Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable.
Dismiss
tasting notes
154 views
Skip to first unread message
401...@comhem.se
Aug 21, 2014, 6:40:13 PM8/21/14
to
Approaching interactive fiction I feel like a dog sniffing a bitch too small to mount. This is so utterly negligible a literary medium, one feels churlish taking it to task. But even a Chihuahua deserves a good fuck - anything else would be ungentlemanly - so I'm going to pretend you are real writers, and not the cartoon characters you appear to be.
Some of you have been awfully perceptive and noticed that I do not exist. If I'm an invention, why take me seriously? It is a moot point whether Jesus existed as something more than an intertextual character in the novels by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Real Jesus (a.k.a. Joshua ben Josef of Nazareth) was a minor headache for Pilate. Fake Jesus (a.k.a. the Lord Jesus Christ) provided the fictional cornerstone on which Christianity is founded. Much like Jesus, my reality is subordinate to my fiction.
Interactive fiction is the closest thing out there to a truly critic-proof medium. It's essentially the interactive equivalent of the souvenir t-shirt, except it's for free and isn't collectible. Since writing it is done neither for critical acclaim nor financial reward, it's the purest form of art. So is flatulence and writing on toilet walls. So why waste time reviewing it? Because interactive fiction writers shame interactive fiction. My job is to shame the writers.
I rarely finish the games I review. This is because my reviews are tasting notes rather than deep readings. All it takes to figure out what kind of a writer Aaron Reed is, is a sniff and a sip of his prose. You don't have to drink the whole bottle. The purpose of a deep reading is to enhance the comprehension and enjoyment of a literary text. It's something one does with F. Scott Fitzgerald, not with you guys. I'm sorry if that sounds dismissive, but I'm the person least responsible for the quality of your mental equipment. If you have complaints in this department, please take them up with your parents, your educational system, and ultimately with yourselves.
To those who wrote asking me to review more recent games, I write this. Many recent games exist solely because the authors wanted to play around with Inform 7 under the guise of writing a game. They are vanity projects where the authors have more fun than the players. I'm not going to waste mine and your time on someone's algorithm assignment.
Welcome to the vomitorium of Robb Sherwin, an excrement-oriented man-child whose intellectual development never moved beyond the anal stage.
Excerpt from Robb Sherwin's _Necrotic Drift_
"Criswell's only half joking, as he's demonstrated his willingness to do that before. When his favorite CFL football team lost in the finals last year he was so pissed off at the TV for depicting it that he grabbed a chair from the kitchen, got up and plopped a steaming load on top of the set. Worse, it was two weeks before anyone cleaned it up. We had a veritable bumper crop of flies around the house that year."
There's a fine line between obsession and endorsement. In Mr. Sherwin's defence it could be offered that these are the lives and values of his creatures, not necessarily of their creator, but obsessions of this kind have recurred and overlapped thickly enough in his work to constitute the equivalent of an artist's palette; this is how he chooses to paint the world because, in all likelihood, it is the only world he knows. To find it a distasteful and limited world is an aesthetic, not a political response. Sure, squalor can animate, but only when mired in the time of Dickens. The dismaying thing about Mr. Sherwin is that he appears to be ascribing a narrative value to squalor which it no longer has. In his fiction, youngish men of the present are boasting of their miserable lives, and it would seem that, to Mr. Sherwin and his characters, squalor still has the bleakness of Dickensian times. But I am, of course, barking up the wrong tree, because Mr. Sherwin's take on squalor is too languid to animate anything, least of all his submental creatures. What his fiction is really about is his thrall to his own childish, undisciplined mind.
Excerpt from _Necrotic Drift_
">x criswell
Criswell is a lanky, freaky sort who usually skulks about in the shadows. His arms are usually tattered with syringe marks as he is a chronic user of horse tranquilizer except for the months of spring when he plays quarterback for a flag football team. He's wearing a shredded 'FREE PITTMAN' t-shirt and pair of acid-washed jeans. It appears as if he recently dyed his hair a fluorescent blue."
His games are about people who have arrived at adulthood unequipped. They hold driver's licences and are eligible to vote, but their minds remain in the hinterland of adolescence. So what, you may argue, regression and infantilism are real issues and real issues are what writers tackle. The problem is not that Mr. Sherwin is portraying a world of adolescent values, but that he shares them.
Had Mr. Sherwin not been a superannuated adolescent, he'd have known that there's no such thing as "syringe marks." Needles leave marks, not syringes. The correct phrasing, by the way, is "track marks." This is because they occur not so much on the arms, but more generally along veins, such as the veins in the neck, penis, feet, wherever the addict can find a healthy blood vessel. The notion that ketamine addiction can be a seasonal thing is another expression of the author's childishness.
Of course, addiction isn't the central concern of _Necrotic Drift_. But then what is? Well, among other things, it's a relationship drama. Yes, believe it or not, but one of the poopmeisters is in a long-term relationship with a human female. It's also a commentary on the semi-nomadism of the modern work force (girlfriend finds work in another city and leaves boyfriend). It's also about the white underclass. It's also a story about a country where there are more guns than people, but when it comes to fighting zombies, everyone uses their fists. Oh yeah, lest I forget, it's also a game about zombies.
As you can see, there's more narrative content in _Necrotic Drift_ than in the oeuvres of Andrew Plotkin and Emily Short combined. What is missing is structure. The plot enters and re-enters the story like an incoherent drunk running in and out of a room, reeking of tedium but rendered harmless by narrative ineptitude. Mr. Sherwin has the lively imagination of a child, but lacks the discipline of an adult. This isn't just a phase he'll hopefully grow out of. Seven years after _Necrotic Drift_ was released, Mr. Sherwin released _Cryptozookeper_, a game whose opening puzzle involves eating vomit.
Excerpt from Andromeda Awakening
"Darkness begins to dissipate. Opening your eyes takes so much effort it feels like someone is sitting on them."
Reading this makes me wonder if Marco Innocenti was stoned blind and giggling when he wrote it. But make no mistake - this isn't deliberate comedy, though much of it indeed sounds as if you had your face planted beneath someone's butt. It's heartfelt. It's simply that what is heartfelt for Mr. Innocenti is funny. His prose has the ludicrous feel of one of those Mussolini speeches where the Duce is making all kinds of silly faces, but is deadly serious, seemingly unaware of his own clowning.
Excerpt from Andromeda Awakening
">x man
You recognize the funny man as coming from the near Bom-Fong Satellite facility: his darker skin tone and his thin eyes betray his provenance. He wears a yellow coat that runs down to his feet, and it looks like he's wearing nothing else."
Provenance is the chronology of the ownership of a historical object. What Mr. Innocenti is trying very hard to say is that the man is Asian. So why not just say so? Probably because he thinks that "Asian" is politically incorrect, hence the "thin" (slanted?) eyes and the "darker skin tone" and the yellow (hint! hint!) coat. The man is "funny" even before he's had a chance to open his mouth. Why is that? Because according to Mr. Innocenti Asians are inherently funny. Also note the verb "betray." The Asian man reveals his race somehow despite himself. The implication is that no one in their right mind would want to be non-white. One can only see the world like this through the spectacles of utter stupidity. A breath of intelligence would cloud the lenses.
