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	Title: Computers: Putting Fiction on a Floppy
	Author: Philip Elmer-Dewitt
	Source: Time Magazine
	Subtitle: Software bestsellers let players write the plot
	Date: December 5, 1983
	Transcription by Steve Derby
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Mrs. Robner says she loved her murdered husband, but you know she is lying.
The proof is in the love note you just intercepted. Ask her about the man who
wrote it, and she says she never heard of him. Confront her with his letter, and
she changes her tune: "You have certainly stooped to a new low, Inspector,
opening other people’s mail!" Then she spills her story.

Not all mysteries these days appear in paperbacks or movies. The tale above
scrolled up the screen of a personal computer. The story, titled Deadline, is part
of the latest craze in home computing: programmed fiction. Machines that
were used mainly for blasting aliens and calculating monthly budgets are now
also churning through adventure tales and murder-mystery plots. "It’s like
reading a novel, only you are the protagonist,” says Science-Fiction Writer
Linda Bushyager. While arcade-style games like Pac Man are losing popularity,
these complex programs are winning more and more fans. In Deadline, one of
ten computer "novels" produced by Infocorn, a Cambridge, Mass.-based
software publishing house, the player is given a casebook of evidence, a floppy
disc containing the plot, and twelve hours to unravel the mystery. If the
murderer is not found in the allotted time, a character named Chief Inspector
Klutz takes the player off the case. The program shuts down automatically and
must be replayed from the beginning. As Deadline opens, a wealthy
businessman has been found dead in the library of his mansion from a
mysterious drug overdose. The player, who takes the role of inspector, has been
called in to investigate. He types commands into the computer, and the
machine responds with descriptions of people and places and snatches of
dialogue that develop the story. Suspects duck in and out of rooms; clues
appear and disappear; characters lie low or kill again, depending on the
player’s actions. The story can unfold in literally thousands of ways. A typical
investigation, including starts and restarts, can run 40 hours or longer. "It takes
me three to six months to get completely through one," says Craig Pearce, 31, a
building manager from Berwyn, Ill. "It’s unbelievable how you can get hooked
on these things."

The concept of interactive fiction is not totally new. The hit of the
Czechoslovak pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal was an experimental movie that
let the audience vote on the course of the action. But it took the computer, with
its awesome power to store and sort text, to turn the concept into a popular art
form.

The first participatory computer tale, Adventure, was created in the mid-1970s
by computer researchers in Cambridge and Stanford. It involved a treasure hunt
through a labyrinth of caves and dungeons and soon attracted a cult following.
Miniature versions that ran on microcomputers were available in the late 1970s.

There are now two types of interactive stories on the market: high-resolution
ones that display colorful pictures on the screen, and text-only games that
show just words. Judging from recent sales, the text programs are more popular.
Deadline (price: $49.95) has sold more than 75,000 copies since it was released
by Infocom almost two years ago. The company’s three-part fantasy adventure,
Zork, is doing even better. The first episode, Zork I, is the bestselling piece of
recreational computer software on the market, with sales of 250,000 copies. It
is currently outpacing the home versions of such arcade hits as Zaxxon and
Frogger. “Whizbang graphics may be easier to sell to the uninitiated, but they
are being replaced by games that give a sense of realism,” says Marc Blank, the
29-year-old M.I.T. alumnus who wrote Deadline and is co-author of Zork.

The key to interactive fiction is the parser, the part of the computer program
that interprets the player’s commands. Parsers originally accepted only one-and
two-word commands ("Take sword, Kill troll"), a most frustrating
limitation. In 1977, a group of M.I.T. graduates, including Blank, began working
on more powerful parsers.

Using programming techniques developed at the university's artificial-intelligence
laboratory, they added adjectives, prepositions and compound verbs, allowing such
full sentences as "Pick up the red bomb and put it in the mailbox" and "Where
is the missing will?"

Their first game, Zork, was developed on one of M.I.T.’s huge mainframe
computers. The next task was to squeeze the program down so that it would run
on a microcomputer with one-thousandth as much processing power. Blank,
who had been studying medicine when he helped write Zork, did the necessary
programming while serving his internship.

With Zork and Deadline already big hits, newer and more colorful computer
novels are appearing on the software bestseller lists.

Stuart Galley, an Infocom programmer, has written a detective story, The
Witness, in the hard-boiled style of Raymond Chandler.

Infidel, by Michael Berlyn, is an archaeological adventure set in modern Egypt.
Planetfall, by Steven Meretzky, is a science-fiction comedy that co-stars a robot
named Floyd.

By literary standards, Infocom's stories are crude. The characters are
two-dimensional, plots are forever clunking to a halt, and the writing tends
to be sophomoric. Perhaps the best computer thriller to date is Suspended, also by
Berlyn, a published author with several science-fiction books to his credit. With
computer novels selling better than many hardcover books, it may not be long
before the new genre attracts an Isaac Asimov or a Stephen King. — By Philip
Elmer-DeWitt. Reported by Jamie Murphy/Cambridge
