Twisty Little Passages

 
 

Twisty Little Passages 
An Approach to Interactive Fiction

by Nick Montfort

MIT Press

2003 

 

 

Twisty Little Passages is an academic history of interactive fiction from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. The title is a pun, referring to the passages of text that make up interactive fiction and the maze-like underground passages that the fiction frequently describes. Interactive fiction is abbreviated IF in the same way that roleplaying games are abbreviated RPGs. Nick Monfort explains what interactive fiction is, gives a history of its origins and rise to commercial success in the 1980s, and discusses how independent implementers - the people who write interactive fiction - took over the form once again in the 90s when it was no longer especially commercially successful.
 
What we today call interactive fiction was originally known as text-based adventure games. The name change reflects a certain amount of legitimacy seeking by its creators, but it also reflects the growing complexity and maturity of their literary efforts. The basis of interactive fiction is a kind of turn-taking between text displayed by the computer and text entered by the interactor - the reader or player of the fiction. The simplest commands are just two words, things like 'go north' or 'take key'. Unlike the Choose Your Own Adventure books, where the reader can only choose from 2-3 options at each decision point, interactive fiction is more open-ended. You can try more things, especially moving and interacting with objects, though you're still limited by the parser, the part of the software that interprets and responds to commands. The setting of the fiction, the setting the interactor moves their character through is called its world.
 
When I was a kid, my family had a Commodore 64, and among our game collection we had some text-based adventure games of the type Montfort is describing, and some kid-friendly graphic adventure games that had a single still image for each location in addition to the descriptive text, and sometimes had an on-screen menu of command words to choose from. (When there was no menu, I recall sometimes being frustrated by the parser's limited vocabulary, like if it only knew 'go' but not 'walk', or 'take' but not 'pick up'.) Monfort focuses on the purely textual games. Commercially, I suspect there was a 'video killed the radio star' situation where graphics and point-and-click interfaces supplanted text, even as the basic type of game remained the same. I think Myst is a lot like some of the games in this book, for example, except that it's puzzles and world are all image-based rather than text-based.
 
Monfort identifies several lenses for understanding interactive fiction. They can be understood as literature, as games, as procedures for producing narratives (like the I Ching or some of the experimental writing of the Ouilipo authors), as software, and as riddles. He spends a whole chapter very early on belaboring the comparison to riddles, which nearly exhausted my patience, but I found each of the other lenses more useful.
 
Probably the first interactive fiction was Adventure (sometimes called Colossal Cave). It inspired a number of similar adventure games, including Zork (sometimes called Dungeon), which in turn inspired the first flowering of commercially successful interactive fiction. Adventure and Zork both take place in cave systems and involve exploration; Zork also incorporates a mix of fantasy and technology. Both have maze-like areas and other navigational challenges, and puzzles that require using items found in the caves. They both came out a few years after Dungeons & Dragons, and were somewhat influenced by it (the back-and-forth conversation between interactor and parser resembles the dialogue between player and Dungeon Master, for example), but they're definitely not direct copies. These early games were written on mainframe computers, accessed on terminals, and shared over the internet at a time when you mostly had to be a university or on a military base to access it. 
 
The creators of Zork were based at MIT, and they formed the company Infocom to sell copies of their games to the owners of then-new personal computers. Montfort describes several. The two that interested me most are kind of about the relationship between people and technology, and both add an extra layer of metafictional distance between the player and the game. In Suspended, the interactor takes on the role of a human in a cryogenic hibernation chamber, who must in turn telepathically command several robots to explore the moon base and repair problems. Each robot has different senses and tools, so each describes the rooms differently and contribute in different ways to puzzle-solving. You can even tell a robot to break your cryo-chamber, killing you instantly! 
 
In A Mind Forever Voyaging, you take on the role of a sentient computer who's been assigned to simulate a small town and itself as a resident of the town, so the main character is essentially playing its own interactive fiction. The simulation is repeated several times, showing the increasingly dire effects of right-wing policies on the townspeople over several decades. According to Montfort, this setup humanizes the computer, who can sometimes help simulated people in the game-within-the-game, but is helpless to convince its programmers not to go forward with the policy changes.
 
