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2) General (Journalism, Reflection, and Literature)

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25 Aug 2001; Dennis G. Jerz
This part of the Annotated IF Bibliography covers: 

• 2.1: Reportage (Journalism and Non-academic Books) 
• 2.2: Essays (Nostalgia and Reflection) 
• 2.3: Literature (References to IF in Other Genres) 

§2.1: Reportage (Journalism and Non-academic Books)

Buckles, Mary Ann. "Interactive Fiction as Literature: Adventure games have a literary lineage." Byte 12.5 (1987): 135-138, 140, 142. [link]
A condensed, popular version of Buckles's thesis on "Colossal Cave Adventure." (See §1.1: Buckles.) The article describes IF's connections to detective fiction, adventure literature (such as Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth and Stevenson's Treasure Island) and the prose novels of chivalry (the target for Cervantes' satire Don Quixote). Buckles, whose byline credits her as "co-owner and writing consultant of Transgalactic Software," offers five suggestions for would-be IF authors, based on her observations of people playing and responding to "Adventure."

1. Game authors should make up a "supra-story" that contextualizes all the puzzles and isolated events that make up the gameplay, but since the player is on his or her own to solve the puzzles, the player should also be permitted to make up his or her own explanation for events, "just as each person arrives at a personal meaning for a poem."
2. "If you build up story tension, make sure something happens!" The buildup to the "Breathtaking View" room was "the aesthetic high point of Adventure" for many players; yet, once the player finds the source of the distant rumbling (an underground volcano) and has read a paragraph of purple prose (adapted by Don Woods from Tolkien's description of Mount Doom), there is nothing further to do, and players generally felt disappointed.
3. "Give the puzzles a moral quality. . . . For example, several people told me they thought the hungry bear bound with the golden chains was the most enticing problem because they were emotionally involved with it. They didn't want to hurt the bear, yet they were mildly afraid of it. When the puzzles have a moral dimension, it gives them emotional depth."
4. "Create a narrator with a unified personality and vision." Since the "Colossal Cave Adventure" narration is sometimes self-referential, and sometimes seems to know more about the cave than the player does, Buckles feels that the player's response to the narrative voice enhances the aesthetic effect.
5. "Test your story on other people." Buckles suggests that groups of two or three people tend to have discussions or arguments about the significance of events they have witnessed; observing their extra-textual reactions will help the programmer improve the game.

A brief conclusion observes that the artistic quality of early movies was pathetically limited, until D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin brought their artistic talents to the new medium. "Perhaps it will take someone who is both a programmer and an author to explore the artistic promise of IF and create works of literature that rank with the classics of traditional literature." [Note: §1.1: Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck will later echo this sentiment, announcing a vigil for the "cyberbard."]

Costikyan, Greg. "I Have No Words & I Must Design." Interactive Fantasy 2 (1994). 31 May 2001. Archived at http://www.crossover.com/~costik/nowords.html. [link]
No specific reference to interactive fiction. The article applies equally to dice-rolling board games. Argues that a game is not a puzzle, toy, or a story. "A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal. . . A light switch is interactive. You flick it up, the light turns on. You flick it down, the light turns off. That's interaction. But it's not a lot of fun. All games are interactive: The game state changes with the players' actions. If it didn't, it wouldn't be a game: It would be a puzzle. But interaction has no value in itself. Interaction must have purpose."

Economist [Editorial] "But Is It Story-telling?" Economist. 11 Nov 1995: 16. Academic Search Elite database, UWEC McIntyre Library, 15 May 2001. [link]
This curmudgeonly article dismisses the efforts of the computer industry to create - and the efforts of "interactive evangelists" to theorize - "interactive fiction." It refers only briefly to command-line IF, but sees CD-ROM games as a direct descendent, suffering from the same storytelling flaws. Argues that the computer's technical capabilities have not yet been successfully been put to use by someone with the creative talents to create something of literary value. (See also §1.1: Buckles; Murray; §2.1: Au.)

