We now turn the camera to this episode’s challenger, LUCIAN P. SMITH, to learn more about his career in interactive fiction…
Q: Your introduction to interactive fiction was a little unusual in that you got it secondhand, via stories from friends at middle school. What was it about this medium that attracted you even before you could experience it firsthand?
LPS: Two things: puzzles and humor. I’ve always liked puzzles of various sorts, and the idea of solving things by going into a simulated environment and just typing things was an inherently compelling idea to me, and of course, being untethered to reality let it become even more wondrous in my mind! And of course the main reason my friends were telling me stories about the games in the first place was to share the funny stories they had found, both those deliberately placed (“You see a fork in the road. >GET FORK”) and the unintentional goofiness that ensues when a game lets users type literally anything and then tries its best to cope.
Q: Your reintroduction to the IF scene after the commercial era was Graham Nelson’s Curses. How did you happen across it? What stands out about your experience with it?
LPS: I was in my first year of grad school, and my fiancée was in a different state finishing college, so I had a lot of time to myself. At one point (if I’m remembering correctly) I searched the nascent internet for ‘text adventure games’ on a whim, remembering the games I had played back in junior high/high school, and found it.
I don’t remember particular room descriptions or anything, but I do remember having just a sense of awe that here was a new game in this old style that I had watched die years ago. And not only that, it was good! And huge! There was no way (of course) for me to directly get a page count or something like that for the game when I started it, but there are ways that games can convey their size to you even early on: giving you a variety of goals, both long- and short-term, letting you mess with objects that obviously have a use, but equally clearly they are not useful yet, even just depth of implementation or complexity of early puzzles. All those sorts of things combined to tell me that Curses was going to be ginormous, but also solid. It was astonishing.
Q: Your first released work was really more along the lines of “interactive non-fiction”: a tool for helping voters in the 1996 IFComp. You kept up annual releases of this tool for many years. The IFDB entry for the collection is tagged easter egg – care to comment?
LPS: It was a great first game exercise! Limited scope, clear goals, simple design. In the end, it was probably a bit overengineered–there were all sorts of ways to cull games by type or operating system (the main way games were distinguished as ‘playable/interesting to me’ in those days), but all you really needed was a way to randomly sort a list. And, realizing that, I also gave people the Big Red Button Which, If You Push It, Will Do Everything You Really Need To Do Automatically, so that ‘>PUSH BUTTON. QUIT.’ was a valid ‘walkthrough’ for the game. Then the next year I put all the new games in but left the previous year’s games in as a sort of easter egg (the probable reason for the tag? I guess?). One year I put in fake games from the far-distant future of 2006, both ones I had made up and ones from an r*if post I had enjoyed. I’m still overly fond of the idea of Andrew Plotkin, Jr. entering a terrible game in AGT in an act of defiance against his dad.
From there, I kept things up for several years, but eventually it became more of a hindrance than a help–comp organizers had to get the final list of games all ready (and that list always changes up to the last possible moment), then send that list to me, then I had to code up all the games and deal with all the weirdness of the odd systems that were entered that year, or game names that broke the parser (like a game with ‘and’ in the title or the like). Nowadays, the personal shuffle list on the web site is overall much more functional than CompXX ever was, but I do like to think it owes at least a bit to my little room of games and bins and levers and a Big Red Button Which…
Q: You’ve said that you “discovered Curses, the newsgroups, Inform [6], and the comp, in that order.” As a newcomer to the scene, you won the 3rd IFComp in 1997 with The Edifice. What do you think was the secret of its success?
LPS: I mean, hands down it’s the language puzzle. It’s basically all anyone talked about in their reviews, and in retrospect it’s by far the standout set piece of the game, both in content and context. I had zero idea that this would be the case when I entered the game, though–to me, it was just one puzzle among many. And interestingly, I had no idea before beta testing whether it was solvable at all, because I had no way to test it!
The content of the puzzle I’ve described before as ‘limited, complete scope’: limited in that there’s well-defined boundaries of what you can do (say combinations of ~20 words, and point at things), and complete, in that Stranger has some unique response for almost everything you try. The sheer volume of responses also meant that he was well characterized, and people ended up being kind of endeared to him.