Excerpt from Andromeda Awakening
"Condominium
The foggy light coming from the grates on the top half of the stairwell looks like a cascade of dusty milk. You are standing just mere feet from your house entrance, above the first step outside.
>enter entrance
That's not something you can enter."
Never mind the unenterable entrance. A more pressing matter is why is there fog inside a stairwell? Why is it coming from a grate? What is a grate doing inside a stairwell? How does light cascade? What does dusty milk look like and how is it like light? The only thing that is described with any intelligence is the legal form of housing tenure. The protagonist lives in a condominium, as opposed to a rental apartment or a hotel or privately owned real estate. This is the kind of writing that's ridiculously exacting with a not particularly pertinent detail while being cavalier about everything else.
Excerpt from Andromeda Awakening
"All these people, you think, watching the passers-by as they crowd the streets in their random duties. If only they knew, they'd squatter around like mad rats, biting at each other and feasting on the corpses.
The major sun -- Korhos -- seems to point its malevolent, cold finger at you."
We live between the darkness of birth and the darkness of death and to phrase our thoughts in another language is to climb the mountain of another country, pierce the clouds and see another sky. Or it can be like bending over to insert one's head into one's anus - more darkness. Conrad, Nabokov and I belong to the former, and most people who insist on writing in an acquired tongue to the latter.
I knew a francophone woman who would say "Sorry I'm retarded" meaning "Sorry I'm late." This was the only occasion when she was funny. Most of the time she was tiresome and incongruous, and so is Mr. Innocenti. The senselessness of his English outweighs its silliness by several orders of magnitude and shows us that the mangling of a second language is rarely amusing. When did "squatter" become a verb? Does it mean occupation of property without payment of rent, or sitting in a crouching position? Since "around" implies movement, neither interpretation makes sense. The story... excuse me for a moment, while I laugh hysterically at having written the words "the story." I'm back. The story confuses mystery with confusion. What-the-passers-by-don't-know-but-the-author-presumably-does is a libretto that would not be enhanced by synopsising. Let's just say that a very private space operetta is playing inside the author's head.
Excerpt from Andromeda Awakening
">touch Korhos
You feel nothing unexpected."
Put *that* in your pipe and smoke it.
I received the following e-mail in response to my review of Mr. Innocenti's _Andromeda Apocalypse_.
"Your jelous coz this game was number one at the comp on it's debut and many peeple like it. Was also an enjoyable reeding experience and as a space alien I found it as authentic as you can get from a text adventure about alien space stations."
This was written either by an actual space alien or by Mr. Innocenti pretending to be one. The latter would mean that Mr. Innocenti has acquired a sense of humour, so I put my money on the space alien theory. It seems odd, though, that an alien civilisation that's mastered interstellar travel has yet to discover spellchecking. After all, those interstellar spaceships are pretty high-tech. Perhaps this particular space alien crossed interstellar space on a bicycle?
Mr. Innocenti has chosen to exert himself in a textual medium, an unfortunate choice seeing how his stories are unlikely to appeal to anyone who can read. YouTube would have been more appropriate. His "characters" could be played by animals wearing funny hats. With YouTube stupidity is the only limit, and I have every confidence that Mr. Innocenti is well-endowed in this department. The kindest thing I can say about Mr. Innocenti is that he is a better writer than Aaron Reed, and that is very faint praise indeed.
Emily Short is, in interactive fiction terms, clever. She is literate according to a peculiarly illiterate convention - that of name dropping. Her work is filled with references to Greek mythology, Giordano Bruno, classic fairy tales, etc. All of this is providing a smoke screen of "culture" to conceal the true nature of her interactive fiction: experiments in game mechanics inflated to the status of fiction. Her Metamorphoses has nothing in common with Ovid's, nor does her Galatea relate to the myth in any but the most trivial way. It's not that she distorts or vulgarizes her material. To do so she'd have to provide narrative content.
Excerpt from Emily Short's _Galatea_
">ASK GALATEA ABOUT GREECE
Buy a map."
Excerpt from Emily Short's _Savoir-Faire_
">EXAMINE ROSES
More thorns than the usual, and fewer blooms, or so it seems to your eye.
>TOUCH THEM
What part of "ferocious thorns" did you not understand?"
A few small jokes come off, or maybe we laugh because we're guiltily amused to see someone as humorless as Ms. Short attempt humor, like watching an elephant ride a tricycle. She seems not only devoid of humor, but almost unaware of its possibility, a kind of comedic colour blindness. Not knowing how the thing looks like, she often settles for testiness, the closest thing to wit she can think of.
Her fiction is consistently without resonance - it doesn't connect with our lives or any lives we might care to imagine - which is just as well, as it ensures replayability. A month or two after having finished one of her games we may sit down to it again, because we don't remember a thing about it.
It's precisely this lack of resonance, the fact that interactive fiction is engrossing but does not impinge on the player's life and thoughts, which enables it to give a pleasure which is distinct from the pleasure of literature. An interactive fabula has no afterlife. It's fully digested the moment we finish it, as opposed to a novel, a poem or a film which can carry on a ghostly existence inside our heads long after we've closed the covers or left the cinema. Extending the metaphor, we could argue that an interactive fabula has no afterlife because it has no soul, that it's a structured time killer that gives its victims the illusion of storytelling, leaving us stranded at the end, with a sense of wasted time. Its hypnotic strength lies in its utter shallowness; a player can go at a fast clip, solving the puzzles and not paying any attention to the characters, because there aren't any.
Excerpt from Emily Short's _Best of Three_
"I don't have a lot of beliefs about that divine entity, but I do think it exists, or existed. Too much feels planned about the universe to have occurred wholly by accident. But that doesn't mean that the whole universe is significant or can be read as a work of art can be read. Some created objects communicate only incidentally: a car, for instance, is made to move people around, and you can get some conclusions from looking at the car, but the conclusions are not what the car is there for."
Her prose has all the charm of a pretty essay written by a bright high school student; it is vague, thin, rambling, a tissue of generalities to conceal the author's intellectual vacuity. To find it nutritious one would have to be on a mental starvation diet, and this is how (I suspect) most of her players come to her. Arriving as they do from Twitter, Facebook and videogames, her jejune musings must seem to them the work of a serious writer.
Take _Savoir-Faire_. This harmless, rather clever bagatelle of an interactive "story" might have been charming and witty had the narrative interruptions between the puzzles been the least meaningful, had they been intended to touch on a common theme, or designed to create an intricate narrative pattern that would match the intricacy of the puzzle scheme. Instead they're just mechanical and repetitive delaying tactics. This is also true of the protagonist, who despite having a fairly elaborate (by interactive fiction standards) background story is merely a mutable cipher with no psychological consistency, responding to changing predicaments much like a chameleon responds to changing surroundings.
It may seem odd to reproach Ms. Short for writing inane puzzle boxes, seeing how writing inane puzzle boxes is her life's aspiration. But this is after all a literary medium - it even has the f-word in its name - and to see her approach it with the blitheness of a housewife baking a cake for the church bazaar, makes me wonder if the world needs more empty calories.
