The FAQ for the game also points to this indeterminate, fluid history. The text describes the game as an “RPG” but then a “gamebook”—not entirely the same thing! And this is borne out in the gameplay. The character creation involves 12 different attributes, and with a randomly generated character, you are often at the mercy of attribute checks, which happen nearly every page. There isn’t really any opportunity to alter a roll or add bonuses to things that are really important for you to accomplish, like you can in some RPGs. But at the same time, this is far more robust than even most online gamebooks. And if this had been released as a Choice of Games story, it would be considered irrevocably broken.

But there is something beautiful and haunting in the half-brokenness of this game. Though there are winning endings, according to the FAQ, in about twenty plays, I don’t feel like I’ve ever gotten close to one. But that rarely seems to be the point. It’s truly a game of exploration and using the huge lapses of plot, time, and space to create the feeling and texture of living inside of a fable. The writing is evocative and full of small moments of levity, and the choices presented to you have, at times, a staggering amount of breadth. This is where the craft of Age of Fable really shines—horizontally, not vertically.

 Of course this occasionally does have the feel of classic gamebooks like Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! series—both in their original gamebook form and in the later, exquisitely fleshed out mobile games published by inkle. But there are some key differences. In Sorcery!, the pacing is indeed jagged, but the narrative arc always seems to keep the larger story from going off the rails. In Age of Fable, there are no rails. Not really. There are recurring locations, but upon entering the main city of Karrakara, each time it feels as if the city is starting anew, with all the props and scenes hastily put back in their place.

Although I haven’t dug into the code of the game, the recurrence of locations feels capricious, which gives the whole game an uncanny, rather eerie feel between that of a “cave of time” style CYOA and a more artistic game that allows you to follow whims or make a series of illogical choices and not (necessarily) die. The art direction also lends to this feeling of unreality. Almost every page is illustrated, as are character avatars, but these are taken invariably from public domain(ish) images of works of art, or at least as a free game in 2006 would understand this. These can range from Renaissance art to watercolors to Internet-era fantasy art, but there is rarely consistency from one choice to another.

But the fact that this was, in all likelihood, a necessary-feeling design choice when the state of browser gaming was much, much different than it is today is beside the point. The jarring visuals manage to blend together once in a while, and the constraints of a rather touchy RPG make the whole endeavor even more absurd. Wherever you are, turn around and head toward the hills, or the ocean, or the desert, or Karrakara. Are you on a quest? You might be. But then again, maybe not.

But keep clicking anyway.

The post Once Upon a Time in the Age of Fable appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

“Space” builds on this keyword exploration by making large jumps in terms of meaning and elliptical narrative. As that narrative progresses, the story of a relationship emerges. However, in a way that parser IF is especially good at, there are vast spatial disjunctions and, importantly, without any warning or cues you are suddenly elsewhere. Poetry is also good at creating these disjunctions, creating a visual marker for them with line breaks.

Some have argued that “Space” would work with the same dynamic in hypertext, but I don’t think that is quite the case. In such a short piece as this, clicking a word versus typing a word creates a different semantic weight, and a different feeling of the unknown. In “Space,” it’s possible to loop back to the beginning with a keyword; or a keyword which might not work in one place does in another. There is a heightened sense of active reading and playing which is, again, very similar to poetry.

One piece of context that’s important to consider when playing “Space”, and one that feels almost forgotten 21 years later, is that there are actually many, many “Spaces Under the Window” which were created at the same time.

Andrew Plotkin created his version for a collaborative project, as described in the game’s “About” section:

“This work was created as part of an artistic endeavor invented by Kristin Looney. Around March 1997, she invited a bunch of people to do independent creative works — any medium, any form, but all with the title “The Space Under the Window”. Around the same time, I had been turning over some ideas about non-traditional IF. Okay, I thought, let’s do both.”

There are 27 works in total, still available online, ranging from illustrated poems, to a movie poster, to a Rubik’s Cube sculpture. What interests me most about this isn’t the individual content of each piece of the whole, but rather the community spirit with which these works were created. It’s this community conversation that is also such a big part of post-Infocom interactive fiction. And of course, Plotkin’s work straddled two communities in its release, each of which doubtless having its own reactions to the piece.

