Hey everyone, welcome back to The Rosebush. Do we have a banger for you today! @lavieenmeow takes a 6.4K-word deep dive into the conventions and stylistic habits that have built up around the arrangement of text in parser IF, and how Drew Cook manipulates those conventions as the poetic form of Portrait with Wolf.
I’m honored to present… Parser Poetics in Portrait with Wolf
Incredible! I really admire PwW and this was so worth the read. I hope there are more analyses of games in the future.
I am intrigued by one word choice:
It hints at an underlying tension and eroticism inherent in parser games.
While I don’t criticise it in any way, in the context of parser games as a general concept it wasn’t the first word that came to my mind, and so I’d be very interested to hear lavieenmeow’s thoughts on this a bit more!
Hi Max! Sure thing, happy to expand on that a bit more. Thanks for asking! My thinking is that one aspect of playing parser games is the player’s testing the boundaries of the game: testing to see what objects and verbs have been implemented, trying to solve puzzles by manipulating objects in ways that might be unconventional, and then sometimes being corrected by error messages that reassert the rules or boundaries of the game. To me, this back and forth between the player and the game feels a bit like a dance–something that can feel kind of charged, but is not overtly sexual in nature. Hope that helps, and thanks for reading :)!
I liked this article. It brings up a lot of potential avenues for nontraditional parser games to explore. Since it mentioned “a parser poem that can be read as Inform code”, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Cicatrix, Amanda Walker’s entry for the Love/Violence jam. Not sure if you’ve seen it, but I found it interesting from both a poetic and programming perspective, especially as I don’t know a lick of Inform 7 so I was constantly guessing at what the various lines did programmatically as well as trying to interpret them on an English level. The only Inform 7 I’ve absorbed has been through osmosis from hanging around these forums, so I knew just enough to guess at the parser logic without being sure. Cicatrix builds two worlds at once, the game world and the “real” world you understand from interpreting Inform 7 code as you would any other story or poem. I normally dislike Inform 7 because it’s so similar to grammatically correct English, which is why I’ve never learned it, but the same thing I dislike about the programming language is what allows such a poem to be written in said programming language, and also what prevented me from fully understanding said poem.
You could say Portrait With Wolf does something similar, where there’s a game world with rules and programmatically defined chains of cause-and-effect, and the “real” world of the text. Most parser games try their best to make these two worlds the same, having the rules and cause-and-effect chains exist in the actual setting itself, such as in Counterfeit Monkey where the game mechanics correspond to the world in the most literal way. But in Portrait With Wolf, each game rule is mappable to hundreds of untold things potentially happening to our protagonist, which we can’t perceive directly but only through abstract verse.
Re: the part about the Convalescence room, which asks the player “to consider the ways in which a state might resemble a room”, that’d also be cool to see in another game. In general, there’s a lot of potential with parser games and abstraction. Mapping a physical dimension to a non-physical dimension. Mental states as rooms you can enter and leave. Turning other things into rooms, or into objects that can be picked up and put down. Or not put down, as it happens.
As for the eroticism of games, I feel like I must have read something about that somewhere, about how there’s a power the game exerts on the player and the player can be utterly helpless before it. You can spend hours with a game. It can make you cry. It’s some kind of relationship, even if it’s not a human one, it’s just you and the machine. Though I guess a game is still a human relationship if you consider the humans who made the game and whoever’s playing it. Even in a solo game, the back-and-forth between the player and the game is really between the player and the dev(s), each party invisible to the other but still there behind the screen. All this still applies to parser games.