Take Ms. Short's _Galatea_. You get to talk to a statue. About Art, God and the Meaning of Life. The idea is sound, if not exactly enthralling. It all depends on where the author takes it. Ms. Short treats the idea as though it were inherently so wicked, it didn't have to go anywhere. The dialogue is so blandly non-committal, it achieves unintentional realism - should a stone brain acquire the faculty of speech, this would be how it would talk. The author seems indeed oblivious of the real nature of her writing, so that the words lead the reader to other conclusions than those intended by her. Although the NPC is a bore and an airhead, she is not supposed to be, if only because the theme of the myth (and consequently the game), art surpassing nature, would collapse. But to merely say that Ms. Short is a writer unaware of the effect of her writing is to put it more gently than she deserves. She also appears unaware of the concept of dénouement. When the "conversation" finally ends and one of the multiple endings is reached, and the author needs to show us the consequences, she folds up. She hasn't prepared the elements that are needed to complete the piece, so the game dies when the talking statue stops talking.
Excerpt from Emily Short's _Galatea_
ASK GALATEA ABOUT ART
"'What do you know about art?'
'In the abstract?' You become aware of her breathing -- the slight expansion of her ribs, the soft exhalation -- natural, and yet somehow studied. 'Not much. I've seen very few pieces: myself, and the murals at the airport -- and the latter, I am led to believe, do not quite count.'"
Slimly endowed as a thinker, it is only prudent that Ms. Short evades philosophy. But when a miraculously sapient work of art has nothing sapient to say about art, what then is the point of its sapience? To have "seen very few pieces" is an odd saving clause, seeing how Galatea was conceived by an artist, created by an artist and awoke to consciousness in an artist's studio. If she knows anything about anything, surely it is art.
In magical realism, the balance between realism and magic is a tricky thing. On the one hand, the author asks us to entertain the realist notion that a newborn mind is a tabula rasa, on the other the magic fact that the very same mind has the linguistic skills of an adult. Why not extend mental competence to other faculties? If she can form sentences, why not syllogisms? It would certainly improve her conversational skills. The answer, I'm afraid, is as simple as it is cruel: because the author can't. Ms. Short has neither the talent not the inclination to cultivate an intellect. A prominent interactive fiction critic once wrote "We are the cognitive ceilings of our creations. We can never create a character more intelligent, or more witty, or more eloquent than ourselves. [...] the limits of a character's cognizance will always reflect the limits of its creator's imagination." (Jacek Pudlo, "Retrospective: Galatea (2000)," February 7, 2014, www.intfiction.org) Ms. Short's cognitive ceiling is knee-high. To enjoy her Galatea you need one of those skateboard thingies auto mechanics use to slide beneath cars. Once you're staring at the undercarriage, filter out the sappy dialogue and the muddling static of apprentice prose and focus on the technical aspects of the game, the ASK/TELL interface and the layered, interconnected topics.
(To those who wrote me defending the banality of Ms. Short's _Galatea_, I write this. Read Richard Powers' _Galatea 2.2_ and reflect on the difference.)
I doubt that whoever invented the typewriter wrote anything sensible on it. This seems to be the raison d'être of Ms. Short's decade-and-a-half long interactive fiction "career;" to create the tools and the technical framework for future interactive fabulists to work with, then to scuttle off to her next pet project and create some more tools and frameworks, all the while paying scant attention to the literary merit of her work. Seeing how she's at heart an artisan rather than an artist, I can only congratulate her modesty and extend my profoundest condolences to her wasted youth.
The last paragraph may have been a wee bit too harsh. So here's a qualifier. If there's such a thing as an interactive faculty - a talent tailored to textual interactiveness with its focus on puzzle design, preemptiveness of player input, clarity and brevity - Ms. Short really has it. But she may be so full of it, that she doesn't have much else. She's in her mid-thirties and has been writing interactive fiction for a decade and a half, and I still can't tell whether she has a mind. If she does, she's done one hell of a job not expressing it through her interactive fiction. Maybe she loves puzzles so much that she doesn't care if an interactive fabula has anything else in it. The problem with this approach is that she appears to select a puzzle scheme and then designs a story to fit it, with the plot and the characters mere coat hangers to suspend the puzzles from. It is the glaring fault of her interactive fiction that all of it has been produced that way. The good thing is that her puzzles tend to be interesting. Her stories are not satisfying, or even mildly interesting, but the puzzles in them are engaging. She's not deep, but she's not entirely dumb, either.
It took Aaron Reed several years to write _Blue Lacuna_, and it is clearly a labour of love, dedication, endurance and humourless lunacy. The game remains to this day a gleaming monument to a man's tragicomic struggle to be eloquent.
Excerpt from _Blue Lacuna_
"Waves. Dreams move beneath you, blind colossi revolving through unknowable patterns, but they do not break the surface, not yet or any more. You float in void outside them, cold, memoryless."
Were alphabet soup an art form, Mr. Reed would be an artist. As things stand, he's a typist. To pay him due respect, he's a wonderfully gifted typist. His sentences are always properly parsed and punctuated and the words are very pretty. A compulsive urge to type seems to have destroyed the envelopes of meaning, leaving the pretty words free to merge and float at their own accord. Cogency must have played little part in a state so directionless, yet it is difficult not to associate a mental process with idiocy of such a pervasive kind. Having concocted so many metaphors, one would expect Mr. Reed to accidentally hit upon one or two apt ones, much like a blind hen accidentally may find a grain of corn. And yet a higher power seems to prevent the hen from finding her grain. This higher power can't be anything other than a mental process. Mr. Reed's witlessness isn't the result of blind stomping. He is deliberately and persistently treading on intelligence.
Excerpt from _Blue Lacuna_
"The physical presence of the woman beside you, her tangible power, dissolves away all other desires. You pull her close.
Waves. The remnants of dream fuse into this new reality without a seam. You roll together, riding peaks and troughs of infinite blue, gasps and vague portents and hot insights suffused in the power of the moment, in the hot breath in your ear, in the dandelion touches on delicate nerves. [...]
Afterwards. Breaths out of sync, pools of cool sweat [...]"
Mr. Reed's English needs subtitles. It's hard to believe that a man wrote those sentences, and not some algorithm semi-randomly picking words from a thesaurus, in which case subtitles wouldn't help. "Dissolves away"? Mr. Reed is certainly not afraid of redundancies, or banalities, or sheer stupidity (what exactly is a "hot insight" and how does it differ from a cold one?), but one thing he does shirk is specificity. Since he is unwilling to mention a single orifice by name, his descriptions of sexual intercourse tend to involve flowers, much like the stories parents tell when trying to explain human procreation to a six-year-old. Being a prude hasn't stopped him, however, from describing post-coital bliss in terms of "pools of cool sweat." Personally I find this particular tidbit more disgusting than an honest description of two people fucking, but I suppose one dude's Gomorrah is another's Paradise.
Have you noticed, by the way, how a short declarative sentence is always followed by one or several long "decorative" ones, bloated with asinine metaphors and inane sentiments? (Were Mr. Reed's prose Guns 'N Roses, the short sentences would be Axl Rose's lyrics and the long ones Slash's guitar solos.) One way of cutting down on the tedium is to add a simple algorithm to your favourite interpreter. The algorithm would work in two stages. Stage one would check if the game's author is Mr. Reed. If true, stage two would filter out all sentences longer than ten words. The Reed Filter would abridge the above excerpt thusly.
"You pull her close. Waves. Afterwards."
