Today I’m posting something a bit more personal (not in the icky sense, relax guy); the story of my obsession with text adventures in my geriatric youth and how, as a middle aged man, I rediscovered interactive fiction with child like wonder. I was originally going to make this another Culture Crypt post, but given the vitality of the genre and the community that supports it that seems wholey innapropriate. IF is alive and, in fact, never really died. The important lesson here is that the viability of any culture cannot, and should never, be defined by profit margins.
I hope you enjoy this mythologising of my past, and as ever please like and share and if you’re not already, subscribe.
In 1985, when I was 7 years old, there was one computer in my school that was available to us to use. It was a BBC breeze block with a black, fishbowl eye. It sat on a table in the middle of an empty classroom with a single chair placed in front of it. One child was allowed to use it at a time, there was no adult supervision. You fed it silky black floppy’s and typed the command “run” to make it work. It uttered violent, mechanical grunts as it loaded and if you touched the corner of its screen you would get a flash and a static shock bad enough to leave a mark. It was at this altar that I was introduced to my first text adventure.
There were other video games; ancient Pong and Space Invaders on a neighbour kids Atari box, cheap arcade machines at the funfair with black-on-green pixelated silhouettes, the out-of-context wonders of my US cousin's Nintendo with its light gun technomancy. Video games were about motion and sound; real time threats and reflexes. They were games in the way that tag was a game, or football or hide and seek- physical even if they were not aerobic. Text adventures were something else.
I remember almost nothing about the game, except that it was bad and seemed impossible, at least to a semi literate seven year old. But I kept coming back to it. It felt like it had a secret I was compelled to unlock. I was frustrated that it would not deliver the endorphin rich thrills of Pac-Man or Breakout, but there was something about the way it spoke to the player, terse and factual, about the invisible world inside the machine; “there is a door”, “exits lead north and south”. It seemed to offer possibilities that Duck Hunt did not.
It wasn’t until we had a home computer that I began to understand what those possibilities might be. On our external tape drive we ran The Price of Magik by Level 9 Computing, a journey through a weird, magical realm where me and my older brother were never able to achieve anything except to provoke a screaming mandrake plant. There was a mechanic in The Price of Magik that linked your sorcerous potential to your deteriorating grasp on reality. It was a question of balance, and one that killed us more times than it resulted in a puzzle solving spell. Over and over the text repeated the phrase “your sanity is shaken”. An unsettling sliver of eldritch horror for a child who wasn't allowed to watch jaws yet.
Just like the text adventure on the school computer, The Price of Magik was not a game I was able to successfully play in any way. I understood the principles of the parser based adventure; using verbs like "take", "look" and "talk" in combination with nouns like "knife" and "moon" and "screaming mandrake" to explore and interact with the environment. But as a player with a prepubescent attention span the correct verbiage never quite suggested itself to me. Even so I kept playing, exploring the same three or four rooms, examining the same handful of items, interacting with the same non player characters and attempting to connect and combine them all in a hundred different ways, and at the beginning of every passage- that phrase "your sanity is shaken", "your sanity is shaken", "your sanity is shaken". There was something going on in these games, some appeal, that was not related to the usual lizard brain instincts accessed by objective based gameplay. It touched some more nuanced network of synapses, ones that were triggered by other kinds of experiences. Art, poetry- fiction.
Rather than disdain, the obscurity of The Price of Magik earned my respect, veneration even. Of course I, a mere child, could not peirce its mysteries. Being unable to do so only made its hidden truths more unknowable and perfect, like latin mass. I didn't understand Shakespeare either but I knew that it was nothing as tawdry as entertainment. I know better than that now, I personally don't think you can understand Shakespeare's plays at all until you're able to enjoy them as glorious trash, but I think that veneration served a valuable purpose. It taught me, early on, that a video game can have cultural weight beyond its ability to stimulate the fight/flight response or, most importantly, make Electronic Arts billions of dollars.
I got older and played other text adventures, the most memorable of which were all published by Level 9; Return to Eden, Red Moon, Scapeghost, Erik the Viking. I loved these games, and even though they were all adventures the effort invested in their gameplay was never secondary to their writing. At their best their mechanics and their narrative were integral to each other. They were an entirely unique kind of artwork- living fiction like cinema but rather than images, it was the story that was animated, the reader‘s mind its motive organ. Adventures certainly, but deserving of a more expansive category; "interactive fiction".
