Reliable as ever, author Brian Rushton was very prompt in providing in-depth interview responses once Buggy was defeated in Round 3. I’m sure you’ll find them as interesting as I did, so without further ado, here they are…
Q: What was your original inspiration for Buggy? Just the idea of “a game about a buggy that was buggy” as described here? At what point did it go from an idea to something you would actually make?
BR: One thing I’ve done with almost all of my games is to email someone to bounce the idea off of them, usually someone who I think has some expertise in that area and whose work I respect and who I’ve already worked with in the past so they won’t feel bad saying if my work stinks or not. That email is usually the defining point for me between “I just have an idea” and “I am actively working on a project”. I’ll tinker around with projects before that point, but I’ll drop the game idea if the person talks me out of it.
For Buggy, I messaged Hanon on intfiction with the message title Extremely stupid ecotcomp petite mort game, and said:
Hanon, I’m making a very stupid ectocomp game called ‘buggy’ that’s just a joke about common mistakes in inform programming. It’s at the very basic stages right now and is just a one-room game that ends in like 2 or 3 actions. Would you be able to take a look at it? I’m mostly just trying to figure out what actions and/or error messages to riff on. I’d estimate it has a max playtime of 15 minutes and a typical playtime of 5 right now; I’ve only spent 62 minutes on it.
He didn’t hate it, gave me some feedback, and that was how it got started.
Q: You’re on record as calling Buggy an “incredibly stupid game.” Obviously, a substantial number of PCT Fans disagree. What was your reaction to its nomination for the PCT? What do you think are the things about it that are winning people’s votes?
BR: Well, it was interesting to see what people thought here. As you can see in my message above, I thought the whole idea was stupid in the sense of “stupid humor.” In 2022 when I released the game for Ectocomp, I had some pretty high hopes for it, since I had won Ectocomp before and some people found the game pretty funny, but it ended up taking 7th place, so I figured the game only had niche interest to a few people (which may be true!).
A year or two ago, I wrote a series of posts detailing all of the 25 games I’ve ever released, and as part of it updated cover art and fixed bugs in games. In that process, I discovered that Buggy had, in fact, a huge bug that ruined the best (imo) joke in the game! The whole idea was supposed to be that you were being chased by “suchthings,” and if you try to look at them they’re invisible, so you see “no suchthings.” But I made them scenery and forget to mention them in the room description, so the player never saw that. After fixing the game and changing the cover art from AI to custom-made cover art, I think people ended up liking it a lot more. But I didn’t know that.
So I was pleasantly surprised when people nominated it for PCT. I was very surprised when it won a few matches. I didn’t predict that, and under my evaluative criteria I wouldn’t have voted for it. My biggest guess for why people voted for it is that they enjoy niche Inform humor, even in small doses.
Q: It seems very likely that you have played more interactive fiction than any other person alive – than any other person in history, in fact. How do you think that shapes your view as an author and and as a player?
BR: You know I thought that, too, but I sorted the IFDB data by reviewers with most ratings instead of reviews, and I think a few people are close to me (like Sobol, I think, might have played 3000 games). But I’ve definitely played a lot!
I think the biggest thing it gives me is I can see patterns in what games do well and patterns in what games do poorly. A lot of it is up in the air (genre doesn’t really affect performance, getting the zeitgeist right is always a gamble), but there are some things that 99% of good games do and there are things that authors do that end up with low ratings 99% of the time. I wrote about some of those things here: The hierarchy of IFComp needs (mostly things like bugginess and variety in writing).
So by focusing on doing all the things that great games do, it helps me as an author to cut out a little bit of that variability in how well a game is received. There’s still a lot of variation in how my games are received, but it’s nice to have a handle on even a little part of that.
As a player, I find I continue to enjoy the majority of IF, and I’m having fun playing Spring Thing games right now. Having played a variety of games makes me open to more variety than when I started, because I know generally what to expect. The only games I have trouble getting into as a category are ones that are intentionally low-effort (like jams designed to get new authors experience by having purposely low expectations like tiny wordcount/no choices/stripped-down UI); I think they’re super valuable to authors to get over that “first game” hump but not very fun as a player.
Q: In your interview for FIFP, you mentioned that it’s the “little touches” that are your favorite aspect of the craft of IF. What are some little touches that stand out most to you across the works that you’ve played? What makes them special to you as a player and/or author?