This sense of community is what draws me most to thinking of “Space” as a “poetic” work of IF. Of course many works of poetry (and, okay, interactive fiction) are written in isolation, never to be seen by another human being. But for many people in many cultures, poetry is a social event—written for occasions, interspersed with riddles, and more recently shared in workshops, on subways, and in spoken word events livestreamed onto YouTube. And in the (relatively) early history of the World Wide Web with graphical browsers, this kind of collaborative promise and fun showed the promise of something old, yet at the same time unique—even if we work alone, we can still build something together. In this sense, “The Space Under the Window” is not only a game but part of a conversation.

Play “The Space Under the Window” at sub-Q.

Anya Johanna DeNiro’s works of IF have included Solarium, Deadline Enchanter and A Bathroom Myth. She can be reached on Twitter at @adeniro and her Patreon is http://www.patreon.com/adeniro.

The post “The Space Under the Window” and the Promise of Interactive Poetry appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

It cannot be underestimated how romance was a rare beast in interactive fiction for a long while. Besides the Infocom game Plundered Hearts, there are a few notable exceptions in late-90s/early-00s IF with romance in games by Christopher Huang, Kathleen Fischer and Liza Daly. But SmoochieComp stands out as an important milestone. And one of the best games from that comp was the one created by its organizer, Pytho’s Mask by Emily Short.

Pytho’s Mask, though not perfect (I wished that the feminist themes running throughout this piece were pushed up from the subtext a bit more), is nonetheless a gem. It’s one of Emily Short’s lesser known games but the dynamism between the conversation system, the landscape, and kinetic action with the parser is as deeply satisfying as any of Short’s longer games.

The game has a lot of intriguing characters to talk to, and the map is neatly made but never feels too constrictive. As a woman and member of the Order of the Phoenix (the, er, novel of the same name came out in 2003), you’re tasked with discovering the nature of a plot against the King in an astrologically regimented royal court. You received an invitation to the Night of the Comet celebration, and the story pieces itself together the more you talk to people in the court: the comet at its apogee can create momentary chaos, and the entire social order might be upended. There’s also a masked man of a swashbuckling persuasion in your past, and a prince who seems to have taken a keen interest to you.

There a lot of moving parts in such a short game, but for the most part it all hangs together. As the motivations of those in the court become clearer, the game does a great job of increasing the urgency. When it comes to moving inside a space and having to balance action with figuring things out, it’s hard to beat parser interactive fiction when it’s working well. The conversation system also warrants special attention, though occasionally it got a little finicky. (I would keep a walk-through handy if you get a bit stuck.) It blends topic-based and menu-based conversation, and the snappy flow of talking back and forth lends itself to your character feeling a bit in over her head, but at the same time being constantly underestimated by the men around her.

It’s tempting to say that we’ve “evolved” a great deal in the last 17 years. But in hindsight creating a game like Pytho’s Mask, in a comp geared specifically for romance and love, was a revolutionary act in its time. Hell, here in 2018, creating a game with real female agency still feels like a revolutionary act in many quarters. We can learn a lot from games like Pytho’s Mask, and from SmoochieComp, when—let’s be perfectly honest—we need games about love now more than ever.

Anya Johanna DeNiro’s works of IF have included Solarium, Deadline Enchanter and A Bathroom Myth. She can be reached on Twitter at @adeniro and her Patreon is http://www.patreon.com/adeniro.

The post Romance in Early IF: A Review of Pytho’s Mask appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

“I think that one day Rybread is going to successfully get what’s
churning around in his mind written & compiled and present us with an
absolutely stellar adventure game. And after giving us three weeks to
play it, I predict he’ll then blow up the earth.”

–Robb Sherwin on L.U.D.I.T.E.

When I first became involved in the interactive fiction community online, back in 2001, my head was blown open by the possibilities afforded by parser-based games. I dutifully tracked down a copy of Lost Treasures of Infocom to find my footing with the “canon” that most others were building from. But there was someone else who seemed to be working on the fringes of the community–who some people considered an Ed Wood-type figure making monumentally bad game after game. Many considered him the worst writer of interactive fiction on the contemporary scene. Still others, fewer in number, considered him one of the experimental geniuses of interactive fiction. His name is Ryan Stevens, but he wrote under the name Rybread Celsius.

I have to say that I found myself in the latter camp right away. Today his work is largely forgotten (which, to be fair, has happened even to many works that were immensely popular in the late 90s and early 00’s). A lot of times he appeared to be banging his head against the constraints of Inform 6, trying to bend and twist the form of the parser game into something that fit his idiosyncratic vision.

