The Douglas Adams Core Canon

There will come a point in my ongoing Doctor Who coverage that I’ll have to talk about season 17 and Shada – which will mean that I have to talk about Douglas Adams a fair bit. Therefore, with the intention of getting myself ready for that, I may as well do a quick little side journey here to cover what you might call the Adams “core canon” – the major works of his once you trim away collaborations (which account for a good chunk of his output). That’ll be the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, plus the Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency novels, plus The Salmon of Doubt, which has bits of relevance to both in it and is a posthumous odds and sods collection.

What I won’t be covering here is either of the Dirk Gently TV series, or the big budget movie version of Hitchhiker’s Guide; these all came to fruition without Adams seeing them through to the end, due to him dying in 2001. (Adams’ death just before 9/11 is a bit like David Bowie’s death just before the Brexit referendum – an omen that some really shit times are just around the corner.) We can’t know what he’d have thought of them, can’t fully blame him for their mistakes, and can’t fully praise him for their good bits. Moreover, much of the appeal of Adams’ works comes from his delightful turns of phrase, and so once he died we were left with either interminable remixing and picking over the scraps or people trying to mimic his tone of voice, neither of which could be 100% satisfying from my perspective because ersatz-Adams as far as I am concerned isn’t Adams at all. Eoin Colfer’s And Another Thing…, the Adams estate’s officially-endorsed sixth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide series, can fuck right off.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy

This is the one which largely doesn’t need to be summarised or reviewed, because it was repackaged and reimagined many times within Adams’ lifetime and beyond it and was a massive hit in several of the forms it incarnated in. Its first form was as the first season of the radio series, six half-hour episodes of hilarity broadcast in March-April 1978, and it’s from these episodes (or “Fits”) which the foundational elements of most subsequent adaptations are obtained.

In particular, you get Arthur Dent’s house being demolished, Arthur Dent’s planet being demolished, Ford Prefect rescuing Arthur from the Earth, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Trillian rescuing Arthur and Ford from being tossed out an airlock by the Vogons (said rescue being an accidental side effect of the Heart of Gold‘s Infinite Improbability Drive), the robots and machines with Genuine People Personalities (including Marvin the Paranoid Android), Magrathea, Earth being a computer, “42” being the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything for which Earth was meant to calculate the question, mice being behind the construction of Earth, the Restaurant At the End of the Universe, Arthur and Ford being stranded on prehistoric Earth with the occupants of the Golgafrinchan B-Ark, and all of this being interspersed with deadpan narration and quotable quotes from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy, which boldly declares “Don’t Panic” on its cover. (The Golgafrinchan B-Ark was originally the concept for a script a fresher-faced Adams submitted for season 12 of Doctor Who, but which was rejected because the show was already cooking up The Ark In Space.)

Mini-Review: Zork

Text adventures had a long history even before Zork, but it’s Zork which is perhaps the most fondly remembered of the early wave, largely because it’s the game which established Infocom, who over the 1980s would become the most widely-revered designers working in the format.

The first Zork game has an almost archetypally simple premise, to the point where it doesn’t even offer you anything in the way of an introductory spiel: the game simply dumps you in a field west of a white house and lets you work out what to do from there. Unless you play deliberately incompetently, you soon enough make your way into the white house and eventually discover a route through its cellar into the game’s dungeon – which, as it turns out, is a small sector of the long-lost Great Underground Empire, a fallen civilisation of the past. Thus, along with portals to Hades and trolls and thieves and vampire bats and coal mines and the like, there’s a surprisingly modern reservoir and dam down there. In the long run, you’re expected to extract a bunch of treasures from the depths and install them in pride of place in the trophy case in the house, and once you’ve caught them all a deus ex machina points you in the direction of the next game.

The process of actually working out this much is arguably a puzzle in itself; equally, there’s a learning curve involved in working out how to play the game which is an illustrative example in people’s expectations of the early text adventures. As with Adventure, the inspiration for Zork, the odds that you’ll beat the game on your first run-through are slim; even though Zork is kind enough to give you multiple lives (though figuring out how to regain your possessions and/or your corporeal form once you’ve been killed is tricky), you’d have to be exceptionally lucky to not get the game into an unwinnable state, like accidentally breaking the crucial wind-up songbird or letting the iconic brass lantern run out of power before you find a reliable alternate light source. A large emphasis is on mapping so early run-throughs are likely to focus on that – a trickier task than you might expect since the game includes several mazes and often has rooms connected together obliquely. (For instance, the west exit in one room might be linked to the north exit on another room.)

