Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction And
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Command Lines: 1 Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Jeremy Douglass UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Committee in charge: Professor Alan Liu, Chair Professor Rita Raley Jeremy Douglass 2 Professor William Warner December 2007 dedicated to my grandparents Charles and Norma Keller Enid and Malcolm Douglass your love made everything possible ABSTRACT Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media by Jeremy Douglass The Interactive Fiction (IF) genre describes text-based narrative experiences in which a person interacts with a computer simulation by typing text phrases (usually commands in the imperative mood) and reading software-generated text responses (usually statements in the second person present tense). Re-examining historical and contemporary IF illuminates the larger fields of electronic literature and game studies. Intertwined aesthetic and technical developments in IF from 1977 to the present are analyzed in terms of language (person, tense, and mood), narrative theory (Iser's gaps, the fabula / sjuzet distinction), game studies / ludology (player apprehension of rules, evaluation of strategic advancement), and filmic representation (subjective POV, time-loops). Two general methodological concepts for digital humanities analyses are developed in relation to IF: implied code, which facilitates studying the interactor's mental model of an interactive work; and frustration aesthetics, which facilitates analysis of the constraints that structure interactive experiences. IF works interpreted in extended "close interactions" include Plotkin's Shade (1999), Barlow's Aisle (2000), Pontious's Rematch (2000), Foster and Ravipinto's Slouching Towards Bedlam (2003), and others. Experiences of these works are mediated by implications, frustrations, and the limiting figures of their protagonists. Plain-Text Edition This plain text-edition of Command Lines omits footnotes, figures, and bold/italics. It simplifies tables, and moves traditional front-matter to the end of the main document in order to aid content accessibility. A full-content edition is freely available from jeremydouglass.com and ProQuest/UMI Dissertation Publishing. Command Lines by Jeremy Douglass is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. All charts and diagrams in Command Lines are the original work of the author unless otherwise noted; these are hereby dedicated to the public domain, useable for any purpose whatsoever. Full copyright acknowledgments are listed in the end-matter. Table of Contents * Foreword: Foreclosure and Interactive Fiction * Chapter 1: The Command Line and the Second Person * Chapter 2: The Implied Code: IF as mental model, mystery, and tradition * Chapter 3: The Aesthetics of Error: IF expectation and frustration * Chapter 4: Minimal Interactivity: IF defined at its limits * Appendix A: Rematch, the final move Jeremy Douglass 3 * Glossary * Acknowledgement * Vita * Full Table of Contents * Figures * Works Cited Foreword: Foreclosure and Interactive Fiction This study aspires to increase the awareness and appreciation of interactive fiction in the new media arts and the humanities. To that end it forwards a few general theories of that command line genre, as well as a number of exemplary contemporary works worthy of close study. The theories generally focus on how interactive fiction is experienced as a phenomenon of discovery and understanding; the examples highlight how contemporary works have explored and refined this mode of play with the player's knowledge. One consequence of these arguments is that much is made of analyzing experiences as they are discovered. Yet if you have not already explored a variety of interactive fiction (and most people have not), this puts the examples in the awkward position of murdering to dissect the process of exploration and discovery. This foreword's meditation on spoilers and foreclosure serves both as a gentle warning to potential readers of this study and as a brief discussion of what in this situation is unique to the given subject of interactive fiction works. 'Spoilers' are statements that reveal the crucial details of fictional media to potential audiences. These details may be of any kind, and indeed the effect may be undesired (as with a review that reveals some climactic secret) or desirable (as with a players guide to a quest video game). Regardless, the effects are most acutely felt whenever they preempt the progressive revelation of the work, often by resolving some central mystery before it can be engaged, whether in drama, literature, cinema or new media. How might Birnam wood move against Macbeth? Who committed the murder on the Orient Express? What happened to Luke Skywalker's father? How can the Prince of Persia defeat his shadow-self? For the uninitiated, the true danger is not that answers might reduce the pleasures of revelation, but that answers might excise