The reviews on the newsgroup universally mentioned the language puzzle, to the point where I was genuinely shocked when The Edifice was nominated for the XYZZY for Best Puzzles. I didn’t realize anyone had even noticed any of the other puzzles in the game!
To answer the implied ‘how did you do so well as a newbie’ question… I’m afraid I can’t say any more than to guess ‘luck and audacity’. It was pure luck that I happened to think of it, and pure audacity that I thought, “Oh, yeah, I got this,” when I started coding it.
Q: Speaking of the language puzzle, are you generally interested in linguistics? If not, what prompted you to try this?
LPS: Nope! The prompt for the game in general was the animated short ‘The Edifice’ from Why Man Creates by Saul Bass (1968)[1], combined with the general idea of the Civilization II Tech Tree. Not that ‘the invention of language’ is in either (though the latter has ‘Alphabet’); it was more the general idea of ‘You’re an early human. Why do you invent stuff? How can I let a player do that?’
Q: What favorite game(s) stand out as particularly inspirational to you as an author?
LPS: There’s a lot of games I’ve liked, but usually not in an ‘I should do something like that’ way. I would say that in general, my favorite games are the ones that know exactly what they’re doing, and then they Do That Thing, enthusiastically. Focus and competence, like you find in many of the standout games of my era like the Plotkin and Short games. But liking games everyone else likes is boring; I have to shout out a couple games that I still remember years later as having won me over with sheer chutzpah in the face of not-always-coherent coding: August, which I got to review as part of the 2001 SmoochieComp, and the bonkers Jacks or Better to Murder, Aces to Win from Comp99. August was written in a week and is buggy as anything, and you solve the mystery in Jacks by going south, but both just had a fire and flash that I remember fondly to this day.
Jumping forward a few decades to when I found myself able to play and rate IF Comp games again, I also have to say that there’s a special place in my heart for Ribald Bat Lady Plunder Quest, which was my absolute top favorite IF Comp game of 2023 by a wide margin, again for its absolute Commitment To The Bit, and its amazing protagonist. And this will probably surprise anyone who read my reviews that year, particularly if you are Robert Patten, but the other game that looms large in my memory is Beat Witch. I was so angry at that game by the end of it. Just furious. But I remember that world. I remember the tone, the protagonist, the magic, the villain, all so vividly. Absolutely the best game I ever hated.
Q: You’ve said that the reason that you moved to Inform 7 from Inform 6 through “inertia,” particularly because it was used in two IF Whispers games you contributed to (An Escape to Remember and House of Dream of Moon). Have any other development systems caught your eye? Are there any that you think you might try in the future?
LPS: Actually, the pilot episode of this very show alerted me to the existence of Dialog, and I was intrigued! The automapping and the word-highlighting in particular seemed compelling, and the weirdness of I7 when you can’t figure out exactly the right phrase has been wearing a little thin, especially when I’m not using it regularly.
Also, I got to attend a working demo of Ink at Narrascope 2024, and I was won over by its look and feel–if I ever want to do something in the Choice realm, I think I’d probably try that first. It just gave off a vibe of ‘oh, yeah, that’s how I think about choice-based games, too’.
Q: You were a contributor to Coke Is It!, two IF Whispers games, and Cragne Manor, all of which were built via the collaborative efforts of many authors. What can you tell us about your experiences as part of large author groups? Is there something about this format that you find particularly appealing?
LPS: Working in a group has been great for me personally because it’s been a good level of responsibility: I’m not responsible for the whole thing, so I’m not overwhelmed, but people are counting on me for my part, which means I’m more motivated. I’ve also delighted in Inform 7’s ability to let me muck about with parts of the game I know nothing about: for Whispers 3 (House of Dream of Moon), I only saw one other person’s code, but wrote a whole extra plotline that involved the player from the very beginning to the very end. In Cragne Manor, I introduced a character that followed the player around, again, through areas whose code I never saw. Writing up code that I knew literally nobody would see how or even if it worked until someone actually played the game was kind of subversively delightful to me.
I should also mention that Ryan Veeder (the Cragne Manor co-organizer but also my opponent in this illustrious showdown) was not super keen on contributed code interfering with other sections, and it was all Jenny Polodna (the other co-organizer) who dived in and helped make it work. Pretending that Ryan still harbors resentment towards me for breaking the walls of his hard-enough-already-without-people-deliberately-making-it-harder project turns this Iron ChIF competition into a bona fide grudge match, which sounds delightful, so let’s go with that. Bring it on, Veeder! If I could contribute code to your game to make your life difficult I would do it again!
