Sunday, June 23, 2013

Heirs of Infocom: Where interactive fiction authors and games stand today

Mobile devices are helping authors present their stories to a new audience.

Andrew Plotkin, Muffy Berlyn and Michael Berlyn await their release from The Lamp
In my review of Get Lamp, the documentary about text adventures, I mentioned that the original Infocom employees believed the market for these games could exist for hundreds of years. After all, the novel is still around today and, despite stiff competition from movies and video games, writing fiction is still a profitable endeavor. Why not interactive fiction?
The reality, however, is that since the demise of Infocom in 1989, many people have tried to make interactive fiction into a commercial endeavor. None have been able to figure out how to make the financial side work—until recently. Everything changed with the rise of smartphones and tablets.

A new platform, a new type of game

Michael Berlyn was an “implementor” at Infocom in the early 1980s and was responsible for hit games such as Suspended and Infidel. He left the company in 1984 before it imploded and went on to a successful career in game design and consulting. Berlyn created the Bubsy side-scrolling games on the Sega Genesis and contributed to Syphon Filter on the original PlayStation. He later retired from the industry and moved to Florida with his wife, Muffy. But when he saw the first iPhone, he knew there was a chance to create something new.
“I was overwhelmed by the intuitive way information could be dealt with and presented,” he told Ars. Berlyn envisioned a kind of “CSI” game where the user could have different modes where they question a suspect, explore a crime scene, or examine evidence. Out of this idea, he developed the game Art of Murder (iOS, Windows 8 Store, $3.99) as a sort of “proof of concept." He tried to raise money through venture capital for development, but when his efforts fell through, he and his wife decided to develop the game independently. They hired an artist to make the cover image and got the rest of the art assets (3D models, drawings, and character photos) from an old clip art CD-ROM from a company that had since gone out of business.
Art of Murder is a sort of puzzle game where the user plays the role of a police investigator. You can explore the crime scene by tapping on important items (if you hold your finger down, all tappable areas will be shown with circles) and collecting them as evidence. The forensic labs will happily run all sorts of tests for fingerprints, blood, and other clues. You can also question suspects, and their responses will open up new potential suspects. The game is smart enough to keep track of how items, suspects, and evidence link together, which helps in unraveling the mystery. Since there is no time pressure and the District Attorney will refuse to send the case to court unless you can come up with compelling evidence, the game can be played at a relaxed pace. Berlyn and his wife later released a similar game, Grok the Monkey, which used the same self-built engine.
While there was considerable text in Art of Murder, Berlyn wanted to explore other possibilities with writing-reliant interactive fiction. The result was Reconstructing Remy ($9.99, Windows 8 Store, currently awaiting approval for iOS). Remy blurs the boundaries between a book and a game. There is as much text (more than 60,000 words) as a traditional novel but only the introduction is read sequentially. After, the player chooses the order in which to read the rest by “uncovering” chapters from various locations (like Remy’s apartment) and objects. Unlike Art of Murder, there is no puzzle to complete other than reading enough of the text to unlock the ending. The Berlyns had to write the text so that each chapter was completely independent from the others while still revealing a story. Much like the movie Memento, reading the story in a different order changes the story itself. Beta testers for Remy reported very different reactions depending on how they approached the tale.

Other tales of the text

Of course, Michael Berlyn isn’t the only person attempting to bring back interactive fiction on mobile devices. Andrew Plotkin, a text adventure author who was featured in the Get Lamp documentary, successfully used Kickstarter to fund Hadean Lands, a new piece of interactive fiction for the iPhone. While it is still a traditional text adventure, Plotkin has many years of experience in crafting these sorts of games. This allows him to experiment with the formula. In a recent update, he said that a lot of the game development is turning out to be “implement a thing! Now implement it again, in the more-convenient shortcut that is available once the player knows how to do it! Then, in some cases, you implement it a third and fourth time, for when the player discovers an alternate solution and starts using that.”
Plotkin isn't just releasing the one game, however. He is planning to release Hadean Lands' display library and iPhone interpreter engine as Open Source when the game is complete. This will allow other interactive fiction authors to release their own games on the iPhone using his engine.
The rise of the iPhone and mobile platforms in general, along with developer-friendly app stores, has made the idea of commercializing interactive fiction possible again. In the age of Infocom, the crude graphics on top-end hardware meant the potential market for text-only games for personal computers was in the millions, and this was enough to fund a whole company of developers. Today, people aren’t likely to pay money to sit down at a PC to play a text adventure game, but enough of them might want to play such a game on their mobile device to fund teams of one or two independent developers.
For developers and writers like the Berlyns or Plotkin, this works out perfectly. In just the same way as Amazon and the Kindle opened up new opportunities for independent fiction authors, the iPhone and iPad have made it possible for interactive fiction authors to do what they love most and make a living doing it. The only thing missing might be the ports to the popular Android platform. At the moment, this is a harder economic proposition due to the larger number of Android OS versions still in the wild and the related support costs.
As someone who remembers playing text adventure games like Zork and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on their original 5¼ inch floppies, it gives me a great deal of satisfaction to see interactive fiction making a bit of a comeback. As a writer, I find it heartening that people are still finding new ways to tell stories. And as a gamer, I’m always looking out for new experiences and new modes of gameplay. Games like Reconstructing Remy and Hadean Lands seem to offer all of these things. Despite the new challenges, at least they have a new medium in which to exist.

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