• "The multimedia industry is awash with attempts to reinvent story-telling with computers... But the enthusiasm of the industry - and the curiosity-driven purchases of new consumers - should not obscure the fact that interactive fiction is all too often a failure, if a story in any standard sense is expected" (¶2, 3).
• "Despite the millions of dollars that software companies and publishers are throwing at this much-hyped field, interactive fiction is still a technical novelty, attracting more programmers with literary ambitions than the reverse. Perhaps one day better writers, directors and actors will make interactive fiction work. So far the evidence points to deeper problems" (¶4).
• After a brief history of "Adventure" (partially confused with the history of "Zork"), the article accurately describes the basic plot of early IF as "Stay alive, collect the right stuff and an elementary story emerges" (¶6). While "[i]nteractive films" are more visually interesting, the story model is no more advanced. "You are given tasks; until you complete them, you cannot get to the next major part of the story" (¶7).
• "Adventure" games are like Advent calendars with little doors that open, one per day, to reveal a holiday scene during the four weeks before Christmas. [The command to start the first "Adventure" game was abbreviated as "advent." I still remember the pious delight on my mother's face when, as a young boy just learning computer programming, I announced that I was creating an "advent program." - DGJ]
• "The snag with most electronic stories is that they tamper with the foundation of narrative: structure. When stories wobble and change with our whim, they lose their believability, and with it our willingness to care. Multimedia entertainment works at the extremes: all-interactivity, minimal plot ('Doom'; Id Software and other games) and all-plot, minimal interactivity (books with hypertext additions, such as the conversion of 'Alice in Wonderland'), but between them is disaster" (¶12).
• The article complains of "interactive evangelists" who argue that there is no such thing as the "right path" (¶16), arguing that "the typical reader wants to know... 'Which path generates the closest thing to a satisfying linear story, the sort that life, experience and thousands of years of story-telling have taught us to expect?' " (¶13).
• Interactive stories, in which multiple outcomes are possible, are "amusing for a while" but unsatisfying because of the indeterminacy of the "'real' - the story-teller's - outcome" (¶17).

Gaiman, Neil. Don't Panic - Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion. Titan Books: London, 1992. [link]
Pages 150-156 describe the relationship between Adams's comic science fiction novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the Infocom version of the game, programmed with collaborator Steve Meretzky.

• A transcript of the IF-related portions of this book was once available at http://www.lysator.liu.se/infocom/articles/douglas.html, but the link was dead as of 24 Aug, 2000.
• The game is playable online at http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html.
• Douglas Adams also collaborated on "Bureaucracy" (Infocom, 1987), and more recently created the graphic game "Starship Titanic" (The Digital Village, 1998), which featured a text parser.

Goetz, Phil. "Interactive Fiction and Computers." Interactive Fantasy 1, Crashing Boar Books, 1994. 98-115. Reproduced on http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/ifan194.htm. [link]
While this article offers little in the way of literary analysis of interactive fiction, it does usefully summarize the pre-history of the genre. It includes sections on graphic adventures, multi-player environments, and artificial intelligence.

• An interactive version of Hamlet, in which the reader could force Hamlet to kill Claudius, would lead to a considerably shorter play: "This exhibits one problem with interactive fiction - sometimes the action which builds up to a more dramatic climax is not the action which a goal-oriented reader would take" (¶3).
• "Serious researchers are squeamish about the term 'player' because of its connotation of frivolity. Since reading fiction is entertainment, and interactive entertainment is a game, the term 'player' is justified. Please understand that this does not imply that all IF will be like adventure games, played to win" (¶54).
• "It is inevitable that future IF will have more real-world knowledge and realistic interfaces. It is not clear whether authors and players co-operating can communicate the same range of emotions and thoughts to the players as in traditional fiction, whether a theory of drama would enable the player to have an exploratory literary experience rather than a controlled one, or if IF will escape from genres" (¶80).

