Light in Interactive Fiction: Exploring the Connection Between Politics and Andrew Plotkin’s Shade

sakline

After playing Plotkin’s Shade and reading Jeremy Douglass’ “Enlightening Interactive Fiction: Andrew Plotkin’s Shade, I was plainly frustrated, but also reminded of this quiz the Washington Post published online by the extent to which it utilizes extended notions of light to craft a narrative. While this is fundamentally different from Shade, there are some interesting takeaways.

First, my initial engagement with Shade was so frustrating I had to quit. Immediately, I began a new document for this post to write down all of the aspects of the structure I found unhelpful or particularly crucial to the experience of playing. These notes included the exploration of a language barrier questioning the existence of a learning curve in regard to knowing the correct “command” language necessary to move the game forward. Douglass describes the sensation perfectly when he states that “no matter how many times you turn off the lamp, the requested interaction is politely refused” (3). Essentially, Douglass calls the frustrating inability to articulate the correct command the “hiding method” that necessitates a ransacking hunt which “produces a moderate amount frustration” – an understatement (6). Therefore, in realizing the scholarly legitimacy of this play induced rage, I am left questioning then whether or not the learning curve is from learning a new process of reading (that is, electronically) or rather learning how to play a new game in order to facilitate reading?

The concept that “darkness kills,” or at least generates fear, Douglass raises interested me for literal and metaphorical reasons (4). Literally speaking, I thought initially of more current interactive games that use darkness as a scare tactic that enlivens the second person nature of the game, most notably among them Slender Man which was discontinued due to a violent act that occurred when two girls took the simulation too far wanting to allegedly be proxies for the video game murderer. Second-person immersion can have serious real-world consequences, but that is another digression.

On a lighter and more metaphorical note, I found the idea of light important in Shade, as Douglass notes, such that “as a narrative, it tells a story of enlightenment” (4). The Washington Post quiz, “Which of these 2020 Democrats agrees with you most?” informs the idea of enlightenment as a narrative strategy. The quiz implies an understood “you” when answering policy questions granting the reader, or player, the agency to choose which narrative they want to craft to better embody their ideal political candidate. Conversely, readers may fashion their answers to craft their own political narrative. The quiz has interactive elements including the readers identification with a character and their construction of a story via online web-based media outlets – an affordance only provided through the Washington Post’s online presence. Thus, the idea of being enlightened through the construction of a story rings true even within the fabrication of our political identities. Moreover, most of what politicians say anyways is a fabricated story, so the media adopting IF as a means of news makes complete sense. Did I just make a case for news as interactive fiction?

Shade: Very Frustrating

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When I attempted to play Shade, I just go increasingly frustrated with the lack of commands and how little you can do in the game. Most of the commands are not understood by the computer, so you just have to keep guessing until you find one that works. The goal of the game is also not apparent in any of the descriptions so you’re not even sure what to do. Every time I managed to get a command that worked, I would get excited and think that I was moving the story forward, but then I would spend five minutes trying to figure out what I was supposed to do next. The game takes place in a single room apartment so there is not much to explore and even when I would try to get up and walk around, the game would say that I walked enough the night before.

It is interesting however how the game describes the area around you and you have to take what is being described to you and use that as context for what actions you will make. If you are in the kitchen, you can grab a glass of water. But you have to type every command in order to fill that glass with water. As Douglass talked about in Enlightening Interactive Fiction, it is interesting that the game is focused on making you feel like you are the character, as instead of error messages, it displays messages for why the character can’t do that, such as saying you broke the habit of drinking from the sink when you were eleven. Interactive fiction focuses on making the reader a part of the story and Shade makes up for its lack of graphics to help paint a picture or set the mood by giving vivid descriptions of the mood and setting in order to drive the reader forward with its decisions.

However, the game is really frustrating to play and I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to move the game forward.

Unique Characteristics of Shade

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Shade follows a less linear structure compared to other text games we’ve played for class. This is a marked departure from other IF games and text adventures, which often have an ultimate goal and objective. Further, as Jeremy Douglass mentions in his article, “Enlightening Interactive Fiction: Andrew Plotkin’s Shade”, rather than a sprawling dungeon or map to explore, Shade entirely takes place in one room (Douglass, 132). The already small space of the apartment is not divided into rooms, only nooks from which the player can still see the rest of the space. The player is actively discouraged from leaving or even looking out the window. The map is big enough initially to promote exploration, but it quickly becomes confining and repetitive to interact with the same objects.

