Chapter 1: What is Interactive Fiction?
“Will you read me a story?
“Read you a story? What fun would that be? I’ve
got a better idea: let’s tell a story together.”
-- Adam Cadre, Photopia (1998)
In its broadest sense, interactive fiction can be considered any form of storytelling which involves the reader or listener as an active participant. Among other things, improvisational theatre, tabletop role-playing games, and of course computer games of many stripes all qualify. For my purposes in this essay, though, I will define interactive fiction – henceforth referred to as IF – much more narrowly in applying its commonly accepted meaning among a unique group of writers, programmers, readers, and players who create and exchange interactive stories on the Internet. In their world, IF is a unique form of computer-based storytelling which places the player in the role of a character in a simulated world, and which is characterized by its reliance upon text as its primary means of output and by its use of a flexible natural-language parser for input. The term originated, many years after the birth of the genre it describes, in the early 1980s with a company called Infocom. At that time, games of this sort were commonly known as “adventure games” or “text adventures,” the latter to distinguish them from the graphical brand of story-based games which were just beginning to compete with text-based titles in the marketplace of that time. Indeed, both terms are commonly used to this day, although they generally connote a rather “old-school” form of the genre that places most of its emphasis on the more gamelike, as opposed to literary, potentials of the form. Infocom decided that interactive fiction was a term which more accurately described their goal of creating a viable new literary form, and following that company’s demise the term was appropriated by a modern community of text-based storytellers who in many ways see themselves as heirs to Infocom’s legacy.
The single feature which distinguishes an IF game from any other kind computer game is its reliance upon a parser for input. A parser is a computer algorithm that converts simple sentences entered by the user in English, or any of a fair number of other languages for which games have been written, into an instruction that the computer can understand. The computer then updates the status of the story accordingly and reports the latest developments to the player through a textual response, to which the user can reply with another command. This cycle continues ad infinitum, until the players “wins” the game by succeeding in some overarching goal; “loses” the game in some fashion often but not always involving the death of her in-game alter ego; or simply quits playing, perhaps to return some other day. While text is the primary method of input and output in any true IF game, the form does not preclude the inclusion of multimedia elements to augment the story being told. IF games can and occasionally do include graphics, music, sound effects, and even animated “cut scenes.” Games have even been written which allow the player to input commands by choosing from lists of words with a mouse, rather than typing. If this trend is taken too far, however, and the parser is replaced with a purely point and click system, or the game’s graphics replace its text at its primary method of communication with the player, that game ceases to be IF, at least for purposes of this discussion.
I will be writing abstractly about quite a number of games in this essay. As you read, I encourage you to seek these titles out and give them a try in order to add your own opinions and first-hand observations to my own and hopefully thereby to see a more complete picture of IF, past and present. Virtually all of the free games that I will mention are available from the IF Archive. Games from IF’s commercial era are unfortunately not so easily acquired, as all of them are now long out of print, but there are sources for the intrepid. Some have been officially released as freeware by their authors, and are available from the IF Archive; many can be found on Ebay and the various online shops specializing in out-of-print software; and virtually all can be found on the Internet’s network of so-called “abandonware” sites that offer free downloads of softwares that are still officially under copyright protection but that have been “abandoned” and are no longer sold by their publishers. Should you choose to avail yourself of these sites, you should understand that you are breaking the letter of the law and engaging in software piracy. Unfortunately, the reality is that this is the only reasonably practical and efficient way for the interested player to acquire many of the rarer titles discussed in this essay. The complete failure of the computer game industry to maintain a back catalog or historical archive is absolutely shameful, and will be a huge hindrance to scholars as they begin to study the origins of this tremendously important new form of entertainment.
The best way to truly understand IF is to experience a game in action. With that in mind, I would like to invite you, my reader, to do just that with me. The game we will use for this purpose is Earth and Sky by Paul O’Brian, a modest and charming little tribute to classic superhero comics first released in 2001. Earth and Sky is a well-designed, polished piece of work, but not terribly unusual in any other respect. In this it actually suits our purposes quite well, providing as it does some fairly typical gameplay. You may wish to simply read the transcript of some typical interactions with Earth and Sky that I am about to provide. If you are feeling more ambitious, though, you may wish to download the Earth and Sky game file and an appropriate interpreter to play it, and play along with me. Such a strategy will give you the best picture of what IF is really like.
In order to play Earth and Sky, we must first lay some technical groundwork by downloading an appropriate interpreter. Contemporary IF games can be created in any of several freely available IF-specific programming languages, each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses. The developers of these language share ideas freely in a web of interrelationships that is as much about cooperation as competition. The universal advice from the IF community to one who is thinking of creating her own IF game is to try several of these language out and choose the one that best suits her potential game’s requirements and her own aesthetics.