Often broken in a very real sense, rife with typos (deliberate or not?), bad default messages, and constant point of view shifts—and largely unplayable without a walkthrough—his games entered in the Interactive Fiction Competition always scraped near the bottom places.

They are eminently difficult to describe.

There’s Symetry (1997, 32^nd out of 34 places), the story of a sinister mirror and a letter opener. “Tonight will be the premiere of you slumbering under its constant eye.” There’s Lurk. Unite. Die. Invent. Think. Expire. (1999, 35^th out of 37 places), with rooms such as the “chaos hymn point” and a koan-like winning command that…okay, would probably be difficult to come up with on one’s own. There’s “Rippled Flesh” (1996, 24^th out of 26 places), an earlier effort that plays it fairly straight but nevertheless yields several surprises.

But his crowning achievement—at least for me—is Acid Whiplash (1998, 23^rd out of 27 places), its title the closest thing to an ars poetica in his body of work. In the preface there’s this:

“Rybread Celsius casts two shadows. One speaks. The other sickens. (They also have a great dance routine.)”

And there’s this:

Note: At any time, type WALKTHRU for a complete solution to the puzzle at hand.

 

>walkthru

 

Walk though what? >

It includes perhaps my favorite room description ever: “A tiny little room in the shape of a burning credit card.”

And room descriptions like this:

Hermit’s R00m Tilly The Tacky leaves here. He is a hermit. He reads “Walden” twice a year. He thinks he is cool, but he’s not, he’s snot. Currenty he is not here. The room is pretty bare. Not tacky at all.There is a beaver and a cheese cloth, prolly his bedding.

 

You can see a Tooth Beaver here.

At one point you also enter the Pope’s hat, and elsewhere into a truck dashboard while co-author Cody Sandifier and Rybread have a long conversation:

[Sandifier]: In Symetry, the response to GET IN BED is “But you’re already in the Your Bed.” I love your mixing of articles and possessive adjectives — especially since the player is actually *outside* the bed. It’s this sort of interior/exterior dualism that strikes me with a pleasant chill.

 

[RC: The bed struck you? I don’t remember coding that. Hmm, but it’s a good idea. I think the best things are that is all shielded in a thin bit o’ seriousness, just waiting to explode with the insanity of Brazil.]

The madcap humor wouldn’t work if it wasn’t so self-deprecating (and of course, your mileage may vary—it is laid on quite thick), and aware of his own status as cult figure (of sorts) within the IF community. Lots of the interviews delve into the strangeness of his games, with interviewer Sandifier providing an almost fawning, lit-crit sheen onto the proceedings. In a way, the interview becomes a retrospective of “favorite scenes from previous Rybread games,” and his work certainly invites this, because they are so hard to describe in terms of narrative. If there’s a skein of images, it becomes (somewhat) easier to pluck one or two out, since the context between the images is rather fragile to begin with.

Even when the images did their best to break:

But what really interests me about these games now is looking at them through the lens of the recent “Twine Revolution”—the wide swath of games made in Twine and other mostly choice based platforms that elide concrete meanings, use langauge like buzzsaws, and take huge cognitive and temporal leaps from one passage to another. The key here is passages, of course. The core unit of organization in a work of Twine (a passage of text) is usually very different than in Inform (a room). But Rybread’s work is the closest parallel to an experimental hypertext work in parser form—and he was doing it 16 years ago.

But Rybread was enamored of the parser form. He clearly loved the history of interactive fiction, and loved riffing off Infocom (“Caecilius est pater. Metella est mater. The last lousy point can be won by… but no. That would be telling. Well, what the hell, I’ll tell. The last lousy point is rot13.”) he writes in the >AMUSING section of Acid Whiplash.

And the games are rife with puzzles. They are, most often, broken puzzles, but the design form that Rybread was working with absolutely took its cues from the Infocom classics and the “first wave” of the hobbyist IF community in the 90s.