• Goetz offers a concise overview of pre-computer hypertextual literary experiments, including those described by Jorge Luis Borges and Kurt Vonnegut, and concludes that "interactivity is very low" in them (¶16). By contrast, classic IF, which uses a second-person, present-tense point of view, is far more immersive. Quotes IF author Brian Moriarty's surprise at "how many people were bothered" by a puzzle (in "Trinity" [Infocom, 1985]) in which the player is required to kill a small animal (¶25).
• Observes that Marc Blank's "Deadline" (Infocom, 1982) uses a hypertext-like plot tree, leading to about 30 possible endings. Notes that even a story with 30 endings is still necessarily finite, since "the author cannot provide a dramatic experience" if the player is completely unrestrained (¶40).
• Introduces Brenda Laurel's computational theory of drama, but argues that real-world implementations are not possible for the foreseeable future: "The systems these people advocate don't need full intelligence because they will be hack writers, at best able to churn out westerns, space opera and romances. Mysteries and sitcoms will remain beyond them. As for me, I will not abandon closed-ended, human-controlled fiction" (¶51).
• "We want to do in IF the things we do in traditional fiction: make readers care about the characters, create suspense and concern, and a feeling of dramatic completion" (¶53).
• Predicts that "truly tragic fiction might never work in IF. . . . I'm referring to such works as 1984, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, Heart of Darkness or Deliverance, in which it is dramatically necessary for the main character to be psychically crushed. The IF player might feel that giving them the freedom to choose how to act had been a cruel farce" (¶58).
• Observes that interactive fiction offers many opportunities to break the suspension of disbelief (¶60). If the game calls for a prop bottle, the bottle should be breakable; the broken shards of glass should be able to cut things, etc. [Goetz seems to mean that this level of simulation is necessary to involve the player with the story, even though these simulated objects may have nothing to do with the story the author wants to tell.]

Hafner, Katie and Matthew Lyon. When Wizards Stay Up Late: the Origins of the Internet. Simon & Schuster: New York, 1996. [link]
A good source for information on Will Crowther, an ARPA programmer and ardent caver who created the "Colossal Cave Adventure" (c. 1975) and Don Woods, who found an abandoned, unfinished copy of the game, and released an expanded version (with the approval of Crowther). (See also §2.1: Kidder; Levy. Also §2.1: Adams; Heller.)

• "Crowther seemed to concentrate best while hanging from door frames by his fingertips, doing chin-ups. While others passed the time at lengthy meetings by drawing squiggles and curlicues, Crowther filled his page with a thicket of differential equations" (98).
• Will Crowther's "Adventure" is "[o]ne of the most stunning examples" of how the early Internet "was opening wider to new uses [besides the sharing of scientific data] and creating new connections among people" (205).
• Crowther's hobbies included cave exploring (he was cartographer for the Cave Research Foundation; see The Longest Cave, by Richard Brucker and Richard A. Watson) and the role-playing board game "Dungeons and Dragons" (206).
• "In early 1976 Will and Pat divorced. Looking for something to do with his two children, he hit upon an idea that united Will the programmer with [his D&D character] Willie the imaginary thief: a simplified, computer version of Dungeons and Dragons called Adventure.... Crowther finished the program over the course of three or four weekends. His kids - ages seven and five - loved it, and Crowther began showing it to friends. But the breakup of his marriage had sapped Crowther's spirit, and he never got around to refining the game" (206). [Note: Other sources place Crowther's creation of the game in 1972 or 73.]
• When Crowther left his employer, for another job, he abandoned the program on the company computer, but it continued to circulate on the network. Don Woods, a Stanford grad student, heard about the game, and downloaded a copy. "But Woods had difficulty getting Adventure to run at first, and when he did he found it riddled with bugs. Still, he was hooked. 'Adventure made users feel like they were interacting more with the computer,' said Woods. 'It seemed to be responding more to what you typed, rather than just making its own moves like a silent opponent. I think this attracted a lot of players who might otherwise have been turned off by the idea of playing "against" a computer. This was playing "with" a computer'" (207).
• "Both Crowther and Woods encouraged programmers to pirate the game and included their e-mail addresses for anyone looking for help installing, playing, or copying the game" (207).
• "'I've long ago lost count of the programmers who've told me that the experience that got them started using computers was playing Adventure,' Woods said" (208).