Most IF programming languages do not create finished games that are directly executable on any given computer. They rather produce portable game files that can be played on a wide variety of computers and computing devices, as long as an interpreter is available for that machine. There are several advantages to this approach beyond the obvious one of portability. To wit: the player can customize her interpreter with her chosen fonts and colors and know that it will remain the same across all games requiring that interpreter; since the game files are not natively executable, viruses and other security threats are not a major concern; and since much of the functionality to run the games resides in the interpreter, download sizes for the individual games are kept small. Balanced against these advantages is just one significant disadvantage, that being the requirement that the first-time player acquire a suitable interpreter before she can begin to play at all. Complicating this somewhat more is the fact that each of the several viable IF development languages requires its own type of interpreter. While there have been efforts toward the creation of a single, universal interpreter capable of playing virtually all IF, they have not reached their fruition as of this writing.
Earth and Sky is written in one of the most popular current IF languages, Inform, created by Graham Nelson in the early nineties. Games written in Inform run on a virtual machine (or VM) called the Z-Machine. The Z-Machine is a complete computer, albeit one that exists only as a software simulation running within an interpreter. It places special emphasis on those tasks associated with playing IF, and gives no attention at all to many others. Game files designed to run on the Z-Machine are frequently called Z-Code files. Since the Z-Machine’s design specifications are available to anyone, there are a substantial number of interpreters simulating it. Your first task to begin your journey into the world of IF is to download one appropriate to your chosen computing device and operating system. If you are running Microsoft Windows 95 or later, I recommend an interpreter known as Filfre, written by myself and available from The IF Archive, a huge repository of games, tools, and information that serves as a sort of Library of Congress for the IF community. You can download Filfre using the following URL: http://home.grandecom.net/~maher/filfre. If you are running Macintosh OS-X or some variant of Unix or Linux equipped with the X-Windows graphical interface, I recommend Andrew Hunter’s Zoom, available at http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/inforom/interpreters/zoom. Interpreters are also available for a variety of other operating systems, including Macintosh Classic, Microsoft DOS, Amiga, Palm-OS, and even Java-capable mobile phones. See the IF Archive directory http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXinfocomXinterpreters.html for a complete listing. Several interpreters, with feature sets ranging from minimalist to baroque, are available for virtually all of the operating systems I have mentioned. Should you choose to continue with IF, I strongly encourage you to try out the various interpreters available for your platform of choice and select your own favorite.
Having downloaded and installed an appropriate interpreter, we must now acquire the Earth and Sky game file itself. This can also be found on the IF Archive, specifically from http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/eas.zip. Once you have uncompressed the archive into a directory of your choosing, open the file Eas.z5 from your newly-downloaded interpreter. (The .z5 file extension indicates that Earth and Sky is a Z-Machine version 5 game file. There have been eight versions of the Z-Machine created over the years, all with slightly different capabilities. By far the most commonly used version for modern games is version 5, followed by version 8, which is used for very large games. Virtually all current Z-Machine interpreters can play version 5 and version 8 games, and generally games of several other versions as well.) If all goes well, you will see the game’s introductory text. Earth and Sky, and with it your own discovery of IF, has begun.
The following is a transcript of actual interaction with Earth and Sky, with my commentary interspersed. Said commentary appears in italics. All other text comes directly from a session with Earth and Sky, and appears here in the way it would look to the player. If you are playing along on your own computer, feel free to deviate from the transcript I provide and experiment. Experimentation and interactivity are after all the essence of IF, and, particularly in a very forgiving game like Earth and Sky, carry with them no dangers at all, only potential rewards.
________________________________________________________________________
It's been almost a month since your parents disappeared.
One Tuesday, they just didn't come home, and there's been no sign of them since. For the University and the rest of the town, the mystery is beginning to pall. To those people, it's as if Claire and Scott Colborn suddenly stopped existing -- strange and inexplicable, to be sure, but forgettable in the long run.
But for you it's as if the ground beneath your feet stopped existing, and you've been plummeting in freefall ever since. Your brother Austin, though, has been a rock through the whole experience, handling the numbing details, the endless meetings with useless detectives, even sorting through Mom and Dad's lab in hopes of finding an answer. Now you stand outside the lab door, clutching his note, hardly daring to hope that such an answer may have arrived at long last.
EARTH AND SKY
Earth And Sky: Episode 1
Serial interactive fiction by Paul O'Brian
First-time players should type INFO or read the easinfo.txt file
Release 2 / Serial number 011204 / Inform v6.21 Library 6/10
Outside the Lab Door
You stand in one of the many beige, featureless corridors of the Physics building. The hall continues west, and reaches its eastern terminus here, at the door to Mom and Dad's lab.
The lab door is closed.
A card reader is mounted to the wall beside the door.
If you are playing along, you will see after this introductory text a blinking cursor on your screen sitting next to an “>” symbol. This is referred to as the IF command prompt. We will enter on the keyboard the actions we wish to attempt in the game world using imperative phrases in a sort of simplified, ” pidgin” English. This mode of interaction may look strange to you at first, but it will likely become second nature very quickly.
