“Sooner or later you’re going to lose,” Bee announces.
Losing I can handle. I love a good forced failure. It’s this “you” business that’s giving me trouble.
“You are a junior spelling champion. Your parents have been teaching you at home since you were four. You’ve never wasted a moment in a conventional classroom.”
Hmm, nice to meet me. That’s who this “you” is supposed to be, right? Call me a narcissist, but I think this story is about me. This text will take me somewhere else, where I’ll impose my presence by making important decisions. Got it.
But sometimes it doesn’t really feel like Bee is about me. I’m not really playing the protagonist, per se, but living vicariously through her thought spasms, forcing myself to think with another brain. That’s not me begging moms to take me back to the salon for another expensive haircut. It’s someone else.
The you in Bee is smart. She’s training for a national spelling bee. She’s home-schooled. Her family is religious and conservative. Her thoughts are interesting. Her sister is funny.
Not halfway through the second page, I had already mapped out the ‘best’ way to approach this work. I would avoid any plot choices involving spelling practice. For dodging such dull endeavors, Bee would reward me with a more interesting story. By ignoring the part that you theoretically can’t win, I would win. For me, the opening sentence had immediately painted Bee‘s game system as an exercise in futility. I’m going to lose, so I should obviously avoid playing. Why doom this poor girl to pursue expertise in a fruitless exercise? And as an added bonus, I could make some high-minded commentary on the tenuous intersection between games and story. Inevitably, I would muse, the most gamified approach leaves you with the least compelling narrative.
Except here’s something: I don’t really know what the hell I’m talking about. I don’t know what to make of interactive fiction. I only discovered it recently because of its uncertain participation in the independent videogame space, by way of the very same Emily Short’s write-up of a disturbing title called The Baron. Though I was disquieted and intrigued by The Baron, I didn’t immediately hunt down every piece of interactive prose I could download. I moved on. Lately though, the more I consider how this type of text operates, the more confused and fascinated I become with the process. I know something about games, and I know something about literature, but of this thing that straddles the line between the two, I know nothing.
But I’m trying to learn.
Murky protagonist characterization is an issue that videogames understand. Most main characters lead double lives as murderous psychopaths and pretty-nice-guys (once you get to know them). Because of this confusion, I often resort to “you” when I try to write about the experience of playing a videogame. First-person feels right in the past tense, when I’m relating my own interpretive process or narrating an unexpected anecdote. Then, there’s the third-person player, which often feels too distant and makes sentences stumble. You is a nice compromise between the two. For whatever reason, it feels the most natural. Interactive fiction lives in this twilight zone, the in-between space of the second person present.
“You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.“
Text adventures, like the aptly named Adventure, were highly influential in the gaming sphere when they arrived in the mid-70s. Today, they serve a devoted, niche community. In a recent interview on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Adam Cadre (Photopia and Endless, Nameless) said he doesn’t enjoy playing IF because he finds the process “exhausting.” It seems absurd that someone who writes interactive stories can’t stand playing them, but I understand Cadre’s complaint. Traditional, parser-based IF involves typing commands into a prompt. The parser, which resembles a limited search engine, decides whether or not the computer comprehends typed commands like “go north” or “stroke moon” or “use spellbook on gerbil.” Parser-based IF can be frustrating because it’s impossible to make airtight, and if a work lacks polish or players prove uncooperative, the fragile fourth wall frequently topples.
Now, many interfaces exist to tell interactive tales, though parser-based IF probably still shares the most overlap with games. The trial and error conversation between player and parser elicits a strange sense of exploration. As with most videogames, you’re barred access from a bulk of the content until you achieve a certain interface mastery. IF juggernaut Andrew Plotkin, who has called interactive fiction “the first *hit* videogame genre,” champions the parser as the fundamental mechanic of IF. According to Plotkin, it “draws the player *into* the game world in a distinct and powerful manner. You can’t skim the text or skimp on imagining the situation, because the situation is your only guide to what to try next.” In other words, a text adventure without a parser isn’t really IF, but something else entirely.
Bee is not parser-based IF, nor is it simply a plugged-in, choose-your-own-adventure story. Short wrote Bee on the Varytale platform, which operates “somewhere on the spectrum between stateful CYOA (like Choice of Games) and quality-based narrative (like Echo Bazaar).” Stories developed on Varytale let you navigate their text through a labyrinth of links, while the system tracks a handful of conditions that may or may not be displayed. Your options depend on prior choices, so you can’t go to the salon with Mrs. Barron unless you’ve visited her home, and you can’t practice Arabic loan words before you’ve gotten down the basics of synonyms and phonetics. The Varytale format fits Short like a glove. It highlights her confident command of interactive interface without hamstringing her crisp, lucid prose.
