Andy Chase

Joel Ray Holveck has written some nice thoughts on the subject on rec.arts.int-fiction.

Like Joel, I have never played any of the old Infocom games to completion. I played Zork I for hours and hours on the Commodore 64, but I never got anywhere. I haven’t even played that many of the more recent, shorter games in the Interactive Fiction Archive.

I have a fairly low tolerance for getting stuck, and most of the games I try lead all to quickly to dead ends where I have overlooked a crucial piece of whatever puzzle is keeping me from the rest of the game. Furthermore, when I am stuck there are almost never any hints forthcoming, and I am usually reduced to the exercise of trying to blindly guess at what it is the author wants me to do:

>PUT CHEWING GUM ON BEDPOST

Apart from losing its flavor overnight, nothing happens.

>PUT CHEWING GUM ON DOORKNOB

You don't need to worry about the doorknob.

>PUT CHEWING GUM ON WINDOW

I only understood you as far as wanting to put the chewing gum.

>EAT CHEWING GUM

But you don't know where it's been!

>THROW CHEWING GUM

(at the floor) You shouldn't litter.

And so forth. It’s actually more frustrating when the author has anticipated all of the foolish things you’re going to try than if every action resulted in a stock You don't need to worry about the [foo] response, because it only confirms the fact that whatever you’re supposed to do is so non-obvious and contrived that the author knows you’re going to be grasping at all of the logical straws.

So, I haven’t actually played a lot of IF, which for a long time has made me feel unqualified to try writing it. I’ve had the sneaking suspicion that I just haven’t played enough good games, or maybe I just don’t have the knack for playing IF, or I’m just missing some damn thing that everybody else in the IF community instinctively groks about playing these games.

Maybe Joel is right, though; maybe other people just don’t write the games I want to play. I’m still getting familiar with the mechanics of the Inform language, but with time there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to write a perfectly good adventure on my own terms.

The other, purely selfish reason I am attracted to writing interactive fiction is that opens a tiny doorway back to the time, before the 7th grade, when I was encouraged by my teachers to be creative and find enjoyment in the process of writing.

All of my writing instruction from junior high onward seemed like a systematic attempt to destroy any possible interest I might have had in the activity. Fiction, which was always the most fun to write, was completely neglected in favor of tedious research papers and nonfiction essays. My tenth grade “Creative Writing” class was anything but. I learned to hate writing anything until I was required to write a journal for my humanities course in 12th grade (proto-blogging on paper, really). The screenwriting courses I took in college were also very enjoyable. I wasn’t much good at it, but the process was absorbing.

Screenwriting, like IF languages such as Inform or TADS, is an interesting way to write; the fun fiction aspect of it gets tempered by the structural requirements of the medium… scene and character descriptions and lines of dialog in screenplays, and program code in IF.

That split between creative and technical breaks up the writing process and forces you to examine your story in managable chunks, which I find tremendously helpful. When putting together an IF story many of the logistics of your plot fall naturally into the realm of programming logic, which goes a long way towards keeping you honest when writing your descriptions and dialog, and considering matters of character (both player and non-player) motivation.

So, why write interactive fiction? I’m still figuring that out, but for me it’s as much about the process as it is about creative compulsion or the desire for critical acclaim. I’m rediscovering that it can be fun and rewarding to make up your own worlds.