Ratings and Reviews by Felix Larsson

This SF piece is definitely worth reading and playing. The PC is a young boy sent on a mining mission on a spaceship under “punishment regime” by his father to make a man of him. (Settlers are much the same, it would seem, whether in 24th century Space or in 19th century Old West.)

Apparently, Wigdahl is a professional programmer and a veteran Infocom beta-tester, though this is his first work as IF-author. And it’s a very well-told and well-coded story, indeed; actually, the telling and coding is rather better than the story itself—which makes the reading/playing experience a curious mixture of satisfaction and (relative) disappointment.

In particular, I found the central puzzle somewhat disappointing, partly because it sins again the degree of realism already established in the narrative—it’s simply unbelievable that the engine of 24th century spaceships would employ a mechanism anything like this—, partly because (Spoiler - click to show)the puzzle is a quite hard and quite old one that many players will have learned from logic and lateral thinking puzzle books already as kids, probably making it virtually insoluble to some and really trivial to others.

At his web site, Wigdahl states that the whole piece was conceived and realized in three months (in time for the IF Competition), so there simply can’t have been very much time left for story and puzzle design. I do hope he got hooked on writing IF, for I would love a long series of works of his with puzzles and stories to match the execution.

By the way, Grounded in Space also has an interesting formal structure: its level of interactivity increases as the story progresses. The transition between these levels never feel contrived or unmotivated; on the contrary, they correspond well to what might reasonably be required from the PC at different stages of the story (so much so that I suspect this formal structure was not intended by the author but dictated by his material).

The story thus begins in ‘linear’ mode: it will unfold very much the same whatever you do. This linear opening serves as an introduction to the rest of the story, just as the first chapter of a book or the opening scenes of a play or a film normally does. In the case at hand, it introduces the player to the personality of the PC and explains what an inexperienced kid like him is doing all alone aboard a spaceship a long way from home.

The linear section is followed by one in ‘hypertext’ mode: i.e. you choose freely what to read and in what order. This hypertext section allows you (and the PC) to become familiar with the environment (the spaceship Marryat) and with your supposed task aboard.

To my mind, these first sequences very successfully sets the mood and premises of the work. (Perhaps, to a die-hard IF gamer as opposed to a willing IF reader, the may seem too long or irreleant or boring or whatever. I really wouldn’t know, since I am the willing reader. and I enjoyed these sections.)

Then finally you enter the properly ‘interactive’ mode in a section that leads up to the peripety of the story and the central puzzle. And after that there are several ways to bring the story to several distinct, more or less happy conclusions

‘Objectively’ the game is nothing but a series of easy puzzles set in a silly nonsense environment: you play a beta tester of a virtual reality world called “the Toybox”.

The whole thing lives solely (and well) off it sense of humour and its central gimmick, viz. the long—sometimes very long—and funny descriptions of items and certain actions (spoon)fed to you by your hitting any key after having read so far. This allows a kind of timing of jokes and punchlines that the author uses to very good effect.

However—there’s a first and a second part to this game. The first part is great fun (if you like silly fun) thanks to the witty writing. After solving the 1st puzzle though, things become more buggy and less implemented. Actually, the game seems simply unfinished—at least in the version entered in IF Comp ’09. Suffice it to say that I really do look forward to a final version where Game Dame Hellaine and her Fun&Games-room is anything like implemented and where I can’t put Jorry the famous stand-up comedian in my backpack.

This is IF in a surreal setting, as such it exploits the lack of logical and natural constraints typical of dreams: the geography of the fictional world does not respect natural laws; NPCs act irreducibly strange etc.

At his website Barker tells us that «Chaos was meant to be a descriptive and unsettling work». And at times he does succeed in being unsettling in just the surreal way intended, especially, I think, if you happen up in “the Infinite”, which soon becomes full of surreally sinister things.

The characterization of the piece as a ‘descriptive work’ is correct (and the writing, by the way, is quite able) and this, I think, puts the finger on it’s weak spot, viz. the lack of plot. The work is descriptive rather than narrative; actually it’s a nearly plotless puzzle piece. The problem is that the PC never is presented with much in the way of motive for acting at all: no treasure hunt, no monsters to defeat, no mystery to solve. You’re sent out to find food for a starving vulture; but I’m not sure if you do it out of pity or out of fear of being eaten by the bird. In the end, I felt I was doing it simply because there seemed to be very little else to do in that game world.