My spellophobic playthrough ended quickly. I didn’t get anywhere near the national competition. My shameful badge was that of the lowly “local spelling champion.” But at least I had lived!
Initially, I made many stereotypical assumptions about the characters in Bee. I assumed there’s no way this girl wants to spend most of her time with spelling flash cards. Her parents are clearly using the bee competition to stroke their egos and show off in front of their claustrophobic homeschooling community.
The thing is, you hardly spend any of your time spelling anything in Short’s narratives. Bee is more interested in language as an idea rather than a mechanical exercise. “Practice” largely entails imagining places that words can take you. Spelling is transcendental. Spelling is escapism. The character’s love of language simultaneously serves as game system and character trait. It allows her to travel to exotic locales, to feel worldly and cultured. Lying face down on the carpet, smothered by oppressive loneliness, this girl bathes herself in words. For her, spelling isn’t just another family ritual or prayer at the frigid altar of Practicality. It is her ritual. Her coping mechanism. Her antidote for loneliness. Her sense of self.
Bee is engrossing because it never resorts to explicit, over-the-top, “beady-eyed religious fundamentalist” characterizations. The weirdness of the narrator’s environment reveals itself with subtlety. The characters’ religious fundamentalism is a matter-of-fact, even endearing, part of their complex personalities, preventing them from being reduced to one-note caricatures. The parents are devout, controlling and paranoid, but never cruel. The annoying but beloved younger sister is allowed, if not always encouraged, to be strange and to draw pictures of strange things.
Most of my assumptions about Bee were wrong. In my second run, I spent more time with Latin and German roots, and the story rewarded me with more opportunities for social exploration. Participating in the game system’s linguistic universe contributed to the longevity of the narrative and, for the most part, this system deftly reconciles the conflict of interest between experience and productivity.
But just as role-playing the diligent competitive speller bought more time, it led to repetition. Passages began to show up multiple times, and I ended up skimming, searching for something I hadn’t already read. I’m torn over whether or not to call this element a flaw. Though the repetition removed me from the experience, it also contributed to the story’s verisimilitude. After all, you, I and this girl live repetitive lives. We arm ourselves for an unpredictable world with artificial schedules and base new behaviors on past experiences. We want to know what to expect, though we think we crave novelty. To some extent, we all take refuge in the arms of our routines. Bee offers us “new things” but reminds us of the psychological roots common to humanity.
(I saw Bee at Free Indie Games)
“In a recent interview on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Adam Cadre (Photopia and Endless, Nameless) said he doesn’t enjoy playing IF because he finds the interface tedious. It seems absurd that someone who writes interactive stories can’t stand playing them, but I understand Cadre’s complaint. He’s referring specifically to traditional, parser-based IF, which involves typing commands into a prompt.”
I may have been talking about IF in that instance, but I didn’t actually mean to contrast parser-based IF with other types of interactive narrative with other interfaces. No matter what the interface, it is very rare that I encounter an interactive work that doesn’t quickly leave me too daunted to continue. From time to time people will send me links to things because I’ve been grandfathered into the indie gaming scene, but, yeah, I am just not really a gamer at all. I haven’t really been remotely up on what was happening in the world of games since, oh, 1992 at the very latest.
Love designing the things, though. Great fun.
Thanks for clearing that up, Adam! I looked at the interview again and made a couple of edits to that paragraph. I removed the phrase that said you were “specifically referring to parser-based IF.” As I transition into my analysis of Bee, I sort of set up that interface contrast on my own and may have inadvertently roped you into it. I apologize if I presumed to put words in your mouth! Hopefully, it’s satisfactory now.
I’ve played around a little with this sort of thing, and have about two things to say about them. The first is that the Japanese seem to have delved into this a lot more than anyone else, and have built a sub-culture around it (words like flag and galge; it’s evolved its own jargon. Kinda wish I knew what a flag was). It’s been digested, meditated, analyzed and… well, I’ll keep profanity out of such a nice white background.
The other thing is a link. http://themodernstoryteller.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=8&action=edit If you want to skip reading, I basically point out how the game gives tons of options and paths, but illustrates which one is ‘right.’ In so doing, it states that life is full of potential, but we only live one life, or something like that
But yeah, the japs have this stuff nailed (it seems). They’ve boiled the medium into a genre, which is often more formulaic and occasionally more impressive than our shooters (which seem to be ‘our’ niche).
