Because It's Not There: Verbal Visuality and the Threat of Graphics in Interactive Fiction Aaron Kashtan University of Florida 4008 Turlington Hall PO Box 117310 Gainesville, FL 32611-7310 1-952-201-9009 [email protected] ABSTRACT can productively be understood by comparison to the aporias of In this paper I analyze two contemporary works of interactive other types of visual writing. fiction (IF), Nick Montfort’s Ad Verbum and Emily Short’s City In IF, room and object descriptions represent translations of the of Secrets, as examples of two contrasting ways in which IF reacts avatar's visual experience into words. One example is the to the perceived threat of computer graphics. In the post- description of the living room in Zork: commercial era of IF, graphics represent a factor that, without being acknowledged, has profoundly shaped the development of You are in the living room. There is a doorway to the the medium. Post-graphical works of IF may be distinguished east, a wooden door with strange gothic lettering to the according to how they respond to the threat or promise of west, which appears to be nailed shut, a trophy case, graphics. Ad Verbum’s response to graphics is to emphasize the and a large oriental rug in the center of the room. purely textual, and thus anti-graphical and anti-visual, aspects of Above the trophy case hangs an elvish sword of great the medium. The implication is that IF’s closest affinities are not antiquity. with visual prose but with printed works of procedural textuality, and that IF is a visual medium. By contrast, City of Secrets A battery-powered brass lantern is on the trophy case. activates a mode of visuality that depends less on immediate [2] presence than on emotional affect and imaginative participation. Short suggests that IF is a visual medium, but that it differs from This description lists all the visible exits from the room and the graphical video games in that its visuality depends on absence visible objects in the room. All these objects are “implemented,” meaning, in short, that the avatar can interact with them. The rather than presence. description mentions no objects that aren’t implemented, and doesn't fail to mention any visible objects that are implemented. Categories and Subject Descriptors The description neglects to mention that there's a trap door under K.8.0 [Personal Computing]: General – games. the rug, because the player isn't supposed to know the trap door is there; finding it is a puzzle. The player may know about the trap General Terms door before moving the rug (perhaps from having played the game Human Factors before), but this knowledge doesn't extend to the avatar. If the player tries to refer to the trap door before the avatar moves the rug, the game responds “You can’t see any trap door here!” [2] Keywords Interactive fiction, ekphrasis, word-image studies So a room description takes a visual experience which can't be accessed directly, since there are no graphics, and translates that visual experience into words. This lets player to back-translate 1. INTRODUCTION those words into his or her own images, so as to visualize the The basic premise of this paper is that interactive fiction, or IF, world his or her avatar is inhabiting. Such descriptions are also known as the text adventure game, is a visual medium which examples of the ancient rhetorical trope of ekphrasis, one can be usefully analyzed with the tools of word-image studies. definition of which is “a speech which leads one around […] This claim may seem counterintuitive since IF, by definition, is a bringing the subject matter vividly […] before the eyes” [qtd. in 7, genre which uses words rather than images to represent the world p. 23]. In contemporary literary theory the term refers primarily to of the game or program. Indeed, as we will see, current poems that describe works of art, but for ancient rhetoricians, scholarship on IF usually treats it as a primarily verbal and textual ekphrasis simply meant describing an absent visual scene vividly phenomenon, belonging to the canonical tradition of ergodic enough that an audience could see it as if it were present. The textuality. Yet I contend that IF is also descended from an ancient classic example of ekphrasis is Homer's description of the shield tradition of visual prose that extends from Homer’s shield of of Achilles. Richard Lanham notes that ekphrasis originated as a Achilles through Ruskin’s word-painting to contemporary replacement for the highly visual gestural langauge used by ekphrastic poetry. IF poses problems of word-image relations that ancient rhetoricians, and that in the computer era “ecphrasis is © Digital Arts and Culture, 2009. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission from the author. Digital Arts and Culture, December 12–15, 2009, Irvine, California, USA. once again coming into its own” [8, p. 34] now that it's possible to The player's goal in this game is to remove all the objects from a visually manipulate text and mix it with images. Yet the computer house belonging to the Wizard of Wordplay. Nearly all of the also affected the history of ekphrasis in another way, by making it game’s puzzles must be solved by entering commands according possible to create ekphrastic texts that could be interacted with. to various linguistic constraints. Some of these puzzles are in fact purely verbal or linguistic in nature, in that they involve no In ekphrastic literature, a running theme is the paragone, or the interaction on the part of the avatar with objects or spaces, only contest between words and images. Ekphrastic poems repeatedly manipulation of language. For example, on the first floor of the dwell on the simultaneous inferiority and superiority of words to mansion, the player encounters a little boy, Georgie, who refuses images: words can engage with conceptual issues that are difficult to give up his toy dinosaur unless the player can name more to represent in images, yet words cannot match the immediacy dinosaurs than Georgie can. Georgie knows an arbitrarily large and vividness of images. In an increasingly image-obsessed number of real dinosaur names, so the solution is to input fake culture, the question may arise as to whether the representation of dinosaur names – i.e. nonsense words ending in “saur” or “saurus” images in mere words is still a viable pursuit. – until Georgie gets frustrated and gives up. Since all the player For IF, this question is especially pressing because the purpose of has to do to solve this puzzle is think of nonsense words, it does the words in IF is to serve as the player's interface to a simulated not matter whether or how the player visualizes the space where gameworld. As a tool for this purpose, prose directly competes Georgie is located. with graphics. Concurrently with the rise of sophisticated Other puzzles in the game do force the avatar to interact with computer graphics in the 1980s, IF became commercially rooms and objects, but in order to make the avatar do so, the unviable and is now seen by most non-experts as an obsolete player has to satisfy certain linguistic constraints. For instance, the medium. For Espen Aarseth, this is natural because “images, game contains several “constrained rooms” where the output text especially moving images, are more powerful representations of consists entirely of words starting with a specific letter. One such spatial relations than texts, and therefore this migration from text room, the White Wardrobe, is described thus: to graphics is natural and inevitable” [1, p. 102]. By Aarseth's logic, the purpose of a game is to serve as a transparent window Wee warehouse warily warded wearable wares - when into an imagined space. According to what Bolter and Grusin call wares were within. Wan, whitewashed walls wait the logic of transparency [3], the game seeks to erase its own without woolens. Wooden, weathered wainscoting materiality and present the player with a vivid, sensuously present wobbles weakly. experience of existence in another world. For this purpose to be fulfilled, the gameworld must be presented with maximum visual Within: ... wooden weapon [9]. richness. Clearly games that translate the avatar's visual In this room the player must obey the same constraint. If the experience into text do all these things less effectively than games player enters a command containing a word that doesn't start with that display the avatar's visual experience onscreen. W, the parser replies “Wha? Wha? Withhold wrong words. Write IF still survives today thanks to the dedicated efforts of a group of wholesomely” [9]. To escape this room with the two objects in it, amateur programmers centered around the rec.arts and the player must think of words beginning with W that refer to the rec.games.int-fiction newsgroups. Yet for contemporary IF actions he or she wants the avatar to take. One solution is WIELD authors, graphics are an elephant in the room, a topic that may not WEAPON, then WHACK WAINSCOTING WITH WEAPON be directly discussed but can't be ignored. Authors of IF in the (wevealing a weird widget) then WIN WIDGET, then post-graphical era cannot avoid the question of why they should WITHDRAW.