• Presents seven "Principles for character-based interactive story" (13).
• Lewis Carroll must have co-created his "Alice" stories by improvising responses to the queries of Alice and her sisters, who were the first audience for the emerging tales (13).
• Carroll "invented and magnificently executed our Seven Principles for character-based interactive story" and would surely have created effective computer narrative if the technology had existed in his day (15).

• On "Adventure" (Crowther, c.1975; Crowther and Woods, 1976): "Charting out subterranean caverns and dead ends is pretty much analogous to mapping out a circuit or debugging a piece of code. So a combination of computers and dragon-slashing games was begging to happen. Adventure not only took care of the scorekeeping and referee chores, but its bone-dry humor and exploratory conventions influenced a generation of game programmers. In Adventure and its descendants, the emphasis was on puzzle solving and getting to some mysterious end at a slow, novelistic pace. In terms of genre and gameplay, it was a straight shot to Myst" (11).
• Interview with Eugene Jarvis (creator of the video game "Defender"): "These days when we do a videogame, it's almost like a Hollywood team. We have a guy just writing musical scores for the game, four or five guys doing the artwork, a couple guys designing the cabinets, and three to four programmers. It=s a huge, huge thing. It's a different era. The games are much more cinematic and much more visually oriented. Whereas back, if you look at Defender, technology didn't give you much to work with. You couldn't really razzle-dazzle them with what graphics you had... So a lot of the work just went into the play of the game. You had to figure out what your game was about" (78).
• On "Zork" (Marc Blank and David P. Lebling, 1977): "Because much of the game takes place in unlit caves, you could almost believe that darkness corresponded to the blackness of the screen. The naturally low visibility of a subterranean environment grooved perfectly with the claustrophobic architecture of Zork's underground maze, where descriptive passages illuminated only one step in any given direction, forcing you to grope through a world shrouded in fog. You never knew what kind of puzzle or twist or surprise attack lay around the next dark corner. And so you kept turning corners, just like you would turn the pages of a book. And you kept turning them obsessively for the weeks or months it took to reach the end. Unlike twitch games, which repeated the same half-hour game ad infinitum, computer text adventures were one long string of game play conducted over forty to sixty hours. You didn't start a game like Zork, you embarked upon it. You made progress, and you saved your place. And you knew you were going to be on this ride for a long, long time. It was less like picking up a comic book and more like cracking War and Peace" (148-49).
• "To make a traditional story truly interactive, a game designer would have to create a branching plot that forks any time the main character has to make a decision. Stay in Hannibal or light out for the territories. Be loyal to Jim or sell him down the river. Act by yourself or team up with Tom Sawyer. At each branching point, the story diverges, creating another set of fictions. The mathematics of this quickly become nightmarish for the designer, who now has the delightful job of writing 256 versions of the same novel. Even if someone tried to do it (and God knows what kind of masochistic soul would undertake this Dickensian task), he'd end up with a narrative sandcastle whose towers and turrets were continually toppling over. Some choices make better stories than others, and constructing a compelling narrative is not a particularly carefree enterprise. It involves a lot of ditchdigging and bridge building and sign posting. And most people [i.e. game designers?] don't want to work that hard. That's why they pay authors" (149-150).

Chapter 5 begins with an indispensable four-page account of the culture in which interactive fiction -- in this case, "Adventure" (Crowther, c.1975; Crowther and Woods, 1976) was being played c. 1979 - after business hours in basement computer rooms. Easily the best account of how the environment contributed to the effects of these early games: simply getting into the basement computing facilities where the off-duty mainframes could be commandeered for entertainment purposes was something of an adventure in itself. (See also §2.1: Levy; Hafner and Lyon.)

