Q+A: Interactive Fiction

Raph asks:

when are you hopping on if

Shin Megami Tensei If…? Probably never. Next!

Now interactive fiction… this is a genre I’ve been keen on getting into a few times but have never quite gone all in on. On and off for the last few years I had been working on an adventure game with a minimal, script-driven engine, and at some point last year I had a phase where I was interested in trying to write it in Inform instead. One of my research tasks is writing monitoring software derived from formal logic statements, and these tend to be written in a declarative language, which is the camp Inform falls into. Most languages are imperative, as in they provide a series of instructions; declarative languages describe simply what entities are by contrast, assuming that if a top-level entity is defined that is compiled from lower-level entities, their attributes and such will transfer directly into the full object.¹ In Inform’s case, I figured the base engine (which handles verb parsing based on what your character is able to perform in the context they’re in) would give me a strong enough basis to do what I wanted with my concepts, though I ended up moving away from it a bit because I wanted stronger authorial control over the pace (surely doable with Inform, but maybe not the right tool for it).

From a wider view, however, this declarative paradigm gives us exactly the dynamism and emergence that we often wish to see in “systemic” games, or rather, games with strong, organic mechanical interplay.² Games with open-ended solutions generally avoid having prescribed lock-and-key obstacles in favor of throwing elements of the system into a scenario and letting you reason one of many ways to apply them to get to the goal state. Inform already has the control surface (the verb parsing), and by using a declarative syntax, it’s ascribing properties to items that you can then interact with seamlessly using the parser, including moving objects around, applying objects to other objects, and creating multi-object interactions that may involve time-based dynamic reaction. It’s obviously a limited system visually speaking, but if you’re willing to work with its confines, then you can get an immersive sim-level of freeform gameplay without the limitations that come with trying to stuff everything into a 3D engine.

The reason I got into Inform, however, was because I had been playing Suspended, a Infocom game from 1983 that has been somewhat lost in the public consciousness compared to Zork or the Brian Moriarty works. In this Michael Berlyn game,³ you play a human stirred to a barely conscious state in the midst of a planet-spanning crisis. Although you can’t really move or do much on your own, you have control of six different robots who can help you figure out all of the major weather creation, food production, and transit management failures through a series of different control stations from around the lab. Each robot comes equipped with distinct capabilities: Waldo has six separate arms/hands for manipulating and repairing objects, Iris, Sensa, and Auda all have capabilities related to their names (sight, general “sensing” of radiation and whatnot, and hearing), and Poet can diagnose objects through touch.⁴ Each of them also has their own distinct verbal affect, from Waldo’s gruff mannerisms to Poet’s non-sequiturs that metaphorically relate to his surroundings. By quickly sending the robots around the command compound to repair machines and observe the surroundings, you can limit the amount of people who die on the surface of the planet.

Although the game instantly tells you what’s wrong (the filtering computers have been damaged at two particular cables), getting inside past a hallway filled with leaking acid is just one of many hurdles you’ll face towards getting the planet’s infrastructure back online.

Actually unraveling what exactly is wrong with the control systems is about 80% of the puzzle here, and it reveals the total lack of visualization as an immense boon to the conceit of the format when used in this way. The distinct sensory capabilities of each robot makes determining what you’re looking at in any given room a major struggle, especially since Iris starts out the game non-functional, and she can never leave a particular wing of the compound, although she has camera feeds to work off of if you’re willing to find their components. Making determinations about what exactly the robots are interacting with requires cross-referencing observational data from each one, passing objects around and letting each take a crack at describing it before attempting to figure out what it may be useful for. Rooms become defined not by their actual look but by what sticks out to the robots: arcs of current, a leaky pipe overhead, or the feel of the metal and concrete walkways. The refusal to provide the visual aid to player makes the act of interfacing with the world a conscious one through methods chosen by the player, providing unusual interpretations of the space that the player must construct into their own mental model.

The multiple robots and many appendages also make transporting items and interacting with specific objects a giant multi-tasking assignment, especially since the whole game runs on a tick system for each action input by the player. If you task a robot to run across the length of the complex, they won’t finish for a certain number of ticks, allowing you to delegate tasks to the other robots in the meantime. Timed events also occur, most notably a group of humans that come in to depose you of your duties thinking that you’ve gone haywire. The humans follow a schedule, but you’re able to bug or harm them in multiple ways, stealing their stuff to have them chase you around the facility or just delay them from making it to your chamber. These are the kinds of fundamental connections that directly derive from that aforementioned declarative programming: every item in the world, capability of the robots, or behavior of the in-game people is labeled as a trait and then let loose in the game, with the engine merely working out the interactions between them all as you key in commands.

I’ve still got a lot of interactive fiction I’d like to play (Counterfeit Monkey is high on my list), and I’ve been poking around Twine a bit too, since the simple display and Javascript integration makes it more my speed for something with light turn-based combat as compared to Inform. Really glad I spent some time with Suspended though (and peeked through a guide lol) to get a glimpse of what kind of alternative possibilities can arise when we dispense with many of the preconditions of visual gaming.