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The Meaning of Interactive Fiction, August 20, 2023Of the many retrospectives on interactive fiction (some of them being outright games themselves), Repeat the Ending seems to be the one that gets to the essence of why people write and tell interactive fiction.
The "meta" premise is simple: this is supposedly a "critical edition" of a parser game that came out the same time as In the End and it predates influential puzzle-less and linear works like Rameses and Photopia, but it was so buggy and people weren't into these kinds of "personal games" that it was largely forgotten -- until people started talking about it again in interactive fiction Usenet groups and a "2003 transcript". This led to some interest from academics and critics to resurrect the game and publish it in Spring Thing 2023, with one of those critics lamenting it as part of "the unfortunate critical phenomenon of 'rediscovering forgotten classics' for retroactive canonization".
The "actual" 2023 game itself meanwhile is a pretty personal story. Think the works of Porpentine, especially their angelical understanding. The protagonist is on medication, poor, and he's learned that his mother is gravely ill. He needs to go to the hospital, but it seems that the text parser isn't very cooperative. You could simply type > WIN, but the game gives you a speedrun of the game with no catharsis. Instead, you are asked to contemplate the scenery and interact (more like dawdle around) with the objects. In fact, the game rewards you by finding fail states, usually ridiculous death sequences. There's some Enchanter-like magic systems to solve some puzzles, but it's a surprisingly grounded work.
Each puzzle, like wearing your clothes, is just an everyday task but rendered far more complicated by the introduction of a magic system that deals with entropy. While your protagonist can be a superhero, they're usually just trying to get things done on their end. I was somewhat familiar with the period of interactive fiction the game purported to be from and I imagined how players saw this then. To these players, they probably saw it as a puzzle. To me, the magic system feels like an interesting allegory on disabilities, much like the oft-touted "spoon theory". Am I reading this too deeply, like one of the many critics that is sapping the enjoyment of playing this game? Who knows, it's not my game.
The way I interpreted this story has little to do with subjectivity, class, (good) criticism, game design, or even the history of interactive fiction. Instead, I'm more enamored by the need to express a story through interactive fiction.
Why did the in-game author create this game in a community that wouldn't understand the kind of storytelling he's trying to do back then? Honestly, even today, people still see parser games as that outdated mode of presentation with puzzles that boomers would only adore (oh, the Infocom trauma). We can only wonder what the in-game author was thinking when he made this game. In one footnote, he even joked about wanting a time machine to study Photopia. If we simply consider it in the realm of alternative history shenanigans, then this game would indeed be considered a classic. Or even better, if the in-game author saw what the Twine revolution was doing and picked that as a time traveling spot too. But, would it be the same story that shook the interactive fiction community? Would it just be something else entirely, the autobiographical work that we descendants of the "personal games" movement actually want but not the work that in-game Drew Cook made? Would it be Repeat the Ending?
I don't know. And I think that's the main point I got from the game. Whatever that in-game Drew Cook made was something special -- a parser game that seems to hate its own construction/self and revels in this paradox of identities -- and the academics and us the reviewers are trying to turn it into something more understandable at the risk of ruining its own uniqueness. It almost feels like canonization of something so personal and expressive to Cook can strip that away. That even the "personal games" movement can turn what is really a heartfelt game into a talking point about game design should raise some eyebrows.
I am reminded of nonlinear literature like House of Leaves that explore the (academic) obsession of a text to the point the text consumes those who read it.
But Repeat the Ending isn't interested in that angle: it is concerned about why people write these kinds of personal interactive fiction regardless of trends, canonization, or legacies. It takes the lessons of interactive fiction before and after to tell a story so therapeutic that it must be fulfilling for the author: "The never-ending discourse on fate vs free will in IF? Let's use that to tell the story I want to write."
The game is rich with rabbit holes that would excite the academics (indeed, that's the point of the paratext), but it eludes them that perhaps notions of "escaping the narrative" may simply come from Drew Cook's drive and not some grand theory on interactive fiction. Beneath all this claptrap lies a simple message from Cook: he wants to be heard.
Cook may devise stories based on witty narrative tricks, but in the end he's trying to write some story. He found an engine and played some games, so he's using it to explore his trauma and history. We don't know if we can understand what he is going through, but we get a sense that he found something cathartic and resonant doing this journey. All he is asking is to be heard, to be taken seriously not as some work on IFDB but as his own expression.
How do you hear a voice like Cook? Do you do close readings of his game like the critics before? Remake his game like the academics? Write a review that's meandering like this one?
It's difficult to know for sure, but I think this game gets to the heart of why people keep coming back to interactive fiction, including text parser games. There's something very powerful about playing a text parser game because you are interacting as someone else in a different world. For a few hours of your day, you are in this person's clothes and you are screwing around in this world. This simulation is what makes expression in interactive fiction so utterly fascinating and beautiful.
But for the designer, it is even more poignant: they are envisioning worlds they can interact with. There are limitations (and the game acknowledges that), but text parser games can be powerful essays that mean a lot to the creator (and nothing to the reader). While we readers may scratch our head and write analytical articles on it, the creative process of the game is the real reward for the creator of this game. It's why game making can be (and is) therapeutic.
In a way, the most important "reader" is the creator of the title themselves. That's the meaning of interactive fiction in my eyes: a mode of self-expression undaunted by what reviewers and critics think. Everyone else clarifies and obscures this self-expression from the author and we are surely important in this ecosystem, but the essayistic creator knows what the process has giveth and taketh away. Those who create and express themselves so purely must be commended, not simply "canonized".