• A description of the techno-fetishistic environment at MIT: "Wandering around the labyrinth of laboratories and storerooms, searching for the secrets of telephone switching in machine rooms, tracing paths of wires or relays in subterranean steam tunnels. . . for some, it was common behavior, and there was no need to justify the impulse, when confronted with a closed door with an unbearably intriguing noise behind it, to open the door uninvited. And then, if there was no one to physically bar access to whatever was making that intriguing noise, to touch the machine, start flicking switches and noting responses, and eventually to loosen a screw, unhook a template, jiggle some diodes and tweak a few connections. Peter Samson and his friends had grown up with a specific relationship to the world, wherein things had meaning only if you found out how they worked. And how would you go about that if not by getting your hands on them?" (3).
• "In a sense, Adventure was a metaphor for computer programming itself - the deep recesses you explored in the Adventure world were akin to the basic, most obscure levels of the machine that you'd be traveling in when you hacked in assembly code. You could get dizzy trying to remember where you were in both activities. Indeed, Adventure proved as addicting as programming - Woods put the program on the SAIL PDP-10 on a Friday, and some hackers (and Real World "tourists") spent the entire weekend trying to solve it" (132-33).
• "[L]ike any significant program, Adventure was expressive of the personality and environment of the authors. For instance, Woods's vision of a mist-covered Toll Bridge protected by a stubborn troll came during a break in hacking one night, when Woods and some other hackers decided to watch the sun rise at a mist-shrouded Mount Diablo, a substantial drive away. They didn't make it in time, and Woods remembered what that misty dawn looked like, and wrote it into the description of that scene in the game, which he conceived of over breakfast that morning" (133).

• Turning a chronicle of events into a compelling plot requires "dramatic compression - the technique of abstracting complicated patterns of human experience into sharply focused moments" (18).
• Murray offers some suggestions for a cross-disciplinary program of study, drawing from simulation, political science, theatre, and engineering, to prepare students to work in this emerging field. Murray describes her own effort, PAINT ("Program in Advanced Interactive Narrative"): "a research and teaching project aimed at furthering the practice of digital narrative as a creative art form and framework for information" (19).

• Quotes a successful artist who found solace in computer games during a psychologically trying time: "Zork kept me alive" (26).
• You don't just read a poem, you live with it - reading, reciting, studying. You work hard in order to see more in it. "This is the opposite of cant about the 'freedom' readers have when dealing with interactive texts: it is the freedom of the detective trying to solve a crime, or the captive trying to escape, a kind of authorial tyranny compared with the welcoming, available pages of a book" (27). (See §1.1: Aarseth for commentary on the difference between the interpretive variability of linear text and the inherent variability of cybertext.)
• When composing "Mindwheel," one of the first things he learned from his "programmer-collaborators" was the difference between a "scene" (which depicts events that take place in time) and a "room" (which depicts objects situated in space) (see §3: Nelson 2001, §53 "The room descripton").
• Quotes the programmers' reaction to reviews of their collaborative work: "I've got to read this Dante's 'Inferno.' Everybody is comparing it to 'Mindwheel.'"

Stern, Andrew. "Interactive Fiction: The Story is Just Beginning." IEEE Intelligent Systems and Their Applications 13.6 (1998): 16-18. [link]
An independent virtual reality (VR) artist describes the commercial product "Virtual Petz," cartoonish animals that "play" on the user's computer screen. (See §1.2: Bates; §2.1: Hayes Roth; Murray; also "Babyz" www.babyz.net.) Article contains only the briefest allusion to command-based IF.