Another aspect of cracking the game consists of timing. Your odds of slaying the thief and finally getting back the stuff he swipes from you are higher if you wait until you have a higher score to do it, but the longer you leave him in play the more of a nuisance he’s likely to become, so judging when the time’s right to go knife the guy can be key. Likewise, you’re going to need to snag that alternate light source sooner or later before the battery in your brass lantern runs out, but do you do this before you get the thief (in which case you run the risk of having your light source swiped from you) or after? And if you delay, do you still have enough juice left in your lantern for those segments of the game which still require it?

And whilst you’re figuring out the map and the best order to do things in, you also have to deal with the puzzles, which range from the extremely logical to the somewhat obscure. Of course, it’s worth considering that Zork, like Adventure, was originally developed to run on a university computer system, back in the day when personal computers were toys for hobbyists and most computer users worked on terminals connected to mainframes and minicomputers. Playing such games would be a much more social process than having a crack at a text adventure alone at home these days; odds are you were playing the game on a terminal in a computer room with fellow students and researchers who’d also played the game nearby you could ask for help or hints. This being the case, it makes sense that a few of the puzzles seem to require mildly obscure courses of action, just as it makes sense that the game doesn’t give you much in the way of help when it comes to working out what you were meant to do in the first place: developed, as it was, in a social context in which you not only could get pointers from your colleagues on how to proceed, but where you also had the millions-of-monkeys-at-millions-of-typewriters effect making it possible to add potentially quite nasty puzzles to the game and still be reasonably sure that at least someone will be able to stumble on the answer, it seems the developers had little to no opportunity to consider or observe how it may play differently for a user who had no access to help from friends playing the game.

This is why I think there’s no dishonour in using hints to beat the game when you’re stuck. To be fair, most of the puzzles are reasonably logical and have solutions which, whilst requiring a little thought, do absolutely make sense, though there are a few rogue incidents which I’d never have been able to guess (like one solution to the “Loud Room”, where typing “ECHO” resolves the situation but typing “SAY ECHO” doesn’t have the same effect). Luckily, Infocom understood that they could monetise this and produced numbers “InvisiClues” booklets which provided gentle hints in a non-spoilery way written with their characteristic wit, and since Activision haven’t been that litigious about Infocom’s copyrights since they bought Infocom out the InvisiClues booklets are available in handy HTML form for all to enjoy. By and large I find the system is good for giving me a nudge in the right direction without robbing all sense of achievement from the game – it’s the same reason I quite like the Ultimate Hints System website – and I’d argue that use of InvisiClues is as much part of the experience of playing Infocom games as actually sitting down and bashing away at the keyboard is.

Speaking of Infocom’s sense of humour, that is one of the major draws of Zork which helps stop the game becoming overly frustrating. The various text descriptions of places, objects, creatures and events are simultaneously economical (they had to be, back in those days of tight memory budgets) and evocative, and also manage to showcase a comedic style which would make Infocom natural collaborators with Douglas Adams for the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy text adventure and Bureaucracy.

Although I suspect most people won’t give Zork that much time unless they have a particular interest in text adventures, it is at least worth a quick look if you have a general interest in gaming history, and if you do dig interactive fiction it’s probably the earliest text adventure I can think of which I actually enjoy playing – so many of its contemporaries are let down either by an over-fussy parser or lacklustre prose that even though Infocom didn’t invent text adventures, I still regard Zork as representing Year Zero for seriously playable ones. Its two immediate sequels – The Wizard of Frobozz and The Dungeon Master – suffered a bit from some irritating puzzle mechanics – The Dungeon Master has an annoying maze, and the titular wizard in the second game largely spends his time randomly teleporting in and casting spells on you which momentarily inconvenience you, which usually requires you to wait until the effect wears off before continuing. It would take a little while for Infocom to evolve beyond this early dungeoneering style into the approach to adventure game design they’d become truly reknowned for.

An Unready Hero For a Genre Ready To End

In the 1980s, text adventures – or interactive fiction, if you want to use confusingly non-specific terminology which doesn’t take into account that a great swathe of other videogame subgenres and non-videogame endeavours also qualify as “interactive fiction” in the natural meaning of the word – were riding high. After the very rudimentary early releases of the 1970s and early 1980s, increasingly sophisticated parsers and greater disk space available for text allowed developers to create adventures with ever-richer stories, deeper worldbuilding and characterisation, and more satisfying prose.