The game also initially appears to have a set of objectives, pointed out in the description through your to-do list. It begins with you looking for the plane tickets which you have misplaced. However, the tasks on the to-do list quickly become unimportant and you are left to your own devices in the apartment. Because of the lack of structure and goals, the game can become frustrating. There are times where the player will become stuck and be unable to forward the story. Only through ransacking the apartment and interacting with every object multiple times can the player progress. Even nonlinear IF games such as Galatea have an objective- learning about the art exhibit Galatea through asking questions. In Shade, there comes a point where there is no objective left to complete.

These unique features of Shade work to create the atmosphere inside the apartment for the player. Being unable to progress mimics the feeling of the character losing their mind, repeating commands ad nauseam. Further, by confining the entire gameplay to a small space and then drastically changing it, the game is able to further the shock that the player and the character feel about realizing they are really in the desert. Both of these mechanics function to parallel the experience of the player and the character.

The Power and Affordances of Second-Person in Shade

Ethan Evans

Jeremy Douglass describes the history and meaning of interactive fiction, using Andrew Plotkin’s Shade as both a typical and an innovative example. Shade is a hypertext game where the reader is the protagonist. The reader is in room preparing for a desert vacation, but as the reader slowly unveils more details through exploring the room, they realize that they had already taken the trip and are stuck in the desert hallucinating about their past life. We have explored several interactive fictions in class, but Shade reminded me most of The Baron. Both require extensive exploration through space in order to solve some puzzle, and at the end, the reader comes to a realization about the meaning of the work.

I recently read an article for my game development class that argued how game developers’ ability to create emotional connections between the game and the player is what sells the game. I see Shade as a clear example of this. As I played Shade, I continually felt frustrated because I kept using invalid commands and couldn’t find any clues, yet I was compelled to continue for almost an hour. No matter what my emotional reaction to the game was (frustration, joy, anxiety), the important point is that I made that connection and became hooked. Interactive fictions are particularly skilled in doing this because of their internal interactivity and second-person mode of address. As with The Baron, I felt personally obligated to reach the ending of the story.

Douglass presents a rather thought-provoking analysis of the ending of Shade, where the reader sees a dying figure in the sand which is supposedly also the reader. Douglass argues that the second-person perspective could be transforming into a third-person perspective that views this interaction from a spectator’s point-of-view. This analysis only complicated the ending for me and brought it to a more abstract level than I’d like. However, it did prompt the following question: what are the affordances of using second-person versus third-person in this story?

The Player and the Protagonist

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In any given game, it seems there are two ways to play a character whose decisions drive the story. You can make the decisions you would make if you were the character, or you can make the decisions you think the character would make.

The former approach is common to most modern games, particularly ones that feature customizable characters, silent protagonists, or open worlds. These games offer a blank slate for the player to fill as they see fit. Since the player is indistinct from the character they play, they can allow their own background to influence their decisions despite the fictional context. Galatea, for example, is a game that features two characters: the titular Galatea and you, an art critic. That’s all you know about yourself to begin with. The entire game is based upon your interactions with the one other character in the room, but it supplies you with several versatile commands and many topics of interest for you to construct your own personality with. What topics you fixate on, where and when you touch her, whether you view her as an artwork or a human—it all depends on you. The decisions you make reflect upon you, because what is a person but the series of decisions they’ve made throughout their life?

The latter approach is less common, but it has deeper roots. The most famous example of a game that makes use of this is Dungeons and Dragons. Though you can still customize your character, this is a roleplaying game and so you are generally discouraged from making a character that resembles you. Instead you are meant to spend the campaign portraying a character whose words or actions would not line up with your own if you were in that same situation. Every decision you make must be “in character,” which at once frees you from moral responsibility and burdens you with narrative plausibility. Photopia is a prime example of this. It leaps between the perspectives of several different characters and provides limited dialogue choices that progress the story in one direction regardless of what is chosen. As such, every decision you make is automatically in character. The responsibility of finding the best possible ending has been lifted from your hands, but you are left with a growing feeling of helplessness as the story veers towards tragedy. The game will end the same way every time because the characters don’t know what kind of story they’re living in. Only the player does.

Prioritization of Interaction in Digital Literature

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In chapter 4 of Scott Rettberg’s book “Electronic Literature, he discusses the beginnings and evolution of Interactive Fiction (IF). Rettberg describes how IF derived from textual based games which allows the interactor to navigate textual scenes. A key component to IF is its riddle-like nature. While the “principal challenge to the reader of interactive fiction, and its central pleasure, is to find a solution,” successful exploration of these virtual worlds require the interactor to input what the text parser is looking for (90). Studying what commands the test parser accepts gives insight to what the author hopes you get out of the literature, similar to how mapping the structure of Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books offers insights to what the author views as important. 