(Now I’m worried that he’s going to submit a malicious pull request for my own game’s code during this competition. I guess I brought that on myself.)
Q: You’ve said that code from other games was “absolutely invaluable” when learning new languages. Are there particular games that have source code you would recommend for study to novices?
LPS: I think the most valuable code for anyone (novices or veterans) is code for a game you know, ideally for something it does that you want to emulate. I only recently found the pinned thread Inform 7 documentation and resources, but it’s obviously excellent, and contains links to a lot of full game source code; finding something in there that you’ve played before shouldn’t be difficult–and if it is, just play some of those games! They’re excellent. It might also be interesting to search github for even more examples.
The reason I like full working examples is that when coding in any system, half the time my problem turns out to stem from some bit of context for the code I’m trying to write instead of the ‘core’ code itself. Having a working example means that all of the context has to be there, even if it’s a pain to find. Working complete C++ examples will show you which files to #include (for example); working I7 examples will have all the little fiddly bits that you have to get right to reference your table or what have you. You can also plop down working code that Does Something into the middle of your own game, make sure it still Does The Same Thing, and can then gradually morph it to Do What You Actually Want. It’s not efficient in the slightest, but it has the advantage of always working, which is sometimes what you need.
In the I7 manual, the short code snippets are nice and usually what you need, but when things are mysterious, the full examples are always the way to go.
Q: Your other published games, The Chicken Under the Window, and Three Steps to the Left were speed IF. What drew you to these particular speed IF events over the others?
LPS: So, The Chicken Under The Window (or ‘cutwind.z5’, as I so hilariously named the file) has a bit of a complicated backstory. On ifMUD in 1998, we were bandying around the idea of having a competition smaller than the annual comp, and I thought, well hey, let’s just do it instead of talking about it. So I put together a web site on my university account, and introduced, “The First Ever (And Maybe The Only) Interactive Fiction Mini-Competition”. I gave people a month to finish their games, and gave them a RIDICULOUSLY COMPLICATED PREMISE. To this day, I am not entirely sure what I was thinking. But I was definitely thinking it strongly! [2] [3]
Within a couple weeks of my competition being announced, Adam Cadre announced a different mini-comp: the ChickenComp, with the premise ‘a chicken crossing a road’. My comp wasn’t even done yet! And I will admit now, with the safety of years of separation from the event, that I was more than a little salty that when I had asked Adam what he thought about my premise back before I announced it, he hadn’t said something helpful like ‘um, maybe this is too complicated’. To be fair, maybe he hadn’t noticed either? But it didn’t take the newsgroup long to figure it out.
At the same time… it was clearly a much better competition and premise. And so I swallowed my pride, and partly in an effort to show other people that I was fine with Adam sort of stepping on my parade, and partly in an effort to get over being salty about Adam sort of stepping on my parade, I entered my own game into Adam’s comp. It was a straight-up parody of Andrew Plotkin’s The Space Under The Window (but much simpler in its structure and execution), that in the end I was kind of proud of. It really runs with its premise and is just unabashedly silly.
This is a very long and drawn-out way of answering your question ‘why this comp instead of others’: it was the first comp of its kind that wasn’t my own! It actually even pre-dated speed IF: The FEAMTO comp was May of '98, ChickenComp in June of '98, the first speed IF in October of '98, and the third (which I entered with ‘Three Steps..’, finally having both an idea and time) in December of '98.
Q: Do you see value in speed IF? If so, is it value for the authors, for potential players, or both?
LPS: My old college Communications professor used to say that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly. Anything that results in an artifact of self-expression has value, in my view. Finding what it’s valuable for is, to a very real extent, an exercise for the reader. And it’s fine if some people know it’s not for them, but the process of finding the value of some weird bit of art can be really rewarding: maybe you find an unexpected turn of phrase, or a new take on an old trope, or an approach to interactivity you haven’t seen before.