Montfort gives us a quicker tour of the other interactive fiction companies of the 80s. In Britain, they seem to have been especially fond of literary adaptations, including Gateway and Rendezvous with Rama, getting Douglas Adams to help adapt The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and bringing in Daniel Pinsky and Thomas Disch to work with programmers on unique new works. 
 
By the 1990s, these companies could no longer really profitably sell text adventures to mass audiences; they either moved on to graphical adventure games or closed. But since then, Montfort notes that a dedicated audience of implementers and interactors continue to make and play interactive fiction purely for love of the genre. Monfort compares this to poetry, which is too niche for anyone to make a living writing poetry alone, but which also continues to have enough interest from both writers and readers to persist as a living scene and medium. I'm a little curious about what's new in interactive fiction since Montfort wrote this ... and also a bit interested in revisiting some of the text and graphic adventure games I played as a kid. 

World Heist

 
 
World Heist

by Linnea Sterte

Peow 

2024

 

 

World Heist is a fantasy graphic novel about two thieves stealing a treasure from a long-ruined palace and then learning the history of their prize. It's quite short, and doesn't so much end as set up more to come, so that it feels like a single chapter plucked from a longer work.
 
I hope there will be more, because I can hardly describe how much I like artist Linnea Sterte's work. I'm enthralled by it. She works in flowing lines that look like they poured from a fountain pen, just black and a couple tones of grey. Her work reminds me some of Mobius and of Yoshitaka Amano because of how fluid it is, how pretty, how detailed and decorated, how strange.
 
The thieves go by the noms de guerre of Tiger and Task. We see them in action before we really understand what they're doing. Tiger has a cat's face and can turn into a cat, and he can see the past, useful when the palace you're robbing is so swallowed up by the desert it seems to belong in the Ozymandias poem. Task is a living spell, drawn onto the skin of a dead child, a ghost animating a corpse, and she seems to be able to open anything, which is useful when you're stealing, full stop.
 

  
What they steal is, as the title of the book suggests, a miniature world inside a magic egg. The world was a wedding present from a king to his young bride (or possibly to himself), or rather it's the dwelling place of the real present, a trapped god, a divine androgyne, who has remained alive inside the world in the egg across the vast expanse of time since. In the end, Tiger and Task free the god, who agrees to accompany them ... and you can see why I'd like to know what happens next. 
 
What's the next score? What's the bigger job they can complete now that there's a third thief in the crew? What do such fantastical beings even desire that the human world can offer them, and what trials and guardians would they have to overcome to get it? I hope we will get another chapter sometime, and I'll definitely be looking for more of Sterte's work now that she's drawn me in.

Destiny

 
 
Destiny

by Otto Nuckel

Farrar & Rinehart

1930 

 

 

Destiny is one of the wordless novels of the early 20th century, an early kind of graphic novel with a single illustration on each page that tells a narrative without words. Last year I read The Sun by Frans Masereel,which depicts a man repeatedly trying to touch the sun in the sky, I think as an allegory for artistic ambition. Masereel seems to have pioneered this style of sequential art, with Otto Nuckel, the artist who wrote Destiny inspired by Masereel, and Lynd Ward, the most famous American to work in this style, apparently inspired by both Masereel and Nuckel.
 

Destiny is a social-realist story about the hard life of a woman born into poverty, who is repeatedly mistreated by men and punished by the legal system. Nuckel used leadcuts instead of the woodcuts favored by Masereel and Ward - as a result, his images are much smaller and finely detailed, with lots of halftones produced by crosshatching. The result is a narrative that falls somewhere between William Hogarth's A Harlot's Progress prints and something like Diary of a Lost Girl or Tess of the d'Urbervilles, somewhere between a morality play and a realistic account of a single life.
 
We follow our protagonist across 17 chapters, depicting her life from childhood to her violent death. In between, she'll just about every kind of harm that could befall a woman in her position. As a child, she is neglected by patents who are too tired and distracted to show her love. Her father, a drunk, is killed by a trolley. Her exhausted and overworked mother has a heart attack and drops her lantern, burning their room down, and half the rooming house with it. 
 
Our protagonist moves from the city to the countryside, where she becomes a servant on a farm. She's courted by a traveling salesman, and when she agrees to a picnic with him, he rapes her and then travels on his way. We see our protagonist continue working throughout her pregnancy. She gives birth by the river, maybe to a stillborn child, or maybe she immediately commits infantacide. Downriver, in the city, the police find the body, and in time she is arrested, but on trial, set to prison, and eventually released. 
 

