Wor(l)d Games

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I grew up with an Apple IIe. I had a group of friends with whom I’d trade games—Choplifter, Sea Dragon, Karateka, and the like (for personal evaluation of course, to see if I wanted to go out and buy them ;-). One day one of my buddies handed me a stack of 5.25” floppies; sandwiched somewhere in the middle was a disk labelled “Adventure (word game).” I plugged it in and soon had Cave. What I remember most from that first session was having an axe tossed at me by one of the nasty dwarfs. That spontaneous event, a product of what I now know was the program’s world model, sent chills down my spine. Like the character in Richard Powers’ novel Plowing the Dark I never finished Adventure, but I did go on to play a number of Infocom games. And until not too long ago, that’s pretty much where I thought interactive fiction ended.

Enter Nick Montfort’s Twistly Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004) which I read over the semester break. It is, in many ways, a perfect book. I don’t mean that it’s a book without flaw or above critique (god forbid) and I even found a typo or two. But it’s clearly the right book by the right person at the right time (and with just the right title too—TLP is a line from the original Adventure, and the “twisty little passages” are of course passages of prose as well as the passages of the cave).

One of the great gifts of the book is the entrée it affords into the contemporary IF scene. Graham Nelson, Adam Cadre, Emily Short, and Andrew Plotkin were all authors who were new to me, but no sooner had I worked through Plotkin’s remarkable “Shade” than I added it to my spring syllabus (which I’ll post soon, btw); and I suspect others will follow suit. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised to find this text canonized amongst a new academic audience because of Montfort’s account of it here. (I should also add that Nick is himself a major author on the independent IF scene, though he avoids mention or discussion of his own creative work.) Throughout the text, Montfort triangulates between an IF work’s tripartite status as narrative, game, and computer program; and it is the riddle which emerges as the figure to bind all three together. If I have one criticism of the book it is that the material on riddles, while fascinating (and convincing on its own terms), does not seem especially well integrated into the other chapters—I’d have liked to have seen a couple of readings of particular IF works that really hinge on their indentity as riddles in the narratological model Montfort lays out.

Something that emerges very early on in the book is a schism, actualized by way of readings, publication outlets, awards, and all the rest of the stuff that goes to make up a literary “community” (a term that in fact comes into question late in the book), between IF and link/node hypertext—both of which Montfort argues, utterly persuasively to my mind, must be considered instances of “electronic literature.” In fact, what I probably most admire about the book is its detailed historical approach, and it become evident in relief that the “other” side of the electronic literature divide lacks any comparable documentary account of its origins and development. Likewise, there’s no work on “traditional” hypertext of which I’m aware that’s comparable to Montfort’s critical (as opposed to technical) explication of the parser and world model as essential computational elements of IF—this is now being called “software studies” in some quarters and we badly need to update the earlier wave post-structuralist readings of hypertext fiction with the insights that come from granular attention to the digital nuances of particular software and systems. (Montfort is meticulous about documenting a work’s original platform and development language.) I’m tackling a few of these things in my own project, to which TLP definitely stands as an inspiration, but most of all it is a book that reminds us of how little we still know, despite all the verbiage and university press ink, about something called “electronic literature”—while simultaneously teaching us that electronic literature has a recoverable history, and need not be essentialized as unknowable. “Twisty little passages” is probably the most famous line to emerge from Adventure, but my favorite was always another: “You are on the edge of a breathtaking view.”