Category: Group E

Today we were tasked to read “A Bestiary of Player Agency” by Sam Kabo Ashwell, as well as play “howling dogs” by Porpentine, “Destroy / Wait” by Chevalier, and “Spy Intrigue” by Furkle. All of these were interesting to play and read about. That being said, playing these games at some point made me want to pick up my laptop and throw it out of the closest window. “Spy Intrigue” and “howling dogs” were so long, and the actions the player had to do were so confusing at times that I almost raged quit a text-based game. Luckily I didn’t, and my laptop is still in one piece.

So the easiest (and less stressful) part of today’s assignment was playing “Destroy / Wait.” This game was fantastic since it was so simple to follow, with there being only two options throughout the entirety of the game. The player can either “Destroy” something like love or trees, or the player can “Wait,” which adds to the story. At some point, clicking “Wait” doesn’t become an option for the player; they have to “Destroy” the world. This is the case for every choice the player gets in this game leading to one end, the destruction of the player. Making it my favorite twine game ever, due to its simplicity to keep up with the story. Now tying this into the reading for today was tricky since it’s such a simple game compared to the other ones we’ve played. However, I believe that when Ashwell talks about the reflective agency, his description best fits what’s happening in the game. Every time a player selects to wait, the screen changes to say something new, but at the end of it all, choosing to remain doesn’t affect the game at all. You learn about the player’s life and regrets.

Now, the other two games took so long to complete and took a while to figure out how to win. “Spy Intrigue” supposedly had a tree showing all the paths you can take in the bottom right corner. It took me until the end to figure that out. “howling dogs” was also tricky since there was no map, and you had to find the right combination of choices until reaching a critical point in the story. These games had examples of big decisions as talked about by Ashwell. “howling dogs” also presents challenges where you must take an absolute path to reach the next story point. I do believe these games are similar when it comes to player agency, but a big difference between the two is that “Spy Intrigue” presents a sense of completionism. Seeing as the game remembers the nodes that the player goes to by marking them yellow. Once the player makes every node turn yellow then that’s how they’d know the game is over. The last thing I want to say is a question that I thought of when playing “howling dogs”. How do you figure out which word leads to the correct ending? I have a feeling that one of the words in the ballroom scene leads to a different ending, but how do you figure it out other than clicking every single word.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.