An example of this is found in our two readings Photopia by Adam Cadre and Galatea by Emily Short. Both readings offer instruction guides to help a first time user navigate the stories. While the examples they give lend some hints to the main ways to get through the story, the more notable aspect of these instructions are the phrases that warrant abbreviations. The phrases “look”, “examine”, “again”, “think about” and “ask about” demonstrate how these authors prioritize engagement with the characters and items to further the plot. This is a stark contrast to IF works that require navigation to the appropriate places to discover new plot lines. Revealing these priorities through further examination of how the test parser is designed resembles how moral structure is unveiled through analysis of CYOA mappings. In both cases, the impact of your decisions is only revealed through repeated readings of the work.

These similarities between CYOA and IF lead me to wonder what exactly distinguishes them all in the first place? Reading jokane’s post  Interactive Fiction: Text Adventure Games in Today’s Games made me question even further. In their post, they claim that video games are a version of IF just disguised by its graphics and heavy interface. If this is the case, wouldn’t other forms of interactive works, such as hypertext be considered IF as well? Better yet, shouldn’t all digital literature be considered IF in the first place? Considering how interactivity is a critical affordance of digital literature, including a “genre” with the adjective “interactive” seems redundant. This is not to say that jokane was wrong in that video games are a type of IF. I agree, and even propose that video games prioritize certain interactions with the game like all times of digital literature.

Interactive Fiction: PC Games and CYOA

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The chapter by Rettberg gives a nice introduction and background into what interactive fiction is and how it has evolved over time, starting with Adventure, evolving with the creation of Infocom, and expanding from an open-source-like medium being shared for some games. Although these text based games aren’t as popular now, they do seem to bring back a sense of nostalgia for me. When I play these games I am especially reminded of PC games I played growing up, like The Oregon Trail, which had similar elements of story telling and decision making to what many of these text-based games have. Although they lack solely being a text-based game, I feel that they are the same at heart. These games all have an “interactor” that is working toward a definable goal that’s to be solved through some sort of reasoning. In a sense, most video games now can be resolved into a ‘flavor’ of an interactive fiction.

I thought the other readings were great examples of interactive fiction, and I had a lot of fun playing them. I think that these games have allowed for a new age of interaction that people didn’t have a lot of before. I almost see it as a Choose Your Own Adventure that’s been ported from a physical version to a digital version. One thing that may be lacking though is that it would be hard to find all possible outcomes, as they may even be infinite. Contrary to the affordance that books are finite, this medium allows for an infinite, or almost infinite, medium as a user could replay the game many times without scratching the surface of all possible outcomes.

Who has the power?

Orion

While reading chapter 4 “Interactive Fiction and Other Gamelike Forms”, I came to realize that we never really defined what we mean by literature or what comes to mind when we do. Even though I am not about to fully respond to that (at least not for now) it got me thinking that up until now we have considered everything we have come across to be a part of “literature”. I am certain that if we showed an English Literature expert or writer the My Boyfriend Came Back From War (1996) piece by Olia Lialina, they would most likely disagree. But would My Body – A Wunderkammer (1997)  by Shelley Jackson be considered literature by the same person?

Thinking about the last couple of interactive literature pieces we have explored, I realised that what they all had in common was not necessarily the literary aspect of them but more so some form of gaming nature. The mixture of those two aspects however create a power dynamic that is not found in your typical/normal literature books. The reader knows where he or she stands and the book has a visible start and finish with no prospect of change, whatever is written is written. On the other hand, interactive fiction gives you the option to feel like you’re the one in control. Pieces such as Galatea and Photopia allow you to choose what your next step should be. In that moment you’re the reader, the player, the author. You have the power of how the plot is going to continue. Something you cannot do in actual literary books.

But do you really? In a way it definitely gives you a sense of satisfaction and control, and maybe that is the whole point of IF. The creators give us the opportunity to feel like we are also contributing in the writing process of a piece. However, there are so many limitation of what you can do, type or say. I found myself extremely intimidate and frustrated while exploring both works for Friday’s class, as most of the time the words or commands I typed would not work and I ended up skimming most of the paragraphs instead of reading them just to see where they would lead me.

Ultimately, no matter what you do, there is always a specific path to follow and specific endings and beginning that have already been plotted/coded. So what makes interactive fiction so different than actual books? Probably the experience and interaction between the consumer and the piece of work, but also the sense of power we have been given (by the creators) when we are a bart of a IF piece of work.This might be a farfetched thought, but people like having power and control and like to feel as if they are a part of something bigger, which is why IF seems so appealing and intriguing. IF definitely has a feel of a detective novel, as Mary Ann Buckles explains, which puts the reader/player in yet another position of control – to figure out what is going on. So the power is all in the hands of the creator but the feeling of power is in the hands of the reader/consumer/player.