• "Contemporary storytelling mediums such as the written novel, theater, cinema, and television lack two key capabilities that the computer can offer: autonomy, or the ability to act and change on its own, and interactivity, or the ability to listen, think, and react intelligently to the audience (the user)" (16).
• Distinguishes between artificial intelligence (which is beyond our technological grasp at the moment) and "believable" or "life-like" characterization (which is more attainable) (16).
• Technology and characterization must be united by a plot. Current attempts at interactive fiction simply place puzzles at the junctions where users ought to be able to make decisions; hyperfiction removes the puzzles and simply supplies additional textual choices. "But in either system, a user ultimately cannot move the plot in any directions that were not predefined and prescripted by the programmers. Users quickly bump up against the limits and feel they have no real choices" (17).
• Industry and academia should co-operate to create "plot-generation systems." Industry shies away from the problem because it is so daunting, and academia is reluctant perhaps because it doesn't know how to integrate artists into scientific research" (17).

§2.2: Essays (Nostalgia and Reflection)

Adams, Scott. "Scott Adams Grand Adventure (S.A.G.A.)." Personal website. c.2000-01. 31 May 2001. http://www.msadams.com. [link]
The personal home page of Scott Adams, author of the first commercial computer game ("Adventureland," sold via a tiny ad in a computer magazine in 1978). While Adams's games are textually minimalistic (due to memory restrictions on the earliest home PCs) and have therefore attracted little attention from literary critics, his non-violent brain puzzlers are fondly remembered by many who played computer games in the late 70s. Adams's website offers links to fan pages and interviews.

Carr, Charles. "IF: The End of an Error?" ComptuerEdge Magazine (June 1997): 4 Apr 2000. http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/articles/ComputorEdge.txt. [link]
One of several "the day I first saw IF" narratives presented here. "I often wonder where IF might be now had the same amount of money and energy been thrown at it as graphic adventures. . . . Room for graphics notwithstanding, imagine the plot depth, character development, and worlds-within-worlds a text-only game could have with that much code."

Heller, Martin. "Adventure." Boston Review (1990); Windows Magazine (1998). 10 Jan 2000. http://www.mheller.com/Adventure.html. [link]
Postmodern biographical essay about Will Crowther, creator of "Colossal Cave Adventure." Interspersed with transcripts from "Colossal Cave," Heller offers his own personal reflections about Crowther, a man of many talents (caver, mountain climber, programmer, and lover of puzzles). [Crowther's design choices (placing most of the game underground; interspersing geographic puzzles and brain teasers; using a Tolkeinesque fantasy motif) had a tremendous effect on the computer gaming industry. --DGJ] (See also §2.1: Hafner and Lyon; Kidder; Levy.)

Lileks, James. "The other day..." Bleats. [Weblog.] 06 Feb 2001. 06 Feb 2001. http://www.lileks.com/writings/bleats/01/0101/01014.html. [link]
Another IF nostalgia article, significant because it focuses on a Scott Adams game, rather than "Colossal Cave" or "Zork".

O'Brian, Paul. "Editorial." SPAG 18 (1999). 07 Feb 2001. http://sparkynet.com/spag/backissues/SPAG18. [link]
The new editor of the Society for Promotion of Adventure Games newsletter writes: "Interactive fiction has been a part of my life for over 15 years. It's hard for me to believe it's been that long since my Dad brought home a copy of Zork I for the brand-new disk drive of our sleek Atari 400, but it's true. For me, just playing a game that didn't take a half-hour to load from a cassette tape was pretty cool, but this new program that understood what I typed, that challenged the agility of my mind rather than of my fingers, and that transported me into a breathtaking new imaginative vista. . . well that was downright *magical*."