The game is now waiting for us to tell it what we would like to do. Absolutely nothing will happen in the world of Earth and Sky until we do so. We could spend hours contemplating our next move, go away to eat dinner, or even take an around the world cruise. The game will still be waiting for us upon our return. When we finally enter a command and press enter, a small amount of time passes in the game’s world, which is updated to reflect our actions as well as any other events that may be happening outside of our direct control. At this point, a single turn is considered to have passed.
>open door
It seems to be locked.
Not a very auspicious beginning to our IF career, but then nothing is ever quite as easy as that, in real life or in IF. Notice that IF games do not care if your inputs are entirely grammatical, as long as you say enough to get your point across. Articles (such as “the”), punctuation, and capitalization are all entirely optional, and are, in the interests of convenience and brevity, omitted by most experienced IF players.
Let’s see if we have anything that might help us get that door open. We will do this by using one of a handful of IF verbs that have something of a special meaning within the games. Inventory can be entered at virtually any time to see a list of everything you are currently carrying and wearing. Because this command is used so frequently, it can abbreviated to simply i if the player so chooses.
>inventory
You are carrying:
a note
an access card
a sweatshirt (being worn)
a pair of sweat pants (being worn)
your sneakers (being worn)
That access card looks like it just might do the trick. Before we try it out, though, let’s take a closer look at some of the other items on our person.
>read note
This note was waiting for you when you got home today. It reads:
Emily --
Meet me at the lab as soon as you can. I've found some things that we need to talk about immediately.
-- A
We must be Emily. Let’s take a closer look at ourself.
>examine me
You haven't been looking your best lately, but you find it hard to care. Austin won't mind your casual clothes, though -- he understands that fashion isn't exactly topping your priorities right now.
Examine is one of the most commonly used verbs in IF. It can also be expressed as look at, inspect, and possibly several other ways. This practice of providing several synonyms for most words is a commonly accepted requirement of any good modern IF design, its intention being to give the game every opportunity to understand what the player is attempting to do, regardless of her choice of words. Many earlier IF games were not so forgiving, often accepting only one word or phrasing for any given action. Thus the hapless player would often find herself having figured out the correct action to take, but still stymied due to not having expressed that action in a particular way. This is known as the “guess the verb” syndrome, and is universally frowned upon in modern IF. Even in a puzzle-laden, gamelike work of IF, the challenge should arise from the environment it portrays, not from attempting to work out how to please a finicky parser. That said, parsing a language like English, with all of its illogicalities and its many ways of expressing any given thought, is an extremely difficult problem to solve, and there is still plenty of room for improvement.
Like inventory, examine is used frequently enough that a handy abbreviation can be entered in its place. To save ourself a bit of typing, we will use that abbreviation – x – from now on in place of the full word.
They say that clothes make the man, or in this case woman. Let’s take a closer look at our clothing.
>x sweatshirt
This sweatshirt is large, baggy, and grey -- just the way you like it. It's also emblazoned with the University's name in tasteful green letters.
>x pants
Just your average black sweat pants.
>x sneakers
These sneakers were probably made by some starving Vietnamese mother on slave wages, but you try not to think about that.
Okay, let’s try out that access card.
>slide card through reader
The green light glows, and there is a click from inside the lab door.
Eureka!
>open door
You open the lab door.
One of the things that can seem strange to IF beginners is the genre’s method of moving from place to place. IF games are laid out as a series of discrete locations, or rooms. A room in this context could be an open field or part of a forest just as easily as an indoor location. To move about within the game’s geography, the player uses compass directions.
When entering a room, the game will print a description of the environment and its contents. Potential exits to other rooms are generally part of this description. You can repeat the currently inhabited room’s description at any time by simply typing look. Look is another of those common IF commands which has an abbreviated form, in this case l.
At the moment, we know that we want to go through the door, but, as it has been a while since we first read the beginning room’s description, we may not remember in what direction that door leads. Let’s find out by using l.
>l
Outside the Lab Door
You stand in one of the many beige, featureless corridors of the Physics building. The hall continues west, and reaches its eastern terminus here, at the door to Mom and Dad's lab.
The lab door is open, revealing the enormous room beyond.
A card reader is mounted to the wall beside the door.
For convenience, IF games give each room a name so that the player can remember it easily, as well as to make things easier if the player feels the need to map the game’s geography. That will not be necessary in this game, as it involves only a few locations. Some epic games, however, especially those of the old school puzzle-intensive stripe, can contain dozens or even hundreds of separate rooms. For them, careful mapping is essential if one does not wish to wander about hopelessly lost.
Our current room’s description informs us that the door we would like to enter leads east. In keeping with the modern IF community’s philosophy of being as forgiving of input variance as possible, there are multiple ways we could proceed through it. Go east, walk east, go through door, enter door, or even simply east are perfectly acceptable. However, since you will spend so much time moving about within many IF games, abbreviations are also provided for all of the compass directions: n for north, ne for northeast, e for east, and so on. In many cases up and down are also valid directions of movement, abbreviated u and d respectively.
With that said, let’s go east!
>e
You take a deep breath, and step across the threshold into the lab.