As you can see, we've retained the sense while skipping the dandelions and the pools of sweat. Of course, the result remains inane, but so do Axl Rose's lyrics.
The name Paul O'Brian carries something of a guarantee that the story will have lazily stereotyped characters and wholesome values. Mr. O'Brian's work is of little intellectual interest, but it is never pretentious, and even when it is monumentally bad, there's always the pleasure of comparing it to the work of other fabulists like him, such interactive luminaries as Paul Panks, Andrew Plotkin or Aaron Reed, and learn just how many shades of monumentally bad there are. Such comparisons may in fact be the best training in aesthetics that interactive fiction players get.
In the spring of 2000 Mr. O'Brian put his thinking cap on and arrived at the conclusion that slavery was bad. This kind of behaviour is known in the English-speaking world as "teaching how to suck eggs," though I rather prefer the Polish phrase "teaching one's father how to make babies." He decided to share this insight by writing _L.A.S.H._, a game that draws an analogy between robots and robot masters on the one hand, and antebellum slaves and slave owners on the other. Apparently belabouring the obvious wasn't dumb enough. Mr. O'Brian invites us to ponder an analogy of jaw-dropping spuriousness, because if you agree with him that the plight of black slaves and the "plight" of robots are somehow morally comparable, you'd better play this game as the analogy is unlikely to be employed again.
Excerpt from Paul O'Brian's _L.A.S.H._
"My master removes my hands from the hook, and unties them. He casts the rope into the fire disgustedly, and says 'Nigger, pick up the gown.'
>get gown
Taken.
'Nigger, wear the gown,' he commands me."
Note the imperative mode notation that uses a comma to separate the grammatical subject from the rest of the clause, a syntax commonly used in interactive fiction to direct non-playing characters. This is Mr. O'Brian extending his analogy to insinuate that fictional characters are slaves and players are slave owners. Apparently what interactive fiction needs is a civil war followed by an emancipation proclamation freeing all fictional characters. Popular culture has made many of us dangerously forgiving, but forgiving enough to accept the trivializing of one of the greatest crimes in human history? Wherefrom does Mr. O'Brian get his infantile notions of slavery? Would we be equally forgiving had Mr. O'Brian drawn an analogy between Auschwitz and a wrecking yard?
_L.A.S.H._ is an insult to Africans, Americans, African-Americans and the hyphen in-between, but how you'll react to it will depend only partly on the colour of your skin. If you're black, you'll be offended. If you're white and intelligent, you'll be embarrassed. If you're white and stupid, like Victor Gijsbers, you'll think it's "thoughtful and serious."
Andrew Plotkin doesn't bring much to the party. In what is already an Asperger's-ish community, he succeeds in distinguishing himself as the autist auteur par excellence, a writer incapable of emotiveness. It's not that he's a bad storyteller; he isn't a storyteller at all, so one can hardly call him a bad one. He'd have to tell a story before we could consider him bad at it.
_Dreamhold_: When the game's not reminding you of Zork it's reminding you of Zork II and Zork III and Myst and the fact that nostalgia in interactive fiction is often used as a mandate for amazingly lazy storytelling. What it's not doing is making you care about the protagonist, or anything that happens to it. Mind you, "it" isn't a typo. Mr. Plotkin was too busy paying homage to bother endowing his protagonist with a gender, or a face, or any semblance of personality. Consequently you play a unisex wizard longing for its lost unisex lover. That's as articulate as it gets. One would be hard pressed to be less articulate, and yet there is truth to the fuzziness, for how can a writer incapable of harbouring emotions be articulate about love?
Mr. Plotkin is like a timid person at a social function - the best way of avoiding a gaffe, he figures, is to say as little as possible. In the short run, this isn't a bad strategy, especially if one has nothing worthwhile to say. It's hard to critique things like plot, characterisation and theme when these components are not present. In the long run, however, their absence becomes conspicuous. Storytelling is implicit in the concept of interactive fiction the way gravity is implicit in the concept of precipice. Without gravity the geological formation known as "precipice" is still there, but it's no longer a precipice.
_Shade_: The only thing _Shade_ offers in literary terms is lots of foreshadowing. Since an author presumably knows where his story is heading, foreshadowing is the easiest and laziest of literary tropes. Mr. Plotkin beckons us with a wily grin, foreshadowing things to come in a way that seems to promise a clever dénouement. How clever is he? You be the judge. Here's the foreplay. You're a faceless, information-age proletarian (no doubt autobiographically inspired) inhabiting a dreary, claustrophobic apartment (no doubt autobiographically inspired). The game goads you into trying to fill a glass with water. This trivial act proves extremely difficult to accomplish. Here's the climax. You can't fill the glass because you're not in the apartment. You're dying of thirst in the desert, hallucinating that you're in an apartment trying to fill a glass with water.
The nudniks will always be with us. They are easily diagnosed but impossible to cure. Mr. Plotkin is a nudnik. Being a nudnik is his greatest usefulness, his vocation. He's very useful. I'm sure he's indispensable at whatever menial job he holds and that he would be a diligent code monkey on an interactive fiction project if someone more sophisticated wrote the story and designed the puzzles.
Most interactive fiction writers are witless, lumbering cattle who dutifully line up to be slaughtered by the critic. Adam Cadre is an exception. Mr. Cadre doesn't eat meat, doesn't drink, doesn't think and is generally speaking one of those male persons one is reluctant to refer to as "man." Despite this he is one of the best writers of interactive fiction. In fact, had someone pointed a gun at me and given me three seconds to name the best interactive fiction writer or die, I'd be shouting "Adam Cadre! Adam Cadre! Please don't shoot me!" This is faint praise indeed, as it says more about the competition than about Mr. Cadre.
_Photopia_: I have no idea why Mr. Cadre wanted to adapt this story to an interactive medium, and close examination of the "game" itself is of no help. _Photopia_ is contrived, artificial, cloying and, since interacting with it has no impact on the outcome, a good candidate for a "Worst Use of Medium" award. To call it manipulative is to pay it a compliment it doesn't deserve. It has an ambition to manipulate, but fails. One component of _Photopia_ is undeniably good, though, and that is the title. It rolls nicely off the tongue and means absolutely nothing. A more descriptive title might have been _Bad Things Happen to Good People_. At the age of twenty-four, Mr. Cadre thought that this was such a radical insight, he had to share it with the world.
Some of you have been awfully perceptive and noticed that I do not exist. If I'm an invention, why take me seriously? It is a moot point whether Jesus existed as something more than an intertextual character in the novels by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Real Jesus (a.k.a. Joshua ben Josef of Nazareth) was a minor headache for Pilate. Fake Jesus (a.k.a. the Lord Jesus Christ) provided the fictional cornerstone on which Christianity is founded. Much like Jesus, my reality is subordinate to my fiction.
Interactive fiction is the closest thing out there to a truly critic-proof medium. It's essentially the interactive equivalent of the souvenir t-shirt, except it's for free and isn't collectible. Since writing it is done neither for critical acclaim nor financial reward, it's the purest form of art. So is flatulence and writing on toilet walls. So why waste time reviewing it? Because interactive fiction writers shame interactive fiction. My job is to shame the writers.
