IFComp 2020, the 26th annual interactive fiction competition, is live, and I am late getting to the reviewing game this year! Life has been busy. It’s going to keep being busy through the Comp period. I may not write many reviews this year.
You, too, should go take a look at the IFComp games available this year! There are more than a hundred of them, and some of them are guaranteed to be amazing. Surely there is something here for every taste. Anyone can be a judge, and vote on the games (until Nov. 29th); you need vote on only five games for your vote to count.
Standard disclaimers: This review represents only my own (hopefully thoughtful) honest response to a single work submitted to the Comp. Reviews are primarily intended to be helpful to other potential players. All reviews are always spoilery.
Amazing Quest is an incongruous entry. It’s more of a simulator than a narrative, and the interaction is limited to a set of yes/no answers to questions the game poses. (And the yes/no answers, as Ant points out, have no effect at all on the outcome of the game.) It’s retrostyled by being written in Commodore 64 BASIC and packaged in an emulator. (And yet, how strange that that C64 emulator is written in JavaScript and running in one of a dozen open tabs in one of my five open Chrome windows.) It eschews the kind of polish that the Comp tends to value in its games in favor of a small set of simple language constructions. There is hardly any narrative at all. The “Instructions” and “Strategy Guide” documents are (or, at least, seem to be) typed on an old typewriter with a dry ribbon.
So Amazing Quest is a minimalist work in a lot of ways, and people have grumbled about that in their reviews: Vivienne Dunstant notes that the ending is sudden and unsatsifactory: “So I think I succeeded. But um I didn’t feel as though I earned it, or really enjoyed it.” Thomas Hvizdos said that it “seems like the sort of game where the code is having the fun.”
WidowDido suggests that the point is to “parody the activity of gaming.” Dan Fabulich takes it to be a prank on the player, one that “IMO … treats its players disrespectfully.” Victor Gijsbers says that “in the end, it does seem like Montfort is just trolling us.”
But “trolling” suggests engaging in bad faith to provoke a reaction, and “prank” suggests the arrangement of an unpleasant surprise that is also a joke at the player’s expense. Even to call it a “parody” suggests that there’s a separate metacritical level from which it, properly speaking, needs to be appreciated. This is, of course, totally appropriate for a work by Nick Montfort, who works with emergence in a large formal variety of electronic literature projects, and who has a well-developed critical awareness.
But while I was interacting with it, I was curious to think what an unironic reading of the game might look like: what is it that the game is ostensibly asking us to meditate on? If we take it ironically, what is it that the irony is hiding behind? If we read the game “straight,” what is it that it purports to represent? What would a generous reading of the piece look like?
On those terms, perhaps the most generous reading of the piece is to think of it as an experiment in minimalism. What is the least possible amount of interactivity in a piece of interactive fiction? Possibly the amount required by someone just hitting Y<enter>, N<enter>, or just <enter>. That the interactivity is wholly illusory—the piece grinds forward with no interest at all in the player’s input, storing it in a variable that is never again referenced, and simply produces a series of randomly generated sentences at intervals when the player enters a response that’s ignored—reduces the amount of interactivity in this piece of IF further: the only control the player has in the game is over the intervals at which the text is generated, and that only by delaying zir response to the game’s requests for a decision. It is the zero-case input version of Zarf’s definition of parser IF as “enter text to get text”: the only relevant fact about the entered text is that it is zero-length of more. Nothing else matters.
The other end of the definition is also minimized as the game explores another boundary: what is the least amount of fiction in a piece of interactive fiction? Why, basically none at all, aside from the fact that the story has an author-scripted beginning and ending, both of which are themselves quite minimalist. The beginning consists of two sentences totaling seven words: “The gods grant victory,” says the first, giving a minimalist set-up. The second gives an even more minimalist explanation of the task the player is trying to accomplish: “Now to home!” The ending is just barely less laconic: “At last, the battered shuttle brings you alone home to family, hearth, rest.” This framing is of course the same as the basic framing of the Odyssey, and the randomly generated text in between is also vaguely “Odyssey flavored”: nautical, pious, pagan, fate-driven, ostensibly action-oriented. But the mid-game text (if we dignify the structure enough to call it that) is of course not structured logically or ethically, which would require an event to have a meaningful relationship to what precedes it instead of simply being randomly determined. And it is not structured narratively, because the mid-game parts bear no necessary relationship to each other: they need not come in any particular order, and there seems to be no guarantee that you’ll see any particular kind of event on a particular playthrough. (Indeed, there are no “kinds of events,” because events are not simulated any further than by being described in randomly assembled text.) So the entire narrative between the opening and closing, in an expected average of just over 18 turns, is entirely emergent, an epiphenomenon of the reader’s mind seeking meaningful connections between purely random events.
And yet the basics of narrative are there for the reader’s mind to play with. If nothing else, there is the thematic unity of the randomly selectable elements, their clustering largely around the vaguely Odyssey-like warrior culture and its trade-based and military concerns, the pious faith that there is reason underlying the apparently random actions. There are (by counting and combinatorial multiplication) 198 types of places that might be encountered, and each has (the same) three possible outcomes to the player’s ignored answer to the randomly generated action choice.
In the end, I think, what the program -most resembles is the short “how to program” demo programs that were common in magazines and books in the C64 era. Strange as it is to think about software being distributed in printed source form in a now-archaic language 30-odd years ago, it was of course a common way for people to get their software: having bought a computer and subscribed to a “things you can do with your computer” magazine, people would type in programs from the magazine and run them. By modern standards the “games” that were distributed were incredibly primitive, often doing little more than demonstrating concepts in ways that programmer-users were inveigled to use as a model for larger projects, and Amazing Quest is in range for just such a “here’s how to write a procgen in C64 BASIC in 1984″ program. Only it wouldn’t have been called a “procgen,” but a “game,” in the lax sense that lets anything with any narrative tension, even merely the narrative tension resulting from a delay in seeing what the random outcome is, be called a “game.”
This is clearly one of the things that the formal presentation of the short randomized procgen is playing with: the disconnect between our notions of electronic fictionality in 1984 vs. electronic fictionality in 2020 is mirrored by the JavaScript-powered one-tab-in-a-web-browser C64 that runs the procgen program.
But there are other disconnects, as well, and one of these is the disconnect between a program that might have been an interesting basis for an article in, say, Family and Home Office Computing in the late ‘80s, on the one hand, and the rest of the kinds of entries in IFComp this year, and I think that, from the perspective of assigning the entry an IFComp judging score, “that’s an interesting experiment in minimalism” is not the same thing as “that was a fun game to play.”
Overall score: 5/10.
(Incidentally, I reimplemented Amazing Quest in Python, two different ways, here.)