Nick Montfort is associate professor of digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Montfort has collaborated on the blog Grand Text Auto, the sticker novel Implementation, and 2002: A Palindrome Story. He writes poems, text generators, and interactive fiction such as Book and Volume and Ad Verbum. Most recently, he and Ian Bogost wrote Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009). Montfort also wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003) and co-edited The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003). Nick was gracious enough to answer my questions about his book, Twisty Little Passages.
MT: Your book, Twisty Little Passages, details the evolution of interactive fiction (IF). How influential do you feel interactive fiction was in shaping today’s adventure games?
NM: IF has been extremely influential -- it dominated commercial computer games in the early 1980s. In interactive fiction, people worked out the essentials of puzzles, fictional and game spaces, and characters in narrative games. Some people may know of IF's influence only indirectly, through other games. Even though some gamers and even some recent developers may know little about IF, the influence of those games is clear, whether it is recognized or not.
MT: How have graphics changed the nature of IF? Is there still a place for both?
NM: Infocom advertised "We stick our graphics where the sun don't shine!" and claimed, next to a picture of a brain, "We unleash the world's most powerful graphics technology." Of course, text is not actually superior to visual art in all ways: Bladerunner does some things that Philip K. Dick's novel couldn't do. But, similarly, there are some things that text can do very well -- reveal the internal, mental states of characters, for instance, and connect to literary traditions and the rhythms, sounds, and shapes of language. So it seems clear to me that graphics and text both can continue to contribute to computer games.
MT: We’ve considered using a “fake” AI like Eliza to power many of our NPCs on RetroMUD. Are there any noteworthy games that have recently advanced text-based interaction?
NM: In terms of bot-like interaction, the two games that come to mind aren't interactive fiction. One is Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic, and the other is Bot Colony, which hasn't been released yet. Beyond that -- even with the very limited "ask/tell" interface that is typical of interactive fiction, in Galatea, Emily Short presented a character with a very interesting conversational and emotional model. A more advanced conversational model is presented in Alabaster. And, I have to mention Façade, by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, an interactive drama that has a very effective free-form natural-language interface.
MT: The notion of inhabiting an avatar was in its infantile form in early IF – with the advent of graphical avatars, that has changed tremendously. Does this help role immersion or hinder it?
NM: Which pieces of interactive fiction have infantile avatars, and which graphical games have sophisticated ones? Infocom's Suspended, by Michael Berlyn, offers five different robots who each have different capabilities and different perspectives on the world they inhabit together. I've never seen anything like that in a graphical adventure. You could say that avatars in graphical adventures have better visual representations, but what would that tell you? That's like saying that text game avatars are defined using more words. I think there's a lot to be learned about inhabiting characters in both types of games, and I'm not at all sure that all text-based games are more primitive in this respect than graphical games are.
MT: With the notion of fantasy rooted in cooperative play (starting with Lord of the Rings and extending through MUDs and MMORPGs), where does IF fit? Or is it the personal isolation, trapped in one’s imagination so to speak, that makes it more suitable for horror and conspiracy-style settings?
NM: In standard interactive fiction, you don't have a group of people, each of whom control a character. But that doesn't mean that people play IF by themselves. They can play together online, sharing the same session; they can play together in person, sitting in front of the same screen; they can play "by themselves" but consult comments on forums and newsgroups and look at walkthroughs that other people have written; and they can play in their own session but communicate with others by email, by phone, in person, or by other means.
MT: Combat on RetroMUD is a scrolling, spamming mess of “you hit, he hits” – an inelegant parallel to graphical games where avatars swing or fire weapons at each other. However, it seems this is necessary to maintain a player’s engagement in combat. Is there a place for turn-based combat in IF, or is it better suited for a more abstract, narrative form of conflict?
NM: I don't know of any recent, quality games that have turn-based combat. But maybe there's an opening there.
MT: What are you working on right now?
NM: I'm completing an interactive fiction development system, Curveship. This system has been used for research purposes already, and I'm trying to get it to a point where it can be meaningfully released and used by researchers, IF authors, and those teaching narrative theory. The system allows the telling of a story (not just the underlying story world) to vary during a game. More information is available at http://curveship.com.
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