The traveling salesman pursues the young woman as she works on the farm.

 
After she gets out of prison, a procurer spots her a brings her to a brothel. She lives and works there as a prostitute. After some time in that life, she strikes up a friendship, and maybe a mutual attraction, with the brothel's handyman. He helps her leave, and she moves in with him, enjoying an idyllic period as his girlfriend, both of them working, keeping house, visiting a summer fair and spending time in the park. But the brothel's procurer doesn't tolerate defections, apparently, and he murders the handyman, leaving our protagonist bereft again.
 
Depressed, she goes to the riverside and jumps in, but an older man sees her and calls for help, allowing her to be saved in time. He visits her during her convalescence, then proposes, and they get married. He's a tailor, and as his wife, she has a home and work helping with the sewing, though maybe less romance than with the handyman. Then into their lives comes a fabric salesman, who seems young and better-looking than the tailor... (I'm not sure if Nuckel had an unusually low opinion of salesmen, or if it was like, common at the time to be so anxious about their sexuality.) 
 
The fabric salesman befriends the tailor, socializes with the couple at home, and the three attend the circus together. Afterward, the protagonist and the salesman start a daytime love affair while the tailor is at work. One of the husband's friends spies on the lovers though, and the protagonist flees with the salesman.
 
Sadly, what she gets is not more romance, but more work. The salesman seems to laze about most of the day, forcing her to do all the housework and make an income working in a restaurant kitchen. In the evenings, he likes to go out drinking and gambling. One night, when the protagonist and salesman are out at a bar together, he picks a fight with another guy, who beats him badly, and seems like he might kill him. The protagonist protects her boyfriend by hitting the other guy with an axe, killing him. The police are called, and she goes on the run, holing up in a boarding house like the one she grew up in. The police break down the door to her room, and when she tries to flee out the window, they shoot her in the back, killing her.
 
To Nuckel's credit, all this is rendered in fine detail across over 200 leadcut prints. I think the story goes on a little long, it could've maybe used like one fewer section, both for the sake of narrative coherence, and to avoid the feeling of going overboard with hardship after hardship. Overall, it's an impressive piece of storytelling, and I can see why other artists were inspired to try out this style. 

In Viriconium

 
 
In Viriconium

by John Harrison

Gollancz

1982, reprinted 2005 

 

 

In Viriconium is John Harrison's third book set in the fantasy city of Viriconium. Compared to the first two, it reads like the total collapse of Harrison's artistic ambitions, both in terms of the story told and the literary style of the telling. The Pastel City is a genuine masterpiece, a deconstruction of the traditional heroic quest, and still an exciting adventure story in its own right, with descriptions so vivid and with such careful word choice they read like poetry. A Storm of Wings was still good, a flawed sequel that tried to top the original, that failed, but went all-out doing so, trying to depict its own fictional world being supplanted by an alien story.
 
In Viriconium is little longer than a novella. It tells the story of a high-born artist trying and failing to convince a poorer but better artist living in the low city to move in with him while she recuperates from her disease. Since the last two books, hundreds of years have passed, and their events have been forgotten by the public. The city of Viriconium now seems basically like Victorian London, and I kind of want to say there's no longer anything fantastic about it that we can see. The plague that afflicts the city appears as a fog, which was in fact how Londoners at the time believed disease spread, and its symptoms appear to be the same as tuberculosis, which really was endemic then. Harrison suggests a couple times that the plague fog itself is somehow draining the wonder from the city, but it's not an idea he particularly commits to. If his goal was for this book to be a funeral for his dream city, for its dreaminess anyway ... I don't think that was worth doing, and also I don't think he does a very good job of it.
 
