Category Archives: Issue 61.5

And Your 2014 XYZZY Awards Go To…

Another year has come and gone, and with it have come a year’s worth of interactive fiction works, across more mediums and formats than ever. But only a few can become XYZZY nominees, and of those, only a few of those can take home the GRAND PRIZE.

SPAG will have further details, quotes and statistics on the XYZZYs in Issue 62 — look for it out next week! — but for now, here’s what you’re really here for: the list of winners, after the cut. Congratulations again to all who were awarded and nominated, as well as all this year’s voters! Continue reading

My SPAG Valentines!

Yes, that’s right — your Valentines are finally* in! (Love has no season, why’s there gotta be a separate day for it, grumblegrumpexcuse.) Thanks for the response! We have three entries, and befitting the broad nature of modern-day IF, they are all in different forms: one in Twine, one in Inform, and one in text. They are below:

Valentines are hosted via Dropbox, except which is in sonnet form, and below:

Bravo to the scribes of Inform 7:
like Prometheus’ theft of fire,
such a gift could be sent down from heaven —
advent crowed by troubadour and crier.

Thinking thoughts out loud is all one’s needing
to create a universe uniquely
yours — and all your furtive fruitful seeding
blooms in others’ gamboling obliquely.

Now must I kowtow upon the floor.  You
gave us all the tools for work and playing
freely and without a catch, therefore: to
Mister Nelson’s crew, here’s much hooraying!

For a gift, you see, that keeps on giving;
text adventures’ triage back to living.

Thanks everyone! We hope to see you again next Valentine’s Day, with even more author and developer love.

* Your editor is clearly the Gretchen Weiners in this scenario.

My Compy Valentine: A Valentine’s Mini-Festival, Sponsored by SPAG!

Valentine’s Day is a time for giving thanks! Kind of like Thanksgiving, but with more baby animals, puns, and painful rhyming verse.

That’s why we’re seeking “SPAG Valentines”: very short IF works in which IF WRITERS show their appreciation to the DEVELOPERS who make their creative works possible. Think of it like a cross between a mini-comp and a speed-IF.

Here are your instructions:

DO:
Choose your Valentine: anyone in the community who helped create your favorite IF language, interpreter, development interface, extension, script, macro, CSS theme or any other component you’ve used in your IF work (including works in progress)
Use IF tools to create a Valentine’s Day greeting for your Valentine
Use your development system / language of choice
Use your dubious poetic skills to praise the fruits of your Valentine’s programming labor
Somehow incorporate your Valentine’s work into the greeting itself, if possible
Send your completed Valentine’s Day greeting or a link to spag.mag.if@gmail.com by February 15 (as we know, the big day itself is not one for scrambling for deadlines)

DO NOT:
Objectify your Valentine
Reveal long-hidden romantic passion for your Valentine
Miss the Feb. 15 deadline to submit your Valentine’s Day greeting!

Issue 61.5: Letter from the Editor, Masthead, and Call for Submissions!

Today is Groundhog Day. I’ve been holed up in a coffee shop in New York all day, and for the past several hours all that’s been visible out the window is static-thick snow; I can’t imagine what a groundhog, with its slush-eye view, would see. Now Groundhog Day, the movie, is a rather IF-like conceit: if at first you don’t succeed, try, try forever until you win the story; perhaps no movie except Run Lola Run has been the source of more IF comparisons. So really there was no better day to officially relaunch SPAG!

We’re biased at SPAG, in that we’ve worked for several decades(!) now toward the preservation of IF; but we believe that interactive fiction is one of the most dynamic artforms out there now. Never before have there been so many authors working in so many different forms, pushing the limits of what IF can be and how it can reach people. The medium truly is, in the perhaps regrettable words of the New York Times, “having a moment”; and we want to be there to help shape and document it.

For our relaunch, we’re bringing you a mini-issue, containing:

a SPAG Specifics entry by the ever-thoughtful Victor Gijsbers!

a brief review of the Year that Was by your editor-in-chief!

– The letter from the editor you’re currently reading. Mathematically speaking, that means my verbiage takes up a whopping two-thirds of this issue, so without further editorial ado I’ll turn it over to the part you’re really here for.

MASTHEAD!

SPAG has been a one-man show for most of its existence, an era that ends today. If you’d like to get involved in SPAG on the editorial level, please get in touch! Here’s who you’ll be working with, either way:

Editor-in-Chief: Katherine Morayati

Katherine Morayati is an IF author and critic; her credits include Broken Legs (second place, 2009 IF Competition) and a swath of other, smaller works and reviews. In her other life, she’s a music critic who writes as Katherine St. Asaph and helps run a mini-constellation of blogs.