E A R T H
A N D
S K Y
Part 1: Suit Yourself
Lab
Ever since Dad got shortlisted for the Nobel in physics and Mom's patents started making millions, the University has pretty much given them carte blanche. Consequently, this lab space is cavernous, tens of thousands of square feet, with ceilings reaching nearly five stories high. Some parts of this giant room are occupied by giant equipment, dizzyingly complex hunks of machinery at whose function you couldn't even begin to guess. Other parts are empty, save for a few tables and terminals. A ring of windows near the ceiling looks out on the distant stars. Doors lead south into the storage room and west into the hallway.
You look around for Austin, but he's not here. Typical. Well, knowing your perpetually late brother, he'll be along soon enough.
Amidst the general chaos of the lab, a legal pad seems to have fallen from one of the tables.
The hallway door is open.
The storage room door is open.
The lab door clicks and swings shut.
Note that we are now in a room simply (but appropriately) titled Lab, and that the game has described the appearance and contents of that room for us. We can ask the game to repeat that description at any time by typing look or just l. It certainly looks like an interesting place. Since Austin is apparently running late, let’s poke around a bit, shall we?
>get pda
Sorry, but that's either not here or not important.
A typo! Curses! As handy as PDAs can be, it appears that there are none present, at least in this room. Notice that the game informs us of that as concisely and politely as possible, then simply returns another input prompt. No harm has been done.
Let’s try again to type what we intended on the previous turn.
>get pad
Taken.
Once again, synonyms and alternate phrasings for this common action abound. Take pad, pick up the legal pad or pick the pad up, for instance, would all be equally valid.
Since we are now carrying the legal pad, it should show up in our inventory. Let’s make sure…
>i
You are carrying:
a legal pad
a note
an access card
a sweatshirt (being worn)
a pair of sweat pants (being worn)
your sneakers (being worn)
Very good! Let’s see what is written on the pad now, and then investigate the lab area a bit more.
>read pad
The first page contains a few notes scribbled in your father's familiar cryptic handwriting:
ES: Str -- OK
Imp res -- OK
E res -- ??? -- probs
SS: Flt -- OK
Fog -- OK
E -- OK
Per N, bac strange. Hi-spd? Panspermia?
Also: c T re: sightings. Could b big. Portal poss. at mtn site?
The rest of the pages are blank.
>x equipment
If you had a couple of days, unlimited curiosity, and several years worth of calculus and physics classes, Austin could probably explain some of this equipment to you. As it is, you prefer to be awed by its mysterious grandeur rather than the impressive feats it can no doubt perform. Luckily, Mom and Dad never pushed the science with either of you, so even though Austin ended up their protégé and you became a contented English major, he never got special treatment from them.
>x door
Which do you mean, the hallway door or the storage room door?
IF players generally try to save typing by entering their commands in the most concise possible way. Sometimes, however, we take this too far and simply do not give the game enough to understand exactly what we mean. In this case, there are two possible doors in the lab that we might be trying to examine. The game does not know to which we refer, and therefore politely asks us for clarification. This is known as disambiguation.
>storage
This door connects the lab with its small storage room.
We have given the game the clarification that it needed, and it proceeds appropriately.
>s
Storage Room
If Mom had her way, the storage room would be a neatly organized gallery of supplies, spare parts, and backup media, all efficiently arranged on the room's many metal shelving units. However, with Dad using the lab, that's not likely to happen. Oh sure, everything is on the shelves, but finding something could take the better part of a day. A door leads back north to the lab.
The storage room door is open.
A wooden chair sits in the middle of the storage room, with some bright blue fabric draped across it.
>x fabric
This appears to be a form-fitting bodysuit of some kind, tailored to fit a female body. It is bright blue, with cloud-patterned streaks of white. A combination cowl and mask is attached at the neck of the suit.
>get suit
Taken.
>put on suit
[first removing the sweatshirt]
You're not about to undress with the door open -- Austin could show up at any moment!
>close door
You close the storage room door.
>put on suit
[first removing the sweatshirt]
[first removing the sweat pants]
[first removing the sneakers]
Putting on the superhero suit implies that we want to remove our everyday student’s outfit. As a modern game, Earth and Sky is thoughtful enough to do that for us without making us enter the commands to do so one at a time.
You slip into the blue bodysuit. It's not a perfect fit, but it's better than you'd expected, skintight in some areas and only slightly looser in others. The feel is warm and comfortable, and the suit covers almost your entire body, even your hands and feet. When you pull the cowl and mask on, you feel a strange tingling sensation in your scalp.
>open door
You open the storage room door.
Austin pokes his head through the door. "Hi Em -- sorry I'm late. Come join me in the lab whenever you're ready."
You find yourself doing a double-take as the door shuts. Was Austin wearing a mask, too?
>n
[first opening the storage room door]
Lab
You are in Mom and Dad's lab. As usual, the majority of the equipment in this enormous space is more or less a mystery to you. Also here are a few tables and terminals; a ring of windows near the ceiling looks out on the distant stars. Doors lead south into the storage room and west into the hallway.