We follow the artist Ashlyme, who keeps sneaking into the quarantine zone to visit Audsley King, whom he admires. He meekly suggests her moving up to the high city for a bit, which she rejects in favor of staying in her own home with the fortune teller who's been acting as her caretaker. Ashlyme returns to the high city where he discusses his disappointment with his friend the astronomer, casts his jaundiced gaze on the hypocrisy of the art world and writes cynical diary entries about them, and is harassed by Tomb the dwarf, who's still alive and possibly now mayor of Viriconium, and who wants to date the fortune teller. There's one exciting scene relatively early on when Ashlyme and the astronomer try to kidnap Audsley King by force, and fuck it up spectacularly, but mostly the rest of the book is just Ashlyme making these rounds ineffectually. By the end it just feels pathetic. Maybe it's good the book's not any longer. Condensed into a short story, it might've been a fitting companion to KJ Bishop's "The Art of Dying".
 
There's sort of a theme of the magic going away, although even that is undermined by the very ending. We see Tomb acting like a rough practical man trying to put on society airs, more a mafioso than a mayor, ridiculous in his greased hair and brightly colored suits, unwilling to give up his low-born vices of berry gin and imitation coffee, still quick to thuggish violence in a world that has no use for it. We see the wizard Cellur once more, his memory gone from old age, making ordinary taxidermy birds now, in awe of the sight of a metal bird he no longer recognizes as his own creation. We learn that all the Reborn Men went into the wilderness and like, psychically projected themselves back to their own time, all except two twin brothers. Those two hang about the city acting like prattling jackasses, annoying just to read about, where they are inexplicably the darlings of the art world in the way that today's socialites might enjoy a tabloid scandal or reality star.
 
In the end, Audsley King dies, the astronomer dies, the plague fog which makes everything dull engulfs the whole city, Cellur is nowhere to be found, Tomb and the fortune teller magically go into her tarot cards leaving mundane reality behind, and Ashlyme finally loses his temper and screams at the two dipshit Reborn Men for being such awful pests. They respond by transforming into idealized versions of themselves, becoming giant sized and translucent, and then hovering over the city like guardian angels. So like, maybe the magic came back? Frankly, I no longer really care.
 
All this is also told not in the mix of formal narration and precise word choice Harrison used so well in the previous two books, but in plain, unremarkable prose, that I guess does succeed in capturing the mood of the author and characters alike having given up and abandoned all hope of anything seeming special or even just authentically nice. The book is adequate rather than bad, but comparison to the other Viriconium books makes it really disappointing.

Arca

 
Arca

by Van Jensen

art by Jesse Lonergan

IDW

2023 

 

 

A few years ago, I read an article someone who attended a conference for billionaires who wanted to strategize how to survive the apocalypse in luxury and comfort. Obviously they'd want a well-furnished compound and a retinue of personal servants; equally obviously they'd want a cadre of well-armed thugs to defend the lair from outsiders and force the servants to work. But how to ensure the loyalty of the private army when there's no way to pay them anything of value? Is it better to use Suicide Squad bomb implants, or addiction to Ketracel White? I kept thinking about this article while I was reading Arca.
 
The city in a bottle is a classic kind of dystopia, the bad place you can't escape because you can't go outside, or because there's nowhere else to go. I would place Arca alongside a few other recent examples, like the Silo and Fallout tv series. Arca is a scifi graphic novel by Van Jensen and Jesse Lonergan, set on a spaceship fleeing the ruined Earth for a distant planet Eden. The wealthy citizens are protected by the crew and served by the young settlers, who get to retire from servitude once they become adults. This retirement is totally comfortable, it just takes place on a different part of the ship where they're never seen or heard from again. But they'll be vital to the colonization process once the ship reaches Eden, in just a few years more.
 
In any city in a bottle story, you know that the populace is being lied to, and thus that you the reader are being lied to. The pleasure of surprise and discovery in these stories comes from learning the truth, and especially from learning you were being lied to even more than you thought you were. Lonergan's visuals build dramatic irony from the start, pairing Jensen's anodyne descriptions of the harmonious society aboard Arca with images of citizens who look instantly suspicious and untrustworthy, settlers who seem oblivious and naive. Arca as a whole is incredibly successful at showing us Arca's mythology, how it really works, and what it would be like to have to live in it.
 
Our viewpoint character is Effie, a settler on the cusp of adulthood and retirement, whose curiosity is certain to get her in trouble. Like Frederick Douglass, Effie is empowered by her ability to read, and thus her ability to understand the citizens and the system they've built much better than they expect her to. Effie seeks out the truth, and finds it, and does indeed get in quite a lot of trouble. I don't know if Jensen read the same article I did, but he seems to share the same assessment of our current billionaires' motivations and goals.

