infocom/articles/NYT83-text

(c) The New York Times BOOK REVIEW - May 8, 1983

READING AND WRITING
By Edward Rothstein

Participatory Novels

When involved in a particularly vexing mystery, Sherlock Holmes would
shoot a revolver into a wall, play his violin or take drugs. Hercule
Poirot would drink hot chocolate and wax his mustache. Lord Peter
Wimsey had his bottle of port and his attentive manservant.

And I have my own criminological habits. I am currently involved in
the Robner case. Spread before me are pills found near the body, a
photograph of the chalked outline of the cadaver, the lawyer's letter
about the will. But unlike my distinguished investigative
predecessors, I forswear a violin, hot chocolate and the temptation to
ring for my butler. I turn instead to the screen of my home computer.

For the Robner case, unlike those of the Red-headed League or Roger
Ackroyd, takes place in a different fictional medium. It is coded on a
5 1/4-inch magnetic disk used to store computer programs. The murder,
the characters and the setting are all part of a computer game called
Deadline.

"Tell me about your father," I type on the keyboard, hoping a feckless
suspect will confess to patricide. "Look, man," the words appear in
reply, "I'm not going to lie to you and tell you I loved him, right?
He got what ...." His voice trails off, accompanied by the gentle hum
of the computer's motor.

The investigation takes place on the screen through textual
descriptions that appear in response to my typed questions and
instructions.  "Fingerprint the teacup," I write, and receive the
results. "Answer the telephone." I type after it rings, hoping to
overhear an incriminating conversation. I shadow suspects, hide in
closets. And I am aided by evidence packaged with the computer disk --
the pills, the coroner's report, the photograph.

But I am not some forensic Pac-Man, proceeding through a pre-existent
maze. From my arrival at the Robner mansion, I am a character whose
actions affect the world I enter. I arrest a suspect only to find that
the grand jury isn't convinced by my evidence. I follow a suspect too
obviously, and he just retires to his room. My questions can lead to a
second murder -- and my carelessness to my own. But there is a unique
solution. And to find it, I must often start the case over,
re-experience it from different perspectives. The average complete
investigation lasts 20 hours; I have spent many more exploring the
program's intricate universe.

Deadline, in fact, is more like a genre of fiction than a game. It is
"published" by Infocom, a company founded by eight young M. I. T.
computer scientists in 1979. Infocom has been a major pioneer in such
games, which have been called "participatory novels," "interactive
fiction" and "participa-stories." The main author (and programmer) for
Deadline is Marc Blank, a 28-year-old vice president and co-founder of
the company.

The genre is not yet, of course, entirely flexible.  Deadline contains
25,O0O words of text, but my comments and questions must be kept
within the limits of a 600-word vocabulary and grammatically simple
sentences. Solving the case involves learning the genre's formal
rules; if I violate them, I am corrected. But as programming and
data-storage techniques advance, Mr. Blank expects interaction to
become more sophisticated, leading perhaps to the ultimate
participatory novel.

The form is already becoming popular, as computers become common in
homes. Thirty-five thousand copies of Deadline have been sold in two
years, at a list price of $49.95 each. The company's remarkable
adventure fantasies, known as the Zork Trilogy, have been even better
sellers. In 1982, Infocom sold about 100,000 copies of five different
"participa-stories" coded for 13 personal computer systems, the sales
yielding nearly $2 million in revenue.

Their success should come as no surprise. For their worlds also happen
to be the worlds of popular fiction -- the detective story, science
fiction, adventure and fantasy. These genres define worlds with their
own logic; they pose lucid ques- tions and possess clear narrative
easily adaptable to a computer. In 1927, for example, the Russian
formalist critic Vladimir Propp mapped out rules governing the
structure of Russian fairy tales in his "Morphology of the Folktale";
in 1965, they were programmed into a computer.

Infocom makes use of such forms, which have traditionally had
archetypal power, and tempers them with irreverent wit. In Zork, the
adventurer passes through a kingdom of magical and threatening
chambers in almost Odyssean fashion. The detective of Deadline must
also be a "man of many devices," interpreting signs, solving riddles.
The classic detective novel itself may be a 19th-century bourgeois
mythic tale, in which the detective -- an eccentric outside the social
order, armed with magical powers of reason -- restores the
transgressed boundaries of the social world.

Sitting at the computer, my goal is more humble -- just to restore my
composure. But a successful detective knows no rest. Stu Galley's The
Witness, to be released by Infocom next month, has just arrived,
complete with a detective gazette and the decadent atmosphere of Los
Angeles in 1938. "Storm clouds are swimming across the sky," the
computer tells me. "Your favorite pistol, a snub-nosed Colt .32, is
snug in its holster. "

"Come. Watson," I would type back in Holmesian fashion, if the program
could understand, "the game is afoot."