9 posts tagged “interactive fiction”

I finally got around to playing Andrew Plotkin's "Delightful Wallpaper," which comes closer than any other IF I know of to approximating the mechanics of the charming game Chronon. (The possibility of doing this is something I was wondering about a while ago.) It doesn't really get all that close, when you get right down to it, but it's at least in the general vicinity. Unfortunately, I think the bits where it gestures in a Chronon-ward direction are not at all the most successful parts of the game, but I do think it suggests possible interesting avenues for game design of that sort.

Delightful Wallpaper has two parts. In the first half, you are armed with nothing but a notepad, and have no ability to affect your surroundings directly. You can go from room to room, and you can read your notes. As you move around, your movements affect the house -- going through one doorway will open a door somewhere else, and so on. As you investigate these affordances, the PC faithfully makes notes of what you've discovered. This is implemented very well, with partial discoveries noted and revised appropriately as you test and explore. (You, the real player, must draw the map by hand, if you need one, which I did.) I found this part of the game to be surprisingly satisfying, and the notepad worked perfectly for me to keep everything moving along satisfactorily.

While it seems that lots of people preferred the second part -- which was the more Chrononesque -- it was not so for me. I've seen other reviewers say that the first half made them anxious, and that they weren't at all sure that it wasn't possible to put the game into an unwinnable state. I'm pretty sure it isn't. But then I have the advantage of knowing who wrote the game, while people who reviewed it as they were judging the 2006 comp didn't.

Anyhow, in the second half of the game, you go from mapping out the house to setting up interactions among the characters who now people it. Your notebook now has partially drafted Goreyesque (though not, alas, with the real Gorey bite, but that would be asking a bit much) verses about each character's demise. As you go through the house, you find "intentions". These are the one sort of thing you can pick up and manipulate. Characters appear in more than one room, and as you pick up each intention, you learn a little something about what they "will" do there. Then you're off to find the correct object of each intention. When you put the intention on an acceptable object -- often, but not always, another character -- the state of the room changes to tell you what "will" happen when the intention is carried out. The verses in your notebook are completed accordingly. Additional intentions are doled out as you go.

The trouble with this part was that it didn't have much in the way of entertaining machinery and novel wrong-way, partial, or dead-end consequences to keep things lively as I toyed around with different arrangements. The trial and error portion of this part wasn't terribly interesting or engaging -- and actually, come to think of it, neither was the success part. The demises weren't surprising or fun, they were just... there. Still, I appreciated the general sort of puzzle design Plotkin was playing with here. It seems as if you could take something like this and achieve more of the kind of effect I was talking about in my previous post. Doesn't it?

You know that I have copious lashings of free time, what with my dissertation and the nasty old job market. That is why I have just paid for a subscription to the New York Times premium crosswords, and have been tearing through the archives in the evenings. Oh well, as these things go, it's more managable than Dice Wars or Webboggle, and I like to hope that it will also prevent Alzheimer's.

I'm also finally teaching myself how to do cryptic crosswords. I got my way through a couple from Games magazine with a fair amount of cheating, and just now did two of the babiest bunniest easy ones from the NY Times with no cheating at all -- the first one, S. and I did together (he's learning too, and is much quicker with an anagram than I am) and the second I did all myself aside from treating S. like my own personal anagram generator on a couple of clues ("Okay, now do 'us clear,' meaning 'layperson'").

Meanwhile, last Friday, when I was thwarted from my plan of doing some journal reading by a lack of internet in our chosen study spot, I spent a little time back with Inform. I'm still working my way through the documentation/tutorial, and making a wonderfully useless hobbled-together scratch game, with various working examples lightly retooled and hacked up to fit in a vague "everything's edible" plotless Wonkaland setting. I was pleased to make my buttercream incline look different from above and below, and also depending on whether you've visited the other side yet. Then I played around with generic rooms, and I am here to tell you that no matter what the manual and sample code might say,

A closet is a kind of room with printed name "Broom Closet" and description "This is just a storage closet. You'll have to pick your way out through the [closet contents]."

A closet has a property called closet contents. The closet contents of a closet is usually "odds and ends and cleaning supplies". The Pantry has closet contents "pots and pans".

East of the Confectionary Workshop is a closet.

does NOT yield a room calling itself "Broom Closet", but rather one titled "closet". As far as I can tell, you have to call out the printed name on each instance of your whatever kind of room, at which point it seems to me that you may as well just say it's "called" whatever. Curious.

I still wish for "code" formatting here, by the way.

The death, also, of jouissance. (Thank god, at least, I didn't have to kill the roadrunner.)

Trinity is killing me! So much terrible tiny animal death.