I’m not sure if that was actually clear or anything, so I went on JSTOR and found some random stuff about eroticism in games written by critical game scholars with more philosophy credentials than I could ever hope to attain in my life, including this book called Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games by someone named Christopher B. Patterson who knows what they’re talking about more than I do. I’ll pull some quotes:
Erotics is an art of conceiving how pleasure, desire, and the interactive work upon the body as a way to master ourselves and to recognize how our pleasures impact others. In games these desires are often social and political—the desire for power, for self-optimization, for knowledge, the desire to dominate, and the pleasures of being dominated. Summarizing Foucault, Amber Jamilla Musser writes that “desire” for Foucault was often “mired in a psychoanalytic concept of lack and anticipation,” while “pleasure” emerged as a form of creative possibility. Video games expose our troubling and sometimes violent desires while enticing us to pursue more creative and queer pleasures within the cordoned-off space of the gameworld, and it is through this realm of sandbox experimentation that we can fathom our erotic selves…
…Habituated to the dread posture, players of Alien: Isolation may, after so many hours of feeling vulnerable, access strange and perverse pleasures: the pleasure of being objectified in a world where everyone is expected to be struggling for dignity, the pleasure of being contradictory when the subject is meant to be a unified whole, the pleasure of feeling disempowered when we are all supposed to be struggling for power. All of this, experienced virtually, can offer a reparative release, a mindful nourishment, a form of living in our bodies without the constant need to expose, to know, to fight…
Or as Porpentine says in this one interview (NSFW): “Games are a tool of punishment by a dark and sadistic god, and I am the instrument of that god.”
As a side note, I got a copy of Patterson’s book and skimmed through, and it has a lot of other interesting bits:
One day, while playing the multiplayer video game Overwatch, one of my five anonymous teammates began to chide me over the in-game text box. “Useless,” the player called me. “Useless fucking American.” The player’s name tag was in Korean characters, but mine, named “Kawika,” did not scream “American.” The character I was playing, Mei, was a Chinese biologist wrapped in a plum-colored snow coat. “Fucking American,” the player wrote again, as my other teammates leaped to my defense, calling him (or her?) a racist Korean and reminding them that “you’re on an American server.” As others joined in, some slandering Americans, the chatbox turned into a flame war of racist bashing. We lost the match.
I encountered this player again. This time, they were on the opposing team. I felt a spark of indignation spurred on by their insults, and I re-called the anti-American, anti-Filipino prejudice that I experienced when I lived in South Korea. I found the player in the match, playing the same character as myself, the ice-damage specialist Mei. I chased the character, cornered her, froze her, and executed her with a sharp icicle to her head. In the chatroom box, the player’s hectoring continued: “Useless fucking American!” the player wrote again and again.
How was I to react to this vicious name calling? Was I to report this player for racism? Or was the player just calling me “American” not as a nation or a race, but because I was playing in a particularly individualist, laissez-faire style? For some reason I felt a strange bond with the other player. The indignation I felt at being harassed had made defeating him an achievement far more memorable than rescuing a digital princess. The two of us, chasing each other in racially spurned rage while both playing the same bubbly Chinese female character, set a ridiculous tone to the altercation. Once we left the game’s “magic circle,” I honestly wished the player no ill will. In a game where people of different races, nations, and languages were forced to cooperate, hadn’t we invited this upon ourselves?
The estimated 2.2 billion gamers around the world are not kids (they hold a mean age of thirty-one), nor are they male (men and women game near equally), nor are they American (the Asia-Pacific takes up 47 percent of revenue, led by mainland Chinese players, while Americans only make up 13 percent of revenue), nor are they interpolated into militaristic killing machines (shooting games make up only 25 percent of the US market). Despite these facts, games are still characterized as mere prosthetics of empire that train players in military tactics and whose designers are in league with US military recruiters. While this is undeniably true for a few games, the game industry’s flirtation with empire is in fact a much more dispersed story: the material resources for game hardware are often derived from African mines, where minerals like coltan ore in the PlayStation 2 have been categorized as a conflict material that has propelled parts of the Republic of the Congo into civil war; game hardware is manufactured and processed in Asian sites like the Pearl River Delta, where workers labor under brutal conditions—stuffed into small dormitories, immured within company “campuses”—and work twelve-hour shifts; the most recognizably American game genre is militarized shooting games, many of which have been funded by the US military explicitly for recruitment and propaganda; the controls for combat drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are made to mimic video game controllers.
From 2010 to 2012, a slew of scandalous articles appeared against Apple concerning the treatment of Chinese workers in factories owned by its Taiwanese contracted manufacturer, Foxconn, one of the largest private employers in China. These scandals began in 2010 when eighteen Foxconn employees attempted suicide with fourteen deaths, and reporters took pictures of Foxconn factories where nets had been strung up to keep more workers from leaping over. Though Apple received most of the negative press, Foxconn did not only produce iPads and iPhones but also game consoles and gaming computers. In fact, all three major console companies, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, had consoles (the PlayStation 4, the Xbox One, and the Wii U) produced by Foxconn. The suicides at Foxconn resulted in a narrative of exclusion and erasure. Twenty universities in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan wrote an eighty-three-page report that detailed the Foxconn suicides and labor conditions in factories, which they called an “inhumane” “labor camp.” Yet sources from Apple and journalists from magazines like the Economist were still skeptical that any suicides had taken place. For Apple, profits only increased.
