Swap Wand User, by Sarah Willson [ParserComp]
One of the canonical justifications for text-only interactive fiction goes back to an old Infocom magazine ad: no graphics can compare to the visuals the human imagination can conjure when prompted by evocatively-written text! It’s never resonated very strongly for me, though. There’s an air of flop-sweat and defensiveness to the claim, sure, and it’s maybe slightly less true now than it was in 1984, but the reason I shrug at the argument is simpler: I don’t tend to visualize stuff I read unless I’m specifically prompted. While in theory I suppose I could use my imagination to create a spectacular setting ever based on my interpretation of the words West of House, in practice I’m just getting the words. But! That’s no bad thing, because words offer aesthetic pleasures all their own (like, I really enjoy chalcedony, 90% because of the sound and rhythm of the word but only 10% because of what it looks like), and there are a whole host of experiences that can only be imperfectly captured in visual media – that, to my mind, is where IF’s competitive advantage truly lies.
Swap Wand User is a case in point. It’s a wordplay game, already a genre that plays to the medium’s strength, but unlike, say, Counterfeit Monkey, where you can kind of picture what a movie version would look like (albeit it’d be kind of terrible and people would have to say stuff like “to be clear, this stick is actually a twig!” three times a scene), this one plays out entirely on the page. It’s a series of self-contained puzzles, each presenting an excerpt from a different document that’s been scrambled up; you’ve got a wand that enables you to transpose one word with another, and so you’ve got to undo the scrambling to recover their meaning.
That’s a simple mechanic to describe, but the puzzle design here is very, very finely judged. There’s a clear progression as early puzzles ease the player into the basics, for example helping you to notice that capitalization and punctuation don’t change as you move words around, so you can use them as anchor points to figure out which words lead off sentences. New constraints get layered in as you go, notably a requirement that swapped words have more or less the same character length, which restrict your freedom but also provide additional clues by ruling out possibilities as the passages increase in size. Repeated words are also kept to a minimum, eliminating disambiguation issues – which is easy enough to say, but just you try writing a hundred words with at most two of them being “the”. Heck, in a just-showing-off touch, even the title is the solution to the first challenge!
As for the content of all those documents, the story they tell isn’t nearly as novel as the game mechanics, but they work well enough. Between technical manuals, newspaper stories, and police reports, they tell a predictable yet effective story of scientific innovation and corporate greed. The structure requires that most of the narrative be left to implication – getting into too much detail would make for laborious puzzles – so relying on standard plot-beats is a smart choice, and there’s room for a bit of character-driven pathos along the way. There’s even a late-game shift into a more stream-of-conscious narrative voice, accompanied by a radical reduction of difficulty, allowing the player to barrel downhill through the final set of revelations (which boast a SWAP WRONG (for) RIGHT command that’s incredibly predictable and on the nose but also awesome). All of which to say the pacing feels exactly right, and the artful semantic disarray leads to moments of clearly-intentional poetry:
in a lucid moment, kathleen addled me to liberate her from that begged mind.
There are some weak spots to Swap Wand User, but I think they’re intrinsic to its approach. I made a lot of typos when trying to swap longer words, which is kind of inevitable, but I still sometimes wondered whether a mouse-driven drag and drop interface would have worked better (heresy since this is a ParserComp entry, but there you are). I also am frankly stymied when I try to think about how, diegetically, the word-swapping wand is supposed to work. Like, the game makes clear that this is a technology that’s been invented and being used in the game’s story, and some of the switches seem to have impactful real-world implications, like the possibility of changing one person for another – but when I swap “an” and “of” in a document, what exactly is supposed to be happening, and why is this tech any more impactful than a bottle of white-out?
But this is where that no-graphics limitation of IF becomes a superpower: I don’t actually need to be able to picture what’s happening, since this is a story told entirely in words – everything else is secondary. In other media, that wouldn’t be enough to be successful, but a reason I love IF so much is that here, it really really is.
swu mr.txt (52.2 KB)