As the market for video games expanded and its audience matured, the appeal of complex narrative in games became clearer and its value as an aspect of the commodity more attractive to publishers. Richer elements of plot, character, world building crept into successful titles. Not just textual feedback and exposition, but writing- fiction. It no longer felt like a choice between deep, curious, narrative experiences and visceral thrills. The Price of Magik was the first video game to really make me think, but Final Fantasy VII was the first game to make me cry. Graphics had become cinematic. With the exception of the occasional midnight delve into the dungeons of abandonware, Games based primarily on text drifted out of my attention.
This changed for me when my friend and fellow writer, Lauren O'Donoghue, started working on a project she refused to tell me anything about. She was trying to rediscover the essence of her own writing, she said, to make something without the motivating influence of outside voices. Make something, not write something. Is it a game? I asked. Yes. She said. A month later I playtested Ataraxia: A Folk Tale.
Ataraxia is an interactive fiction based around exploration and relationship building. It is a true role-playing game in which player agency and expression are intertwined with a sense of community and connection to its verdant, sinister world. All of this is conveyed to the player in vivid splendour and with absolutely no graphics. I could talk at length about Ataraxia, and fully intend to in a future post, but suffice to say it played a big part in renewing my interest in the genre and its potential. So I attended an online IF conference called Narrascope and what I learned there was illuminating.
In my mind games based around text had died some time in the late 90’s- meaning that while such games were still available- and people might still be creating them- they were not growing as an art form. They were a peripheral, archeological experience that mainly survived as a compliment to more successful organisms, like the sonnet form in a fantasy novel or a playable version of an 8 bit arcade game rendered in a virtual environment. But the IF community gathered around Narrascope disabused me of that notion.
I learned about Nested, a procedural database that is played entirely by opening expanding folders within folders, beginning with "universe" and then "galactic cluster" and then "galaxy" descending into categories like "Telluric Planet", "Country of Povania", "Duck", "Blood Vessel", "Protein" and on like this until you penetrate the sub-atomic and discover a whole new universe. If you're wondering whether this can really be a viable form of gameplay, I once spent at least ten minutes in Nested just opening up all the members of an ant colony and investigating their inner thoughts.
I learned about “Choices Of” games and their library of adventures, romances, mysteries and paranormal social work simulators. This is a company that hosts the content of a range of IF writers, much of it available to play for free, and makes enough of a profit to pay both its staff and its contributing creators. It sustains an entire independent ecosystem of game writers and readers that you could go your whole life without knowing ever existed or fall off the internet into and never escape.
I learned about the successful games being built in Unity and distributed on mobile devices. Titles like Boyfriend Dungeon, which I’d heard of but never really engaged with as interactive fiction. I thought of games like BD, and the whole genre of otome and dating sims more generally, as something distinct from ominous realms I explored as a child. The same is true of other highly successful genres that touch on the IF sphere- like Inkle's 80 Days Around the World or Failbetter’s Fallen London. I didn’t think of these as interactive fictions because their interfaces were so different to the parser games I had grown up with and, more than that, simply because they were commercially successful.
The IF community I saw at Narrascope was mainly young (as in younger than me), optimistic and, by the standards of the games industry, highly diverse. They seem to have no conception of their work as niche or hobbyist and there is not so much nostalgia for the past as a purposeful intellectual appreciation of it. These are enthusiasts, obsessives, fellow dorks if you will, but also cutting edge writers and highly refined artists contributing to the forward march of our culture.
Discussion ranged from the highly technical, to the ethical, to the aesthetic to the radical. We met in the aftermath of the heatwave and the early days of the war in Ukraine. The welcoming lecture was introduced with the reassurance that we were entering a space where we could not expect to escape the effects of these terrors, but at least contribute to an alternative commonality. It was a gentle sentiment that spoke to the spirit of the community; inclusive, questioning and mutually supportive.
Encountering the IF community has been like drifting apart from an old friend, hearing somewhere that they have died, and then bumping into them one day on the street and discovering that they have been living their best life without you this whole time. When you meet such an acquaintance you will be at first elated to find them alive, and then desperate to get a piece of what they’ve got.