Also, I think it’s important to mention that it’s not quite the same kind of medium. Clannad, which has been pretty much my only foray (it takes at least 10 to play through each ‘route,’ I couldn’t even finish this one!) gives the player difficulty in the form of exploration, and puzzling. One has to meditate on the affect of any given action, and formulate a series of good actions to solve any route. For instance, one route pins the protagonist into ‘having’ to go with the sister of his girlfriend. In order to solve it correctly, he has to kiss his girlfriend, so that he stays in contact with both of them long enough to get in contact with his emotions. Deep stuff? No. Interesting? Yup.
Also, it did offer a ‘skip previously read text’ option. I used that a lot.
Don’t take it personally babe… Has a similar, if very different, thing going. I mention this one because it’s Actually free, and, well, that seems to be your thing.
Whoops. Gave a very, very wrong link. That one leads to the article from my point of view, editing. http://wp.me/p2tD0D-8
Interesting take. I’ve always meant to devote a good chunk of time to exploring Japanese visual novels–fascinating stuff there. Some day soon, perhaps…
I’ve had a look at Don’t Take it Personally but only a cursory look. Thanks for reminding me that I need to return to it. I’m a big fan of Christine Love’s other work: Digital: A Love Story and Analogue: A Hate Story.
When I was making one of my hypertext things (also about the you character may I add), I thought hypertext was the natural successor of command-driven IFs. Much in the same way some new graphic adventures discarded their bunch o’ verbs to replace them with a single use button, I figured, in-game links were the new interactive narrative’s use verb.
Don’t know if I still believe the same. But Bee here is definitely proof that mouse-based text games can surely “draw the player into the game world in a distinct and powerful manner” too.
David, I still haven’t decided if I have a preference—parser or no. On the one hand, I can see where Plotkin is coming from. The parser can encourage a vivid, interesting dialogue between player and author; a sense of exploration that isn’t there with hypertext stuff. On the other hand, I’ve been really taken with the flow and strong sense of voice in works like Bee and Christine Love’s Analogue: A Hate Story. I guess the easy answer is that no interface is a natural successor. Neither is inherently superior, and it’s necessary for skilled authors to be aware of each tool’s strengths and weaknesses in order to create a successful relationship between form and content.
I enjoyed your hypertext thing. It’s got a great sense of humor. It’s also interesting that the player is inside the knight’s head but in control of the squire’s actions. Have you seen that sort of thing anywhere else?
I’ve never seen it done. Tried to take a common thing in interactive storytelling and make a new thing with it. I thought how silly it was that the IF player is always in control of the main character’s actions.
I asked myself “why is it so easy to accept that our only input in the story is this random guy’s actions”, “why can’t we control other stuff, like the environment or secondary characters’ actions”. When reading a 3rd person IF there’s room for surprise player character, but if the text simply says the word you there’s really no doubt that you’ll be playing as that you dude for the rest of the thing.
I mean, it can’t be natural, so it had to be possible to do it otherwise. I had the great idea to make an IF piece where commands were a lil’ more similar to spoken language just ’cause the fact that they had subjects, so you could type in “Jack go north” or “Melissa take candle” or even “branch break window” and the story would take those events as part of the plot.
I settled for the much more easy hypertext with the player controlling just one secondary character. Or maybe a main character, but with the narrator referring to someone else as the you guy. I’m glad I did, because how good could I be in writing parser IFs if I can’t stand playing them? (Well, now I see Cadre pulls it off, but I doubt I could.)
I would really like to be an IF player, but so far the only real IF I ever enjoyed was Weir’s Backup, not sure why, and everything else just seems like Anything, Alejandro Grilli’s excellent commentary on how IF feels to most people. Grilli and Anna Anthropy are actually the people whose interactive narrative I admire the most.
“I had the great idea to make an IF piece where commands were a lil’ more similar to spoken language just ’cause the fact that they had subjects, so you could type in ‘Jack go north’ or ‘Melissa take candle’”
Nearly all IF released in the past 30 years can parse orders like these (though you have to use a comma, as in proper English). In most cases ordering other characters around will just produce a default response saying that the character in question has better things to do than obey your commands, but there are a number of pieces in which such commands are productive, and even some which are built around the concept. A landmark example of the latter is Infocom’s SUSPENDED, whose gameplay is based around issuing commands to a fleet of robots with different abilities.
“why can’t we control other stuff, like the environment [...] even ‘branch break window’”
As my making-of writeup explains, this was actually the original concept behind my 2002 game LOCK & KEY. A scenario was going to play out on a Brooklyn streetcorner, and you would affect events by doing things like opening windows and unlatching fences and so forth. Eventually this evolved into a different sort of thing – you build a dungeon, then watch as a (parodic) fantasy adventurer attempts to escape from it – but, yes, IF without a player character has been an interest of mine for quite a while.
Awesome!
