Counterfeit Monkey

Emily Short's masterpiece is widely considered to be the Greatest Work of IF of All Time. This is reflected in its very secure #1 spot in the IFDB Top 100 list and its continual appearance among the topmost slots of every quadrennial Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time since its release (having placed 3rd in the 2015 edition and 1st in the following 2019 and 2023 editions).

It is undeniably fun to play with the semiotic manipulation technology (one of those advanced technologies that are indistinguishable from magic), and the inventive exercise of the various combinations of changes in the puzzle design makes for a "just right" feel of challenge almost universally throughout the game. The task for the player is constrained enough that finding a solution is almost inevitable, but unique enough to make each solution feel like a surprising breakthrough intuition. I once saw someone describe the essence of good puzzle design as "making the player feel smart," and it's hard to imagine a better recipe for doing so using "reasonably easy but not boring" puzzles.

In addition to sporting very enjoyable puzzles, Counterfeit Monkey's narrative earns consideration as literature by exploring questions that seem even more relevant today than they were when it was released. Its indirect commentary on the nature of language and its interaction with reality, and especially how that interaction is relevant to politics, is the work's thought-provoking philosophical core.

Short's tremendous worldbuilding skills are put to the test by this work's scope, but, as Edward Lacey's early review points out, she does a remarkable job of inventing a plausible-feeling world in which this technology exists but which is somehow not too different from our own. The pacing of the complex exposition is slow enough that significant questions will linger in the player's mind for some time, but by the end of the game those questions will have been answered.

Viewed through the lens of conventional storytelling, the resolution of the narrative comes off as strangely incomplete; the three most significant characters (Spoiler - click to show)(Andra, Alex and Brock) all seem unexpectedly subdued about the radical rearrangement of their relationships with respect to each other -- my impression on completing the game was that they are in shock at the story's conclusion, not yet ready to acknowledge the scale of the inevitable changes to their respective status quos. The outcome of the greater political situation also seems a bit too pat, in that (Spoiler - click to show)the new Atlantida seems too insubstantial to hang any hope upon; surely there were other people involved in the government with a vested interest in the way things were and who will look to "reset" the embodied spirit of the country in their own image posthaste. Still, the dramatic questions of the ostensible plot have been resolved (Spoiler - click to show)(if in a manner that looks like failure to the player), so perhaps the remaining questions are springboards for their own stories. (... and note that, for anyone brave enough to try, the game was published under a CC-BY-SA license, so the way is open.)

Short did consciously make the moral climax of the player character's story into a "no-win situation," citing it as "an illustration of one of the core problems of democratic society," and (per the same source) was clearly aware that she was leaving the items outlined in the previous paragraph unresolved. As such, we can be fairly certain that Counterfeit Monkey is telling exactly the story that she wanted to tell, in exactly the way that she wanted to tell it.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about why this work left me a little disappointed. At first I thought that it was just the familiar result of exploring a work that is surrounded by hype and finding that it didn't live up to my expectations, but I later realized that that's not the case here. It actually exceeded my expectations as a game -- it is such a high level of craft that it pegs the needle of my ability to discern things to appreciate; doubtless there is much genius embedded in this work's coding and storytelling technique that escapes my notice entirely by virtue of being off the scale. What I can see is that this work perfects many of the signature elements of Short's style (e.g. conversations, creating a "living" setting, thematic puzzle design) and is truly a masterwork in terms of game design.

What disappoints me is the story side, and the reason is that I was convinced for structural reasons that a different story was being told.

(Spoiler - click to show)
The story that is actually being told is about the intersecting character arcs of Andra and Alex. The situation is such that each perceives a zero-sum game, but in actuality there is a wider range of possible outcomes including negative-sum (as is actually observed in the ending) and possibly positive-sum (as is hinted but not realizable). Each character acts in accordance with his or her own values and priorities, and certain choices -- including the functional climax choice of whom to release from storage -- are between mutually exclusive options that can satisfy only one of the two.

The structure of the work makes me believe that Short was trying to create a genuine tragedy, i.e. a story in which the "right" choices from the perspective of the actors in the story results in a "wrong" outcome from the perspective of the audience. The key evidence here is that the player must make the climax choice without being able to anticipate the resulting consequences. I scratched my head for a long time about this design element, because as a player of even the most interactive of fiction I feel more like a member of the audience than a genuine actor in the story -- an almost inescapable side-effect of the fact the available actions are always constrained by the finite nature of the embodying program. The design around the story climax did not seem consistent with Short's normal style, but it makes sense as a deliberate choice if the intent was to simulate being the actor in a tragedy, i.e. not knowing what the audience knows.