Managing Editor: Matt Carey

Matt Carey is a longtime IF follower and the author of a number of acclaimed (pseudonymous) works, both parser and Twine; he’s also the former editor of the science-fiction zine Labyrinth Inhabitant.

Senior Editor/Webmaster: Dannii Willis

Dannii Willis is the previous editor of SPAG, the maintainer of Parchment and the developer of Kerkerkruip. He hopes to one day produce a work of IF himself, but for now his creativity is directed toward the ones and zeros of technology.

CALL FOR PITCHES!

The next full issue of SPAG will come out in April! and its theme will be: Society/Preservation/Text/Adventure. Interpret this theme as strictly or as loosely as you’d like, and feel free to deviate, or not, as you will. Some ideas, to guide you — perhaps you’ll think of more:

SOCIETY: Interviews with IF figures, prominent, niche or otherwise interesting; guides to setting up IF-related events in your city; outreach; coverage of local events; parts or whole of the IF community, whether writing or dev communities; compelling personal essays if you’ve got those sort of chops.

PRESERVATION: The storage and rediscovery of older IF works, either within the IF community or Internet archival efforts; the canon, and everything surrounding; efforts to re-release adventure and/or IF works; replayability/rereadability.

TEXT: IF’s crossover into other literary forms, such as poetry, flash fiction, scriptwriting or traditional hypertext; the art and science of writing IF prose; IF in translation; books and IF; static fiction authors’ involvement, hypothetical or not, in IF.

ADVENTURE: Puzzle design; design tutorials; IF and the graphic adventure community; experimental IF; adventures in the still-largely-uncharted land that is commercial IF; generally, a catch-all for whatever weird, niche or enthusiast ideas you may have.

OTHER, NON-THEME STUFF: Did I mention “design tutorials”? We want those. Another thing we want: traditionally, since its inception in 1996, SPAG has run reviews of interactive fiction, particularly the entrants in the annual IF Competition. It’s never been the only contender in this arena; Usenet gave way to IFDB gave way to forums and blogs. So to avoid spewing into a flood of spew, we are going to look for two specific kinds of reviews:

  • SPAG Specifics. In-depth reviews of a piece, preferably about one salient aspect. Why is this good? How does it work? Victor’s piece, in this mini-issue, is a nice guide.
  • Super-brief capsule reviews of the comp field. Fun is good, irreverent is good, supportive is good. Christopher Huang’s Breakfast Review is the crème de la crème (in coffee, with a pastry) of this sort of thing; while I don’t advise you rip off his gimmick, that’s what we’re looking for here.

Send all pitches to spag.mag.if@gmail.com, along with a brief bio of yourself, and writing samples if you prefer. Also appreciated: a rough sense of word count (we’re an online publication and flexible, but we’re probably not gonna run 50,000-word novellas, nor 140-character tweets, unless stated above) and an estimated time of completion (aim for February or March, leave time for line edits, follow your gut.)

We highly encourage submissions from experienced IF critics as well as newcomers, and we are particularly interested in applicants who are under-represented in IF writing. However, all are welcome, including those who have previously expressed interest in writing for the website. To paraphrase a call for submissions from one of my old haunts: We are not so interested in anything you have ever written anywhere ever. All we care about is how well you can play our game.

P.S.

There’s really no place to plug social media links while maintaining the flow of an article, so I’ll put it here: we are on Twitter, at @spagazine! Follow us, retweet us, swell our numbers to the trending heavens.

SPAG Specifics: Puzzles come to life in “The Hours”

An analysis of the puzzle mechanics in Robert Patten’s The Hours, by Victor Gijsbers.

SPAG Specifics are in-depth discussions of IF works and can contain frequent spoilers. We recommend that you first play the works discussed if you are bothered by spoilers.

The HoursThere is a scene halfway through Robert Patten’s The Hours, from the 2011 IF Competition, where the protagonist meets Maurice, a scientist who designs time travel equipment. In keeping with genre conventions, Maurice’s laboratory has just exploded; and in keeping with other genre conventions, he is all too willing to tell and even demonstrate to us how it happened. We already learned in an earlier scene that one travels through time by wearing a “tick,” which only works when submerged in water. Maurice is working on ticks that will allow you to travel to the future. But current test results are not encouraging, as he is about to show us. Maurice gives the player character a glass of water, takes a tick that is programmed to travel into the future, and drops it into the glass, where it promptly disappears – as it should. So what’s the problem?