Well, I don’t play a great deal of IFs, so it’s not that surprising that my great original ideas are in fact very old concepts of common usage. I wrote “Jack go north” as a mere simplification that I guess would be necessary for technical reasons, I was actually thinking in “Jack goes north”, “Melissa takes the candle” and “a branch breaks the window” but with the obvious choice to let the commands be a simplified version of the full sentence, like in the case of “take candle”, where no game requires you to type “take the/a candle”.
I wasn’t thinking in orders, more like in playing to make a story up, like children sometimes do, playing as the narrator, and having the game accepting your descriptions as part of the plot. I’ll probably make a hypertext in the future where parts of the text suggest something might be about to happen, and clicking’em results in that event happening.
I’ll definitely look for those examples you gave and try to play’em.
I liked Urquel a lot. One really nice touch is the way that the choices often give you information about what the squire is doing even when he’s out of view of the knight. That’s something you couldn’t do with parsed IF.
There are a couple of IF games that have a “you” character who isn’t the PC; in “Speculative Fiction” the first-person narrator is the familiar of the “you” character and takes the actions, and in “Bellclap” the parser voice is an angel or something mediating between “you” (a god) and the third-person character who takes the actions.
Digression: “Jack go north” and “Melissa take candle” aren’t actually idiomatic English; in English imperative sentences don’t naturally take explicity subjects (except for “somebody” or “everybody,” as in “Somebody help me!”). As Adam said, to make them idiomatic you have to set off the person you’re talking to with a comma, which is something you can do with non-imperative sentences as well (“Melissa is taking the candle, Jack”). I actually hate it when a game makes me use the “Jack, go north” syntax, because I always forget it exists, and (unless it’s explicitly cued) there are better ways of conveying that you should ask another character to do something.
What did you like about “Anything”? I couldn’t find any payoff; I interacted with everything I could find, but as a critique of IF it just comes across like a poorly made IF. Anyone who’s taken a modicum of care (which generally means beta testing) with their IF will implement something other than the default response to “stand up” when the opening text says the character is lying down. And I say that as the author of this.
To elaborate on what I said about Anything: I’m terrible at first-person games, especially anything with platforming. I can’t get the camera to go where I want it to, and I can’t tell where I can jump.
If I had more technical knowledge, I could make a first-person platformer where the camera swings around randomly and the jumps are almost impossible. But, unless I did something to convey what my aim was and communicated it very well, it would just be a bad first-person platformer. It wouldn’t be a critique of the first-person platformer. Actually existing decent first-person games don’t have those problems.
I just took a look at this, and can state my review in two words: Pattern Sixteen.
I don’t know about that platformer. I understand Anything is pretty bad, but I think just as with You have to burn the rope, it’s just a joke you laugh at and then leave it. Personally, IFs bore me, and I often feel very angry at this, because I really want to play them and enjoy them. And I think Anything conveys that feeling of “IFs just don’t do what you expect them too, and you spend a lot of time typing things and the game just doesn’t show you any game in response” that most people like me get every time we try one, because we don’t get to the entertaining part.
That statement is not true, of course, and I don’t want to disrespect IFs at all, but it’s a feeling I can relate to and that’s why I find the joke funny. Anything‘s author tends to do joke games, like Gently.
Glad you like the Úrquel thing! It’s kind of a joke game on its own.
Oh, the platformer doesn’t exist! It’s just something I was thinking about as a form of gaming that I have a lot of trouble with, the way that many people (many more people, I suppose) have trouble with IF.
It’s possible that I didn’t get to the joke in Anything — I tried a few things and most of them elicited only the default response. But, as Adam suggested more succinctly, I think something that’s designed to show how that a certain kind of interaction is broken needs to be made with enough craft that it’s clearly broken on purpose.* Otherwise, well, people who are frustrated by IF can get frustrated in exactly the same way by any other game, and people who aren’t will be able to pick apart the ways in which the frustration in this game is due to flaws in the programming rather than inherent flaws (again, failing to implement any special response to “stand up”). You Have To Burn The Rope works because it obviously does what it sets out to do, and it doesn’t needlessly frustrate the player (though my sister-in-law couldn’t beat it). And Urquel is funny because it’s obviously subverting our expectations on purpose.
Obviously I’m being a bit humorless about what is a pretty common critique of IF, and one that IF authors ought to deal with. (And I don’t want to be overly critical of Grilli, who was making this for some kind of jam; most of his stuff appears to be Windows-only but Prosopamnesia was brilliant.)
*To toot my own horn, the game of mine that I linked upthread does that I think; if you play it for a minute you can tell what’s going on. In any case it wasn’t primarily a parody; it was an adaptation of this song as part of a tribute album.)
Reblogged this on you find yourself in a room and commented:
Something I’d like to play in the future.