Not Stopping Believing

You wake slowly, sit up in your bunk, look around the tent, and try to ignore the pounding in your head, the cottony taste in your mouth, and the ache in your stomach. The droning of a plane’s engine breaks the stillness and you realize that things outside are quiet—too quiet. You know that this can mean only one thing: your workers have deserted you.

They complained over the last few weeks, grumbling about the small pay and the lack of food, and your inability to locate the pyramid. And after what you stupidly did yesterday, trying to make them work on a holy day, their leaving is understandable. The Professor’s map was just an ancient map—as worthless as an ice cube in the Arctic without an instrument fine enough to accurately measure longitude and latitude. You knew that the site was nearby. You dug, and you ordered the workers to dig, even without the box. As you listen to the plane and rub your aching eyes, you pray they left you supplies enough to find the pyramid and to survive, and that the plane’s carrying the long-overdue box.

This is the opening from Infidel by Michael Berlyn, an engaging story about desperation, ingenuity and redemption set deep in the Sahara. It’s a story that demands a great deal of participation from the reader, putting you in the shoes of this poor guy sentenced to a slow, blistering death in the desert. How does Berlyn successfully suck you in to the story? By making the story a game.

Infidel was a piece of interactive fiction (IF) published back in 1983 by Infocom, a now-defunct software company based for a time here in nearby Cambridge, Massachusetts. IF is a story that you play. After getting a chunk of the story, like the one above, the game asks the reader what to do next. Based on your input, which is typed in with phrases like this, on a command line…

>EXAMINE JEWEL-ENCRUSTED SWORD

…the story/game unfolds dynamically. Kind of like a digital choose-your-own-adventure book, but with much wider array of choices.

I loved these games as a kid, primarily because I was/am a complete nerd. But also because they were way more fun than making the green block attack the blue square on my lo-fi Atari. The Infocom games didn’t have the reflex-driven adrenaline rush, but the worlds they created were far more immersive. Alas, as graphics got cooler, Infocom became irrelevant and was eventually absorbed by Activision in 1986.

Hit With a Wave of Nerdstalgia

A few years ago, while digging through my parents’ attic, I found a bunch of my old Infocom game boxes. Infocom packaged all their games with all sorts of cool knick-knacks, called “feelies;” Infidel came with a treasure map, an explorer’s diary and a hieroglyph rubbing, all essential to solving the game’s puzzles.

Here's a shot of the "feelies" included in Infidel. You can see a detailed library of Infocom game box contents and cover art over at the Infocom Gallery.

FEB 9 UPDATE: I’ve also started writing my own IF game, Shark Tank. Start reading more about it here.

With the rising popularity of e-readers and digital books, and Kindle opening up their system to app development, I’m thinking IF might see a resurgence. As it is, IF has staked a small but stable claim in the gamer community, with popular sites like GameSetWatch, Jay Is Games, and Play This Thing! all having dedicated IF content. A good number of IF writers will be attending and speaking at PAX East, a gaming conference being held here in Boston, March 26 to 28, 2010.

Enough Talk! Get Playing

• There’s a great IF intro/tutorial article [PDF] by Emily Short that’s worth reading if you’re new to interactive fiction.

You’ll need an app like Zoom for Mac, Frotz for PC, or Frotz for iPhone [app store] to play game files. All free. For games (also all free), try Baf’s Guide to the IF Archive. Baf has a listing of the winners of the XYZZY Awards; it’s one of the IF community’s juried shows, and a good place to start.

Finding the old Infocom games like Infidel will prove to be a bit more difficult, due to Activision’s hateful resistance to releasing the games as open source. Use your Google powers cleverly, and by the grace of Allah, you may be able to find them.