The hallway door is closed.
The storage room door is open.
You can also see Austin here.
Just as you thought, Austin is wearing a bodysuit similar to the one you've donned, complete with cowl and mask. The only difference is that while yours is blue with cloudy white patches, his is a black-speckled grey, shot through with streaks of orange and yellow.
"I see you're wearing the suit already," Austin says. "Good. I would have asked you to put it on before I told you this, anyway."
He shows you a notebook he's been carrying. "I found this notebook, along with these stylish outfits, late last night. I was checking out all the ongoing experiments in hopes of... well, I don't know what I was hoping for. All I know is that nobody seems to know what happened to Mom and Dad, and nobody can even think of any reason why they would have disappeared. So I've been combing through the lab, trying to reconstruct what they were working on at the time it happened."
He leans back against a towering piece of steel machinery, allowing himself to slide down it and sit on the floor. "They were working on a lot, Em, let me tell you -- most of it so far beyond my own scientific experience that it took me a long time to even grasp the point of each experiment. Dad's cryptic notation style didn't help much either. So last night, when I started checking out a piece of equipment that didn't seem to have any purpose at all, I figured it was just my own ignorance again, that I didn't know what the thing was. Then I stumbled on a tiny little latch, and the whole thing swung open. Em, it was hollow inside. And stuffed into that cavity were these suits, with this notebook."
He opens the notebook and begins to read aloud:
Earthsuit: provides
* greatly enhanced strength
* resistance to electric shock
* invulnerability to impact (nearly)
Must be Mom's notes, you think to yourself. Dad would've written something like "inv 2 imp (~)". Austin flips a few pages, then reads again.
Skysuit: provides
* flight
* electrical discharges (blasts)
* fog
"The rest of the pages are filled with notes and diagrams that are way beyond my grasp. But near as I can figure, these are the suits those notes talk about. I'm wearing the earthsuit, and you're wearing the skysuit."
Please select a reply:
1) "I don't understand. What's this all about?"
2) "Did they also make a monkeysuit? Maybe with 'greatly enhanced banana-eating ability'?"
3) "I had to wear this goofy suit just to hear you recite from a notebook?"
4) "But this is just so bizarre. You think Mom and Dad were planning to make us into some kind of superheroes?"
Select an option or 0 to say nothing >> 2
The problem of creating believable character interaction is perhaps the thorniest in IF. Various developers have come up with various solutions, or at least compromises. Earth and Sky chooses to use a menu-based conversation system at this point. This comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages, which I will discuss in more detail much later in this essay.
In some games, selecting different dialogue choices might send the plot off in radically different directions. Some choices might even lead to the player’s death, or at least losing the game. Earth and Sky is both rather simple in structure and specifically designed to be friendly for newcomers, however, and so there are no truly “wrong” choices in this dialogue menu or the ones that will follow. Most will lead to only minor plot variations, so feel free to choose differently from me if you are playing along. The thrill of discovery is among the greatest pleasures IF has to offer.
"No," he smirks, "but there are some notes in here about an armanisuit, with greatly enhanced fashionability. Seriously, though -- these suits are no joke. I've been experimenting with mine. Watch."
Austin turns around to face the device he had been using as a backrest. It's some sort of steel tower, probably fifteen feet tall and two feet in diameter. He squats in front of it, embraces it, and smoothly unbends his knees, lifting the entire thing as if it were made of balsa wood.
"This thing must weigh almost a ton," he says through gritted teeth, "but I can lift it like it was a piece of furniture. It's a little awkward to keep balanced, but I can do it." As if to prove the point, he bends his knees again until the tower is in its original resting place, then turns to face you.
"Remember that tingling you felt when you put on the cowl? The suits respond to mental commands. I bet if you decided you wanted to fly up to the ceiling right now, you could. Why don't you try it?"
>x austin
Austin was never one to conform to the whims of fashion, but right now he's dressed much more strangely than you've ever seen him. He's wearing a grey jumpsuit, speckled with black and shot through with streaks of yellow and orange. The outfit seems to include a cowl and mask, which covers Austin's brown eyes.
Conversation in Earth and Sky is not entirely limited to menus. It is also possible to ask or tell Austin about various subjects…
>ask austin about flying
"All indications are that you can do it in that suit. Just think 'UP'."
…within limits, of course.
>ask austin about politics
"Em, I'd love to chat, but there are more important things to do at the moment."
>fli
That's not a verb I recognize.
Another typo! If at first you don’t succeed…
>fly
The moment you think it, the ground silently drops away beneath you, so fast and so smoothly that it almost feels as if a wire is pulling you up to the ceiling. But there is no wire, and only air beneath your feet. You have risen...
High Above The Lab
You are hovering in the air, several stories above the lab floor. The beams and girders of the ceiling are so close you could touch them, and the windows display a magnificent view of the campus and ocean. Far below, Austin looks up at you from amid a sea of equipment. Good thing you're not afraid of heights.