Interactive Fiction: Text Adventure Games in Today’s Games

jokane

Reading the chapter “Interactive Fiction and Other Gamelike Forms” was very familiar to me already. I once was invested in games described in the reading, like Zork and the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, but that was a long time ago. Even though I was familiar with interactive fiction, reading the chapter brought new information, that in turn, posed further questions that came to mind. The big question that came to mind in the reading was, how did interactive fiction games influence the games we see today?

(I first want to say that I am a person that plays some video game genres, and I believe I have enough experience playing video games to help answer this question.)

Today, we don’t see too many text-based adventure games; with computers getting better processing speeds and better graphics, the desire for text-based adventure games shrank, according to Rettberg. He is right because now people want to play games with better graphics and dialogue, but the basis of text-based adventure games hasn’t gone away, and they will not go away for a long time. I believe that everyone that plays video games is experiencing interactive fiction. I want you to think about the most recent game you played for fun, that wasn’t assigned for this class. For me, I recently played NBA 2K20. Now NBA 2K20 is a basketball game that has no text-based interactions on the outside, making it seem like a horrible example for this. The reason it’s a good example is that what we’re looking for isn’t on the outside, it’s on the inside of the game, or the code. That’s the one thing all video games have in common, code. Imagine playing a game like this, and strip away the graphics so that all that is left is code. If you keep playing the game with no graphics, the code will still be running, and it will be looking for what the next command is. If you move forward with the arrow key, the code will send the command to move forward. Now unlike text-based games, there won’t be a text that appears saying what happens, but if you do another action like shoot the ball, the code will receive the instruction to shoot, and then the game keeps running just like games like Zork and Galatea. These games will keep running until you do all the actions necessary to win.

That may be a stretch to some people, but take a look at a game like Galatea. All one needs to do is set arrow keys to send commands for a move to the north, east, south, or west. Add all of the characters, and if you walk up to someone and start interacting with them, then that would be the same thing as typing talk.

This shows that just because computers have better graphics and higher processing speeds, doesn’t mean that interactive fiction games are dying out because those games are seen in most of today’s games. The only difference is there are less text and commands in today’s games, but text-based games and modern games both use the same kind of code. So when Rhettberg says, “the market for text adventures shrank drastically.”(Rhettberg 87) He is correct in the sense of pure text adventure games, but the market for these games, in reality, has been growing for decades.

How I Played With Dolls…

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We had to read from the book, Electronic Literature.  When I first picked the book up, I didn’t think much of what the title could mean, the two words in general really.  However, upon reading and from past class discussions, I have already grown to understand and appreciate a little bit more about what electronic literature actually entails.  Simply put, electronic literature, as I have been growing to understand, is an online space in which to put actions from books or even real life.  Pages 73-86 from Electronic Literature exemplify my point well.

One of the first online game examples this reading addresses is that of dolls, The Doll Games.  This game is a very good representation in my opinion of electronic literature.  The way the book describes the game, “The work takes a layered metafictional approach, taking a phenomenon- playing with dolls- that is often dismissed as an ordinary idle pastime of young girls wrapping layers of commentary around it from the imagined voices of the dolls themselves, to the reflections of the sisters on their games at different stages of their lives as writers and researchers, to the fictional voice of the scholar, to the relation of their stories to larger questions of how children use weird forms to play to wrestle with their emerging sense of identity and their place in the world” (Rettberg, 74).  I think this quote is particularly useful in explaining what electronic literature means.  The act of playing with dolls is something I think a lot of young girls have done at some point in their childhood, I know I have.  But the way in which that same action is translated to a digital platform is so interesting and really expresses electronic literature.

The book also talks about hypertext fiction, which is something we have discussed in class as well when talking about other games.  I really enjoyed reading about this as I felt I could easily relate it to the in-class games we had previously discussed.  It made it easier for me to understand what the book was trying to exactly get at since I had been previously exposed to the concept of hypertext fiction.

The game that was assigned for homework, My Body- A Wunderkammer was in my opinion a game of adventure and exploration.  This is something else we have spoken about in class that I saw relevant to our assignment.  The game has you click on different body parts to learn more and read more of the story.  As you clicked, you got to learn more about which each part of the body meant to the main character.  You were essentially part of writing the story you read by choosing which body parts to click on and when.

I think the following link is a good example of how I am trying to explain Hypertext as I have been understanding class discussions.

Work Cited:

Rettberg, Scott. Electronic Literature. Polity Press, 2018.