top expert

Considering the origins of interiority in Interactive Fiction.

a warning.

This essay completely and explicitly spoils the content of Joe Mason’s In the End. It should also be noted that the work in question contains no content warnings for its severe and explicit depiction of mental illness and suicide. Please consider whether or not it would affect you adversely.

no puzzles, no game.

Adam Cadre’s Photopia rightly enjoys canonical status as the first truly successful–at least in terms of critical consensus–instance of “puzzle-less” or “puzzle-light” parser game. One might place Steve Meretzky’s A Mind Forever Voyaging there, but I think that it is without puzzles in the same way that Kierkegaard is an existentialist: akin, aligned, and precedential. In Meretzky, there is an invisible scoring system that tracks the dystopic observations of its protagonist Perry Simm. While it is a game of subjective qualities, said qualities are unambiguously gamified. Moreover, the climax of A Mind Forever Voyaging is a puzzle of “things” in the old, Zorkian sense. Devices are turned off and on, a timer ticks toward the player’s destruction, and success conditions, unlike those determined by the scoring system, are narrow to the point of singularity.

It’s Photopia, then, that is the first successful game in its sparsely-populated genre. I’ve expressed my affection for it, publicly, on many occasions. It’s the kind of game that brings that out in people. After all, Photopia is presently the most-rated game at the Interactive Fiction Database. People love it, and, more than that, they want to tell people about it.

In 1996, no one was lining up around the block to express affection for Joe Mason’s In the End, an insistently glum work about one person’s terminal battle with despair. It ranked a less-than-middling 15th in that year’s annual Interactive Fiction Competition (or IF Comp, as so many call it) out of a field of 26. In the months preceding the competition, Mason had been evangelizing on behalf of IF without puzzles on Usenet, but it was an idea that had been met with skepticism. These conversations weren’t motivated by empty promotion: Mason was by all appearances quite earnest, convinced that Interactive Fiction could offer experiences that were not rooted in solving mechanical problems. The “about” text that accompanied the IF Comp release captures the spirit of his aesthetic ambitions:

So I have presented a world to explore – not because it is necessary to explore the world in order to solve problems encountered in it, but simply for the sake of exploring, finding its nuances, and discovering what drives it. And, hopefully, finding out what it can tell us about our own world.

While several reviewers attempted to meet In the End where it was (cf “editorial reviews” linked here), it is mostly forgotten today. Nevertheless, because of the conversations that Mason and his work promoted in the wider community, the concept of “puzzle-less” IF became a more and more pressing question of craft. IF without mechanical problems remained controversial for years, with its possibility presented as an open question as late as the Design Manual 4 version of Graham Nelson’s “The Craft of the Adventure” (2001). Even if In the End cannot be considered a success in terms of audience appreciation, it served to launch and further vital investigations into unexplored possibilities in interactive fiction.

inside job.

Less discussed, but just as important, is Mason’s focus on the interior life of the protagonist of In the End. There had been few–if any–excursions into the interior lives of characters suffering from what seems to be severe clinical depression. Mason may be even more of a trailblazer in this regard, as it is quite common to see contemporary authors explore the interiority of characters, mentally ill or not. Deemphasizing the Zorkian world model of things created space for the treatment of subjective experiences. While Photopia absolutely does explore the emotional lives of characters, its success is ultimately of a different kind.

In the End is also a notable first in terms of representation for the mentally ill. While the protagonist’s depression may feel underdeveloped at times, that seeming lack of vividness may, in fact, seem relatable to many. Nevertheless, the conclusion, which requires that the player enter the command “kill me,” comes across as a rather spectacular overexertion. How can this conclusion, a kind of sprain, be explained? Perhaps, even though it was possible to imagine interactive fiction without puzzles, a work without a decisive and victorious end-state, which this conclusion ironically mimics, remained undreamt. The writing, while capable, does not meet the considerable challenge of its subject. It is inevitable that some readers will object to the way suicide is depicted therein, and such concerns are completely and utterly valid.

Still, in a dialectical sense, the failure of In the End is, in terms of its characterization of mental illness, at least different from the kind of lurid set-dressing sometimes seen in media then and now. Depression is not a metaphor here, nor is it a way to invest an unrelated subject with unearned seriousness. It is, rather, the thing itself. While authors would continue chipping away at the problem of puzzle-less interactive fiction, it would be years before such degrees of interiority would appear in widely-read and well-regarded works.

But the advent of Twine is a story for another day.