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	Title: (Electronics) Interactive fiction: games that put the player in the middle of the action
	Subtitle: The latest computer trend lets the user become a detective, or a treasure hunter, or....
	Author: Steven Levy
	Source: Rolling Stone, #425
	Date: 5 July 1984
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

*A locked door. A dead man. And twelve hours to solve the murder.*
-- slogan for Deadline

The hottest mystery story of 1983 was
not available in hard-cover or paperback.
Nor was it optioned as a major
motion picture or television series. No, if
you wanted to test your powers of ratiocination,
you had to go to your local software vendor
and purchase a computer program stored
on a floppy disc. Thousands of people popped
it into their computers and prepared to spend
around fifty hours (about one hour for each
dollar they paid for the disc) trying to solve
the murder (or was it suicide?) of industrialist
Marshall Robner, found dead in his library of
a drug overdose.

The name of this program is Deadline,
and though the software industry classifies it
as a computer game, it bears as much resemblance
to Pac-Man, Space Invaders and The
Earth Dies Screaming as it does to a tax-calculation
program. Some have called it one of
the first successful ventures in a genre known
as interactive fiction, wherein the reader is
also a participant in the action. When you
read a mystery novel, you might take a guess
at who the murderer is, then read on (or peek
at the end) to see if your guess is correct.
When you play Deadline, you *become* a detective.
Like any good shamus, you interview suspects,
sneak around for clues -- anything from
secret letters to fingerprint samples -- and
then confront the suspects with hard evidence
to jar them into giving more information or
even a confession.

You do all this by typing instructions, in
English, into the computer. It takes a while to
understand the limited format for addressing
the machine, but once you do, the program
allows you to assume another persona. Here
is an excerpt from a recent session of mine:

<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">Player:</span> Enter house.<br>
<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">Computer:</span> The door is closed.<br>
<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">Player:</span> Knock on the door.<br>
<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">Computer:</span> You hear footsteps inside the
house. Mrs. Robner, dressed in black, opens
the door and greets you. "Hello," she says.
"I'm afraid I really can't be of much help to
you. As I said...you may look around here, but
you must be out by eight o'clock at the latest."<br>
Mrs. Robner leads you into the house and
closes the door behind you.<br>
<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">Player:</span> Mrs. Robner, tell me about Mr.
Robner.<br>
<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">Computer:</span> "I loved my husband, no matter
what you may think. I am very sorry to have lost him." The speech is almost a set
piece, and not too convincing.

You get the idea? While the prose is kind
of creaky, the Deadline experience can be exhilarating,
as you poke around the Robner
mansion, uncover clues, send Sergeant Duffy
to the lab to analyze strange white powder,
and flirtatiously interrogate the mysterious
Miss Dunbar. You *are there*.

<figure class="float-right-half">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/rolling-stone-interactive-fiction/berlyn-blank.jpg" alt="Michael Berlyn and Marc Blank">
	<figcaption><strong>Berlyn (left) and Blank: Storytellers who've
		adapted their art to the computer</strong></figcaption>
</figure>

The mind-boggling implications of all this
have not escaped Marc Blank, the bookish
twenty-nine-year-old computer author and
corporate vice-president who wrote Deadline.
Blank's company, Infocom, is the most successful
publisher of this form of computer
games, and Blank has been involved in interactive
fiction almost since its inception in 1977.

Unlike real novels, the interactive computer
novel has an undisputed granddaddy -- the
original Adventure game, created in the Stanford
Artificial Intelligence Lab by computer
hackers Don Woods and Will Crowther. Adventure
firmly established a Dungeons and Dragons scenario
as the genre's prime setting.
Though Adventure accepted only two-word
commands and didn't develop its characters
very deeply, it presented a fresh, literary,
puzzle-solving challenge unprecedented on the
computer. Blank, while a student at MIT,
joined his friends in solving the game and then
writing a more complex sequel called Zork.

When Blank and other MIT alumni
formed Infocom, their first product was the
microcomputer-based Zork. This program,
Blank estimated, has now sold over a quarter
of a million copies at $39.95. Nine Infocom
products have appeared since, and each one
has been on the Softsel distributing firm's
"Hot List" of best-selling computer games.
But Blank is careful to note that the term
*game* is an inadequate label for them.

"We call what we do 'interactive fiction' to
distinguish it from mere games," says Blank,
sitting at a picnic table outside the complex of
Infocom's campus-style Cambridge, Massachusetts,
headquarters. "It's interactive in that
you are the main character."