“Traveling into the undefined gives off a great deal of heat and disrupts molecular cohesion. I can’t send a person into the future — when the tick arrives, it explodes.”

Maurice gestures to the ruins of the door.

“Just like last time … But how do I know my last experiment was not a fluke, do you ask?”

(You weren’t going to ask, actually.)

“Because I’ve done it more than once, and I only bring the ticks a half-minute into the future! In the same place! In this case, in the same glass. And every time, kablooey!”

Terror drains Maurice’s face. “Oh.”

>

This is a lethal situation. If you don’t type exactly the right command at that prompt, you will be blown into smithereens by an exploding tick. But this is not an old-school IF puzzle, where you have to try dozens of moves to slowly work out the solution. On the contrary, it is almost inconceivable that you do not immediately and automatically type in one of the few commands that will save your life.

> drop glass

You throw the glass. It busts in midair.

This is a satisfying moment. You understood the author, you felt drawn into the scene, you did that which was obvious to you, and the game responded in exactly the way that you hoped.

But given that the puzzle was trivially easy, how can it be satisfying? Doesn’t the satisfaction of solving a puzzle depend on the difficulty of that puzzle? Suppose that I give you the following two puzzles; in both of them, the aim is to regroup the letters such that the name of an animal appears:

  1. elehpant
  2. roamlldai

We can agree that the second puzzle, while perhaps not particularly interesting, gives at least some satisfaction when solved. The first, on the other hand, is barely fit to be called a puzzle at all. You know the solution as soon as you see the puzzle, and the knowledge does not satisfy.

Let us compare The Hours to All Things Devours, a game from the 2004 IF Competition that also revolves around time travel. The puzzles in All Things Devours are hard. You must wrestle with a complicated system until you come to understand its rules; you then need to come to several critical insights; and finally you must combine them in smart ways to achieve your goals without causing a lethal time travel paradox. Congratulations! Solving these puzzles is a real achievement, and it feels that way.

Now look at The Hours. If it stood to All Things Devours as our puzzle 1 stands to our puzzle 2, then The Hours ought to be a particularly unsatisfying game, and ought to have been more satisfying if its puzzles had been more difficult. But neither of these conclusions is true. Dropping the glass feels good, even though it is no achievement at all, and if the dropping of the glass hadn’t been clued so well, if the player would have had to search for the right command, this might have been a frustrating moment in the game rather than a moment of small joy.

There must, then, be a kind of satisfaction that is independent of achieving a difficult goal: a kind dependent on the puzzles being trivial. But what kind of satisfaction could that be?

One option is that in interactive fiction, where getting stuck is always a possibility, knowing what to do to advance the game is in itself a pleasurable experience. The scene where I drop the glass would then be satisfying simply because it is crystal clear what I need to do. But this theory is highly problematic. Imagine a travel scene in which one needs to follow the always present road signs to one’s destination. At every point I know what to do:

> x sign

The sign saying “Stockholm” points north.

> n

You arrive at a small mill. There is a sign here.

That scene would certainly not be interesting. Why not? Is it simply that this scene is repetitive, and requires me to do the same actions over and over again? No – while repetition would obviously rob the glass scene in The Hours of its power to satisfy, the travel scene would be boring and unsatisfactory even if it consisted of only one location to traverse.

Before discussing another, more interesting option, I want to talk about the final puzzle in The Hours, the one for which the glass dropping scene is only the preparation. Near the end of the game, the player character is captured by her original self, Alpha, and strapped to a table where her organs will be ‘harvested’. Alpha arrogantly tells you about her genius and how she will achieve eternal youth because of all the bodies cloned through time travel that are at her disposal.

At this point of the game the player is completely helpless; you cannot take any action that will allow you to escape. Of course, you don’t know that, and so you are going to do what a player in such a situation will always do: check your inventory and see whether you’re carrying anything that might help. You have only one thing: a tick set for the future, contained in a jewelry box. Unfortunately, that isn’t going to help you. After all, ticks only activate in water. So you dismiss the possibility, and look for other way to escape, while Alpha keeps on droning about her superiority.

At that point, another captured clone, Omega, causes a fire. This text appears on the screen:

A flaming mass of rock shoots into the operating room. The impact flips the operating table, severing the straps.

The sprinklers above spray a torrent of water into the cavern.

