Interactive Fiction Competition Reviews

Games

If you’ve stumbled upon this blog, you may or may not know that people are still writing and playing interactive fiction: those all-text games that were the state of the art back in the eighties.

For some purposes they still are. As Infocom‘s ads used to point out, literate text combined with human imagination has better graphics capabilities than any computer. The main strength of IF is the creation of environments, simulated spaces to explore. I think of my favorite IF games as virtual, interactive sculptures as much as stories. Andrew Plotkin’s The Dreamhold and So Far and Emily Short’s Savoir-Faire are good examples.

Graphical games create environments, too; the best are vivid, cinematic and evocative. The Myst games still insinuate themselves into my dreams, sometimes. But it’s sometimes frustrating when your interactions with them are limited to “point here and click.” This is where IF picks up the slack: any well-programmed game will have at least a couple of dozen verbs… which from the writer’s perspective is as much a curse as a blessing. The player can use any of those verbs on anything, and everything has to react. (I tried writing IF years ago, and didn’t get far. Admittedly this has as much to do with the intense difficulty I have motivating myself to do anything, including get up in the morning, as anything else. I may try again sometime; Inform, the premiere IF development software, has come out with a new version that looks intriguing.)

Anyway: the point. Every year the IF community holds a competition. This is where most IF games these days get released. The quality tends to vary; in any competition you’ll find a few brilliant entries, a few childishly bad ones, and one or two wastes of everybody’s time. Anyone can download the games and vote. In the past the competition runners have discouraged public discussion of the games during the voting period, but apparently that’s no longer the case. So I’m planning to post some reviews; expect the first one within the next couple of days. In the meantime, you might want to take a look at the games yourself.

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Mr. Dickens Goes to Washington

Books, History,

Charles Dickens visited Washington, D.C. in 1842.

I was sometimes asked, in my progress through other places, whether I had not been very much impressed by the HEADS of the lawmakers at Washington; meaning not their chiefs and leaders, but literally their individual and personal heads, whereon their hair grew, and whereby the phrenological character of each legislator was expressed: and I almost as often struck my questioner dumb with indignant consternation by answering ‘No, that I didn’t remember being at all overcome.’ As I must, at whatever hazard, repeat the avowal here, I will follow it up by relating my impressions on this subject in as few words as possible.

[…]

I saw in them, the wheels that move the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought. Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tamperings with public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers; shameful trucklings to mercenary knaves, whose claim to be considered, is, that every day and week they sow new crops of ruin with their venal types, which are the dragon’s teeth of yore, in everything but sharpness; aidings and abettings of every bad inclination in the popular mind, and artful suppressions of all its good influences: such things as these, and in a word, Dishonest Faction in its most depraved and most unblushing form, stared out from every corner of the crowded hall.

— Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation.

I think Charles would be pleased to learn that, one hundred and sixty-five years later, there has been an important change: members of our nation’s legislative body can now be trusted not to spit on the floor.

The Senate is a dignified and decorous body, and its proceedings are conducted with much gravity and order. Both houses are handsomely carpeted; but the state to which these carpets are reduced by the universal disregard of the spittoon with which every honourable member is accommodated, and the extraordinary improvements on the pattern which are squirted and dabbled upon it in every direction, do not admit of being described. I will merely observe, that I strongly recommend all strangers not to look at the floor; and if they happen to drop anything, though it be their purse, not to pick it up with an ungloved hand on any account.

— American Notes (four paragraphs later).

Cleek of Scotland Yard

Books, Mysteries,

After reading Thomas Hanshew’s Cleek: The Man of the Forty Faces on Project Gutenberg (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, click that first link to read an essay from this past June) I knew I had to have a hard copy. So I headed over to AbeBooks and dropped twenty bucks on Cleek of Scotland Yard, an omnibus edition containing Cleek, a few of the short stories Hanshew pasted together to make Cleek, and an eponymous sequel: Cleek of Scotland Yard.

I think there’s a book missing in between. I’m pretty sure it’s one I’ve seen listed as Cleek’s Government Cases. I’m going to have to get hold of that one, too, because Cleek of Scotland Yard—which we’ll call CoSY, to save typing—is almost as good as the first. Continue reading Cleek of Scotland Yard →

Review: To Ruhleben–and Back

Books, History, ,

In 1914, two months after England and Germany went to war, Geoffrey Pyke persuaded a newspaper to hire him as a war correspondent. Pyke was about 20 at the time and, acting under the same impulse by which modern 20 year olds crash keg parties and drink themselves into comas, snuck into Berlin. He was arrested, of course. But, hey, at least he got a book out of it.

To Ruhleben–and Back was published in 1916 and recently republished under McSweeney’s (McSweeney’s’s?) Collins Library imprint. (And damn, this is a handsome book. Good paper, a cover made of sturdy boards and real cloth–Cloth! In an age of big-publisher hardcovers covered in construction paper!–and the design must have time-travelled forwards from the days when books were bound like their publishers gave a damn. I stuck it on my shelf between Phillip Pullman and David Quammen and it looked like Mr. Blackwell at a hobo convention.)

Pyke spent months in solitary confinement wondering whether he’d be shot. Then he was transferred to a cold and inadequate POW camp at Ruhleben. A case of pneumonia left him with a weak heart. He escaped in the company of a man who knew the country better. They walked a very long way to the Netherlands with very little food. Pyke collapsed several times and was once almost left for dead.

As Pyke tells it, all of this was hilariously funny. Continue reading Review: To Ruhleben–and Back →