That said, my guess is that for most speed IF, the biggest value is to the author. Just getting something complete and out the door is a win, and the low stakes means that you can try something weird or fun or dumb and just see if it works. And failures are just as valuable (if not moreso) than successes, especially if it helps you improve in the future.
Q: What’s your basic game plan when creating speed IF? Do you plan to do something similar here?
LPS: Yes, my game plan has not changed in the slightest since 1998: damn the torpedoes, and full speed ahead!
This competition will actually be an interesting blend of my past timeframes: all of my stuff so far has been written to deadlines, but generally there was ‘plenty of time’, with the exception of Three Steps for which I had (IIRC) two or three hours total. This time there’s a good amount of time pressure and a deadline, plus the expectation of making constant progress over the course of the week. That’s new to me!
My plan is to set up a github repository for the game beforehand, including all the extensions I might need, and with a basic structure using ‘extensions’ to break up my source code into separate files. Once things start, I’ll spend a good amount of time the first day brainstorming and planning, and then… dive in and see what happens? Since the competition is open to free-form beta-testing, I’m lining up one person each day to test the game as it stands at the end of it. I hope this fulfills two goals: it will give me the impetus to create something playable by the end of every day, and it’ll fulfill the ‘test early, test often’ mantra.
Q: You’ve been involved in the IF scene for quite a while. Of all the new things to come along in that time, which ones are the most significant in your view, and why?
LPS: I don’t feel remotely qualified to answer that question, but I can answer a related one: what’s the weirdest thing to come along? And the answer to that, hands down, is ‘people actually pay money to play IF’. That was an absolutely ludicrous notion in the '90’s and aughts. In fact, one way to spot the people on the newsgroups most out of touch with reality was if they claimed they were selling their game. Joke was on us, though, apparently! Turns out they were ahead of their time, not behind it.
Q: How has IF affected the rest of your life?
LPS: It got me my job!
In 2003, after having been in grad school for an unconscionable 10 years, my family and I moved to Seattle, moved back in with my parents, and started job-searching, this time in the city in which we wanted to live, instead of from halfway across the continent. A few months later, I found a posted post-doc position in the lab of one Mary Kuhner. “Wait,” I thought, “I know that name…” And indeed, she turned out to be another denizen of the r*if newsgroups, who had even written a review of my game lo these ages past (she gave it a ‘7’). I applied for the position, and in my cover letter said “Hey, by the way…” When she got it, she looked me up, remembered her review, and found my XYZZYNews article about coding the language puzzle. She was running a software lab, and essentially, she knew I could Do Science because of my PhD, but she knew I could program because of The Edifice. I got hired, and ‘programming in science’ is what I’ve done ever since. [4]
Q: What do you see as the highest skills in the craft of IF?
LPS: IF is inherently an interactive medium. It’s why your players are there instead of reading a book. As such, the first ‘high skill’ you need as an author is simply the ability to give your audience something to do that they’ll enjoy doing.
But the second is the same as I see as the ‘high skill’ of the craft of any art: the ability to communicate. If an author can speak truth into a game in a way that I can hear it on the other side, everything else is kind of moot–I’ll forgive even terrible or nonexistent interactivity if I’m moved by something an author has to say. I feel like most of us have heard someone sing from the heart, and suddenly it didn’t really matter if they were on pitch or kept a steady beat. The ability to bare your soul, whether it be profound, silly, dry, sincere, sarcastic, evocative, or anything else, is fundamentally how art works.
And when I’m a participant in that moment of communication, there’s nothing quite like it.
Fun fact: you can see it playing in the background in X-Men 2! ↩︎
OK, as I browse the old site again, I’m remembering more and more of what I was thinking. I was wrong, and I’m not sure how I didn’t notice that I was wrong, but I do remember my grandiose ideas of ‘oh, sure, people will be able to do this no problem’. Ah, youth. ↩︎
Oh, yeah! I was also thinking of the Twonky Island assignment/games that students had written for a class at NWU! ↩︎
My dad told me later that while I was languishing in grad school, he had googled me, and discovered The Edifice. ‘Ah, so that’s what he’s doing instead of writing his thesis,’ he thought (but, kindly, did not tell me). When I finally got a job in large part because of that selfsame goofy game I had written, his attitude shifted to be a little more charitable to how I had spent my time. Not that he was wrong, mind you. ↩︎