Notice that Earth and Sky interprets the air above the lab as a separate room with its own description. This approach to geography may seem odd at first, but will quickly become second nature as you continue to play IF.
>look through window
From here, the windows command an incredible view. To the east, the campus spreads out before you and the main roads reach to the horizon. On the other side, moonlight glimmers on the vast ocean.
>make fog
That's not a verb I recognize.
Modern IF games try very hard to accept as many variations of potential inputs as possible, but there are unfortunately still occasions when you will attempt to phrase an action in a way that the game’s designer did not anticipate. Earth and Sky is generally very forgiving, but even its parser can be tripped up occasionally. Let’s see if that might be the case here by trying a variation of the previous command…
>fog
At your mental command, fog swirls around you, billowing out and silently engulfing the room. Because of the size of the lab, however, it quickly thins into a light mist. Austin appears not to have noticed.
>land
As smoothly as you rose, you descend once more.
Lab
You are in Mom and Dad's lab. As usual, the majority of the equipment in this enormous space is more or less a mystery to you. Also here are a few tables and terminals; a ring of windows near the ceiling looks out on the distant stars. At the moment, a thin mist floats in the air. Doors lead south into the storage room and west into the hallway.
The hallway door is closed.
The storage room door is open.
You can also see Austin here.
"Well, it's clear that the flying functionality is operational," says Austin.
"Now let's test out some of that suit's other capabilities. The notes mention a fog power -- the flying worked when you decided to fly, so let's see what happens when you try to fog something. Why don't we start by having you just think FOG? I have a hunch that will probably cloud up the general area."
Please select a reply:
1) "Sure thing."
2) "Oh, there's a useful superpower. 'They're getting away! Quick, Fog-Woman, worsen their driving conditions!'"
3) "Okay, but all this moisture had better not make my hair really frizzy."
4) "I already did, when I was up at the ceiling. Look at the mist in the air."
Select an option or 0 to say nothing >> 4
Austin looks around. "Oh. I didn't notice that. Would you mind doing it again, from down here this time? I'd like to actually watch it take place, from close up."
>fog
You concentrate on fogging the area, but nothing happens.
That’s strange. Our fogging power was working just a few turns ago. Let’s try it one more time.
To repeat our previous command, IF games allow us to simply type again. An even shorter form is that command’s abbreviation, g.
>g
You concentrate on fogging the area, but nothing happens.
Still no luck. Let’s see if Austin has any insight.
>ask austin about fog
"I don't know exactly what the fog power entails. Why don't you give it a try?"
Perhaps we need to wait until the mist from our previous fogging has dissipated before we can use this superpower again. To wait around doing nothing for a turn in an IF game, the command wait can (appropriately enough) be employed. Wait can be abbreviated as z.
>z
Time passes.
You notice that the mist has pretty much dissipated.
Let’s give it a try now…
>fog
At your mental command, fog swirls around you, billowing out and silently engulfing the room. Because of the size of the lab, however, it quickly thins into a light mist.
"Excellent!" says Austin. "Looks like the suit can generate a limited amount of fog when you just give the basic mental command. It's not enough to do much in this room, but it might be quite handy in a more confined space."
Austin walks to a corner of the lab, retrieving a huge wooden spool that probably once held some of the cables powering Mom and Dad's various big machines. He carries it casually, in one hand, the way you might carry a cup of coffee. He then sets it down in front of you, saying, "Perhaps the suit allows you to fog specific objects as well. Why don't you focus your thought on fogging this spool?"
Please select a reply:
1) "Alright, I'll give it a shot."
2) "Why don't you focus your thought on not being so freaking bossy?"
3) "Hang on, I want to try something else first."
Select an option or 0 to say nothing >> 3
"Knock yourself out," says Austin. "Whenever you're ready to try fogging this thing, we'll continue."
>fly
Once again, the ground drops away as you soar upwards.
High Above The Lab
You are hovering in the air, several stories above the lab floor. The beams and girders of the ceiling are so close you could touch them, and the windows display a magnificent view of the campus and ocean. At the moment, a thin mist hangs in the lab's air. Far below, Austin looks up at you from amid a sea of equipment. Good thing you're not afraid of heights.
>zap window
The lab is plenty well ventilated as it is.
>zap austin
Nothing happens. Perhaps Austin is too far away.
>land
As smoothly as you rose, you descend once more.
Lab
You are in Mom and Dad's lab. As usual, the majority of the equipment in this enormous space is more or less a mystery to you. Also here are a few tables and terminals; a ring of windows near the ceiling looks out on the distant stars. At the moment, a thin mist floats in the air. Doors lead south into the storage room and west into the hallway.
The hallway door is closed.
The storage room door is open.
You can also see Austin and a large wooden spool here.
>zap spool
You extend your hand, and a sizzling bolt of bright blue electricity arcs between you and the large wooden spool. With a thundering KER-POW, the large wooden spool disintegrates, leaving only a smoking scorch mark.