FOUND Polaroids

  
 
FOUND Polaroids

by FOUND Magazine

Quack! Media

2006 

 

 

FOUND Polaroids is a small art book published by the creators of FOUND Magazine, showing off some of their collection of Polaroid pictures. FOUND was a collective art project started in the early 2000s. The founders, Davy Rothbart and Jason Bitner, used the internet to solicit people to send them things they found that other people has lost, especially things like old notes and pictures. FOUND Magazine then curated the submissions and published a zine, then a magazine, then several books. In my mind, I place it in the same category as PostSecret.
 
I'm not completely sure of the criteria for photos in this book, beyond that they're Polaroids. (Surely their storehouse of regular film photos is much fuller.) Are these the best, the most interesting, or an attempt at a representative selection? Each two-page spread has a photo, the name of the sender, where it was found, and sometimes some additional context, like the circumstances of the find, or the sender's thoughts about what the photo depicts. These vary quite a bit in length, from just the bare facts conveyed in a handful of words (tweet-length with characters left over) up to a couple paragraphs.
 
There are no chapters or section breaks, but the photos are mostly grouped by topic. There are photos of parents with children, teens, parties, home interiors (including several bathrooms), cars, home exteriors, damaged or graffitied photos, people with pets, people with Santa, people with friends. 
 
Some of the photos seem like real losses - sentimental images the owner probably wanted to keep, sometimes discovered after an eviction. Others kind of seem like trash, not so much lost as littered or dropped. They vary in condition, mostly clean, a few pretty dirty and scuffed up, none pristine. 
 
Some of the photos, quite frankly, are boring. Some were so dark or blurry you could scarcely see anything, a couple were extreme close ups of stairs or walls, and some are just dull because they show an ugly, undistinguished landscape, shot with no sense of composition. I'd throw them away too! But the photos of people tended to be more interesting, if only because you might wonder what they're doing, what their relation is to each other or their photographer. One of the damaged photos had been found in a puddle, and the image was discolored as a result, which I thought was fascinating. 

Ancillary Mercy

 
 
Ancillary Mercy

by Ann Leckie

Orbit

2015

 

 

Ancillary Mercy is the final book in Ann Leckie's trilogy following the last surviving segment of an imperial warship's computer mind, now confined in a single cybernetic body. For 20 years, Breq has been living in a single human body, mourning the loss of the rest of herself (both her ship-self and the dozens of other networked bodies that collectively made up her electronic brain), and planning revenge on Anaander Mianaai, the emperor of the Radchaai Empire. 

 

Mianaai is also distributed across countless bodies (clones, in her case). She has ruled the Radch for 3000 years, and for the past 1000 she's been in an unacknowledged cold war with herself after wiping out an entire star system - revenge for them resisting annexation into the Radch using weapons supplied by the alien Presger. After the massacre, Mianaai signed a treaty with the Presger and began reforming the Radch, eventually including no annexing new star systems into the empire, and no longer making ancillaries (the cybernetic bodies, like Breq, made from recently annexed civilians). But part of her never wanted to admit the massacre was wrong, and has been covertly scheming to force a return to unapologetic colonialism and chauvinism ever since.

 

We learned this, in flashback, in Ancillary Justice, as Breq remembered being the warship Justice of Toren, who was overseeing the last annexation, where the ultra conservative part of emperor Mianaai was secretly trying to stir up ethnic conflict as an excuse to start a mass killing of civilians. One of Justice of Toren's officers refused to go along and was summarily executed, Justice of Toren was heartbroken, and that part of Mianaai triggered the destruction of the warship, with the segment-body that eventually became Breq as the only survivor. In the book's present, Breq hunted down the only remaining alien weapon capable of killing Mianaai, the Presger gun, and took responsibility for a former officer, who'd been cryogenically frozen since the planetary massacre, and who, since being awoken 1000 years after her time, had become depressed and addicted to space drugs.