In fact, the "audience" does know the most important and impactful fact affecting the personal drama between Andra and Alex, which is that there is a time limit of unknown length after which their temporary fusion will become permanent. It is clear that neither Andra nor Alex want this outcome, but the game makes it easy to forget this and to ignore that ticking clock in favor of having fun in the moment. (Who doesn't delight in discovering the untalented naval polecat?) Upon reaching the ending, I, too, was in shock alongside the main characters. Like many, I tried different ways to reach the winning state that I assumed must exist, only to later discover that it simply is not provided.

This story doesn't feel like a tragedy to me, it feels only like a bummer ending to an otherwise extremely fun game. (Tellingly, most of Counterfeit Monkey's effusive reviews tend to ignore the endings entirely.) I credit an excellent essay by Drew Cook for elucidating various aspects of tragedies that are essential but which are not provided here. The key quote from the essay sums it up: "Through tragedy, capricious disaster becomes comprehensible and–rather optimistically–a step on a path toward social harmony and cohesion." Among the available endings for Counterfeit Monkey, I felt only the capricious disaster; there seems to be nothing to learn.

Maybe that's not actually true. Maybe the deep message is that we are supposed to keenly observe how the limited perspectives of Andra and Alex make them focus on their short-term conflicts about items of lesser importance to their what-should-be-evitable mutual detriment. The fact that Short ultimately let the structural requirements of a tragic story outweigh the structural requirements of a fun game shows what her priorities were as the author, and this aspect of the work as a whole is good evidence that she was trying to craft something more than "just a game," i.e. entertainment alone.

Until near the end, the story that I felt sure was being told was one about a society whose authority figures have grown unresponsive to its citizenry, and which is on the verge of rediscovering what "democracy" really means. A society in which the power to manipulate symbols is equivalent to the ability to manipulate reality itself. A society whose increasingly authoritarian government knows that its ability to define the symbols is the basis of its control over the populace. Given the background of discontent and the "showdown" scene between a crowd of protesters and a policeman -- a scene so perfectly placed as the climax of an Act II, the resolution of which raises the dramatic tension of the societal conflict that has constantly threatened to break into the foreground -- given that setup, I fully expected the actual climax of the story to be one in which the masses descend on the Bureau's headquarters, interrupting the protagonists' escape plot but allowing the player to use the knowledge gained earlier to tip the balance one way or the other... perhaps at the willfully-paid cost of giving up the chance to reverse the corporal fusion.

As it is, the showdown scene is not foreshadowing, it's just a wonderful study in miniature of the highest potential of IF: a point at which everything that the player has experienced so far begins to resonate with a thrilling emotional and cognitive power so rarely reached in the form. (I personally haven't been so enthralled since "The Puzzle" of Spider and Web.)


Is this Short's best work? As a game, yes, undoubtedly. Counterfeit Monkey is a brilliant resolution of the archetypal conflict between narrative and crossword through skillful synthesis into something more than the sum of its parts -- with a clever meta-wordplay twist, to boot.

As art, though, I'm not so sure, and since it's not just a game, I can't rate it on that basis alone -- I have to take into account the story side at least as much.

My playing group spent a good month talking about this work, debating about the core message(s) it presents. One member was almost 100% on the author's wavelength and laid out an analysis that turned out to be very well supported by Short's own self-commentary when we got to the point of doing research instead of just comparing perceptions. Thus, it seems likely that the narrative part is a complete artistic success for a substantial portion of the audience.

Perhaps the shortfall that I perceive only seems important because the game part is so masterfully done that it comes off (very deceptively) as having been effortless to produce. As other reviewers note, it is an amazing gift to the public for Short to have released this work, her magnum opus, for free, and I don't want to be unappreciative here -- I had a lot of fun playing it, and you will, too. I just can't help but think that there was a missed opportunity to discuss larger aspects of society, aspects that I would have loved to see Short's particular genius explore in more detail -- indeed, aspects that were clearly part of her thought process while creating this work! -- and that doing so would have raised the artistic value of the result considerably. My gut instinct is that this could have been enduring literature of a quality comparable to Ursula K. LeGuin's best if themes about language and its impact on society had been the primary focus instead of just a prominent element. Even though Counterfeit Monkey as a game is an as-yet-incomparable synthesis of narrative and crossword puzzle, it seems to me that there are still greater heights to be reached by interactive fiction -- heights that, if they are ever attained, will be so in part because Emily Short with this work pointed the way.

My natural inclination is to go with 4 stars in acknowledgement of what Counterfeit Monkey might have been, but by the standards of my published rubric there is no doubt that, as a work which is "so incredible it effectively defines the genre or technique that it introduces or perfects," 5 stars are deserved for being the pinnacle of the wordplay puzzler. Kudos to Ms. Short, and thank you.