Park, Mel. "Colossal Cave Revisited." TidBITS 8 (1994). 10 April, 2000. http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-229.html#lnk4. [link]
A brief article describing the real geographical origins of the landscape Crothwer incorporated into his "Colossal Cave Adventure" (c.1975). "'According to legend' - Hah! ADVENTURE is based on a real cave, one that is, indeed, now part of the Mammoth Cave System in Kentucky. The cave is not Colossal, however, but Bedquilt Cave. In our small circle, Willie Crowther is a famous, as was his wife then, cave explorer..." "Computer types who grew up exploring ADVENTURE don't realize how accurately the game represents passages in Bedquilt Cave. Yes, there is a Hall of the Mountain King and a Two-Pit Room. The entrance is indeed a strong steel grate at the bottom of a twenty-foot depression."

Watson, Blake. "Welcome to the Well House." The Well House [column]. Adventuregamer.com. 21 Apr 2000. 25 Aug 2001. http://www.adventuregamer.com/features/columns/wellhouse-1.shtml. (Unavailable as of 25 Aug 2001). [link]
This article, which announces a new column on the adventuregamer.com website, is here treated as IF nostalgia.

• "If you play Adventure games, you should know where they come from - and if you've played very many Adventure games, you may be surprised at how many conventions (good and bad) came from that first one."
• "Unfortunately none of the easily available modern versions of Advent that I have found are exact duplicates - even those which use Fortran code, the language in which the original was written. One thing you'll notice if you quit right away is that you already have 30+ points. In the original, you started at zero and got points for finding your way into the cave. For reasons I don't entirely fathom, the modern clones don't duplicate that."

§2.3: Literature (References to IF in Other Genres)

• Jerz, Dennis G. "PICK UP AX (review)." Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games 22 (2000): n.p. 15 Sep 2000. http://sparkynet.com/spag/backissues/SPAG22.
  "Much as Shakespeare might allude to mythology or appeal to floral symbolism in order to make a point about human nature, playwright Anthony Clarvoe uses IF as a vehicle to show the audience who his characters are and what they want out of life."
• Stone, Dudley. "Revenge of the Cybernauts" [Review of PICK UP AX.] (1996). 31 May 2001. http://www.oobr.com/top/volThree/two/OOBR-Ax.html.
  "It's a simple story but director James Abar moved it at a frenetic pace throughout, with very short scenes (bytes?) interspersed with some very well-chosen music including the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Jimmi Hendrix and Sinatra. In fact the sound design in this play was excellent."

Powers, Richard. "Escapes." Esquire 131.7 (1999): 86. [Excerpt from Powers's novel Plowing the Dark.] [link]
The short story "Escape," told in a second-person format, presents the thoughts of a political prisoner in a one-room cell, whose isolation is so severe that his flashbacks border on hallucinations. The short story published in Esquire contains no obvious references to command-line IF, but the novel from which it is excerpted deals with virtual reality, and many reviews (e.g. NY Times Book Review, Salon, The Village Voice) made the connection explicit. A short segment of the story: "You pace about, astonished. From the once-mythical far side of this cube, you look back across the ocean of air. Seeing your corner like this, from a distance - your mattress, radiator, chain; the grubby country that swallowed you entire - it looks bounded, known, livable."

Ross, Gary and Anne Spielberg [screenwriters]. Big. 20th Century Fox. 1988. [link]
The opening sequence of this Tom Hanks comedy shows a boy playing a graphics-and-text video game. The young Josh is frustrated by a puzzle involving a character frozen in ice. He types "melt ice" but is stumped when the computer replies, "What do you want to melt the ice with?" Later, Josh makes a wish in front of a coin-operated mechanical fortune teller, and is transformed into an adult (played by Hanks). After leaving home and finding work at a toy company, he makes a successful boardroom pitch for his concept of "electronic comics" - book-sized video screens with buttons that can control the action. Now that the computer game has become a business proposition embroiled in office politics, Josh is nostalgic for his lost childhood. He returns to the same computer game he had been playing at the start of the movie, and solves the puzzle by melting the ice "with thermal pod." The ice puzzle seems to be a metaphor for Josh's childhood, and the mechanical fortune-telling game is a bridge between childhood and adulthood.

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Dennis G. Jerz
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