Barker, at the web site, tells us his piece was influenced by filmmakers working in a surreal vein. Perhaps the kind of surreal sequences of events that work well on the screen simply won’t work in interactive fiction. As a reader of IF it’s (of course) simply not possible to sit back and observe the series of events as they unfold; you have to take active part in it and influence it, or nothing will happen at all. But to do that in any interesting way, you’re pretty much bound both to have an in-fiction purpose to guide you—the kind of purpose that can, perhaps, not be had without a storyline. Again, I think, it’s the lack of plot that seriously marrs Chaos as interactive fiction.

The surrealism of it all even means that you can’t be perfectly sure that things that seem to be puzzles really are. And at the same time the plotlessness makes it hard to know whether you are making any real progress through the game or not. The scoring system didn’t help me much either. What does a negative score mean in this game’s context? That the game is now in an unwinnable state? Or that I am farther from completing it now than when I began?

Besides, the work has its fair share of bugs, underimplementations, inconsistent descriptions and technical flaws that could surely have been avoided with some beta-testing. That said, however, there were also some nice, unexpected details here and there.

This very short piece sketches an excentric way of making narrative sense of Pac-Man: (Spoiler - click to show)Pac-Man is a junkie, haunted by ghostly apparitions; he needs a ”power pill” to save his day, drive his ghosts away, and go to junkie heaven. I’m sure the author could have made more of this particular idea; but, as it stands, it’s no more than a mere sketch, with no real choices for Pac-Man to make along the brief way to the ending: you go one way you win, you go another you die. The writing is as good as it comes, though.

A pretty faithful IF-remake of Space Invaders: The aliens drop their intergalactic missiles at you; you fire at them with your gun. As a game in it’s own right, I suppose it would be quite a disaster. But, of course, now, it’s not a game in it’s own right: it’s a rendition in text of an old graphics video game. That makes it kind of corny fun—to players who are familiar with the original game, that is.

I don’t think there’s a way actually to win this one (which is quite fair, since there never was a way to win Space Invaders in the first place, was there?), but I didn’t have the superhuman patience nor the subhuman pigheadedness to keep playing long enough to be sure of this.
Also, at a certain point, the author introduces an original element to the game …

You are a paddle. You can move up and down to block the ball.
Making interactive fiction of Pong is a wacky idea that Granade manages to transform into a weird experience, thanks to a writing that is reminiscent, in ways, of the language in For a Change, only more convoluted and presented as a kind of inner monologue of the paddle’s. Some feat, really, since (though there are appropriate responses to other standard commands) the paddle can (did I mention that?) do nothing but move up and down. The novelty of the writing is, however, gone some while before either you or the opponent Non-Player Paddle scores a fifteenth time and the game is at last over.

To anyone who never played or even watched a match of Pong, this game must be terribly confusing; and I suppose it would be quite the worst introduction to interactive fiction that could well be imagined.

It’s pinball. You’re the ball. The first time you fly off, the experience will likely be as disorienting to you as it must be to the poor ball, and the game is soon over; by the third time, however, you will probably have got the knack of it. The game is replayable, in a sense—the sense in which any game of pinball is replayable: you can always try to score higher than before.

(Wuerz’s writing, a times, hints at pinball as an allegory of life, again with you as the ball. Come to hink of it, there’s obviously a deep buddhist meaning to Tilt!: (Spoiler - click to show)there you are, a ball, trying to make sense of a world you’re thrown out into without a say in the matter and telling yourself you have some control, though in truth you’re at the utter mercy of outside forces—those outside forces, on closer inspection, being you(!), the player, who you actually are (the ball and its world being empty—mere virtual objects devoid of any real existence) and who, moreover, is no real party to the virtual pinball world, except for playing this very game of Tilt! over and over again in the pursuit of ever increasing high-scores in your (i.e. the virtual ball’s) next (virtual) life—until, at last, you suddenly realize the futility of it all, stop clinging to an illusory pinball world and are awakened to the truths of its emptiness and your own power and purity.)

This is a hypertext collection of poems demonstrating the basic functionality of the author’s Interactive Poetry Extension to Inform 7. The poems are all single stanza quatrains. The first line of all the poems reads “Arid and pale”. The reader chooses one of the words of this line and the poem is incremented by one line according to that choice.

As a collection of poetry I didn’t find the work very convincing (though it might well be more to somebody else’s taste); anyway, the collection was probably intended more as a demonstration of the extension than as an attempt to achieve literary immortality.