Austin leaps backward in surprise. "Good Lord!" he exclaims. When he has recovered his composure a bit, he says, "So that's the electrical blast. It's certainly impressive, I'll say that. There must be upwards of 10 megajoules of energy in that blast -- enough to blow most things to bits. Remind me not to get on your bad side!"
You notice that the mist has pretty much dissipated.
>fog austin
At your mental command, fog swirls around Austin, silently engulfing him in a cloud of thick, grey vapor.
"Verrrry funny," says the cloud. It blunders about the room for a few moments, finally bumping into and encompassing one of the lab's many tables. There is the sound of sliding papers, then a deep whoosh whoosh whoosh emanates from within the cloud, and you are buffeted by powerful waves of air. Within seconds, the cloud has cleared, revealing Austin waving a six-foot table as if it were an oriental fan.
He sets the table down. "Okay, wiseass, you've made your point. Clearly, you can fog specific things, and even specific people. And I'm guessing that if you use it on somebody who can't overpower it, it'd probably be a pretty good weapon. I still think the spool would've been a better test subject, though," he says grumpily.
"You've certainly made it abundantly clear that the blast power works, so I think we've tested all the suit's capabilities at this point."
Another way to communicate with other characters within an IF game is to show or give them objects they might find of interest. Let’s see if Austin has any insight into the decidedly cryptic page of notes we picked up earlier.
>show pad to austin
"Typical Scott Colborn notes -- I'm sure they mean something to him, but for anybody else they might as well be written in Greek. Well, anybody else who can't read Greek. You know what I mean."
"Well, I guess the suit checks out," says Austin. "We've tested every power mentioned in this notebook, and they all seem to work. I have no idea what Mom and Dad intended their original purpose to be, but they're not here to tell us, and the suits seem to fit us fine. So let me ask you this, Emily: How would you feel about using these suits to investigate the situation ourselves? I don't much feel like a superhero, but in a sense, that's what we are when we've got these suits on. Maybe we can explore avenues that aren't exactly open to the police. What do you say?"
Please select a reply:
1) "Okay, you've convinced me. Let's do it."
2) "No. I'm sorry, but I just think it's a bad idea."
3) "We can't be superheroes! We don't know a thing about investigating a crime! How is shooting lightning and lifting heavy things going to find us clues that the police can't find?"
4) "I can't be a superhero! I don't have long, flowing hair or gigantic breasts!"
5) "You can't be a superhero! You're not covered with steroid-enhanced bulges!"
6) "I can't be a superhero! I'm scared to death of fighting!"
7) "We can't be superheroes without snazzy-sounding code names, now can we?"
8) "I can't be a superhero! I'm in horrible shape! I probably couldn't even run around the block!"
9) "We can't be superheroes! What if we get hurt?"
10) "We can't be superheroes! How will we wear these suits without being noticed?"
Select an option or 0 to say nothing >> 10
"Yeah, the whole 'secret identity' problem. I always thought it was a little silly for comicbook superheroes to hide their identities, but maybe we ought to do that, at least until we find Mom and Dad. Otherwise, there might be a lot of uncomfortable suspicions around us, not to mention around Mom and Dad's research."
"I agree, but that doesn't answer my question," you say.
"Oh, right. Actually, Mom and Dad seem to have thought of that, too. I tested wearing street clothes over the earthsuit before you got here; when enough of the suit is covered, the visible parts fade into transparency, and the cowl does some kind of holo-projection thing so that your hair and face look normal, too. It's really cool. You should give it a try sometime. The only problem is that you can't use the suit's powers when it's covered like that -- I think it uses mostly photoreceptors to power itself. But that's probably for the best, since without the cowls visible it'd just look like us doing those superpower things. Anyway, I hope that addresses your objection."
Please select a reply:
1) "Okay, you've convinced me. Let's do it."
2) "No. I'm sorry, but I just think it's a bad idea."
3) "We can't be superheroes! We don't know a thing about investigating a crime! How is shooting lightning and lifting heavy things going to find us clues that the police can't find?"
4) "I can't be a superhero! I don't have long, flowing hair or gigantic breasts!"
5) "You can't be a superhero! You're not covered with steroid-enhanced bulges!"
6) "I can't be a superhero! I'm scared to death of fighting!"
7) "We can't be superheroes without snazzy-sounding code names, now can we?"
8) "I can't be a superhero! I'm in horrible shape! I probably couldn't even run around the block!"
9) "We can't be superheroes! What if we get hurt?"
Here we have a “repeating” dialogue menu. This is fairly common in IF, and allows us to have an ongoing conversation with Austin by selecting various choices. Note that selections we have already chosen are removed from the menu each time. This makes sense, as we probably do not want to repeat ourself.
Select an option or 0 to say nothing >> 8
"Heh. I know what you mean. Still, with these suits, it's not like we really need to be in good shape. You can fly wherever you want to go, and this suit keeps me strong enough to run or jump or whatever without getting particularly winded. It probably wouldn't hurt us to start working out a little more, but it's not like we have to be Olympic athletes before we can use these suits."