I rarely finish the games I review. This is because my reviews are tasting notes rather than deep readings. All it takes to figure out what kind of a writer Aaron Reed is, is a sniff and a sip of his prose. You don't have to drink the whole bottle. The purpose of a deep reading is to enhance the comprehension and enjoyment of a literary text. It's something one does with F. Scott Fitzgerald, not with you guys. I'm sorry if that sounds dismissive, but I'm the person least responsible for the quality of your mental equipment. If you have complaints in this department, please take them up with your parents, your educational system, and ultimately with yourselves.
To those who wrote asking me to review more recent games, I write this. Many recent games exist solely because the authors wanted to play around with Inform 7 under the guise of writing a game. They are vanity projects where the authors have more fun than the players. I'm not going to waste mine and your time on someone's algorithm assignment.
Welcome to the vomitorium of Robb Sherwin, an excrement-oriented man-child whose intellectual development never moved beyond the anal stage.
Excerpt from Robb Sherwin's _Necrotic Drift_
"Criswell's only half joking, as he's demonstrated his willingness to do that before. When his favorite CFL football team lost in the finals last year he was so pissed off at the TV for depicting it that he grabbed a chair from the kitchen, got up and plopped a steaming load on top of the set. Worse, it was two weeks before anyone cleaned it up. We had a veritable bumper crop of flies around the house that year."
There's a fine line between obsession and endorsement. In Mr. Sherwin's defence it could be offered that these are the lives and values of his creatures, not necessarily of their creator, but obsessions of this kind have recurred and overlapped thickly enough in his work to constitute the equivalent of an artist's palette; this is how he chooses to paint the world because, in all likelihood, it is the only world he knows. To find it a distasteful and limited world is an aesthetic, not a political response. Sure, squalor can animate, but only when mired in the time of Dickens. The dismaying thing about Mr. Sherwin is that he appears to be ascribing a narrative value to squalor which it no longer has. In his fiction, youngish men of the present are boasting of their miserable lives, and it would seem that, to Mr. Sherwin and his characters, squalor still has the bleakness of Dickensian times. But I am, of course, barking up the wrong tree, because Mr. Sherwin's take on squalor is too languid to animate anything, least of all his submental creatures. What his fiction is really about is his thrall to his own childish, undisciplined mind.
Excerpt from _Necrotic Drift_
">x criswell
Criswell is a lanky, freaky sort who usually skulks about in the shadows. His arms are usually tattered with syringe marks as he is a chronic user of horse tranquilizer except for the months of spring when he plays quarterback for a flag football team. He's wearing a shredded 'FREE PITTMAN' t-shirt and pair of acid-washed jeans. It appears as if he recently dyed his hair a fluorescent blue."
His games are about people who have arrived at adulthood unequipped. They hold driver's licences and are eligible to vote, but their minds remain in the hinterland of adolescence. So what, you may argue, regression and infantilism are real issues and real issues are what writers tackle. The problem is not that Mr. Sherwin is portraying a world of adolescent values, but that he shares them.
Had Mr. Sherwin not been a superannuated adolescent, he'd have known that there's no such thing as "syringe marks." Needles leave marks, not syringes. The correct phrasing, by the way, is "track marks." This is because they occur not so much on the arms, but more generally along veins, such as the veins in the neck, penis, feet, wherever the addict can find a healthy blood vessel. The notion that ketamine addiction can be a seasonal thing is another expression of the author's childishness.
Of course, addiction isn't the central concern of _Necrotic Drift_. But then what is? Well, among other things, it's a relationship drama. Yes, believe it or not, but one of the poopmeisters is in a long-term relationship with a human female. It's also a commentary on the semi-nomadism of the modern work force (girlfriend finds work in another city and leaves boyfriend). It's also about the white underclass. It's also a story about a country where there are more guns than people, but when it comes to fighting zombies, everyone uses their fists. Oh yeah, lest I forget, it's also a game about zombies.
As you can see, there's more narrative content in _Necrotic Drift_ than in the oeuvres of Andrew Plotkin and Emily Short combined. What is missing is structure. The plot enters and re-enters the story like an incoherent drunk running in and out of a room, reeking of tedium but rendered harmless by narrative ineptitude. Mr. Sherwin has the lively imagination of a child, but lacks the discipline of an adult. This isn't just a phase he'll hopefully grow out of. Seven years after _Necrotic Drift_ was released, Mr. Sherwin released _Cryptozookeper_, a game whose opening puzzle involves eating vomit.
Excerpt from Andromeda Awakening
"Darkness begins to dissipate. Opening your eyes takes so much effort it feels like someone is sitting on them."
Reading this makes me wonder if Marco Innocenti was stoned blind and giggling when he wrote it. But make no mistake - this isn't deliberate comedy, though much of it indeed sounds as if you had your face planted beneath someone's butt. It's heartfelt. It's simply that what is heartfelt for Mr. Innocenti is funny. His prose has the ludicrous feel of one of those Mussolini speeches where the Duce is making all kinds of silly faces, but is deadly serious, seemingly unaware of his own clowning.
Excerpt from Andromeda Awakening
">x man
You recognize the funny man as coming from the near Bom-Fong Satellite facility: his darker skin tone and his thin eyes betray his provenance. He wears a yellow coat that runs down to his feet, and it looks like he's wearing nothing else."
Provenance is the chronology of the ownership of a historical object. What Mr. Innocenti is trying very hard to say is that the man is Asian. So why not just say so? Probably because he thinks that "Asian" is politically incorrect, hence the "thin" (slanted?) eyes and the "darker skin tone" and the yellow (hint! hint!) coat. The man is "funny" even before he's had a chance to open his mouth. Why is that? Because according to Mr. Innocenti Asians are inherently funny. Also note the verb "betray." The Asian man reveals his race somehow despite himself. The implication is that no one in their right mind would want to be non-white. One can only see the world like this through the spectacles of utter stupidity. A breath of intelligence would cloud the lenses.
Excerpt from Andromeda Awakening
"Condominium
The foggy light coming from the grates on the top half of the stairwell looks like a cascade of dusty milk. You are standing just mere feet from your house entrance, above the first step outside.
>enter entrance
That's not something you can enter."
Never mind the unenterable entrance. A more pressing matter is why is there fog inside a stairwell? Why is it coming from a grate? What is a grate doing inside a stairwell? How does light cascade? What does dusty milk look like and how is it like light? The only thing that is described with any intelligence is the legal form of housing tenure. The protagonist lives in a condominium, as opposed to a rental apartment or a hotel or privately owned real estate. This is the kind of writing that's ridiculously exacting with a not particularly pertinent detail while being cavalier about everything else.
Excerpt from Andromeda Awakening
"All these people, you think, watching the passers-by as they crowd the streets in their random duties. If only they knew, they'd squatter around like mad rats, biting at each other and feasting on the corpses.
The major sun -- Korhos -- seems to point its malevolent, cold finger at you."
We live between the darkness of birth and the darkness of death and to phrase our thoughts in another language is to climb the mountain of another country, pierce the clouds and see another sky. Or it can be like bending over to insert one's head into one's anus - more darkness. Conrad, Nabokov and I belong to the former, and most people who insist on writing in an acquired tongue to the latter.