revelation entirely. Wherever questions are fundamental to the experience of the work, answers prevent a questing motion of the mind that the work might otherwise encourage, and thus answers prevent the work itself. It is normal for mysteries in art to end in discoveries, as energy accumulates around the gaps in the mind between knowns, remaining potential until, in a sudden synaptic arc, a connection is made: closure. A spoiler is merely a special type of closure, which I will term foreclosure. External and prior rather than internal and concurrent, foreclosures perform in themselves the act of resolving the gap, and in doing so preempt the reader's performance. The site of potential energy is short-circuited before engagement with the work even begins. While the potential for foreclosure is implicit any time the uninitiated consider a work from a distance, the concept of the "spoiler" as a threat to experience is most relevant addressing potential audiences, as do book and film reviews or introductions to unfamiliar genres. Even then, foreclosures are taken most seriously in domains where the process of exploration and discovery is held to be central to the experience of the work itself, as for example in mystery, suspense, riddles, or jokes. This is true across media forms such as theatre, literature, and film. This is also true in the case of interactive media such as video games. Foreclosure is more consequential for the experience of Zork (whose progresses and pleasures depend largely on puzzles and mysteries) than it is for Space Invaders (whose progresses and pleasures depend largely on reflexes and technique). Jeremy Douglass 4 Figure 1. The hero Wander charges to climb the leg of Valus in the video game Shadow of the Colossus. Two distinct types of foreclosure affect interactive media. The type described thus far is conceptual foreclosure. For example, Fumito Ueda's 3D video game Shadow of the Colossus (2005) presents a young hero, Wander, who begs an ancient spirit to revive a dead girl. To ransom her life, the hero (and, by extension, the player) is told to hunt and destroy a pantheon of magical stone creatures called colossi, yet not told why the colossi exist, or to what end they must be destroyed. While this mystery is resolved at the conclusion of the game, uncertainty, ambivalence, and doubt about the hero's goals are what give the work part of its peculiar and powerful emotional force. Much as in a film, foreclosing this uncertainty for the player in advance of play would change the work, particularly the desire for and fear of outcomes that might color the player's labors. The second type of foreclosure that can affect Shadow of the Colossus is procedural foreclosure. The colossi are antagonists, but they are also mysteries, in that each one must be first located in a vast landscape and then undone by discovering and exploiting a series of physical and behavioral weaknesses. Acting as the hero, the player must locate, observe, and engage with the colossi, often culminating in physically traversing the terrain-like expanses of their vast bodies. Colossi can only be destroyed once interaction with them has been explored to the point that they are truly understood for what they are more majestic than terrible, and more bestial than monstrous. This intimacy may lead the player into identification with the colossi, and is part of what transforms each expected triumph into a loss. While mastery is the goal, the outcome of a collapsing colossus is a sobering spectacle of exterminating the sublime, evoking an atmosphere of wistful melancholy. Procedural foreclosure displaces this active process of coming into understanding, as for example when the player learns in advance of initial play the optimal method for locating and destroying each colossus (as with a guide, tutorial, or review). Procedural foreclosure changes both the play technique and the resulting procedures of the interactive experience, and thus changes those aesthetic affects that arise procedurally. In the case of Shadow of the Colossus, optimally guided play shortens the length of the work dramatically by omitting exploration in every sense. Forewarned and forearmed, an epic half-hour struggle to subdue a creature fighting for its life becomes 30 seconds of precise and perfunctory execution an encounter with Moby-Dick revisited by contemporary commercial whale-harvesters. As with a viewing of The Empire Strikes Back prefaced by the identity of Luke's father, the aesthetic experience of the work may be changed. Unlike the film watcher, however, the player of Shadow of the Colossus additionally creates and witnesses a different work a shorter work largely cleansed of both mystery and the learning process. Spoilers are not a normal anxiety for those writing literary and art criticism, which is generally intended for readers who are already familiar with the objects of study. To the extent that criticism is concerned with engaging crucial detail, avoiding spoilers may in fact be beyond its power to achieve.