Authorial intent is often tricky to discern—but what did Rybread mean to do with his games, after all? Maybe then it would be possible to intersect those aims with those of more recent Twines. I was pleased to find the closest thing to a more-or-less coherent “artist’s statement” by Rybread in the IF Theory Handbook:

Myself, I have ideas. And try to express them. But it’s like some sitcom father trying to get all the clothes into suitcase. They overflow, wrinkle and escape. What’s left is some sad ready-made. The line between a bad game and a Dada game need not exist, they share the same Venn diagram. But the attributes expand. There is the sense of the uncanny and stupid, without stepping into the realm of surreal (a more fleshed out plane), but ghosting its border. … Grammar mistakes and coding ineffiencies paint miniscule portraits of the author’s states.

This idea of “ghosting borders” is certainly one that some experimental Twine games play with—“glitching” a game to provide a heightened sense of fracture or confusion. For example, in b minus seven’s Inward Narrow Crooked Lanes, the if/then statements are embedded within the player’s field of vision. The scaffolding highlights the sense of playing a game (in fact, during the 2014 IF Comp when this game was released, it became a discussion point as to whether this was intentional or not; whether it was a “bug” or not):

Leaving “broken” pieces in plain sight is of course a technique that has a long life from early Joycean modernism to postmodern cut-up. So perhaps the closest similarities don’t have to do with content, but rather process: bending an interactive fiction platform to get at something. The words and connections appearing to rush out of control because of an inner state that needs to be expressed. Of course, no game is “immune” from this—even the driest puzzle fest is an attempt to communicate an interior desire by the author. But in both Rybread’s games and later “personal” or more experimental Twine games, the author is trying to disassociate the player in order to convey a mental state or something “uncanny”, and giving the player an opportunity to navigate this disassociation. In Porpentine’s Cyberqueen (2012), language melts  (“thousandfold armlungs breathing datapotence) as you the player-character become more and more trapped, more and more caught in the visceral embrace of the Cyberqueen. For Porpentine’s signal works, the word disassociations are at the service of a profound, almost unbearable sense of alienation, while for Rybread it’s more for anarchic play and, in later games, a winking awareness of his own status in the interactive fiction community. Maybe this is the difference between tragedy and comedy in gaming. (Though games like Crystal Warrior Ke$ha and High End Customizable Sauna Experience certainly display Porpentine’s wicked—and invitingly collaborative–sense of humor.)

And for me, since coming into the IF community in 2001 and joining Team Rybread, I have definitely changed as a player and creator, and I think I’ve grown as well. In 2001 I was 28 years old, still only a few years removed from poetry grad school in a homogenous college town and, well, still fairly precocious. My first forays into interactive fiction were in the parser form (ALAN, actually). Now in 2016, I’m a parent to four-year-old twins, I’ve recently come out as transgender and what excites me about interactive fiction has certainly evolved. Recent games—both choice and parser-based have a depth and breadth that is unparalleled in history of the field. And in particular, interactive fiction works from queer authors have certainly sustained me when I still wasn’t ready to articulate who I was in public.

So I have complicated feelings about my own devotion to Rybread Celsius’ games. I still love them, particularly Acid Whiplash, but I’m also acutely aware of their limitations—not in terms of experimental content, but in terms of heart, and putting risky content (which might confuse your audience) at the intersection of the emotional and the political.

But I have to remind myself that influence doesn’t happen in a straight, neat line most of the time. I have to give myself permission to have complicated feelings about things that I liked when I was in my 20s. And I encourage you to try out some of Rybread’s games yourself—perhaps you’ll take your own inspiration from them, in a way that couldn’t even be conceived 15 years ago. That’s perhaps the beauty of interactive fiction as a living, breathing tradition—one that the “Twine Revolution” is certainly a part of.

Anya Johanna DeNiro is a two-time XYZZY Award winner and the author of IF works such as Solarium, Deadline Enchanter, and Feu de Joie. She can be reached at www.goblinmercantileexchange.com and @adeniro on Twitter.

The post The Works of Rybread Celsius: A Critical (Re)Assessment appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

In 1993, the golden age of commercial interactive fiction was mostly over, although a few notable games—such as Eric the Unready—were still being published. TADS (Text Adventure Development System) was still pretty new, and a man named Graham Nelson had just written a game called Curses! to show off a new programming language (Inform).

This was also the year that G. Kevin Wilson began work on a new game called Avalon. Kevin is better known today as the founder of the annual Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp). Avalon was to be a huge game based on the legends of King Arthur. He announced that it would be released that same year.