You tumble to the floor. The jewelry box pops open. The tick lights up in response to the water, and is gone.

The fires are out, but now everything is drenched. The robots have stopped moving.

Alpha still has her scalpel, and it looks like she’s going to use it on you anyway. All you have is an empty jewelry box.

>

All I have is an empty jewelry box? Ha! Without a moment’s hesitation, and with a growing grin on my face, I type the one command that will let me survive:

> throw box at alpha

You throw the empty box at Alpha. She catches it in surprise.

The rest, of course, is a fiery explosion, and victory. Again the puzzle is trivial. The whole game has been designed with this moment in mind, to make it obvious to me that throwing the box at my enemy will cause her death. And again the moment is very satisfying, even more satisfying then the one with the glass, because this time I don’t just save my own life, but also defeat my primary and hated antagonist.

So what is it that makes these scenes so enjoyable? My suggestion is that it is something I would like to call immersive agency and which consists in (a) a sudden identification with the player character that (b) leads to recognition and performance of the (or an) action that (c) is gleefully acknowledged by the game to be the (or a) right one. Let’s work that out that step by step.

(a) Normally, the thinking of the player can be quite distant from that of the player character. For instance, nobody believes that the protagonist of an interactive fiction is in the habit of methodically examining every object in the room. As another example, when the player is stuck mulling over a puzzle, it need not be fictionally true that the character is stuck in the same way – the entire fictional time of all our attempts to solve the puzzle may be just a single second, and the character may not even realise that there is a puzzle to be solved. But in the scenes I picked from The Hours, this gap disappears. The player and the player character have the exact same realisation at the exact same moment; and this gives the feeling that we really step into the scene. For a moment, our thoughts and feelings coincide with those of the protagonist.

(b) The sudden insight of the player and the player character takes the form of knowledge that a certain action must be taken; and the player and player character both have the power to perform this action (on their respective levels of reality). Thus we do not merely step into the scene, we take control of it.

(c) In all collaborative story telling, control over the story is only real if it is acknowledged by others. In improvisational theatre, I need the other actors to pick up on my ideas and run with them. In a roleplaying game, my fellow players must agree that I had the authority to make the claims I just did; otherwise, they will not become part of our shared fiction. And in a piece of interactive fiction, the program must respond in a way that shows it has understood my action and has changed the state of the world accordingly (if such a change is required). By allowing me to take the action, and by describing it in such a way that it becomes clear that this was the action I was meant to take and that it has the result that I had anticipated, the game acknowledges my control.

These three elements together constitute a form of agency that is not as ubiquitous in interactive fiction as one might naïvely think. Much of our interaction with games comes in the form of exploration, puzzle solving, or decision making. It is only with a small minority of our actions that we take control of the action in the way I just described in (b) and (c); and even then, it is rarely the case that we have the sudden feeling of identification described in (a). But this type of agency, when it is achieved, is very satisfying. Perhaps more than other types it really immerses us into the fiction, if only for a moment, and allows us to experience almost first-hand that element of human experience that interactive fiction ought to be particularly good at representing: action.

Thus, immersive agency is one way of fulfilling the old promise that “You control the story”. It gives us the experience of acting out the actions that determine the narrative. As such, it is a welcome addition to that other way of fulfilling the promise: giving the player choices that change the outcome of the story – the kind of experience that Alabaster, Floatpoint, Fate and Blue Lacuna have attempted to give us. (These different experiences can perhaps be linked to what in roleplaying theory has been called “actor stance” and “author stance”, but that is a topic for another essay.)

What makes The Hours interesting from a design perspective is how the entire game has been set up to enable several moments where immersive agency becomes possible. I discern two major lessons. First, the necessity of detailed preparation that allows the player to perceive non-standard actions as obviously the right ones. The way that the glass scene sets up the jewelry box scene is an excellent example of this. Second, the necessity of distracting the player. The Hours gives us an elaborate and somewhat dizzying time travel story with several characters that turn out to be clones of each other, with alternate realities, and so on … none of which is terribly important to the narrative, but all of which keeps us busy so that we haven’t been thinking about exploding ticks for a while when the moment comes that we need to think about them again. Without this distraction, the player might see what is going to happen too clearly; and she might then feel too manipulated to enjoy the control when it is finally given to her. But now she has been spending her mental energy on keeping track of the story, and the moment of agency comes as a sudden and surprising present.

In conclusion: extremely trivial puzzles can be very satisfying, if they are used to create moments of immersive agency. Given that I have been very critical about the ideal of immersion in the past, and have doubted its ability to give much satisfaction, this conclusion comes as something of a surprise to me.