BR: I really appreciate the games of Eric Eve and Lynnea Glasser for this. They both have a way of working extremely hard on error messages in a way that guides the player towards a solution, gently at first and then more openly.
Glasser goes into this in more detail:
So, I added a mechanic so that every attempt to solve the problem (by opening the door, talking about the door, etc.) or attempt to interact with the meat monster (look at it, touch it, talk to it, etc.) would increase a counter. At each counter level, the hints on how to solve the puzzle would become more and more direct. This conditional counter (instead of a turn-based counter) meant that players could do other things (like go back for more heat) without being punished. At a certain point, the game would even solve the puzzle for the player, with the meat monster forcing you into control of its mind. This kept the plot moving forward and rewarded players who were concerned about how to help without being quite sure what specific action was needed. If that had been a failure condition instead, players would have just gotten frustrated over their helplessness.
I like this because it feels like I’m still solving the puzzle myself, but I don’t spend time frustrated. Eric Eve’s games do something similar, which I noticed as I replayed Nightfall.
Another “little touch” I like is how pervasive the worldbuilding is in Worlds Apart. You can tell the author just loves the world and setting she’s created, and everything you look at has some messages for you about how the world works.
Q: Your Ph.D. is in topology. Do you like math in your fiction? If so, which books, films, games, etc. have the best treatment of topological or other mathematical ideas?
BR: It’s so rare that it’s fun just to see topology in games at all. Of course the Moebius strip in Trinity was exciting to see, and it’s nice to see people realize that wormholes and portals should actually be spherically-shaped instead of door-shaped.
A Beauty Cold and Austere is my favorite math-based game, and I helped the author with testing it a bit (he was my boss at the time). Other than that, most math I’ve seen in media has been pretty disappointing.
Q: You have frequently written advice for authors entering the IF Comp, and in one of your posts you suggested taking lessons from the art and craft of filmmaking. In your opinion, which published works of IF have done the best job of drawing on those lessons, and is there anything specific about them that you would point out to new authors?
BR: Adam Cadre was a film student, and his games reflect film techniques more than anyone else. Photopia is the best example, with its clear division into scenes, use of color for “lighting,” non-linear narratives and forward-driven gameplay.
Porpentine also seems to have a knack for cinematic choice-based games, like Howling Dogs with its opening sequence and title drop, and the way that she seems to think hard about making each page and its links visually beautiful (i.e. the text isn’t just there to deliver a message; the size of paragraphs, the use of capitalization, and the position of links is all designed for visual appeal).
But I don’t actually know much about film, so I guess my suggestion was as much for myself as for others.
Q: Aside from literature, videogames and film, which art forms do you consider to be closest to IF in its essence? Are there lessons in craft to be found in them? If so, what are those lessons?
BR: I do think cryptic crosswords are especially close to parser IF. Unlike most normal crosswords (not counting fun ones like Will Shortz’s), cryptic crosswords have a kind of narrative element. Just like in humor, each entry has a setup (the clue) and a punchline.
The lesson I’d see there for parser authors is to rely on genre conventions. Cryptic crosswords become easier and more fun once you know that they follow the same basic set of patterns, with some variation around that. Similarly, with parser games, players get accustomed to what’s “normal” (like treating INSIDE as a direction or using the word INVENTORY). As authors, it’s good to both cater to the experienced group by providing for responses to common actions like X ME, while also providing resources for people new to the genre like links to the IF postcard or a tutorial (one of the reasons I like playing TALJ [Text Adventure Literacy Jam] games).
Q: You were the top prognosticator for FIFP and are currently in the lead for PCT. What’s your secret?
BR: My theory is that, because I’d already played all the games (except for the few I tried in the reading period), I had a good sense for when one game was an underdog (or an… overdog?). There have definitely been some upsets, but I think just knowing the games helped.
Q: What are the “eras” of IF as you see them? What are the most important formative influences on the current era?
BR: There are numerous “streams” of IF. In the IF I usually interact with, the graphic adventures of the 80s and the academic hypertext of the same time period had little impact (although they impacted other IF streams much more), so I’m going to neglect them. In my stream, here are the periods:
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Golden age (Infocom, Magnetic Scrolls, Scott Adams). This was the commercial era. A huge amount of IF authors and tool creators grew up playing games in this era and tried to imitate them. Almost every author nowadays was influenced by someone who was influenced by someone who etc… who played these commercial games (like Chris Klimas’s Twine system being inspired by Emily Short’s First Draft of the Revolution, where Emily Short early on used tools by Graham Nelson, who was directly imitating Infocom games).