Though large IT companies like Intel and Toshiba have some factories in their home countries, invariably electronic companies contract with factories in China’s Pearl River Delta, which produces an estimated 90 percent of the world’s consumer electronics, as it provides a seemingly endless supply of disposable labor alongside the protections of the People’s Republic with its pervasive internet censorship, unenforced environmental regulations, and lack of free speech. The consolidation of factory work in China has formed an alliance among IT companies, as no one company can adequately frame a narrative about the exploitation of workers in Asia without also being implicated in it, making the erasure of Asian factory work a common interest for all companies involved. While, for example, the hardware company Dell Computers may have emerged as an alternative to Apple products, not long after the Foxconn incidents, information also emerged about Dell contracted factories forcing workers into seventy-four-hour work weeks, to stand for twelve hours a day, and to inhale toxic fumes.
Oh wow, I totally missed Cicatrix! What an excellent and powerful game poem–thanks so much for sharing! Kind of reminds me of reading the Doctor script(s) from the ELIZA psychotherapy program (there’s an example at the end of this article). While playing Cicatrix, I found myself experiencing what you describe: trying to read the text as a story and also trying to figure out what was going on programmatically. For me, what makes it effective is precisely Inform’s similarity to natural language. It feels kind of like a linguistic “uncanny valley” that has a really satisfying defamiliarizing effect. I loved what you shared about Inform’s making such a poem possible, while at the same time preventing you from fully understanding it. Those oppositional impulses are fascinating, and imho that’s where the energy is.
I also think it’d be cool to see more games where states are rooms! One game that immediately came to mind is Midnight. Swordfight, where you can navigate through the present and the past as though they were rooms. And actually M.S was a game I thought a lot about as I was writing about PwW–as well as games like Counterfeit Monkey, What Heart Heard of, Ghost Guessed (another game by Amanda Walker), Lime Ergot, etc. Those great games also use parser conventions to surprising and poetic effect. I wondered: Are those games all parser poems too? And I think where I landed was that PwW is not just subverting or altering or calling attention to parser conventions; it’s actively using them as material–like silly putty or clay–to create something else. The closest example I could think of (which I didn’t end up including in the article) is how Gertrude Stein uses words as material in Tender Buttons.
Yeah, there’s so much to unpack with regard to eroticism and viedogames–not erotic themes or situations within games, but rather the underlying power dynamics between player and system, or player and dev, as you point out! I wonder if there is something that could be gained from the literature on queerness and videogames–that is, not literal LGBTQ representation, but playing, making, and interpreting games in “queer” or transgressive ways (e.g., Video Games Have Always Been Queer)? Lmk what other sources you come across!
Thanks for engaging so deeply with the article and for all these additional resources (the porpentine interview was awesome)!
I kind of did this in ‘The Edifice’ (‘Streaking Across the Countryside’ as a ‘room’ when you’re on a horse, and obstacles come into the room, instead of you going from room to room) and while I remember thinking it was clever, I also remember thinking I had stolen it from something else. But I don’t remember what I thought I stole it from!
Galatea, the initiating inspiration for PWW, is twenty-six years old. It is, at this date, an old-school parser game, and so, therefore, is PWW. Experimentation and boundary-pushing are old-school IF.
It’s an honor to see something I made written about in such a thoughtful and observant way, and I’m so grateful to @lavieenmeow for spending this kind of time with my work. I also love her question for readers: what would your parser poetics look like? Not Drew Cook’s, but yours? This essay doesn’t end with me, it ends with you.
I’m glad The Rosebush is platforming long-form craft writing and criticism about interactive fiction. If you have a cool idea that you’d like to pitch to The Rosebush, I hope you will.
! Chiming in with another plug for pitching articles to The Rosebush. I had a really positive experience with the Rosebush team. Editors @pieartsy and @DeusIrae spent lots of time with the draft, providing generous and thoughtful feedback that significantly improved the article. I’m so happy that we have this platform, and can’t wait to see future articles!