<!--
	Title: Reading and Writing: Participatory Novels
	Author: Edward Rothstein
	Source: The New York Times
	Date: May 8, 1983
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

When involved in a particularly vexing mystery, Sherlock Holmes would shoot a
revolver into a wall, play his violin or take drugs. Hercule Poirot would
drink hot chocolate and wax his mustache. Lord Peter Wimsey had his bottle of
port and his attentive manservant.

And I have my own criminological habits. I am currently involved in the Robner
case. Spread before me are pills found near the body, a photograph of the
chalked outline of the cadaver, the lawyer's letter about the will. But unlike
my distinguished investigative predecessors, I forswear a violin, hot
chocolate and the temptation to ring for my butler. I turn instead to the screen
of my home computer.

For the Robner case, unlike those of the Red-headed League or Roger Ackroyd,
takes place in a different fictional medium. It is coded on a 5 1/4-inch
magnetic disk used to store computer programs. The murder, the characters and
the setting are all part of a computer game called Deadline.

"Tell me about your father," I type on the keyboard, hoping a feckless suspect
will confess to patricide. "Look, man," the words appear in reply, "I'm not
going to lie to you and tell you I loved him, right? He got what. ..." His
voice trails off, accompanied by he gentle hum of the computer's motor.

The investigation takes place on the screen through textual descriptions that
appear in response to my typed questions and instructions. "Fingerprint the
teacup," I write, and receive the results. "Answer the telephone," I type
after it rings, hoping to overhear an incriminating conversation. I shadow
suspects, hide in closets. And I am aided by evidence packaged with the
computer disk - the pills, the coroner's report, the photograph.

But I am not some forensic Pac-Man, proceeding through a preexistent maze.
From my arrival at the Robner mansion, I am a character whose actions affect
the world I enter. I arrest a suspect only to find that the grand jury isn't
convinced by my evidence. I follow a suspect too obviously, and he just
retires to his room. My questions can lead to a second murder -- and my
carelessness to my own. But there is a unique solution. And to find it, I must
often start the case over, re-experience it from different perspectives. The
average complete investigation lasts 20 hours; I have spent many more
exploring the program's intricate universe.

Deadline, in fact, is more like a genre of fiction than a game. It is
"published" by Infocom, a company founded by eight young M.I.T. computer
scientists in 1979. Infocom has been a major pioneer in such games, which have
been called "participatory novels," "interactive fiction" and
"participa-stories." The main author (and programmer) for Deadline is Marc
Blank, a 28-year-old vice president and co-founder of the company.

The genre is not yet, of course, entirely flexible. Deadline contains 25,000
words of text, but my comments and questions must be kept within the limits of
a 600-word vocabulary and grammatically simple sentences. Solving the case
involves learning the genre's formal rules; if I violate them, I am corrected.
But as programming and data-storage techniques advance, Mr. Blank expects
interaction to become more sophisticated, leading perhaps to the ultimate
participatory novel.

The form is already becoming popular, as computers become common in homes.
Thirty-five thousand copies of Deadline have been sold in two years, at a list
price of $49.95 each. The company's remarkable adventure fantasies, known as
the Zork Trilogy, have been even better sellers. In 1982, Infocom sold about
100,000 copies of five different ''participa-stories'' coded for 13 personal
computer systems, the sales yielding nearly $2 million in revenue.

Their success should come as no surprise. For their worlds also happen to be
the worlds of popular fiction -- the detective story, science fiction,
adventure and fantasy. These genres define worlds with their own logic; they
pose lucid questions and possess clear narrative structures, easily adaptable
to a computer. In 1927, for example, the Russian formalist critic Vladimir
Propp mapped out rules governing the structure of Russian fairy tales in his
"Morphology of the Folktale"; in 1965, they were programmed into a computer.

Infocom makes use of such forms, which have traditionally had archetypal
power, and tempers them with irreverent wit. In Zork, the adventurer passes
through a kingdom of magical treasures and threatening chambers in almost
Odyssean fashion. The detective of Deadline must also be a "man of many
devices," interpreting signs, solving riddles. The classic detective novel
itself may be a 19th century bourgeois mythic tale, in which the detective --
an eccentric outside the social order, armed with magical powers of reason --
restores the transgressed boundaries of the social world.

Sitting at the computer, my goal is more humble -- just to restore my
composure. But a successful detective knows no rest. Stu Galley's The Witness,
to be released by Infocom next month, has just arrived, complete with a
detective gazette and the decadent atmosphere of Los Angeles in 1938. "Storm
clouds are swimming across the sky," the computer tells me. "Your favorite
pistol, a snub-nosed Colt .32, is snug in its holster."

"Come, Watson," I would type back in Holmesian fashion, if the program could
understand, "the game is afoot."