After playing Ataraxia I began skootling around in Twine, an open source platform used by many IF creators. I didn't have any intention to create a viable game and ended up instead with a meandering highly personal exploration of my anxieties and memories. I named it Lucid to convey the idea of consciously exploring a dream, which to me is the essence of reading Interactive Fiction. While I was working on this I learned about IFcomp and thought that entering it might be an interesting way to sneak into the community, that is sneak in the sense of stumbling awkwardly into a pep rally wearing poorly constructed cheerleader cosplay. I made some edits to Lucid to make it a little more appropriate for public consumption, gave it to my friends to playtest, and then entered it into the competition. NERVES.
The competition isn’t over, but the experience has been wonderful. The IF community has survived and grown by enthusiastically nurturing it’s constituents. There is no gatekeeping or passive aggressive hostility. People have strong opinions and are open about their tastes, but they are shared constructively and with an emphasis on positivity and the possibility of growth. The open source Twine community in particular is an incredible resource, Lauren sherpa’d me through a lot of my climb to submission but once i’d gained confidence in the basic principles I found that I could find the answer to practically any question about the platform simply by searching the forums for some paleo-noob with the same query which invariably multiple initiates had examined and resolved many times over.
A lot of the participants share reviews of the games they have played as part of the competition, but I don’t feel like I’ve earned the right to really review the games I’ve played. Besides which my experience has hardly been critical, but more like an infant walking wide eyed into an arcade run by strange, chthonic spirits. My heart full of wonder and terror, my sanity shaken.
Instead I would like to offer the following tributes to the completely random selection of games I played in order to rate them as a participant-judge in IFComp 2022 (check out the rules here). Some of them are tentative explorations of the format expressing powerful feelings and compelling ideas, others highly sophisticated games that seem ready for commercial publication. I hope that you will click on the link and try them all, every one is worth your interest and your time.
[All the games entered for IFcomp 2022 can be found here.]
Lazy Wizard Academy- By Lenard Gunda
The first game I played was, by complete chance, the most nostalgic. The 90’s saw fantasy go through a necessary era of self parody, the pinnacle of which was Terry Pratchett’s series of Discworld novels, seeing a tumult of pythonesque heroes that were, far from heroic, cowardly, sarcastic or, indeed, lazy. The proceedings of Lazy Wizard academy are thus familiar, but all the more lovingly rendered for it.
This is a classic parser game with fun mechanics, exploring the expanding map of the academy the player accrues puzzle solving spells. The non player characters are a delight, and Lenard has conveyed wit and personality in just a few phrases. This is always great to see done well and with a lightness of touch, like a good comic artist can convey character with only a few pen strokes. I particularly enjoyed the obnoxious goblin in the kitchen which provides precisely the kind of atmospheric service the genre demands.
It was the small touches that stood out in Wizard Academy, like the magical antics of the helper Djin that remind you it’s present in your current location or the neat, evocative descriptions of the paintings that hang everywhere in the school. This was a warm homecoming to the genre and I was grateful for it.
Staycation- By Maggie H
Staycation is a relatively brief game that conveys a sharp feeling, like a quick stab to the kidney. It deals with themes of mental health and struggling with isolation and I would caution anyone who doesn’t want to reflect on those feelings to approach it forearmed, but speaking as someone who does I fully recommend that you do.
What I found most interesting about the game was its format. Most contemporary IF seem to fall into the category of either parser games that use typed inputs or choice-based games where options are selected by clicking a link. Staycation fits very broadly into the latter category, but rather than clicking a link the player drags one of a series of icons (“look”, “speak”, “listen” and so forth) into the body of the text and onto one of a series of highlighted words.
This may be a familiar interface to people who are more au fait with the various platforms on which IF are being scripted, but I think even if I had seen this before the author has made clever and effective use of it. The selected choice doesn’t simply trigger a new passage, but often alters the original text. This plays beautifully on the layers of thought and feeling experienced by the unnamed protagonist, the double think of the persevering depressive and the sinister un-thoughts that one battles to suppress.
The Archivist and the Revolution- By Autumn Chen
This was the first game I played in the competition that felt like the work of a highly accomplished practitioner. When I read that it had been created by means of the same platform that I had used to assemble my own, maddeningly jank, offering I felt very quiet inside. Several games later I am yet to find another entry which has achieved comparable ambition with equivalent polish.
The Archivist and the Revolution presents a dystopian future where the world has been scorched and a remnant fraction of humanity struggles on in a colossal bunker-city where, as it’s perfect tag-line explains, “The world is ending and you are still paying rent”.
