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<title>DM4 Chapter VIII: The Craft of Adventure</title>
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<h1>Chapter VIII: The Craft of Adventure</h1>
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<p class="normal"><span class="atleft"><img src="dm4-349_1.jpg" alt=""></span>
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Designing is a craft as much as an art. Standards of workmanship,
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of “finish”, are valued and appreciated by players, and
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the craft of the adventure game has developed as it has been handed
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down. The embryonic ‘Zork’ (Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce
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Daniels, Dave Lebling, 1977) – shambolic, improvised, frequently
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unfair – was thrown together in a fortnight of spare time.
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‘Trinity’ (Brian Moriarty, 1986), plotted in synopsis
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in 1984, required thirteen months to design and test.</p>
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<p class="indent">‘Spellbreaker’ (Dave Lebling, 1985)
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is a case in point. A first-rate game, it advanced the state of the
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art by allowing the player to name items. It brought a trilogy to
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a satisfying conclusion, while standing on its own merits. A dense
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game, with more content per location than ever before, it had a
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structure which succeeded both in being inexplicable at first yet
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inevitable later. With sly references to string theory and to Aristophanes'
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<i>The Frogs</i>, it was cleverer than it looked. But it was also difficult
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and, at first, bewildering, with the rewards some way off. What kept
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players at it were the “cyclopean blocks of stone”, the
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“voice of honey and ashes”, the characters who would
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unexpectedly say things like “You insult me, you insult even my
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dog!”. Polished, spare text is almost always more effective
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than a discursive ramble, and many of the room descriptions in
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‘Spellbreaker’ are nicely judged:</p>
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<p class="output"><em>Packed Earth</em><br>
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This is a small room crudely constructed of packed earth, mud, and
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sod. Crudely framed openings of wood tied with leather thongs lead
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off in each of the four cardinal directions, and a muddy hole leads
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<p class="normal">In short, it was masterly craftsmanship (in what was
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Lebling's seventh title) which made this exercise in pushing the boundaries
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of difficulty and connectedness possible.</p>
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<p class="indent">Classics like ‘Spellbreaker’ cast long
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shadows and have endured beyond all expectation: ‘Zork II’,
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for instance, has been continuously on sale in the high street since
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1981, a record matched by only about two dozen of that year's novels.
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But the story of interactive fiction is <em>not</em> the story of the production
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company Infocom, Inc., alone. Many hundreds of plays were performed
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in late sixteenth-century London, but today only Shakespeare's three
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dozen are familiar, even the weakest protected from neglect by the
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gilding of being canonical. The resulting attention may be justified
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on literary grounds, but perhaps not historical, since it gives a
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picture wholly unlike the regular diet
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<a id="p350" name="p350"></a>
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of the contemporary audience.
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So with Infocom. Many 1980s adventure players seldom if ever played
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their works, or not until years later. Their real importance, besides
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quality and familiarity, is that they were foundational, in the same
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way that Hergé's pre-war <i>Tintin</i> albums evolved the visual
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grammar of the European graphic novel, from layout rules for speech
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bubbles and panels to how sudden motion should be depicted. Tintin
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and his dog Snowy began to walk from left to right (the direction of
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reading) when making progress, but from right to left after a setback.
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Snowy lost first the ability to speak, then the ability to understand
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Tintin's speech. Infocom had a similar effect in laying down the
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mechanics of interactive fiction, the conventions of which are subliminally
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accepted by players (and silently perpetuated by Inform). For instance,
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it was the Infocom games of 1986 which began the now familiar use
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of pop-up literary quotations as a stylish form of commentary or
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signposting, a development which might be compared to exclamation
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marks appearing over the heads of surprised characters in <i>Tintin</i>.</p>
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<p class="indent">The mechanics of reading a novel are almost unconscious,
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but the mechanics of interactive fiction are far less familiar,
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and it is a uniquely unforgiving medium. A technical mistake by a
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novelist, say an alternating dialogue so long that it becomes unclear
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who is speaking, does not make it impossible for the reader to continue,
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as if the last hundred pages of the book had been glued together. The
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designer of an interactive fiction has continually to worry over the
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order in which things happen, the level of difficulty, the rate at
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which new material is fed out and so on. Meanwhile, even the designer's
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footing seems uncertain, for the form itself is a wavering compromise.
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An interactive fiction is not a child's puzzle-book, with a maze on
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one page and a rebus on the next, but nor is it a novel. Neither pure
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interaction nor pure fiction, it lies in a strange and still largely
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unexplored land in between.</p>
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<p class="aside"><span class="warning"><b>•</b>
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<b>REFERENCES</b></span><br>
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In this chapter, a game is cited by designer and date when first mentioned
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but subsequently by title alone. Details of availability may be found
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in the <a href="cited.html">bibliography of cited works</a>.
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<span class="warning"><b>•</b></span>Unattributed quotations from
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Infocom designers are all to be found in the <tt>ftp.gmd.de</tt>
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archive of 1980s computing press articles. My choice has been skewed
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by availability: Lebling is quoted frequently not because he was a
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great designer (though he was) but because he often went on the record.
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Marc Blank, among other notable figures, spent less time entertaining
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<span class="warning"><b>•</b></span>Some thousands of internal Infocom
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email messages (1982–) have been quietly preserved. Except
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at the end the overall impression is of a sensible workplace with
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engagingly warm moments, and a number of unsung figures emerge from the
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shadows. Much of this material is unlikely to become public because
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of its personal nature. To respect this, I have quoted nothing directly
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from <em>unpublished</em> email and have avoided attributing specific
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<a id="p351" name="p351"></a>
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opinions to named people. I do quote from the handful of relatively innocuous
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emails published on Activision's <i>Masterpieces of Infocom</i> compact
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disc, though note that these were stripped of all context. For instance
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the most interesting, a 1987 memo about which way to take text games
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now (discussed briefly in <a href="s49.html">§49</a> below),
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is not as it seems a minute of a committee but was typed up as an
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apology to two people offended at being excluded from a low-key crisis
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meeting, held covertly off the premises.
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<span class="warning"><b>•</b></span>A happier example is a sketch
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written by Stu Galley in response to an email circular asking for a job
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description: the so-called ‘Implementors' Creed’.
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Despite the style – fifty percent mission statement, fifty
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percent Martin Luther King – this manifesto is worth reading,
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because it is conscious of working in an experimental and artistic
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medium: “I am exploring a new medium for telling stories. My
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readers should become immersed in the story and forget where they are.
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They should forget about the keyboard and the screen, forget everything
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but the experience. My goal is to make the computer invisible. …
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None of my goals is easy. But all are worth hard work. Let no one doubt
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my dedication to my art.”
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<span class="warning"><b>•</b></span>Another true believer was Cleveland
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M. Blakemore, in his treatise in issue 54 of <i>Ahoy!</i> magazine:
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“Every human being on earth is a natural dynamo of creative
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energy. Learning how to tap this energy and translate it to a book,
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a canvas, or a computer's memory, is a skill that can be learned.”</p>
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<p class="dotbreak">� � � � �</p>
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<h2><a href="s46.html">§46</a> A short history of interactive fiction</h2>
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<h2><a href="s47.html">§47</a> Realities</h2>
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<h2><a href="s48.html">§48</a> A triangle of identities</h2>
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<h2><a href="s49.html">§49</a> Structure</h2>
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<h2><a href="s50.html">§50</a> The design of puzzles</h2>
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<h2><a href="s51.html">§51</a> The room description</h2>
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<h2><a href="s52.html">§52</a> Finishing</h2>
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