I aspire to and consciously imitate. He’s probably influenced me more than anyone (as I write this I have a plush vampire I won from the last Ryan Veeder expo I was part of. I was crushed to find Moondrop Isle was closed and I couldn’t participate at all; it’s why I haven’t played it yet, I have to overcome my sadness first).
Emily Short wrote most of the Inform examples and has more code sources than anyone else. Much of my game code is from Emily Short; I think around 5,000 to 10,000 words of Never Gives Up Her Dead is directly from her examples, modified to mesh with each other.
Chandler Groover is another. He has helped me so many times that I feel like he is a close friend to me that I would do a lot to help. His games are like polar opposites of mine and many of the things I shun he embraces, but his darkest games are run through with a streak of burning hope that is essential to his style. I remember making Grooverland in tribute to him and saying I wanted to end with the character trapped in the park forever as a statue and he said that that was too dark.
Finally, Astrid Dalmady and Brendan Hennessy are the choice authors I fanboy over the most. Astrid was the first Twine author that ‘clicked’ for me; I played You are Standing at a Crossroads and thought, ‘Oh, so that’s what Twine is. This is what people like’. And then Brendan is one of my favorite writers in all of fiction, not just IF.
Q: You are a professional mathematician. How does a mathematician’s outlook affect your perception of IF? What aspects of craft most impress you in your favorite works?
BR: Parser IF and math research have the same kind of ‘reward loop’ where you beat your head against a wall for a while and then get an ‘aha’ moment that is very rewarding.
That’s one reason a lot of people don’t like parser IF (or crosswords), because you spend so much time on dead ends before you hit the reward.
Although, I didn’t really succeed in math research and I use walkthroughs a lot, but that’s life. A walkthrough can be like a good textbook. I felt guilty about walkthroughs for a while, assuming no one else used them, but then I saw Emily Short and Andrew Plotkin mention using one, and I thought, ‘okay, so everyone’s doing it.’
My favorite aspects of craft aren’t actually math related, it’s more about the little touches. The thing I love about Curses every time I play it are the little boxed quotations (and I’m still so sad Glulx can’t do those the real way). I like Cannery Vale because of the responsive way the world changes. I love Worlds Apart for things like the locket that comment on the world around you.
Q: How does it feel to have two games listed in the top 0.5% of all works on IFDB according to the Top 100 algorithm?
BR: I think that’s great! I make games because I hope people like them, so this feels good to me!
Q: In your description of your first experience with interactive fiction on another thread, you mention that you “remember[ed] seeing Zork on [your] dad’s computer as a kid” but imply that you only first played any games circa 2010. Was there lingering curiosity about interactive fiction from your younger years, or was your interest in IF formed wholly during your adult years?
BR: I had a few other IF experiences as a kid. I played a game called Hacker that let you guess passwords and then access satellites that was fun, and in 6th grade we had some IF that felt like it was related to Alice in Wonderland and had riddles about roses.
But I was a JRPG kid. I played FFVII for hours, and got emulators and played Secret of Mana 1 and 2 and FFV and Lufia II and Chrono Trigger. I was obsessed. I’ve resolved to keep the law as an adult and so I can’t access those games anymore. IF filled the void.
Q: What was your biggest hobby before interactive fiction?
BR: Editing Wikipedia. I had hundreds and even thousands of edits on math Wikipedia. They sent me a T-shirt to thank me, which was sweet. I rewrote Addition and Topology and restructured Symmetry into two articles.
I stopped when I tried to get an article to be a Featured Article because I felt like nothing I wrote could be good enough for the editors, like it was a constant battle to be accepted. It was especially hard because the reason I had failed as a professor was because my papers were being rejected, not because of factual errors, but because the referees said ‘the writing is bad’, ‘the writing is quite bad’, etc. I was using Wikipedia as way to prove I could write, but I didn’t get the approval I was looking for. So I tried IF, and came in with the attitude that it would be like everything else, that Andrew Plotkin and Emily Short and Adam Cadre and a list of other people would be the big meanies who would hate me and I’d have to prove myself to them to be valid as a person.
Ironically none of the people I wanted to prove myself to have ever seemed interested in my work at all and, outside of Emily Short, I doubt any of them have played one game of mine. Instead, I just kept making stuff and had fun interacting with people who were new like me, and we all grew to be better authors and enjoy each other’s work.
Reading my stuff from back then, I really was a bad writer. I should have just focused on getting better instead of proving I was already good, but I got better in the end, mostly by making a lot of games, reading every IFWiki craft and theory article, playing and analyzing thousands of past games, starting a writing workshop with some students at my school, etc.
Q: It seems that you were playing IF for about five years before you decided to try to write some yourself – is that correct? Describe the process that led you to make the leap from player to author. Was Ether the first game that you ever wrote, or were there previous unpublished efforts?
BR: In those 5 years, I only played the first few months and at the end.
I didn’t have a computer of my own in college because I didn’t want one; I felt like computers isolate you from others. I would have gotten an iPhone, which would be more welcoming with its ‘open’ structure, but the fonts were too small. So when iPad’s came out, they were like iPhones but big, so I bought one of the first ones. I tried to think of games, remembered Zork from my childhood, searched it, and found Frotz.
I loved all the games on it and thought they were all the IF canon (which is why I was surprised people don’t talk about Heroes or The Weapon more). But Vespers and Varicella really disturbed me, especially because in trying to win I typed evil commands and the game accepted them. I also got married and my wife wanted me to stop playing video games that she didn’t also play, so I stopped for five years.
Once I got back into IF, I discovered it was still being made; I had thought it was dead! I played a ton of games and became the top reviewer in just a few months. Learning about all the games, I realized that some concepts had not been implemented, which I thought was silly and wanted to fix. I did Ether because people said that 3d movement was impossible. I did Color the Truth because they said conversation was a challenge.
I only made one other test game before Ether. It was about Abraham and Isaac going to the mountain and Abraham sacrificing him. But the one person who tested it couldn’t find the gloves I had hidden in a pile of scree. So for Ether I was determined to make every object clearly visible; in fact, you’re floating in a void with every object visible from every room.
Q: What’s your advice to new or would-be authors of interactive fiction?
BR: Don’t be afraid of failure! I see so many people who never make anything big because they couldn’t handle people not liking it. I see people who never make anything small because they’re afraid of having bad games. Failure is the lifeblood of learning. There are some people like Jeremy Freese who burst onto stage with a perfect game and flee, but I love seeing the journey of people the most who try, learn from failure, and revise their strategy.
Also a lot of people want to master a language before writing a game, but I feel like you master a language by writing games.
Q: Aside from those involving your own games, which matches have had the most surprising outcomes to you in the tournament so far?
BR: I was shocked that Birdland lost to Of their Shadows Deep. In my view Birdland is pretty much the best Twine game ever. I love Amanda Walker’s work but I like The Spectators best, then Fairest, then What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed, then After the Accident, then Of Their Shadows Deep. So I thought, ‘no way the best Twine game will lose to the fifth best Amanda Walker game’, but it did. On the other hand, I thought The Spectators would win against Slouching Towards Bedlam, and it lost!
I also have been surprised at how handily Spider and Web has been crushing literally everything. I think Spider and Web is a masterful game and have written about it more than once, but everyone I’ve ever talked to about it says things like ‘I don’t see the hype’, or ‘I liked part of it but not all of it’. I do think the audience for this competition is people who feel like they’ve played a lot of these games, which skews slightly older, but I’d think that same group would have loved a lot of Spider and Web’s opponents.
But I can’t complain, I’ve voted for Spider and Web in all of its matches.