 

Breq managed to kill at least one segment of Mianaai, and more important, forced all of the emperor to realize that she was no longer one coherent mind spread across her many bodies, triggering open civil war. In Ancillary Sword, a reformist segment of Mianaai made Breq a fleet captain, gave her a ship and crew, and sent her to take control of a star system, including the inhabited planet, the space station orbiting the planet, and a couple warships with unknown loyalties. Breq agreed mostly because her favorite officer, the one who was executed for refusing to fire on civilians, that officer's sister worked on the station. 

 

Once she arrived, Breq found a situation similar to the one at the time her ship-body was destroyed - the station was ethnically divided, and someone was cynically trying to stir up violence against the minority for their own benefit. This time the person orchestrating events was merely a wealthy private citizen, not the emperor of known space, so this Breq was able to out-maneuver her, expose the manipulation, and use her authority as fleet captain to impose fairer conditions for the minority group. It's like a more successful replay of the events that led to Justice of Toren's destruction. Unfortunately, during the chaos, a Translator, a human raised by the alien Presger to act as a diplomat, was killed in what was essentially a police shooting, when she was mistaken for a member of the minority group violating curfew.

 

Now in Ancillary Mercy, Breq fears the star system will be attacked by the conservative part of Mianaai, and also that the Presger, who are vastly technologically superior to the Radchaai empire, will retaliate for the killing of their Translator. Very early on in the book, the Presger send a new Translator, and station security arrests an infiltrator - an ancillary from a 3000 year-old star ship that survived the war that led to Anaander Mianaai becoming emperor, that's been hiding out in a neighboring star system ever since. Because the ship is still intact, even if out of communication range, this segment has basically the same mind as the whole, as Breq did when she was just one segment of Justice of Toren. This segment, like its ship, wants to kill Mianaai, and has come to see if Breq might be a potential ally.

 

In the previous book, I really liked Translator Dilique, and missed her after she died. Translator Zeiat is a little more business-like, although she's so psychologically different from human humans that she still seems comedic. We get some cryptic, but still fascinating, hints about how the alien Presger think. They fundamentally can't understand any distiction between different types of humans, between the Radch and non-Radchaai, for example. When Breq is injured and her leg is amputated partway through the book, Zeiat thinks she's now a completely new person who happens to slightly resemble the precious fleet captain. Even 'Dilique' and 'Zeiat' seem like they might be roles instead of names, like if an interrogator introduced themselves as 'Officer Goodcop' - although that's just my interpretation, and it might be wrong.

 

Anyway, as expected, the most conservative part of Mianaai arrives and takes over the station (which, as emperor, no one can refuse her), with the goal of killing Breq, destroying her new ship, and either fully conquering or destroying the station. Breq wants to protect the station and its people, which takes priority over revenge. Fortunately, because of the ongoing civil war, the emperor isn't nearly as laden with resources as she could be - she comes with only a single body, a handful of ships, and no guarantees that reinforcements might arrive before the reform faction does. Plus, Breq still has the Presger gun, which can not only pierce Mianaai's armor, it can destroy Radchaai space ships ... if you can hit one, which isn't easy, because it's a hand gun, and they're, you know, space ships.

 

Breq has the gun, and her pair of strange new potential allies, but her greatest asset is the earned loyalty of almost everyone living on the space station thanks to her actions during the crisis in the previous book. Meanwhile Mianaai shows up angry and paranoid, accidentally damages the station and kills a transport shuttle full of civilians by crashing into them upon arrival, immediately demands the total obedience of everyone on the station, including the station's computer mind, and restricts all the civil liberties and elements of self-government that Breq had been granting. There's no grand violent conclusion, and little about the wider civil war is resolved, but Breq does manage to protect the people counting on her (and they, collectively, protect her) in what feels like a local victory for equality and democracy over hierarchy and authority. 

 

In Ancillary Justice, and to a lesser extent in Sword, the Radchaai's absence of a concept of gender and universal 'she' pronoun for all humans was something Breq had reason to talk about several times, especially when she interacted with gendered non-Radchaai humans. But in Mercy, it fades into the background. Everyone is still she, but the book never draws attention to it or comments on it.

 

Outside this trilogy, Leckie has written a few more books set in Radchaai space, and her success in telling this story has me curious to see more.  Structurally, it seems like these books might be similar to Iain Banks's Culture novels, where they share a broad setting, but don't necessarily have recurring characters or locations, and where we view the society from many angles and perspectives across the books, mostly from the edges where it touches outsiders.