The Year that Was

Sentiment on the Internet seems to be that 2014 was a bad year. Perhaps so. In IF-land, however, 2014 was one of the most exciting years in a decade that’s been full of them. Simply put, IF’s hasn’t had this large an audience and this vibrant a field of creators since the 1980s. A brief rundown of The Year that Was:

February 14: IndieCade East enters its second year at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. (The author, who lived in Astoria for years, takes a perverse sort of pride in the fact that New York’s IF events these days, largely take place in Manhattan and Queens, and not in Brooklyn.) While not an IF-only event, interactive fiction or IF-adjacent works showcased included Elegy for a Dead World, Ice-Bound and the excellently titled Sext Adventure.

April 6: The 18th annual XYZZY Awards ceremony was held, as always, on ifMUD! Some facts about the 2013 XYZZYs:

2013 is the second year in a row, after 2012, in which the majority of XYZZY Award winners were women. Part of this can be attributed to the rise of Twine – but not all; Coloratura and Olly Olly Oxen Free are both traditional parser works.

2013 is the year of the coolest thing ever: the acceptance speech for Trapped in Time, a PDF CYOA, was also a PDF CYOA. This is a fact. It is in no way opinion.

2013 has the best out-of-context Best Individual Puzzle, dethroning Violet’s  “disconnecting the Internet” (oh, how puzzling):  “creating the meat monster,” from Coloratura. This also is a fact. Indisputable, cold fact. Nothing about it is opinion.

May 11: Results came in for Spring Thing, an annual competition traditionally intended for longer, more experimental, critically meaty works – a preview of Aaron Reed’s epic Blue Lacuna lived there, as did Victor Gijsbers’ The Baron. 2014 was no exception: winner The Price of Freedom was polished, expansive in story, and part one of an ambitious trilogy — something surprisingly rare in the IF world. Spring Thing’s returning next year as a festival and showcase; and if you are reading this, there’s still time for you to concoct an idea!

July 6: Interactive fiction, according to The New York Times, has a moment. As we all know, interactive fiction has had a lot of moments! You’ve read about several here. But this year, IF was so presumably momentous to merit a mention in the Grey Lady; despite a baffling swipe at one author’s prose from a writer who thunk the clunker “Interactive fiction, which once went by the name ‘text adventure’,” it was a hard-won piece of visibility for IF in one of the most prestigious outlets in the world. And it wasn’t the NYT’s only time this year covering IF; the New York Times Magazine ran a full-length piece on Twine in November.

July 31: 80 Days, a piece by Inkle, is released for iOS (its Android counterpart arrived in December); it’s one of the rare IF works to receive widespread critical acclaim, even being praised by The Telegraph as one of the best novels of the year. (That’s novels. As in, DeFoe, James, Austen stuff.)

September 13: Boston’s Festival of Independent Games has traditionally been a haven for IF enthusiasts (who tend to be independent and into games); this year featured a live playthrough of IFcomp winner Coloratura and tutorials in Inform and Twine.

October 30: Hadean Lands, Andrew Plotkin’s five-years-in-the-making magnum opus, is finally released. It’s by far the most expansive piece of interactive fiction the scene’s seen in years, and the sort of alchemy of worldbuilding and puzzlecrafting that’s not just difficult, but Zarfian-difficult, to get this right.

November 8: WordPlay, run by the Hand Eye Society, enters its second year in Toronto. Every year the IF community has something like a summit, and this year Canada was it; the event featured a live reading of Aisle, premieres of works by Deirdra “Squinky” Kiai and Porpentine, a talk by Plotkin on the aforementioned Hadean Lands and an entire, usually-packed room showcasing IF and IF-adjacent works, of all kinds.

November 16: The Interactive Fiction Competition announces its winners. 42 authors entered – historically, a high-water mark – and the top five was remarkably diverse: Hunger Daemon, a traditional Lovecraftian-lampoon parser work; Creatures Such as We, a space dating sim using ChoiceScript; Jacqueline, Jungle Queen!, a parser romp made in Quest; AlethiCorp, a surveillance satire with an entire Web interface; and With Those We Love Alive, a multimedia-enhanced Twine piece. They’re all beyond worth your time.

December 22: Twine 2.0, the long-awaited second release of the hypertext tool, is released. Long in the works – it was previewed at No Show Conference in 2013 – the new system notably adds browser-based support for creating Twine pieces.