Interactive Fiction

Joe Dever's Lone Wolf series of "which-way" (or, if you prefer, "choose-your-own-ending") books were part of an efflorescence of such works in the 80s. (The other two most popular series were the Bantam Choose Your Own Adventure books, and the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks from Ian Livingstone and the UK Steve Jackson [not to be confused with the Texan Steve Jackson], both of whom have gone on to stellar careers in digital games).

Some games become so canonical in game design discussion that it's easy to remember just the groundbreaking things about them, and forget a lot of the nuances of how they play and why they work.

In the world of interactive fiction, Rameses is one of those games. It was released as part of the annual IF Competition in 2000, got a respectable 13th place out of 53, and showed a wide standard deviation on votes: some people loved it, while others thought it was a depressing imposter in a competition for fun things. One person recently described it to me as the work of IF he hates most in the world. Ever since, Rameses has starred in rec.arts.int-fiction discussions about well-characterized protagonists, about the player's complicity in action, about whether it's possible to have a good game in which the player has no significant agency, about interactive narrative as a way to explore the constraints imposed on a fictional character.

The Reprover is a piece of art, and literature, in which the player/reader has the freedom to choose the order in which he experiences new passages. But there is no space for individual agency within the story, no way to make the narrative come out differently. There is also no challenge and no goal, other than the goal (certainly self-selected and individually defined) of getting an aesthetically satisfying experience out of the reading.

Georgina Okerson specializes in light adventure games with anime-style graphics that are designed to appeal primarily to a young adult female audience (but that are perfectly enjoyable by those of us with a Y chromosome). In Summer Schoolgirls, you play a recent high school graduate going to an orientation program at an women's college, where you meet your roommate and the other girls in your dorm.

Photopia made me cry.

That's not something I say often. I don't think any other work of art has ever affected me to the extent that Photopia has.

I say "work of art" there partly because that's what Photopia is, a magnificent work of art, but mostly because I hesitate to call it a game. Photopia is very, very linear. It has very simple puzzles. It's barely interactive at all.

Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom tears down all the standard rules of design in its chosen medium, piles them in a heap, hacks the heap to splinters, burns the splinters to ash, and scatters the ashes on a blood-red sea.

The results are pure awesome.

You have to think that most game designers have an imaginary consumer clearly in mind, and based on the evidence of most of what gets published, that seems to be a Maxim-reading dude with baggy pants and plenty of heavy metal and hip-hop on his iPod. Yes?

If that's so, then Georgina Okerson's imaginary consumer is very different -- an anime-obsessed teen emo girl, probably.

I haven't played Rendition to the end, and I don't plan to. I suspect most people reading this won't want to either.

Rendition is a short interactive fiction about torturing a terror suspect for information. It is both banal and distasteful. The piece provides little motivating background, little to make the player want to commit the atrocities the piece demands; and, for that matter, since the torturer and his suspect don't apparently even speak the same language, there's no possibility of finding out anything of value. The goal is simply to accumulate points for thinking of new areas of the suspect's body to which to apply pain, while remaining within the literal confines of the Geneva convention rules. (The legalistic way it approaches these makes a mockery of them, which is also part of the point.)

The correct response, I'm fairly sure, is to quit.

The Chinese Room is a little like Norman Juster's Phantom Tollbooth in interactive form. Taking place entirely in the realm of philosophical thought experiment, The Chinese Room tackles questions about the nature of perception, the foundations of ethical systems, and the theoretical basis of calculus. If you've ever wanted to meet Aristotle or Karl Marx in text adventure form, this is your opportunity.

An Act of Murder is a classic country-house mystery: an isolated estate, a small group of suspects, a limited amount of time to solve the crime.

The country-house mystery premise has been done numerous times in interactive fiction: consider Infocom's Deadline, or Sierra's Mystery House. Even in the best of these, though, the game-play almost always fails to capture what's essential about detective fiction. Even at their best, mystery IF games usually test the player's thoroughness (have you looked under every bed? analyzed every object?) and patience in replaying (have you tried spying on all the characters at all the available times of day?), rather than his logical thinking and deductive abilities.

An Act of Murder stands out because it does ask the player to focus on drawing conclusions: what do you know? What do you need to find out next? What do these alibis mean? There are a few objects to discover, a few pieces of evidence that have to be searched for, but for the most part, Act of Murder is about the conclusions you draw, and how you figure out where to look next.