The basic gameplay revolves around this contradiction, making ends meet in a world where life is increasingly impossible and all the forces of the state are organised to oppose your very existence. I don’t want to give too much away, because the game’s greatest achievement is the way that it’s rich lore is integrated into gameplay in a way that reveals itself organically and under the agency of the player, but it is this sense of living in a world that objects to you on the most fundamental level which is the core conceit.
Like all the best speculative fiction I found the allegory at once unsettlingly relatable, as it could be for any subject of late era capitalism, but also profoundly illuminating about existences beyond my own. I insist that you play it.
Trouble in Sector 471- by Arthur DiBianca
I have to apologise to Arhtur, because I cannot remember the initial setup for the game and as I refuse to abandon my current save, even for the sake of praising their work, I cannot reload the game and check that I have the details right.
Trouble in Sector 471 is set on a space station which has been infiltrated by alien lifeforms that interfere with its operation. The space station is maintained by an entertainingly varied range of robot characters, of which the player is one. Your job is to move around the game world interacting with the robots, opening up the map with various puzzle solves and exterminating the bugs. Very satisfying. Very fun.
Trouble is a parser based game but rather than verb/noun combinations it employs a limited set of one word commands. This feels restrictive at first, but as the game expands so does this list of commands and they reveal themselves to be the genius at the core of its play.
There are so many wonderful little touches in the game, like the ascii map and the brilliant use of an out-of-game decoding page for the walkthrough. I was limited by the 2 hour window in which to judge these games, but I will definitely be back to thread my way through it’s joyful, intricate puzzle.
Elvish for Goodbye- By David Gürçay-Morris
Rediscovering interactive fiction has been a continuous process of revelation for me as I've seen the range of ways in which the interface between reader and text are explored and expanded by the community. Elvish for Goodbye epitomises that revelation.
In some ways what Goodbye offers is precisely the tender, thoughtful encounter the title suggests. It plays on the preconceptions we have received from Tolkienesque fiction about the titular race and it's associations with melancholy, otherworldliness and the fantastic, as well as the Oxford Don's fanatic legacy of imagined languages. But equally the game presented me with things I never expected and did not know that I was looking for.
Many video games involve an element of simulation defined by how the player's agency is connected to the narrative. In that sense the core of Goodbye simulates an interview with a poet and through that means initiates the player into the imaginative history of their world and the civilisation of the Elves. It is a rare conceit and executed brilliantly.
There are stories here, the fate of the poet and the history of the Elves, but the agency of the player in no way shapes them- but is instead is used as a tool to explore the fascinating threads of the lore behind them. I would love to discuss some of the elements of the world David describes, but to do so would rob you of the delight and wonder of discovering them yourself. I urge you to do so.
No One Else Is Doing This- By Lauren O'Donoghue
Finally, I could not finish without saying something about Lauren's entry in this years competition. I can't vote for it myself as I was a playtester but I would like to offer a few words of appreciation both of the game and of the way in which it has been received by the community.
No One Else is Doing This simulates the role of a community organiser working for a leftist organisation on a perpetual recruitment drive. It communicates the exhausted passions of a working class radical struggling with a toxic, micromanaging NGO culture, an alienated and ambivalent public and the persistent needs of a frail human body that just can't get warm.
The writing is, typical of Lauren, phenomenally good and applied with the evocative lightness that characterises her work, but the bitter genius of the game is in the subtle application of org specific jargon that speaks to the deteriorating politics of the movement as the desperation to produce results obscures the very lives it has set out to organise.
It has been a real joy, and an education, to see the enthusiastic and varied responses to Lauren's debut as an IFcomp participant. What has been especially interesting is the common thread in the reviews people have written about her game, of people sharing and contrasting their own experiences canvassing and door knocking for different causes.
It reflects the progressive spirit at the heart of the IF community- a spirit that has protected and continues to champion spaces like IFcomp where games are still being made for reasons other than to satisfy the bank accounts of tech moguls, to share personal experiences, to communicate social or existential truths, for fun, for education for why the fuck not. To tell us a story with the capacity to transform the way we think about ourselves and our world, to alter our perspective, to shake our sanity.
Yeah, No One Else is Doing This was a great game. I'll pass on your compliments.
I had a similar experience this year. After years of writing IF on my Substack, I decided to explore the IF community via the comp and had a great time! So glad this corner of the gaming world is thriving.
Lauren’s game was one of my favorites in the show. I loved the unique story and mechanics, and I’m looking forward to playing more of her games.