[JUNE] Twisty Little Passages by Nick Montfort

[Liz England]

The June reading is "Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction" by Nick Montfort

"Interactive fiction—the best-known form of which is the text game or text adventure—has not received as much critical attention as have such other forms of electronic literature as hypertext fiction and the conversational programs known as chatterbots. Twisty Little Passages (the title refers to a maze in Adventure, the first interactive fiction) is the first book-length consideration of this form, examining it from gaming and literary perspectives. Nick Montfort, an interactive fiction author himself, offers both aficionados and first-time users a way to approach interactive fiction that will lead to a more pleasurable and meaningful experience of it."

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/twisty-little-passages

Keep in mind this book was written in 2005 - before the surge in interactive fiction in the form of choice-based text games like 80 Days or all the games made in Twine, and before the success of narrative-based indie games like Gone Home or Edith Finch. A lot has changed in 10 years!

Sorry for the lateness on this month's announcement - I'm actually still waiting on last month's book (Spelunky) to arrive in the mail.

[Seb A.]

Hey everyone! *waves* I am excited to read some books. And, I like to think I have some basic theoretical familiarity with IF stuff, so. Here we go.

(Disclaimer: I'm not sure if there's preferred method of providing feedback or discussion points for the group. If I'm doing this in an annoying / wrongheaded way, I'd be happy to change. And if I've jumped the gun by posting early, I'm happy to hold back. *nods earnestly*)

Here are my notes/thoughts on the prologue + the first three chapters. They are mostly critical, but I don't think it's a badly written book at all.  

How IF is defined / what works TLP is concerned with 

IF is defined by two unique properties. The world model, and the parser. The world model is a graph of structures with associated procedures, methods, functions; the physical environment and objects and PC; the simulation of the rules of the fiction (such as time, allowable solutions, light levels). The parser accepts natural language input within the context of the world model. The book is primarily concerned with IF defined as above, and not with hypertext fiction. 'text adventure' is eschewed as a definition because of its low art connotations ('a popular and less literary work', p.6) and because it is narrower in terms of meaning.

Later on, Montfort fills out this definition of IF further. IF has the following properties:

• A text-accepting, text generating computer program
• A potential narrative, that is, a system that produces narrative by during interaction
• A simulation of an environment or world
• A structure of rules within which an outcome is sought, also known as a game (p.23)

In addition, IF (or, at least, IF with puzzles) has the following in common with the literary institution of the riddle:

• A systematic world
• Something to be solved
• Challenge and difficulty
• A combination of the literary and the puzzling (p.43) 

Arguing the case for IF's legitimacy as a 'literary' art detracts from the other goals of TLP

From the get go, there is something in the way the book defines its terms that rubs me up the wrong way. One of Montfort's primary concerns in the first chapters of the work is to establish the literary pedigree of IF against the contemporary academic sentiment that privileges hypertextual works: "It is unfortunate, however, that while hypertext fiction has gained some acceptance in academic and literary circles, interactive fiction has usually been dismissed as a triviality." I think that this concern is unfortunate, as it leads to a lot of ink being spent in the service of what I would call 'academic bolstering' - bigging up the 'special nature' of IF, and this in turn leads to some weaknesses in the lenses presented to understand the work.

One thing that Montfort is very clear to emphasise is that IF cannot be completely understood as a 'game' ("they are difficult to understand in terms of video games, since the few elements that they share with video games function quite differently in interactive fiction" (p.viii)"); that IF comes from a different tradition to video games ("the influence of these graphics-based, action oriented computer games on interactive fiction actually turned out to be rather slight in the long run. Video games showed themselves to be a different branch of recreational computing" (p.79)) and that IF is more than 'just' a game ("it is misleading to categorize interactive fiction as only a game" (p.14)). 

Am I the only one that feels the 'only a game' very acutely, here?  As someone who will die on the hill of 'games are an art medium', I am a little sore to see an academic throw 'game' under the bus as a term not big enough to incorporate the incredibly complex and vitally interesting experience of playing IF. 

