Rest in Peace, or, The Game Continues

Sometimes it is hard to be funny.

But let’s back up. Let’s talk about interactive fiction for a moment. You know, those games that were pretty big in the 80’s because the graphics capacity of the imagination was so, so much more than the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment Systems that were the state of the art at the time. The ones that described the room you were in using plain text and then gave you a little command prompt you could use to (hopefully) tell the computer what your protagonist was attempting to do. The ones that mostly died out as people became jaded to the format but whose spirit has been kept alive across the years by the small but dedicated interactive fiction online fandom.

Let’s talk about Once and Future.

Once and Future, published in 1998, is Kevin Wilson’s love letter to the classic interactive fiction genre of old, and is probably the last of its breed. Which is not to say it was the last IF title ever written; far from it. Fan-written freeware IF, shared via online forums, continues to be a thing, and advances in the toolset (Twine, e.g.) have made crafting your own shareable interactive story easier than ever before. On the commercial side of things, five-buck CYOA-style apps continue to flourish for mobile devices. Both of these are pushing at the boundaries of the genre in interesting ways. But Once and Future was probably the last commercial attempt at a classic parser-based Infocom-style IF experience. It was noteworthy for its evocative prose, the depth of its non-player characters, its keen understanding of Arthurian myth… and its five-year development cycle, something of a lifetime for an already-hoary genre. By the time Cascade Mountain Publishing finally released it in paid form, hobbyist IF writers online had done so much more, and more interesting things with the medium, that it was not exactly even the niche commercial success that Cascade Mountain had hoped for.

One critique leveled at Once and Future was the mechanical linearity of its design. No real spoilers here; notwithstanding the fact that the game itself is twenty years old, what I’m about to say is pretty much the first thing that happens to you when you boot ‘er up. In Once and Future, Private Frank Leandro (the playable character) is serving out a tour of duty in Vietnam, when his squad is ambushed by a grenadier while they are relaxing and playing cards. Frank heroically throws himself on the grenade to save his friends, and is subsequently horribly killed transported to Ancient Times where he quests for the Holy Grail and saves the world and all that stuff. For atmospheric reasons, the grenade is tossed into Frank’s camp right as he’s laying down a card. Sounds kind of cinematic, right? The problem is, the arrival of the grenade is specifically keyed to you playing that card. You could just instruct Frank to “wait” over and over and over again, and the grenade would literally never arrive.

Of course, there’s nothing much else to do in the world. You failing to play a card doesn’t allow you to sleep peacefully in your cot that night, successfully complete your tour, get an honorable discharge, etc. It is inevitable that most players will play that card and then throw themselves on the grenade, just as the game wants them to. But still, it felt a little weird to some dedicated critics of the genre that these two events were (apparently) causally linked in the fictional world Wilson had created.

You know who else was interested in pushing the boundaries of interactive fiction? Infocom itself, during their heyday. Not content to keep churning out the same experience over and over again, the Infocom Implementors constantly experimented to bring new tweaks and gameplay elements to their rapidly-aging genre. From the light RPG elements of Beyond Zork, to the nonlinear storytelling of the masterfully-crafted A Mind Forever Voyaging, to… to whatever the hell Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or (sic) Tail of It was, Infocom continued to improvise. Let’s talk about Infocom’s 1987 espionage-themed Border Zone. This was a contemporary Cold War spy thriller set in a clear analogue to a then-divided Germany. While most prompt-based IF waited patiently for you to type something, anything into the prompt, then advanced the clock accordingly, Border Zone‘s clock was always running, regardless of whether you were typing or not. This made for an intense and frustrating player experience, especially for those of us who had a habit of staring pensively at our inventory screens for minutes and sometimes hours on end, trying to figure out how to progress. If you started any of the three episodes and then walked away from the keys, you would just plain lose. The Soviet Agent absolutely would notice the blood-spatters on the floor of the Businessman’s private train compartment (left behind by the American Agent) and the Businessman would be arrested. The American Agent would absolutely die of blood loss from his wounded arm. And the assassination that the Soviet Agent was trying to prevent would absolutely eventually occur, whether or not you made a single move or typed a single command.

People did not react well to this gimmick. Computer Gaming World found the title to be one of Infocom’s “weakest to date” and no further games were published featuring this sort of real-time input. I personally never finished it, and have never seen the end of the game except perhaps in transcript form. I gather that not many people liked it.

Life isn’t an interactive fiction game. But if it were an interactive fiction game, it wouldn’t be Once and Future. It would be Border Zone.

Because…

…this has all just been roundabout way of saying that when you have made the crushingly-difficult decision to have your faithful fourteen-and-a-half year old Labrador Retriever euthanized due to her life-threatening laryngeal paralysis, and you have brought her into the tiny little room with comfy chairs where they will be administering the lethal injection, you want the world to work like Once and Future. As you are sitting there, looking into your dog’s eyes for what will undoubtedly be the last time, you want to just remain perfectly still, in the hopes that the clock will not advance. If you just remain quiet enough–not even pressing “Z” to give a “wait” command–the next action literally will never arrive. Like a permanently-frozen-in-time Frank Leandro, you will never have to endure that goddamn grenade attack.

Of course, then you never get to experience the rest of the game. But sometimes that seems a small sacrifice.

For better or for worse, though, we are living in Border Zone, and just like the KGB agent methodically moving down the length of the train in Episode One, the veterinarian will shortly arrive, and will kill your fucking dog, and you will leave without her, and the worst part is this is exactly what you wanted to happen. It is the reason you brought her here.

So, yeah. It’s hard to be funny right now.

The game continues. We’re down a player. But the game goes on.

Rest in peace, Desi. You were a very, very good dog.