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Remember how the last five years have been a papier-mache Godzilla’s-worth of arts pages articles on how graphic novels aren’t just for kids anymore? Here’s what’s next.
Douglas Adams understood well how an idea could cross literary genres. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has had multiple incarnations – radio, book and eventually a film – but forgotten now is the interactive fiction game, written by Adams himself. In 1984, it sold 350,000 copies. And while Italo Calvino probably never touched a computer game, he is one of several writers to immerse the reader, not a character, in a world by writing in the second person.
Interactive fiction (IF) is probably the place where literature and games intersect most cleanly. Curses, by Graham Nelson, is a cerebral and whimsical epic that begins with the search for a lost map and spreads out through Eliot, Proust, and most of 20th-century literature. (Curses is huge, so newcomers to IF with an afternoon free could try the game Lost Pig, by Admiral Jota, in which you are a slow-witted caveman called Grunk on a quest for porcine reunion.)
Stories make games compelling, and interactive fiction is an old, old genre born in a time when computers were barely more functional than staplers.
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March 30th, 2009 at 8:35 am
Curiously enough, I’m giving a guest lecture on video games as literature to a bunch of first-year English students tomorrow. I’m going to run them through The Majesty of Colours (see link above).
March 30th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
WOW! Like…yeah!
Not only did I read the books, listen to the audio, and watch the BBC series, and … much to my dismay … watch the US movie version… but I also played the game!
Yep, that was me! Arthur Dent. Spelunking through black holes, turning into a penguin, trying to figure out what Zaphod was talking about. Trying to pronounce Slartitbartfast.
Ah…the memories. Now I must find my towel and scan the skies…after three pints that is.
March 31st, 2009 at 2:59 am
I’ve been a big fan of interactive fiction for something like 25 years, but to say it’s the future or has anything to do with modern gaming is an ENORMOUS stretch. It’s a niche genre for oddballs and reactionaries, like making your own paper or owning a Model T.
However, I’d argue that all adventure video games these days are in a sense “interactive fiction”.
Today’s biggest games, like Grand Theft Auto 4, have thousands of lines of dialogue and hundreds of scripted events. Somebody has to write that stuff. Surely it deserves intelligent analysis.
March 31st, 2009 at 11:21 pm
I don’t think they’re film or literature, I think they’re something else, something new. They are what they are. They’re video games. Some of them have stories, but interactive mediums provide something new and different by letting the player make decisions that affect the plot and in fact the entire game world.
Of course the problem is that it’s incredibly inefficient to come up with dozens of scripted events only a small percentage of players will see, each according to her decisions. It’s for this reason that I prefer ’simulation’ type games to more traditionally linear ‘adventure’ games when I’m looking for a deep interactive experience. The simulation is prepared for me to make a much wider variety of decisions than allowed by the type of ‘dialogue tree’ you’ll find in common role-playing games. Alpha Centauri isn’t a film or a novel but it most certainly is science fiction. It’s chock full of interesting ideas, including plot events, and some of the entries in the ‘Datalinks’ that detail the technologies and characters in the game give it rather interesting back-story.
Now, interactive fiction, that’s something else, quite its own animal, capable of being truly inventive, even of letting you talk to in-game characters freely. This is something a later Douglas Adams game (a graphical adventure), the Starship Titanic, did quite well. The AI is by no means perfect but the developers get away with this by making all the other characters robots and very witty robots besides that. Quite a number of puzzles had sneaky clues you could reveal by properly interrogating the smarmy interrogator, and this required real ingenuity (as opposed to the patience to click through a bunch of menus). I’m disappointed the idea of typing full sentences at game characters hasn’t caught on because it could very well be refined and made quite powerful.
The last series of games I’m going to recommend is Fallout. The latest installment came out recently and is worth playing, but the earlier games had less of a focus on action and more on story. It’s rare that a game that isn’t a pure puzzle or adventure game will give the player the option of being a pacifist throughout and still coming out on top, but even in a post-apocalyptic, dog-eat-dog wasteland the designers managed to make that just as viable as the more usual alternative of going in guns blazing. In fact, the fastest and most efficient way to beat the first game is simply to walk into the arch-villain’s compound and talk him down, or his thugs into mutiny.
Very likely the independent gaming scene (including interactive fiction) will always be a better source of artistic depth than the blockbuster gaming houses, for the same reasons indie filmmakers feel able to take more risks than their hollywood counterparts — especially as we continue to overcome the technical challenges involved.
March 31st, 2009 at 11:26 pm
ahem. Smarmy bartender. Barkeep. *hic* It’s getting late. (I should be gaming… or reading… or both.)