To take an example, consider the development of Level 9 Computing, a UK-based developer specialising in text adventures. Their early releases, like the Time and Magik, Jewels of Darkness, and Silicon Dreams trilogies stood out at the time, but in retrospect seem to have ambitions well beyond the ability of the technology to deliver, and all too often the challenge involved less engagement with the actual puzzles and more trying to visualise what the game is attempting to describe to you without quite enough information to properly parse what’s going on. Later in the decade, however, they would hone their craft to produce material like Scapeghost, in which you play a ghostly detective who must solve his own murder.

It was this enrichment of the prose – the very thing which prompted Infocom and others to market their work as “interactive fiction” and hype up its literary merit – which kept the genre alive in the face of the increasing sophistication of graphic adventures. An additional contributing factor was that whilst an annoyingly fussy rudimentary parser is deeply annoying to the player to interact with and rather limiting to the game designer, a smart parser is a joy to interact with and can open up possibilities which the necessarily constrained interface of a graphic adventure can never quite match, and as the decade went on parsers got smarter and smarter.

A (Moon)Missed Opportunity

In the pantheon of game developers specialising in text adventures back in the golden age of the genre, Infocom’s name looms large, and with good reason. By heavily pushing the line that their products are “Interactive Fiction” – and going out of their way to cover a range of genres from classic videogame fare like SF/fantasy to less traditional subject matter for games, they not only presented their products as refined pursuits for elite gamers who are too good for games which involve hand/eye co-ordination or actual game mechanics, but they arguably also set the tone for the IF fan community who beaver away producing new games to this day.

The “Interactive Fiction” label is still used by those who want to hype up the artistic potential of the medium or who otherwise find “text adventure” to be an embarrassing term – something which rather bugs me, since I think the more effort you put in to make the things you like seem less embarrassing to others, the more obvious it is that you are a bit embarrassed of them, and therefore the more embarrassing it seems. (To take an example from a very different field, the famed Gimp Man of Essex seems to be mostly regarded as a national treasure rather than a weird pervert, largely because he’s very casual about it and doesn’t go out of his way to make it weird; if he acted all embarrassed about his activities then I think he’d have a much more negative reception.)

Another beef I have with the term “Interactive Fiction” is that it’s horribly imprecise. Any videogame with a plot is interactive fiction. A gamebook is interactive fiction. A pantomime is arguably interactive fiction, at least in the sense that the characters acknowledge the audience and respond to their calls. Lots of stuff is a) clearly presenting fiction and b) clearly offering interactivity of some form. “Text adventure” pins down the medium far more precisely, and if it’s got some embarrassing and unfortunate associations you do the work to decouple it from those associations and promote text adventures which don’t go there, you don’t make up a new word for the stuff you are doing to try and set up some sort of elite divide between the text adventures you approve of and the ones you disapprove of.

More positively, the Inform family of languages, which are probably the most common ones used in the field, were developed to let home coders produce games that would run on Infocom’s Z-machine – a virtual machine which lets Infocom games be played on any computer system with a suitable interpreter.

Infocom’s development of the Z-machine is a happy historical accident which has been a real boon to the modern-day text adventure community. Infocom, it should be remembered, were operating at a time before personal computer architectures and operating systems had ossified into the major standards we have these days. By writing their games for the Z-machine, Infocom effectively only had to write each game once – then all they had to do was make a Z-machine interpreter for whichever computer platform they wanted to publish for, and then they could put out all of their games on that platform, which is obviously massively cheaper than having to rewrite each game for each operating system you want to adapt it to. (It even led to major price savings when it came to the packaging – Infocom games of the classic era came out in the same box with the same handouts and inserts for all platforms, and they’d just stick the appropriate disk or cassette tape in the box and put a sticker on the front specifying which operating system the contents worked on.)

This, of course, has also been very helpful when it comes to running classic Infocom text adventures and brand new Inform-based homebrews on modern computers, because the exact same task applies: simply write a Z-machine interpreter for whatever new platform comes out, and then once you have that working everything written in Inform or by Infocom can be played on that platform.

The fan community has also followed Infocom’s lead in recognising that there’s two things which are really key to a good text adventure: an interpreter which is easy to engage with and can understand a broad range of commands, and really solid writing. (After all, if the sole means a game has of delivering content consists of text, it may as well be really nicely polished text that is a pleasure to read.)

It’s fair to say, then, that whilst the homebrew adventure game scene has made some very important contributions to the genre – making a range of interpreters for running new and old text adventures on modern computers, smartphones, and more or less anything with a computer chip in it, as well as expanding the versatility and hence the user-friendliness of interpreters by widely expanding the range of verbs understood – they’re very much standing on the shoulders of giants, and Infocom is by far the largest giant. Usually, I would say that this position is well-earned; of the 1980s-era text adventures I have played, Infocom ones have almost always had the richest and most flavourful prose, the most forgiving and user-friendly parsers, and the most interesting stories and puzzles.