Another Infocom author, thirty-four-year-old
science-fiction writer Michael Berlyn,
concurs. "In any piece of fiction, there's
involvement and identification. We do classic
storytelling in that we manipulate the reader
by building expectations in a linear fashion.
But here, there's a degree of personal involvement
you can't get with books or movies.
Take something like *Raiders of the Lost Ark*,
where a character is about to open a door and
you know something horrible is behind it. You
think, "Don't open that door." With our
games, you can *act* on that impulse."

Both Blank and Berlyn admit that the
interactive-fiction form is relatively primitive,
though they boast that the Infocom "parser" --
the part of the program that translates the
player's English commands into a form the
computer can understand -- is the best
around. For the most part, interactive-fiction
programs are indelibly wedded to the puzzle-solving
form -- the player must be motivated
by some goal. Also, while the Infocom games
allow you to deal realistically with objects (if
your character arrives at a creek, you can fill
any vessel you carry with water, be it a cup, a
canteen or a hat), the kinds of discourse it allows
with your fellow characters are much less
varied than those in real life.

Right now, no computer program can simulate
a real, no-holds-barred conversation
with an imaginary character. Still, once you
take the leap of faith and adhere to the rules
of communication established by the program,
incredible things can happen. You not
only act through your computer persona, but
you must figure out what kind of behavior will
get you successfully through the game.

In Michael Berlyn's latest game -- the
search for a lost pyramid, called Infidel -- the
player assumes the role of a ruthlessly ambitious
treasure hunter. "The character turned
out to be not a nice person," Berlyn admits.

"One of the people testing the game complained,
'I've just insulted an entire race, ransacked
and pillaged a national shrine, bilked a
woman out of her life savings...and the game
says, "You're a rich man! You live happily
ever after!'"

<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">
Welcome to NSRT center.<br>
Your clearance: top secret.<br>
Your mission: extremely hazardous.<br>
Your chance of survival: minimal.
</span>

After this introduction, the computer
screen changes to show a control room in full
color. A television set in the room is full of
static, and the player must take the paddle attached
to the computer and fiddle with it until
the screen shows a clear shot of a jungle
scene. The camera pans across what is obviously
the campsite of an expedition team.
Bodies are strewn, Jonestown-style, over the
landscape, and tents are burning. Then a face
appears -- a painted native warrior. He comes
closer to the camera, filling the whole screen.
The screen goes blank. Your mission, should
you choose to accept it, is to go deep into the
Amazon and find out what happened to that team.

The game is called Amazon, and it is indicative
of the latest trend in interactive
fiction. New software publishers feel that interactive
fiction, like regular fiction, is best
handled by big-name authors like Michael
Chrichton (*The Terminal Man*, *Congo*), who's
the creative force behind Amazon.

"We called him up, and it turned out that
he had already been working on a computer
game," explains Seth Godin, brand manager
of the Trillium series made by Spinnaker
Software. Best known as a publisher of educational
software, Spinnaker is attempting to
train top science-fiction writers to create
interactive fiction. "There's a high correlation
between computer owners and science-fiction
readers," says Godin, who claims that science-fiction
authors are far more qualified to turn
out this kind of product than the "engineers"
who do it at other companies. "Science-fiction
writers are masters at building characterization
through plot," he says. That's the key to
good interactive fiction, circa 1984.

Crichton agrees. He had seen some of the
early adventure games on the Apple, and even
got hooked on some of the Hi-Res Adventures
(interactive fiction with pictures) put out
by a company called Sierra On-Line. But he
became impatient with what he called a
"debugger's mentality" within the game, and
thought that with his background in novels
and movies, he could do better.

Working closely with a programmer,
Crichton spent a year and a half refining Amazon,
eliminating things that drove him crazy
about previous games. For instance, the Amazon
adventurer never gets stuck in maddening
mazes. "I hate to get stuck -- it makes me feel
stupid," explains Crichton. Also, his game
does not recognize the command "kill," as
many games do -- an admirable pacifistic gesture
marred by Amazon's arcade-type game-within-a-game,
where you gun down Huni
warriors, skeet-shoot style.

<blockquote class="larger" style="font-family: var(--article-title); border-top: 2px solid; border-bottom: 2px solid;"><strong>
'When a character in a movie is
about to open a door and you know
something horrible is behind it,'
says Berlyn, 'you think, "Don't open
that door!" With our games, you
can act on that impulse.'
</strong></blockquote>

Crichton found that despite the differences
between interactive fiction and books, "you
can't get away from telling a story." Also, to
Crichton's disappointment, by the time he had
finished designing his game, other companies
had already matched some of the advances he
had made in the genre. For example, one Amazon
feature is the relationship between the
player-protagonist and a sidekick he adopts
along the way, a smart wisecracking parrot
named Paco. In the interim, Infocom came
out with the game called Planetfall, where the
player's partner is a friendly robot named
Floyd. So it goes in the high-tech fiction race.