I knew a francophone woman who would say "Sorry I'm retarded" meaning "Sorry I'm late." This was the only occasion when she was funny. Most of the time she was tiresome and incongruous, and so is Mr. Innocenti. The senselessness of his English outweighs its silliness by several orders of magnitude and shows us that the mangling of a second language is rarely amusing. When did "squatter" become a verb? Does it mean occupation of property without payment of rent, or sitting in a crouching position? Since "around" implies movement, neither interpretation makes sense. The story... excuse me for a moment, while I laugh hysterically at having written the words "the story." I'm back. The story confuses mystery with confusion. What-the-passers-by-don't-know-but-the-author-presumably-does is a libretto that would not be enhanced by synopsising. Let's just say that a very private space operetta is playing inside the author's head.
Excerpt from Andromeda Awakening
">touch Korhos
You feel nothing unexpected."
Put *that* in your pipe and smoke it.
I received the following e-mail in response to my review of Mr. Innocenti's _Andromeda Apocalypse_.
"Your jelous coz this game was number one at the comp on it's debut and many peeple like it. Was also an enjoyable reeding experience and as a space alien I found it as authentic as you can get from a text adventure about alien space stations."
This was written either by an actual space alien or by Mr. Innocenti pretending to be one. The latter would mean that Mr. Innocenti has acquired a sense of humour, so I put my money on the space alien theory. It seems odd, though, that an alien civilisation that's mastered interstellar travel has yet to discover spellchecking. After all, those interstellar spaceships are pretty high-tech. Perhaps this particular space alien crossed interstellar space on a bicycle?
Mr. Innocenti has chosen to exert himself in a textual medium, an unfortunate choice seeing how his stories are unlikely to appeal to anyone who can read. YouTube would have been more appropriate. His "characters" could be played by animals wearing funny hats. With YouTube stupidity is the only limit, and I have every confidence that Mr. Innocenti is well-endowed in this department. The kindest thing I can say about Mr. Innocenti is that he is a better writer than Aaron Reed, and that is very faint praise indeed.
Emily Short is, in interactive fiction terms, clever. She is literate according to a peculiarly illiterate convention - that of name dropping. Her work is filled with references to Greek mythology, Giordano Bruno, classic fairy tales, etc. All of this is providing a smoke screen of "culture" to conceal the true nature of her interactive fiction: experiments in game mechanics inflated to the status of fiction. Her Metamorphoses has nothing in common with Ovid's, nor does her Galatea relate to the myth in any but the most trivial way. It's not that she distorts or vulgarizes her material. To do so she'd have to provide narrative content.
Excerpt from Emily Short's _Galatea_
">ASK GALATEA ABOUT GREECE
Buy a map."
Excerpt from Emily Short's _Savoir-Faire_
">EXAMINE ROSES
More thorns than the usual, and fewer blooms, or so it seems to your eye.
>TOUCH THEM
What part of "ferocious thorns" did you not understand?"
A few small jokes come off, or maybe we laugh because we're guiltily amused to see someone as humorless as Ms. Short attempt humor, like watching an elephant ride a tricycle. She seems not only devoid of humor, but almost unaware of its possibility, a kind of comedic colour blindness. Not knowing how the thing looks like, she often settles for testiness, the closest thing to wit she can think of.
Her fiction is consistently without resonance - it doesn't connect with our lives or any lives we might care to imagine - which is just as well, as it ensures replayability. A month or two after having finished one of her games we may sit down to it again, because we don't remember a thing about it.
It's precisely this lack of resonance, the fact that interactive fiction is engrossing but does not impinge on the player's life and thoughts, which enables it to give a pleasure which is distinct from the pleasure of literature. An interactive fabula has no afterlife. It's fully digested the moment we finish it, as opposed to a novel, a poem or a film which can carry on a ghostly existence inside our heads long after we've closed the covers or left the cinema. Extending the metaphor, we could argue that an interactive fabula has no afterlife because it has no soul, that it's a structured time killer that gives its victims the illusion of storytelling, leaving us stranded at the end, with a sense of wasted time. Its hypnotic strength lies in its utter shallowness; a player can go at a fast clip, solving the puzzles and not paying any attention to the characters, because there aren't any.
Excerpt from Emily Short's _Best of Three_
"I don't have a lot of beliefs about that divine entity, but I do think it exists, or existed. Too much feels planned about the universe to have occurred wholly by accident. But that doesn't mean that the whole universe is significant or can be read as a work of art can be read. Some created objects communicate only incidentally: a car, for instance, is made to move people around, and you can get some conclusions from looking at the car, but the conclusions are not what the car is there for."
Her prose has all the charm of a pretty essay written by a bright high school student; it is vague, thin, rambling, a tissue of generalities to conceal the author's intellectual vacuity. To find it nutritious one would have to be on a mental starvation diet, and this is how (I suspect) most of her players come to her. Arriving as they do from Twitter, Facebook and videogames, her jejune musings must seem to them the work of a serious writer.
Take _Savoir-Faire_. This harmless, rather clever bagatelle of an interactive "story" might have been charming and witty had the narrative interruptions between the puzzles been the least meaningful, had they been intended to touch on a common theme, or designed to create an intricate narrative pattern that would match the intricacy of the puzzle scheme. Instead they're just mechanical and repetitive delaying tactics. This is also true of the protagonist, who despite having a fairly elaborate (by interactive fiction standards) background story is merely a mutable cipher with no psychological consistency, responding to changing predicaments much like a chameleon responds to changing surroundings.
It may seem odd to reproach Ms. Short for writing inane puzzle boxes, seeing how writing inane puzzle boxes is her life's aspiration. But this is after all a literary medium - it even has the f-word in its name - and to see her approach it with the blitheness of a housewife baking a cake for the church bazaar, makes me wonder if the world needs more empty calories.
Take Ms. Short's _Galatea_. You get to talk to a statue. About Art, God and the Meaning of Life. The idea is sound, if not exactly enthralling. It all depends on where the author takes it. Ms. Short treats the idea as though it were inherently so wicked, it didn't have to go anywhere. The dialogue is so blandly non-committal, it achieves unintentional realism - should a stone brain acquire the faculty of speech, this would be how it would talk. The author seems indeed oblivious of the real nature of her writing, so that the words lead the reader to other conclusions than those intended by her. Although the NPC is a bore and an airhead, she is not supposed to be, if only because the theme of the myth (and consequently the game), art surpassing nature, would collapse. But to merely say that Ms. Short is a writer unaware of the effect of her writing is to put it more gently than she deserves. She also appears unaware of the concept of dénouement. When the "conversation" finally ends and one of the multiple endings is reached, and the author needs to show us the consequences, she folds up. She hasn't prepared the elements that are needed to complete the piece, so the game dies when the talking statue stops talking.
Excerpt from Emily Short's _Galatea_
ASK GALATEA ABOUT ART
"'What do you know about art?'
'In the abstract?' You become aware of her breathing -- the slight expansion of her ribs, the soft exhalation -- natural, and yet somehow studied. 'Not much. I've seen very few pieces: myself, and the murals at the airport -- and the latter, I am led to believe, do not quite count.'"
Slimly endowed as a thinker, it is only prudent that Ms. Short evades philosophy. But when a miraculously sapient work of art has nothing sapient to say about art, what then is the point of its sapience? To have "seen very few pieces" is an odd saving clause, seeing how Galatea was conceived by an artist, created by an artist and awoke to consciousness in an artist's studio. If she knows anything about anything, surely it is art.