There are, of course, exceptions…

All The World’s a Text Adventure, and All the Men and Women Merely Players…

It’s January 1603, and it’s a Plague year in London. You are struggling printer Richard Fletcher, and you receive an invitation to dinner with an old friend of yours, John Croft. After you arrive at Croft’s home, however, you find all is not well – and it stems from Croft’s relationship with Christopher Marlowe and a curious unfinished Marlowe play that Croft had been trying to complete with help from William Shakespeare, entitled The King In Yellowe…

Adapted by Jimmy Maher from a Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG scenario by Justin Tynes (the original adventure was published in Strange Aeons, a set of scenarios set in time periods not typically addressed by the game), The King of Shreds and Patches is a remarkably accomplished text adventure, with several important strengths. The first is the extremely high standard of writing; the descriptions are vivid but also to-the-point, and usually succeed at making sure that important matters are highlighted. More or less anything which the text draws your attention to in the area descriptions is something that can be usefully examined, for instance, and each and every description contributes something to the atmosphere.

Ferretnibbles 0.3 – Tiny Text Adventures

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Specifically, this consists of my contribution to Ferretnibbles 3 – hence the retitling to reflect that the remainder of the original article, not reproduced here, was written by other hands.

Lately I have been poking at a number of text adventures, largely because the interactive fiction database has been refined to the point where it’s really nice and easy to find good ones. Whilst some can be true epics, others can be wrapped up extremely quickly – here’s some I quite enjoyed recently.

9:05: This bite-sized nibble of text adventure goodness from Adam Cadre is a gentle, easy introduction to the format. There are no real puzzles beyond getting out of bed in the morning, leaving the house and driving where you need to go – except if you do all that as expected of you, you run into a twist which prompts you to immediately replay it and puts a whole new spin on all the descriptions so far. Brief yet fun, and an interesting exercise in how the limited descriptions offered in text adventures can blinker the player.

Lords of Time: Written by Sue Gazzard, this was an early time travel game, commercially published back in 1983 by Level 9 Computing (both as a standalone and as part of the Time and Magik trilogy, though the games in the latter series didn’t have much of a connection). It has an interesting central mechanism – a grandfather clock with nine cogs inside gave access to nine different time zones, allowing you to travel about until you reached the endgame as you tried to collect the essential items needed to repair the structure of time for… reasons. It was let down, as were many games of its era, by the extremely limited text descriptions, which resulted in the premise of the game being a bit heavy-handed and the experience not seeming especially rich compared to later efforts. In its era, it was probably pretty good, but the rich standards of post-1990s text adventures have rather spoiled it for me since it cannot help but seem a bit threadbare in comparison.

Three-Card Trick: Chandler Groover’s pocket-sized adventure gives the player much less freedom than it at first appears, but if you pay attention to the descriptions it yields not just useful hints for progress, but also hints as to a deeper horror to its world. In principle, you’re just an award-winning stage magician annoyed at your rival improving on your signature trick; in practice, something much darker is happening. Making the protagonist a fabulous woman stage magician in a dapper tuxedo is the final bit of polish that makes it perfect, and the clever tricks it pulls with the standard IF parser format are fun.

Anchorhead: You and your husband Michael have moved to the New England town of Anchorhead, where Michael has unexpectedly inherited a family mansion and been given tenure at the local university. Of course, this was as a result of his relative Edward Verlac abruptly killing his wife and children and then committing suicide – but it’s beyond credibility that a sinister ancestor would reach out from the past and try to possess Michael as he tried to take Edward and his family, with the aim of invoking dark gods to end humanity’s pitiful reign on this planet, right… right?

Anchorhead bills itself as a Lovecraftian text adventure, but it’d be more accurate to call it Derlethian – it uses August Derleth’s Standard Narrative as used in his Mythos pastiches to the hilt. That said, it is much more enjoyable than those stories in part because designer Michael S. Gentry is a much better prose engineer than Derleth, and in part because it casts you not as the possessed inheritor of a sinister house but as the inheritor’s wife, which opens up a new take on the old story. Various flavours of real-life abuse are thematically touched on, making this a story more comfortable with dealing with real-life horror than Derleth ever was, and in some respect more than Lovecraft ever did. It is rendered a little tough going by the ease with which you can get the game into an unwinnable state inadvertently, however.