Please select a reply:
1) "Okay, you've convinced me. Let's do it."
2) "No. I'm sorry, but I just think it's a bad idea."
3) "We can't be superheroes! We don't know a thing about investigating a crime! How is shooting lightning and lifting heavy things going to find us clues that the police can't find?"
4) "I can't be a superhero! I don't have long, flowing hair or gigantic breasts!"
5) "You can't be a superhero! You're not covered with steroid-enhanced bulges!"
6) "I can't be a superhero! I'm scared to death of fighting!"
7) "We can't be superheroes without snazzy-sounding code names, now can we?"
8) "We can't be superheroes! What if we get hurt?"
Select an option or 0 to say nothing >> 7
"Cool code names, eh? Well, since it's an earthsuit and a skysuit that give us our powers, how about something that incorporates those elements? Like, I don't know... Earth-Man and Sky-Girl?"
"First of all," you say, "why is it that you get to be a Man, and I'm just a Girl? Also, Earth-Man sounds like something a Star Trek alien would call you."
"Okay, fine. What's your idea?"
"I think rather than try to sound like cheesy comic book superheroes by appending things like 'Man' or 'Lass' or 'Captain' or whatever, we ought to keep it short and elegant. How about just Earth and Sky?"
"Earth and Sky. I have to admit, those do sound pretty cool. Okay, Earth and Sky it is. So now that we have our cool code names, will you help me investigate this disappearance?"
Please select a reply:
1) "Okay, you've convinced me. Let's do it."
2) "No. I'm sorry, but I just think it's a bad idea."
3) "We can't be superheroes! We don't know a thing about investigating a crime! How is shooting lightning and lifting heavy things going to find us clues that the police can't find?"
4) "I can't be a superhero! I don't have long, flowing hair or gigantic breasts!"
5) "You can't be a superhero! You're not covered with steroid-enhanced bulges!"
6) "I can't be a superhero! I'm scared to death of fighting!"
7) "We can't be superheroes! What if we get hurt?"
Select an option or 0 to say nothing >> 1
"All right!" says Austin. "Tell you what -- I know you're helping Aunt Nina in lab tomorrow. Let's meet afterward and come up with a plan. Oh, and try to avoid kryptonite between now and then." He grins, and you roll your eyes.
E A R T H
A N D
S K Y
Part 2: Shake, Rattle, and Roar
When your parents first suggested that you work as a research assistant for Nina Icolari, you were pretty skeptical. Sure, she's a close friend of the family, so much so that you grew up calling her "Aunt Nina." Yes, you get along with her just fine, in some ways even better than you get along with Mom and Dad. And yes, you need the money. But Aunt Nina is a world-class biologist, and as fun-loving as she may be in the rest of her life, when she gets to work she's a driven scientist who needs competent help. Hardly an auspicious position for a non-science-minded English major such as yourself, but so far, you've been pleasantly surprised. The work is a bit pedestrian, but the pay is good, and Aunt Nina never gets impatient with you. Today, though, she's doing an extremely important materials transfer, and you get the sense that when she gives you an order, you'd better snap to it...
Observation Booth
This small chamber is an adjunct to the materials handling room, designed to allow observation and some degree of remote control over the equipment in that room. On the north wall is the long, rectangular pane of thick glass that separates the two rooms, and below that is a control panel. Opposite the edges of this large window, on the south side of the room, a couple of tall window-slats let in the sunlight. To the west is the door out to the hallway.
We have now completed the first of Earth and Sky’s three parts. Earth and Sky is very forgiving in that there is no way to get permanently stuck or to make the game unwinnable through imprudent actions. Still, death is always a possibility even in this game, especially as in its remaining two-thirds you will progress from merely trying out your superpowers to battling villains in best comic book fashion. With that in mind, it might be a good idea to bookmark our progress here so that we do not have to start the story over completely if we should meet an unhappy fate. We can do this through the save command, which will bring up an interpreter-specific menu that will allow us to store the game’s current state into a small file on our computer. We can then return to that exact point in the story at any time by entering the restore command and selecting the desired save file from the menu that results. It is possible to have as many save files as you desire for any given story, limited only by the storage capacity of your chosen computing device. Experience teaches IF players to save early and save often to avoid replaying large sections of a story, especially if that story is more complex and less forgiving than Earth and Sky.
>save
Ok.
Hopefully the time we have spent together playing Earth and Sky has given you a fair picture of just what IF is and how it works. I will leave this hands-on transcript now to focus on historical and theoretical matters for the rest of this essay, but I encourage you to finish Earth and Sky on your own. After all, Austin and Emily still have evil plans to thwart and monsters to crush in this game, and, should you enjoy that, Paul O’Brian has written two sequels featuring the same characters and their search for their missing parents that are also well worth playing.
Much of the remainder of this essay will be structured as a chronological narrative of IF’s development over the years. We will begin this history in the next chapter with a discussion of two important IF progenitors, followed by the world’s first work of true IF, Adventure.