In magical realism, the balance between realism and magic is a tricky thing. On the one hand, the author asks us to entertain the realist notion that a newborn mind is a tabula rasa, on the other the magic fact that the very same mind has the linguistic skills of an adult. Why not extend mental competence to other faculties? If she can form sentences, why not syllogisms? It would certainly improve her conversational skills. The answer, I'm afraid, is as simple as it is cruel: because the author can't. Ms. Short has neither the talent not the inclination to cultivate an intellect. A prominent interactive fiction critic once wrote "We are the cognitive ceilings of our creations. We can never create a character more intelligent, or more witty, or more eloquent than ourselves. [...] the limits of a character's cognizance will always reflect the limits of its creator's imagination." (Jacek Pudlo, "Retrospective: Galatea (2000)," February 7, 2014, www.intfiction.org) Ms. Short's cognitive ceiling is knee-high. To enjoy her Galatea you need one of those skateboard thingies auto mechanics use to slide beneath cars. Once you're staring at the undercarriage, filter out the sappy dialogue and the muddling static of apprentice prose and focus on the technical aspects of the game, the ASK/TELL interface and the layered, interconnected topics.
(To those who wrote me defending the banality of Ms. Short's _Galatea_, I write this. Read Richard Powers' _Galatea 2.2_ and reflect on the difference.)
I doubt that whoever invented the typewriter wrote anything sensible on it. This seems to be the raison d'être of Ms. Short's decade-and-a-half long interactive fiction "career;" to create the tools and the technical framework for future interactive fabulists to work with, then to scuttle off to her next pet project and create some more tools and frameworks, all the while paying scant attention to the literary merit of her work. Seeing how she's at heart an artisan rather than an artist, I can only congratulate her modesty and extend my profoundest condolences to her wasted youth.
The last paragraph may have been a wee bit too harsh. So here's a qualifier. If there's such a thing as an interactive faculty - a talent tailored to textual interactiveness with its focus on puzzle design, preemptiveness of player input, clarity and brevity - Ms. Short really has it. But she may be so full of it, that she doesn't have much else. She's in her mid-thirties and has been writing interactive fiction for a decade and a half, and I still can't tell whether she has a mind. If she does, she's done one hell of a job not expressing it through her interactive fiction. Maybe she loves puzzles so much that she doesn't care if an interactive fabula has anything else in it. The problem with this approach is that she appears to select a puzzle scheme and then designs a story to fit it, with the plot and the characters mere coat hangers to suspend the puzzles from. It is the glaring fault of her interactive fiction that all of it has been produced that way. The good thing is that her puzzles tend to be interesting. Her stories are not satisfying, or even mildly interesting, but the puzzles in them are engaging. She's not deep, but she's not entirely dumb, either.
It took Aaron Reed several years to write _Blue Lacuna_, and it is clearly a labour of love, dedication, endurance and humourless lunacy. The game remains to this day a gleaming monument to a man's tragicomic struggle to be eloquent.
Excerpt from _Blue Lacuna_
"Waves. Dreams move beneath you, blind colossi revolving through unknowable patterns, but they do not break the surface, not yet or any more. You float in void outside them, cold, memoryless."
Were alphabet soup an art form, Mr. Reed would be an artist. As things stand, he's a typist. To pay him due respect, he's a wonderfully gifted typist. His sentences are always properly parsed and punctuated and the words are very pretty. A compulsive urge to type seems to have destroyed the envelopes of meaning, leaving the pretty words free to merge and float at their own accord. Cogency must have played little part in a state so directionless, yet it is difficult not to associate a mental process with idiocy of such a pervasive kind. Having concocted so many metaphors, one would expect Mr. Reed to accidentally hit upon one or two apt ones, much like a blind hen accidentally may find a grain of corn. And yet a higher power seems to prevent the hen from finding her grain. This higher power can't be anything other than a mental process. Mr. Reed's witlessness isn't the result of blind stomping. He is deliberately and persistently treading on intelligence.
Excerpt from _Blue Lacuna_
"The physical presence of the woman beside you, her tangible power, dissolves away all other desires. You pull her close.
Waves. The remnants of dream fuse into this new reality without a seam. You roll together, riding peaks and troughs of infinite blue, gasps and vague portents and hot insights suffused in the power of the moment, in the hot breath in your ear, in the dandelion touches on delicate nerves. [...]
Afterwards. Breaths out of sync, pools of cool sweat [...]"
Mr. Reed's English needs subtitles. It's hard to believe that a man wrote those sentences, and not some algorithm semi-randomly picking words from a thesaurus, in which case subtitles wouldn't help. "Dissolves away"? Mr. Reed is certainly not afraid of redundancies, or banalities, or sheer stupidity (what exactly is a "hot insight" and how does it differ from a cold one?), but one thing he does shirk is specificity. Since he is unwilling to mention a single orifice by name, his descriptions of sexual intercourse tend to involve flowers, much like the stories parents tell when trying to explain human procreation to a six-year-old. Being a prude hasn't stopped him, however, from describing post-coital bliss in terms of "pools of cool sweat." Personally I find this particular tidbit more disgusting than an honest description of two people fucking, but I suppose one dude's Gomorrah is another's Paradise.
Have you noticed, by the way, how a short declarative sentence is always followed by one or several long "decorative" ones, bloated with asinine metaphors and inane sentiments? (Were Mr. Reed's prose Guns 'N Roses, the short sentences would be Axl Rose's lyrics and the long ones Slash's guitar solos.) One way of cutting down on the tedium is to add a simple algorithm to your favourite interpreter. The algorithm would work in two stages. Stage one would check if the game's author is Mr. Reed. If true, stage two would filter out all sentences longer than ten words. The Reed Filter would abridge the above excerpt thusly.
"You pull her close. Waves. Afterwards."
As you can see, we've retained the sense while skipping the dandelions and the pools of sweat. Of course, the result remains inane, but so do Axl Rose's lyrics.
The name Paul O'Brian carries something of a guarantee that the story will have lazily stereotyped characters and wholesome values. Mr. O'Brian's work is of little intellectual interest, but it is never pretentious, and even when it is monumentally bad, there's always the pleasure of comparing it to the work of other fabulists like him, such interactive luminaries as Paul Panks, Andrew Plotkin or Aaron Reed, and learn just how many shades of monumentally bad there are. Such comparisons may in fact be the best training in aesthetics that interactive fiction players get.
In the spring of 2000 Mr. O'Brian put his thinking cap on and arrived at the conclusion that slavery was bad. This kind of behaviour is known in the English-speaking world as "teaching how to suck eggs," though I rather prefer the Polish phrase "teaching one's father how to make babies." He decided to share this insight by writing _L.A.S.H._, a game that draws an analogy between robots and robot masters on the one hand, and antebellum slaves and slave owners on the other. Apparently belabouring the obvious wasn't dumb enough. Mr. O'Brian invites us to ponder an analogy of jaw-dropping spuriousness, because if you agree with him that the plight of black slaves and the "plight" of robots are somehow morally comparable, you'd better play this game as the analogy is unlikely to be employed again.
Excerpt from Paul O'Brian's _L.A.S.H._
"My master removes my hands from the hook, and unties them. He casts the rope into the fire disgustedly, and says 'Nigger, pick up the gown.'