For the next five years, Kevin continued to release periodic announcements about the game, describing the plot, the puzzles, the NPCs (non-player characters), and generating immense interest. Adam Thornton joked that it was “the most-eagerly awaited IF event of the millennium,” while Magnus Olsson said that it was “one of the most eagerly awaited games ever.”*

Finally in 1998 Avalon was released to the public. The scope and depth of the game attracted Cascade Mountain Publishing. However, by 1998 the name “Avalon” had been copyrighted, so the name was changed to “Once and Future.” Despite the name change, its release attracted immense attention, including, for the first time in the magazine’s history, an entire issue of the Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games (SPAG) Magazine devoted to one game.

However it could not have picked a worse year to come out. That same year saw the release of Spider and Web, one of the highest-regarded puzzle games of all time; Anchorhead, one of the most popular long-form games of all time; and Photopia, the game which many regard as IF’s turning point from primarily puzzle-based games to story-based games—three games that ranked in the top four of all time in IF author surveys in both 2011 and 2015. Faced with such stiff (and free) competition and an audience whose tastes had changed since its inception, Once and Future faded away and is now rarely mentioned.

So what is the game all about? Once and Future follows an American soldier in the Vietnam War who is transported to another realm. There, he is given a mission by King Arthur that takes him on a wide-ranging journey through different worlds and through time itself, culminating in a chance to stop one of America’s great disasters. The setting includes mid-20^th century America, the isle of Avalon, the fairy world, various dream worlds, and a host of well-textured smaller areas: a mole’s home, a witch’s house, and the moon.

The writing is both earnest and polished. It ranges from Chaucer-like quotes and prophetic poetry to folksy colloquialisms. Many reviewers in SPAG noted that the quality of the writing varied a lot, probably due to the game’s 5-year creation period and the growth in the author’s ability. Here’s a sample of the writing:

You walk placidly through the light forest, and gaze upon a hundred flowers that you would swear are not pictured in any book. Their sweet scent fills the air, making you remember a vacation you once took in Tennessee, when you went to visit your fiancee’s parents. It’s a shame things never worked out between the two of you. Vivian was such a nice girl. Once or twice you think that you see a sudden flash of movement out of the corner of your eye, but as you turn to look, you see nothing. There is a lake to the north.

The puzzles are also well-thought out—as expected for a commercial game. They include a wide variety: conversation-based puzzles, giving instructions to NPCs, testing out complex machines, alchemy, action and combat sequences, lateral-thinking puzzles, and some simpler quests. Once and Future is infamous for its Mountain King Puzzle. Using objects composed of twenty-five different materials (things like gold, ruby, etc.) and twenty-five different rooms built of these same materials, the player must place each object where it belongs. The twist is that the player cannot touch the objects but must use a device that moves the objects from room to room. The technique required by the object-moving device is quite difficult to master. As the puzzle progresses, the player encounters rooms that are dark or even completely inaccessible, and objects that are hidden and only revealed through the solving of additional unique puzzles. As the walkthrough (unattributed) states, “Welcome to one of the hardest puzzles in the history of IF.” There are a few other ‘manipulate the device’ problems, like a field of lights where turning on one light turns off all adjacent lights. On the other hand, some of the puzzles feel like filler; the PC openly complains about having to do yet another scavenger hunt.

It’s a surprise to me that Once and Future is not played much now; as of this writing, the game has only five ratings and no reviews at all on the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB). Part of the reason for its low engagement may be the fact that it is written in TADS; the lack of a ‘PLAY ONLINE’ button on IFDB restricts the number of possible players. Another is that former commercial games outside of the Golden Era tend not to do as well as they should; Klockwerk: The Shadow in the Cathedral is another example.

As a coherent whole, Once and Future succeeds. It flows better than many commercial games I’ve seen and is pretty enjoyable overall. It is more friendly to beginners than many games of the ’90s but, as I’ve said, it contains some of the hardest puzzles of all time. I would recommend using a walkthrough on these parts if you’re not a puzzle aficionado, as it doesn’t really take away from the rest of the game.

Ultimately, I think there is something in Once and Future for everyone.

*SPAG Issue # 16, November 28, 1998 – “Once and Future” Special

Brian Rushton is a mathematician with an avid interest in interactive fiction. He currently lives in Utah with his wife and son, and enjoys stories in every form. He is also a frequent contributor to the math articles on Wikipedia under the name brirush.

The post Review: G. Kevin Wilson’s Once and Future appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.