Other Trillium software authors are very
hot names in science fiction. There is Arthur
C. Clarke, with a computer version of his
*Rendezvous with Rama*. There is Ray Bradbury,
with a follow-up to *Fahrenheit 451*. (Though
enthusiastic about the project, the veteran author
actually had little to do with it, "I'm just
coming into the twentieth century," he says, "I
just got a word processor last week!") Robert
Heinlein is also represented, though, unfortunately,
his classic *Stranger in a Strange Land* is
too complex for the computer. "We can do an
intelligent, wiseass parrot," admits Seth Godin,
"but not Michael Valentine Smith," the
charismatic *Stranger* protagonist.

Another company relying on science fiction
is Baen Software, named after its
founder, Jim Baen, a veteran sci-fi book editor.
He's managed to get such notable authors
as Fred Saberhagen, Jerry Pournelle
and Larry Niven to help create programs that
will be distributed by Simon and Schuster.
The games will combine action and text, and
Baen envisions a software package that will
also include the novels on which the games
are based.

Then there is Synapse Software, a company
mainly known for its fast-action computer
games. The firm plans to release a series of
ten "electronic novels" -- text-only adventure
games in which the player's attitude in
addressing the game's fictional characters will
determine how the characters react. "For example,"
says Synapse's Jon Loveless, "you
come across a panhandler. You can't get rid
of him unless you act the right way." Loveless
is frank in explaining why Synapse is delving
into a more literate form of software than
shoot-'em-ups: "There's much less interest in
hard-core action games than in the past. Now
there's significant demand for the mind game
as opposed to the joy-stick game."

Even former LSD-poselytizer Timothy
Leary is getting into the act. Lately, he's been
circulating a proposal for an interactive-fiction
program called The Adventures of Huck
Finn -- 100 Years After. It would have the
player rewrite the characters of Huck, Tom
Sawyer, Becky Thatcher and the runaway
slave Jim. For instance, you can turn Jim into
Joan! Throughout the game, you keep changing
the characters and settings in Mark
Twain's classic to your specifications until
Twain's vision yields to yours. Within minutes,
Twain's great American novel could resemble
a prime-time situation comedy.

<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">"steven, snap out of it," cries tip
randall, bursting into your laboratory. "The alert
signal is on!"</span>

You look up from your plans for the Scimitar,
a top-secret submarine that's still being
tested. You notice that the alarm bell is ringing.
Someone's trying to reach you over the
videophone neetwork of Inventors Unlimited!

"Okay, Steven, what do you want to do now?"

It is no coincidence that the above passage
is reminiscent of the books by Victor Appleton
II, the *nom de pulp* of a conglomerate of
authors who turned out countless Tom Swift
Jr. books in the Fifties and Sixties. It was written
by Jim Lawrence, the author of dozens of
Tom Swift Jr., Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew
novellas. He coauthored the new Infocom
game, called Seastalker, the first in a series of
"junior level" computer adventures. Kids can
now cut their reading teeth on words appearing
on computer screens, and enter the dramas
as characters. This game assigns the
player's real name to the protagonist. And to
help young undersea explorers along, Seastalker
is more generous with hints than other
games in the genre. It now retails for fifty dollars,
but kids will first have to hit their parents
up for a thousand dollars or so to buy the
computer and disc drive required to run it.

One wonders, though, if the identification
that the young players of Seastalker develop
with their eponymous heroes will be as strong
as the one that kids forged with Tom Swift Jr.
Even a kid with almost nothing in common
with young Tom -- a well-off blond know-it-all
who could invent state-of-the-art weaponry --
could easily fire his imagination so that he
would, in essence, be Tom.

As the slogan for Jim Baen Software
reads, "The Future Is Now." Interactive fiction
is here, and as it gets better, it might well
deliver some of the pleasures of its wiser,
deeper, big brother -- the book. As it stands,
the better interactive fiction on the marketplace
is engrossing enough to keep players
staring at the screen and racking their brains
for ways to save cryogenic societies or eliminate
forces of evil in enchanted lands. The
passion that players bring to these games
comes from the same source as all fiction-induced
pleasure -- the projection of self into
another world and the desire to learn what
happens next as the adventures unfold. Only
in this case, it's up to you to determine what
happens next. And that can be a lot more
challenging than turning a page.
