Advent Calendar 04: Interactive (And Feelable!) Fiction

By Circe -

Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games.

As usual, the Advent Calendar is also a pledge drive. Subscribe to my writing Patreon here by December 15th for at least $5/mo and get an e-card for Ratmas; subscribe for $20/mo (and drop me a mailing address) and you'll get a real paper one!

I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence!

The tragically short-lived practice of including fold-out maps and info sheets with console RPGs was part necessity, and part tradition. Once upon a time, before consoles, before RPGs, before even graphics... there were games with words. And those games came with "feelies".

The earliest text-based video game I am aware of is Colossal Cave Adventure, often styled as ADVENT, the only case and maximum number of characters allowed in file names on the PDP-11, the minicomputer it ran on. Back in those days, people did not have an all-in-one computer system sitting on their desk; rather, some large institution bought an expensive cabinet-sized thinking machine and put it in an equally-expensive climate controlled room, and those permitted were allowed to use terminals to access some sliver of the expensive machine's thinking time. Will Crowther took advantage of this arrangement while he was undergoing an unpleasant divorce, to write a game for his two daughters to play remotely while he couldn't be with them in person.

Crowther's major innovation was in programming the game to use a "parser", or a mini language processor, that allowed the player to communicate with the game in basic English words rather than having to learn the technical PDP-11 command set. It provides the basic framework for interactive fiction games to this very day, and in the mid-2000s the metaphor was even extended to programming interactive fiction with Inform 7, an interpreter that allows the author to build the game in something that looks and reads a lot like English.

Parsers are fun, for a certain very specific definition of "fun". IF players are all familiar with the metagame of "guess the verb", caused by a parser with a limited vocabulary and a game that fails to make clear what words it knows. You see a lot of transcripts like this:

> take snack

Taken.

> eat snack

You have to open the wrapper first.

> open snack

Opened.

> eat snack

I'm sorry, I don't recognize the command "eat".

> consume snack

I'm sorry, I don't recognize the command "consume".

> taste snack

I'm sorry, I don't recognize the command "taste".

> lick snack

I'm sorry, I don't recognize the command "lick".

> nibble snack

I'm sorry, I don't recognize the command "nibble".

> bite snack

I'm sorry, I don't recognize the command "bite".

> fuck you

That's not very nice.

> iashfuihasiufhisuhdf

I'm sorry, I don't recognize the command "iashfuihasiufhisuhdf".

The classics of the genre developed "feelies" -- that is, tchotchkes in the packages -- early on. The first one I know of is Deadline, a murder mystery where they just couldn't fit everything they needed within the game itself, and so resorted to packing a printed autopsy report in the box. Turns out that, in addition to being adorable props, feelies were excellent cheap(ish) copy protection. Deadline was accidentally unusable without the autopsy report, but publishers soon realized that if they made progress in the game contingent on having information present only in the feelies, they could curtail the kind of rampant piracy made easy by disk copying. In general, the more obstacles you put between copy and distribution, the less people will do it; making people hike down to the copy center was not insurmountable, but it was enough to deter the most apathetic of casual pirates. Later schemes employed text in an unXeroxable blue, or screened with a red that looked black to non-color copiers, or scrambled such that you needed a lens or prism (also in the box) to read it.

Interactive fiction is alive and well; there's an IF club at MIT, where I once got to sit in on a couple of meetings with an old co-worker of mine. (Getting there was an adventure of its own. MIT is not well-marked. All the doors have 'authorized personnel only' notices on them, but if you're the kind of person who's kept out by polite "keep out" signs, you're not the sort of person they really want wandering around MIT in the first place. I casually tailgated into several blocks of offices before I figured out where the meeting was.) Many years ago, Infocom, the great grand-pappy of commercial IF publishing, was gracious enough to distrubute the classic Zork trilogy free as a promotion for one of the later Zork adventures. You can watch a playthrough here:

...or play it yourself at this link. Walkthrough here, in case you find yourself playing "guess the verb".

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