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Dark ages (late 80s and early 90s). There was IF going on, like the AGT competitions and the money-locked TADS system, but most of those games are disconnected from the “stream of influence” and many lack the polish of both earlier and later games.
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Silver era (late 90s, early 2000s). This was an era of a lot of innovation, where tons of people were interested in IF not just as a retro platform but also as a cheap tool for prototyping advanced concepts like modeling fire, gravity, etc. Andrew Plotkin, Emily Short, Jon Ingold and Adam Cadre stand out in this era.
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The great depression (late 2000’s, early 2010’s). A lot of people dropped out as time went on, pursuing other careers, leaving grad school so they had less time, having kids. I pinpoint 2009 and 2010 as pretty low points in IFComp (although there were some great games!). In terms of innovation, there was less focus on being the first person to try something and more on making really great versions of well-used tropes (resulting in games like Lost Pig and Violet).
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Twine revolution (2010s). Twine was invented and became very popular with the trans community following its adoption by Anna Anthropy and Porpentine. It spread from there to other marginalized game creators because it gave a way for people to make enjoyable games without a huge art budget. In turn, this actually drove up parser innovation as people adopted choice-based ideas into parser games and others made parser games simply out of fear they were going to disappear.
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Bronze age (Late 2010s and on). In this era, people have looked back, in a good way. Twine aged up enough that many early creators left and new tools have found use, so Twine is actually a nostalgic, retro engine now. In parser games, retro communities have sprung up like Adventuron and PunyInform, and people are openly embracing the limitations of parsers through both trying to get them to run on old software and using limited parser games (which have been very popular for the last ten years).
Q: What do you consider to be the most underrated works of IF, and why do you consider them to be so?
BR: That’s really hard to say, as the community has had several events designed to rescue underrated games, and it has often worked in general.
In terms of “games I think the modern audience would like but don’t get brought up a lot,” I’d say Eric Eve’s games (which is why I nominated Nightfall) and a lot of Hanon Ondricek’s games (which is why I nominated Fair). A lot of Hanon’s games are “slow-burn” games that don’t reveal their greatness until partway through, which is why I think they don’t get as much appreciation as I would lavish on them.
Q: Turning your unparalleled firsthand knowlege and proven prognostication skills to the field as a whole, what do you see as being the big trends within IF right now, and how do you expect them to unfold?
BR: Two things I see happening now and will likely continue to go on for a few years is the return of “mega games” (I was proud of releasing Never Gives Up Her Dead as what I thought was the 2nd largest Inform 7 game of all time, but I’ve played a French game this year that had more code and there are at least two upcoming games with more code than it) and narrative heavy escape-room style Twine games (i.e. Twine games with emphasis on codes and piecing together clues and other escape-room tropes) with Ben Jackson’s games being a primary influence.
Q: In your view, which recent experiments (which have not become trends) in IF hold the most promise, and why?
BR: Some of the best experimentation in the whole IF world is in the French scene. They’ve been doing amazing things that just haven’t leaked over, and when they do (in translation), don’t seem to take off. For instance, that game I mentioned earlier with tons of code has custom-made ASCII art for every character, with different poses, and is completely menu-based in a way that feels different than other menus. Other examples include Hansel et Gretel: La Revanche, which used vorple menus really effectively. The choice-based side of French IF has also been very inventive, such as with Manonamora.
Q: What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned about topology that would be comprehensible to the average forum reader?
BR: There are no knots in 4 dimensions. Imagine the fourth dimension to be a color slider, where parts of an object with different colors can’t touch each other. If you take the knot and look at a crossing, you can “color” one side of it, say, red, and the other side blue, and then they don’t touch each other, so the rope can cross through itself. So knots just don’t exist. Except (this is less understandable) you can knot a basketball.
Q: If you had the license to adapt any short story, novella, novel or film to IF, which would it be and how would you go about it?
BR: It would probably be the Magnus Archives, a horror podcast, and I intend to do this at some point because they have a fairly generous license. I’ve already unofficially done this; in Never Gives Up Her Dead’s horror area, every area is based on one of the types of horror listed in the Magnus Archives.