<!--
	Title: Q. How do you make fiction "interactive"?
	Subtitle: A. I dunno. Ask Hitchhiker's Doug Adams.
	Author: Shay Addams
	Source: Family Computing, v3(6)
	Date: June 1985
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

<img class="float-left" src="/public/img/articles/family-computing-douglas-adams-interview/douglas-adams.jpg" alt="Douglas Adams sitting down">

*Born in Cambridge, England, in 1952, Douglas Adams attended
Cambridge University, where he collaborated with
many of the comedy writers who later created "Monty Python's
Flying Circus" and "Not the Nine O'clock News" for British television. After
graduating in 1974, Adams penned several episodes of the "Dr. Who" TV series
before finding time to write a radio show called "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy." The show's cult following turned into an international audience
when Adams' book version was published in America in the early '80s. He
recently completed* So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish, *which picks up where the*
Hitchhikers *triology left off. Adams had just finished the screenplay for the book
when he discussed his adventure game adaptation of* Hitchhiker's Guide *and its
potential effect on the digital watch industry and civilization as we know it.*

**Q:** What was the first adventure game you played?

**A:** Original *Adventure* [the first adventure
game, by Crowther and Woods], on The Source
about a year-and-a-half ago
while living in Los Angeles. I guess my
first commercial game was *Suspended*.
That was the only one I actually played to
the bitter end and completely finished. I
played Deadline and *Zork I* and *Starcross*
about the same time, but never finished
them.

**Q:** What about graphic games?

**A:** I'm not so interested in graphic
games. I think text is better for the imagination.
There's a role for graphics in the
games if they do things that are kind of
incidental to the story, but I wouldn't like
to see not-very-well-realized sort of cartoon
figures of the characters in the story.
That would spoil it for me. I think, "Well I
can imagine better than that. Why not
just give me the text?"

**Q:** Are adventure games popular in England?

**A:** Yes, they are. I haven't played any of
them. The thing is, in England there are
more home computers per capita than
anywhere else in the world. But they're
mostly very small machines, Sinclairs,
and an awful lot of them don't have disk
drives and don't have a lot of memory. So
games that require a lot of disk space and
memory have not made commercial in
roads in England. The Infocom games are
pretty much a cult thing there. When I
was doing *Hitchhiker*, I phoned around all
the English bulletin boards to see what
the level of awareness of Infocom was. It
was very strong, but amongst a fanatical
minority.

**Q:** You mention telecomputing. What's it
like in England?

**A:** Not nearly as developed as in the U.S.
for one simple reason: getting modems is
a lot more difficult and expensive. If a
modem runs at 1200 baud it won't run at
300 baud. They're two completely different
standards. And the reason for this is
that British Telecom has had (although
they'll shortly lose it) a monopoly on anything
to do with the phone system. And
they're terribly, terribly slow and old-fashioned
and don't like the idea of people
having modems.

When I was working on the game [from
England], with Steve [Infocom's Meretzky]
in Boston, we did a lot of It by electronic
mail.

**Q:** How does writing an adventure differ
from writing a novel?

**A:** I suppose it's more a difference of degree
than a fundamental difference. When
you're writing a book you're constantly
aware of the reactions you're trying to provoke
in the reader: how you intend to play
with or manipulate those reactions, and
the surprises you're going to spring:
whether you want to lull them into a sense
of false security in which they think they
know what's going on. You just have a
much greater ability to do that when
you're writing an adventure game, because
you're actually soliciting the reaction
from the player, and the program will
then know how to deal with that response.
So you're fooling around with the
reader/player a great deal more. Which is a
natural extension of what you're doing
when you're writing.

**Q:** What do you project for the future of
adventure games as interactive fiction?

**A:** I feel that it's a completely new medium
that we've only got one toe in — and
there's a whole ocean out there. We're still
very much constrained, I feel, by the traditional
forms of novel writing. One doesn't
necessarily need to be. I don't think
breakthroughs come through suddenly,
but that each time one sits down to work
out a problem or the structure of an adventure
game, I think you turn around
the next comer and see another possibility
and you turn another corner and you
see another possibility. And every now
and then it's as if you go past a little
window or a little crack in the wall and
you see a whole vast *vista* of possibilities.
I think adventure games could become a
very, very extraordinary and different,
Imaginative form of storytelling.

**Q:** Will it someday replace books?

**A:** People are always asking that silly
question. Of course not. People said that
about books when radio came out, and
the same thing about radio when TV came
out. But I think we keep on adding new
media for storytelling. And none of them
is killed by new forms. There's something
particularly distinctive about the experience
of reading a book; it's like nothing
else. And nothing else will replace it.
Something else may add to it, but noth
ing's going to replace it. I suppose TV
dealt quite a nasty body blow to radio,
which is a shame because I think radio is
a much better medium than television. In
the words of a small boy who was asked
the difference between the two, "In radio
the scenery is better." That's the strength
of all text games — the scenery is better
than that of graphic games.

I think there's an awful long way for
adventure games, interactive fiction,
whatever you want to call it, to go. And I
hope that more people will come into that
field from outside the computer field. Up
until now, it's been rather like, well, imagine
if everything ever written on a typewriter
had been written by the guys who
invented the typewriter.