S. has reminded me that Goose, Egg, Badger is a fine example of charm in modern IF. (Not so much sweetness, still, but hey.) It is in large part a gimmick game, but the gimmick is clever and charming. It's been a while since I played it -- I do remember finding it a little... un-immersive, but I found it witty and a pleasure to play. And it hinges on wordplay, nicely. It did much less well in the IF Comp ratings that year than I thought it deserved. This was in part because, it seems, a ton of people utterly failed to notice its main clever feature. Or for some other reason, I don't know. I guess that's not why Zarf disliked it, though I can't tell for sure. My luck was such that I didn't pick up on the gimmick right away but rather had it dawn on me at pretty much the optimal aesthetically enjoyable point in my progression through the game.

Once again, I wish I had spoiler tags at my disposal. Alas.

A certain someone presented me with a copy of the Infocom classic Trinity. I'm not done yet, but I'm enjoying it a great deal. I realized on starting it that I actually had played it when it first came out but got deeply stuck in the opening sequence and eventually gave up. This time around I have a better idea of what I'm doing and had no trouble getting on my way. Also, I found the Invisiclues online much later on when I was stymied by a guess-the-verb problem (the verb in question was "empty").

I've had to get back in the habit of saving all the time -- so many modern games make that far less necessary -- and am apparently fundamentally incapable of remembering that "x" for "examine" won't work, but overall it lacks most of the frustrations I am used to running into when I go back to older games, and the atmosphere and puzzles are great. I'm finding it interesting, too, how evocative and emotionally engaging it is while leaving the PC essentially a cipher.

Perhaps next I'll find a way to play A Mind Forever Voyaging.

Have you seen the Eyezmaze game Chronon? It's a game of contigencies, like On's previous Flash games in the "Grow" series. There are a number of set points at which you can manipulate various items, and depending on the order in which you mess with them, different results ensue. The objective is to find the optimal order in which to do things. In his best games, wrong choices and right choices alike have interesting/charming outcomes, which keeps things lively, and the right choices are emotionally satisfying.

Chronon is nifty in that it works on this same principle, but you can bounce back and forth along the timeline to see how a given change you made affects things down the line, instead of having to work your way through the sequence and start over each time you want to do it in a different order. If I do X at 6:15 and Y at 9:05, what's the state of affairs at 12:25? Ooh, not good -- let me go back to 9:05 and do something else and see how that works out.

At the same time, a nice thing happened where my sense of what my objective was changed while I fiddled around, and based on things I glimpsed at the end of the timeline while I was definitely still provisionally rearranging things. Spoilers ahoy:

It seemed at first that I should want to poison the shuffling monster who I figured had imprisoned "me" (I'm not sure why I associated myself with the little figure in the cage, especially since it was clearly in no position to be doing all the stuff I was up to with moving pots and pans and clocks around). But long before I got to the point where I could slip some poison into his cake, I did some other thing that resulted in the shuffling monster's coming home to a dark and empty house, and he looked SO SAD. There was no way I wanted to poison him now! And indeed it turns out that the winning ending is happy for all involved.

So, my question is: Is there any way at all to achieve, somehow, a similar effect in interactive fiction? It's tantalizing, and obviously it would be very different in all kinds of ways in its execution, but something that somehow echoed this structure and experience while working as IF seems like it would be so great to me. How might it be done?

PS. I used the quote feature in lieu of a proper spoiler tag so you could see where the spoiler ends. Is that a good convention, do you think?

Since I started my scritchy-scratchy learning "game" code with an example from the manual set in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory*, I've pretty much gone with the theme -- Oompa Loompas, candy rock by the sugar-water sea, and so on. Now I think I'd better implement the everything-edible feature from the recent Tim Burton movie.

Everything in this room is edible. Even I'm edible. But that is called cannibalism, my dear children, and is in fact frowned upon in most societies.

*I love the way you can copy examples from the manual into your working source code with a single click.

Inform 7 is a new IDE for Inform (i.e. one of the major languages for writing interactive fiction, AKA "text adventure games") and a wrapper around Inform 6 based on natural language. This means you can write things like:

The golden porthole is west of the Workshop and above the Briny Deep. The porthole is a door. The description is "The porthole door shines faintly."

and:

Size is a kind of value. The sizes are small, medium, and large. A thing has a size. A thing is usually small.

and:

The Oompa Loompa is a man in the Glassy Plain. The Oompa Loompa wears a coconut poncho. He carries a piece of gum, some marshmallows, and a giant cacao pod. The poncho is large. The pod is large. The gum and the marshmallows are contraband.

It's cool! It feels much easier to sketch things in and go back later to flesh them out this way, and I like playing around with what seem like plausible ways to make things work and then testing them out to see if I was right. Inform 7 also has a nice single-window interface for coding and testing, with an integrated manual. Both the natural language aspect and the easy-to-test-as-you-go aspect are making this a lot more fun for me than my abortive attempts at earlier versions of Inform have been.

I'm still very much in the beginning stages of this, though. This weekend I'll be working on how to make concealed objects (as you can begin to see me doing in my Oompa Loompa example), among other things. I also have some half-baked ideas for games, naturally.