>get gown
Taken.
'Nigger, wear the gown,' he commands me."
Note the imperative mode notation that uses a comma to separate the grammatical subject from the rest of the clause, a syntax commonly used in interactive fiction to direct non-playing characters. This is Mr. O'Brian extending his analogy to insinuate that fictional characters are slaves and players are slave owners. Apparently what interactive fiction needs is a civil war followed by an emancipation proclamation freeing all fictional characters. Popular culture has made many of us dangerously forgiving, but forgiving enough to accept the trivializing of one of the greatest crimes in human history? Wherefrom does Mr. O'Brian get his infantile notions of slavery? Would we be equally forgiving had Mr. O'Brian drawn an analogy between Auschwitz and a wrecking yard?
_L.A.S.H._ is an insult to Africans, Americans, African-Americans and the hyphen in-between, but how you'll react to it will depend only partly on the colour of your skin. If you're black, you'll be offended. If you're white and intelligent, you'll be embarrassed. If you're white and stupid, like Victor Gijsbers, you'll think it's "thoughtful and serious."
Andrew Plotkin doesn't bring much to the party. In what is already an Asperger's-ish community, he succeeds in distinguishing himself as the autist auteur par excellence, a writer incapable of emotiveness. It's not that he's a bad storyteller; he isn't a storyteller at all, so one can hardly call him a bad one. He'd have to tell a story before we could consider him bad at it.
_Dreamhold_: When the game's not reminding you of Zork it's reminding you of Zork II and Zork III and Myst and the fact that nostalgia in interactive fiction is often used as a mandate for amazingly lazy storytelling. What it's not doing is making you care about the protagonist, or anything that happens to it. Mind you, "it" isn't a typo. Mr. Plotkin was too busy paying homage to bother endowing his protagonist with a gender, or a face, or any semblance of personality. Consequently you play a unisex wizard longing for its lost unisex lover. That's as articulate as it gets. One would be hard pressed to be less articulate, and yet there is truth to the fuzziness, for how can a writer incapable of harbouring emotions be articulate about love?
Mr. Plotkin is like a timid person at a social function - the best way of avoiding a gaffe, he figures, is to say as little as possible. In the short run, this isn't a bad strategy, especially if one has nothing worthwhile to say. It's hard to critique things like plot, characterisation and theme when these components are not present. In the long run, however, their absence becomes conspicuous. Storytelling is implicit in the concept of interactive fiction the way gravity is implicit in the concept of precipice. Without gravity the geological formation known as "precipice" is still there, but it's no longer a precipice.
_Shade_: The only thing _Shade_ offers in literary terms is lots of foreshadowing. Since an author presumably knows where his story is heading, foreshadowing is the easiest and laziest of literary tropes. Mr. Plotkin beckons us with a wily grin, foreshadowing things to come in a way that seems to promise a clever dénouement. How clever is he? You be the judge. Here's the foreplay. You're a faceless, information-age proletarian (no doubt autobiographically inspired) inhabiting a dreary, claustrophobic apartment (no doubt autobiographically inspired). The game goads you into trying to fill a glass with water. This trivial act proves extremely difficult to accomplish. Here's the climax. You can't fill the glass because you're not in the apartment. You're dying of thirst in the desert, hallucinating that you're in an apartment trying to fill a glass with water.
The nudniks will always be with us. They are easily diagnosed but impossible to cure. Mr. Plotkin is a nudnik. Being a nudnik is his greatest usefulness, his vocation. He's very useful. I'm sure he's indispensable at whatever menial job he holds and that he would be a diligent code monkey on an interactive fiction project if someone more sophisticated wrote the story and designed the puzzles.
Most interactive fiction writers are witless, lumbering cattle who dutifully line up to be slaughtered by the critic. Adam Cadre is an exception. Mr. Cadre doesn't eat meat, doesn't drink, doesn't think and is generally speaking one of those male persons one is reluctant to refer to as "man." Despite this he is one of the best writers of interactive fiction. In fact, had someone pointed a gun at me and given me three seconds to name the best interactive fiction writer or die, I'd be shouting "Adam Cadre! Adam Cadre! Please don't shoot me!" This is faint praise indeed, as it says more about the competition than about Mr. Cadre.
_Photopia_: I have no idea why Mr. Cadre wanted to adapt this story to an interactive medium, and close examination of the "game" itself is of no help. _Photopia_ is contrived, artificial, cloying and, since interacting with it has no impact on the outcome, a good candidate for a "Worst Use of Medium" award. To call it manipulative is to pay it a compliment it doesn't deserve. It has an ambition to manipulate, but fails. One component of _Photopia_ is undeniably good, though, and that is the title. It rolls nicely off the tongue and means absolutely nothing. A more descriptive title might have been _Bad Things Happen to Good People_. At the age of twenty-four, Mr. Cadre thought that this was such a radical insight, he had to share it with the world.
Peter Pears
Aug 23, 2014, 6:51:56 AM8/23/14
to
I used to take offense at things like this, I really did. Now I'm older, possibly a little bit wiser (not by much), and all I can find in myself to do is chuckle.
Lest anyone be taken in: this person is a known troll, please do not respond directly to this post or you'll feed him. We've seen this many times before and it's just not worth it.
Lest anyone be taken in: this person is a known troll, please do not respond directly to this post or you'll feed him. We've seen this many times before and it's just not worth it.
Adam Thornton
Aug 23, 2014, 11:33:27 AM8/23/14
to
In article <7f4b89fc-076e-43d9...@googlegroups.com>,
Adam
<401...@comhem.se> wrote:
>Approaching interactive fiction I feel like a dog sniffing a bitch too
>small to mount.
Hi, Jacek. Long time no see. Were you in jail?
>Approaching interactive fiction I feel like a dog sniffing a bitch too
>small to mount.
Adam
401...@comhem.se
Aug 24, 2014, 1:06:22 PM8/24/14
to
Adam Thornton:
> Hi, Jacek. Long time no see. Were you in jail?
She said she was 18...
(Awkward silence. Some banter?)
Anyway, what have you been up to lately?
> Hi, Jacek. Long time no see. Were you in jail?
(Awkward silence. Some banter?)
Anyway, what have you been up to lately?
hanono...@gmail.com
Aug 28, 2014, 1:40:01 PM8/28/14
to
On Thursday, August 21, 2014 5:40:13 PM UTC-5, 401...@comhem.se wrote:
> Approaching interactive fiction I feel like a dog
Jacek, have you thought perhaps of directing the energy you spend in reiterating your distaste for the work of popular IF authors into completing an opus of your own?
> Approaching interactive fiction I feel like a dog
Whatever became of that one of yours that involved detachable arms and truckloads of unimplemented scenery? (Which I'm sure you would manage to clear up, as it was only a beta after all.)
Gauging the tone of this harangue, I'm sure you'd feel it unworthy of your time. But surely a genius like yourself couldn't resist placing a shekel in the location of your communicative orifice to show the community exactly how someone of your intellectual stature might revolutionize a chihuahua-petite literary niche.
<<Others: Sorry for baiting the troll, but I am genuinely curious to read an actual competing work that could illuminate by example how interactive literature of the quality the poster clamors for should actually be done.>>
0 new messages