Worse, I feel that Montfort undergoes some rather impressive contortions to avoid us understanding IF through the lens of a game, even when it would be helpful to do so. I think the two most egregious examples of this are to refer to the player of an IF work doggedly as 'the interactor', and not, well, the player. (Again, I believe play is both complex enough to do the necessary work here, and that it harms comprehension more than helps it to have a special term for interacting with IF.) The other is where they use  'situation' to refer to game state (p.31) with 'initial situation' and 'final situation' being the initial state and win/end state of the game respectively. Surely, 'game state' would suffice here; we do not have to reinvent the wheel. Telling, I think is that Montfort admits that the two are synonymous ("not only is the state of the game (i.e. the situation of the IF world)" (p.34)). However, Montfort keeps PC ('player character' intact) which is somewhat baffling. 

Montfort's chapter on riddles is really interesting, but I think that the claim that the riddle is the 'true' antecedent of IF and the best / most useful way to understand IF is overstated at best (p.37) and, I feel, done primarily as an exercise in academic politicking rather than helping us understand how IF works. Two main reasons why. First, Montfort suggests another literary model which could be compared to IF - the 'situational puzzle' or 'lateral thinking puzzle' (p.41) - which I think is wonderful and really illuminating - but isn't given more than a paragraph or two of consideration, I think because of its novelty as a literary form (the classic formulations date back to the 50s), and Montfort needs something much older to pin IF to to make his case for legitimacy. Perhaps this is unfair. In any case, I would really read the heck out of a comparison of how lateral thinking puzzles work vs. how IF puzzles work. 

Secondly - and this is something I couldn't shake as I read the first chapters - a lot of the criteria that Montfort says IF and riddles have in common are all found in graphical adventure games (the quality of being 'literary' I suppose being open to interpretation). 

It is unclear what the purpose of TLP is

I feel that this work is currently suffering from being muddled in what it is setting out to achieve. The end of the prologue (xi) is quite enigmatic as to what the book is 'about', it is an 'approach' to appreciating IF - but it feels to me like the main thrust of the book so far is to very methodically legitimise IF as a literary medium rather than to offer lenses to understand how it produces the particular literary effects that it does.

The vocabulary / critical framework that is offered in chapter 1 (input, cycle, command, directive, etc.) is something I am very interested in, but not sold on -  aside from the concerns about wheel-reinvention, it seems to be offered somewhat halfheartedly, and it was not immediately clear to me on reading it what the utility was in defining a whole slew of terms to our ability to understand how IF works. (I tend to be very suspicious of jargon unless I see the benefit of it from an analytical perspective). However, it's very possible that this will become clear to me in later chapters where close readings are offered using this framework. 

So far, there are some omissions that seem odd to me. The first is that there seems to be a limited focus on the experience of the 'interactor' when it comes to the meaning of the IF work and how it works, and a more pronounced focus on the inherent formal elements of IF outside the player. This is fine for preference, but I get a little twitchy when the player / reader's experience is not given at least some sustained focus. 

For example, one omission that occured to me in the comparison of IF to riddles - the 'riddlee' in both cases is designed to experience the feeling of stuck-ness, confusion - of being puzzled. Then, they are supposed to (at least in what I call the platonic archetype of an 'adventure game puzzle') come up with a solution by induction - experience a 'eureka!' moment, try it out, get feedback, and hopefully feel like a genius if they got it right. My gut feeling is that the analysis would work better if there was more focus on 'puzzles' themselves, rather than the form of IF as a whole. 

Where I'm at now

So, it seems re-reading the above that I'm pretty down on TLP. I do have some reservations, but I'm definitely going to read it through to the end. In particular, the historical elements to the book, and the surveys of works are by themselves very well crafted and stand up as deeply interesting on their own merits in addition to how they function in the book.

However, my goal is always to find better, more effective lenses to understand games, and I'm not sure that TLP has given me that for IF works yet, in a way that, say, some essays from the IF Theory Reader really did.