Interview with Patrick Farley This issue I'd like to introduce you to American author Patrick Farley. He has won AGT's annual Adventure Writing Contest twice - in 1990 with Crime to the Ninth Power and, more recently, this year with Purchased Sight Unseen. Each game features private investigator, Cliff Diver, who lives and works in San Francisco and is one of the traditional PIs like Sam Spade. I buttoned up my trenchcoat, grabbed my notebook and headed off into the mist to find out more about Patrick and his alter ego, Cliff. * * * * * * * * "Hello, Miss Medley, and, through the magic of text adventuring, welcome to San Francisco. I apologize for not meeting your boat, and I'm glad you were able to flag that Market Street bus from the ferry terminal. Drops folks off right in front of Cliff's office building (the city council's working to get the drivers to slow down to 10 mph before they do). Seeing as how it's close to noon and we're less than a block from Leonard's (Cliff's second office), let me buy you one of the best burgers in the bay area. Right over ... ah, here, let me get the door for you. Nice trenchcoat. We'll take a booth right over ... there now, that better? Now, what can be said about Cliff Dive--" @~First things first ... would you like to tell us a bit about @~yourself? "Me? Of cours-- oh, don't wait for me. Go ahead and start in. Whatever you do, don't give Allen's guacamole a chance to set up. Excuse me . I'm a 40-year old former jazz-radio personality, producing computer games in a day and age when I should be showing you -- on one screen -- what's down a hallway, instead of describing it in two or three paragraphs (I love it). Never was an artist. Couldn't draw a cinderblock, let alone a flight-dragon, to save me. Irish are descriptive by nature, gesturing with their hands two-thirds of the time they're saying something. See, I'm doing it already! I chose to put my constantly-active hands down on a keyboard and record what I was describing. Like a weaver at a loom, I weave words. "My great-grandfather was the thespian in the family line, sending his acting talents along to my branch of the tree. I developed, from him, a talent for elaboration. Today I can never carry an intimate conversation without taking the "long word" around it. there, I just did it! Boy, this is a great burger (Allen must have scraped the grill for three days). "My office is a four-hour drive, south, from the bay area; a quiet village on California's Central Coast, called Los Osos (Spanish, The Bears). The only thing between me and the outside world is my computerized dinosaur of a computer (a 286) -- that does impersonations, really! Every time I fire it up it impersonates an old lady ... "I don't feel like accessing your hard drive this morning. Balance your checkbook manually. I'm going to switch off now!" I'd love a studio apartments, with those bay windows overlooking the park. Well, writers can't be choosy, can they? "My writer's day begins at 8:00am. I sit at the keyboard and write like crazy, getting wired on hot coffee and toast. At 9:00, I begin to edit and re-shape what I've entered. At 10:00 I say, "That's it. I HAVE to get away from the screen." I usually go downtown. Window-shopping provides hundreds of ideas. Noon finds me back at work till after 3:00 -- business hours are OVER. Oh, I put in few retouches here and there, but nothing extensive." @~When did you first get interested in computers and adventure @~games? "Computers came first, not the chicken or the egg as is believed. As a child of the late 50s/early 60s, I was introduced to computers that were giant mainframes; noisy beasts that resided in air-conditioned dens the length of football fields. My brother sat me down in front of a printout terminal (no monitors then) across the room from this ... huge thing. Looking over at me he said, "Type NO and hit the enter key." I did, and a few seconds later, an answer was printed. The thought of all those parts doing all that thinking, and waiting for me to interact with, was -- dare I say -- awesome. I was hooked on computers. "I had no trouble interacting with these creatures. Programming them, THAT was another story. I was introduced to IBM's BASIC and BASICA shortly after the Personal Computer Revolution, and 'toyed' with the language. My college life coincided with the premiere of Apple ][, and later, Apple //e. There my language knowledge increased and I began collecting magazines -- those that published programming sourcecode. I learned how GOTOs and GOSUBs worked in regards to plotting adventures; BASIC adventures." @~Who are your favourite authors and games? "I was never that much of a reader. I could be called a 'late reader.' Only recently have I returned to reading on a novel scale. As for authors, I enjoy Alan Dean Foster (the SpellSinger saga) and, most recently, Simon Brett (The Christmas Murders). Pooh's A.A. Milne surprised me as a mystery writer. I prize three 'physical clue' mysteries (reproductions), originally published in 1939 by Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links. "I never grasped the game concept of "Something just moved there -- SHOOT IT!" If I tell my computer, "Ok, let's play something" it's usually Scrabble, Gin Rummy, Cribbage, or some other form of intellectual play (Solitaire's wasted effort). Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure (Apogee) has been the only graphic game I've invested in -- all three episodes. The main character is interesting and well produced." @~What made you decide to write your own adventures? "A literary agent -- oooh here ... take a sip of water. There. Easy does it ... try taking smaller bites in the future. While still dabbling in BASIC games I chose to explore the world of real novels. I sent a manuscript of a SciFi novel to an agent in New York who said, "Novels of the type you wish to pen move with the speed of a rocket. This story of yours moves with the speed of an iceberg." Not very much of a push for a young writer, but pushing enough to make me say, "Hah, I'll show them. I'll write -- and publish -- my own work!" "The major stumbling block against BASIC adventures was that unless you were smart -- knew the secret coding characters to encode the BASIC listing -- anyone with a BASIC interpreter could open your listing and jump to the, so called, "final chapter" to see your solution. I was in the market for a system that encoded the final product into non-human-understandable text (ok, machine- understandable). AGT did just that. This was what I was looking for. When I learned that AGT-produced mysteries could be distributed as stand-alone games -- Shareware games -- that was what I bought! Essentially, I had bought myself a revolutionary -- albeit manual -- typewriter. "Cliff's sourcecode was produced with a text editor that provided paragraph revision/wordwrap in addition to Cut and Paste functions. I only had to produce the text (well, that and the compiler commands). The AGT compiler did the sweatwork. After the story's layout was developed, writing became Edit ... Submit to Complier ... Study Report ... Re-Edit ... ReSubmit to... well, you get the idea. What I was attempting to produce was not so much a game that you switched on, played for a while, and switched off (that's depressing). I wanted to produce a "book," waiting on your electronic book shelf for you to take down and open up. "After reading the opening segment (the first four or five screens; the intro to the case) Cliff appeared, saying, "That's enough reading. Let's go." The "book" would fade away and you would off on the case with Cliff." @~Where did the character of Cliff Diver come from? "The best way to describe Cliff would be, "He's a vegetable soup." In Cliff are segments from every PI ever seen (keyword: visual); just enough to make him unique, not so much as to make him a carbon copy (I want him to have his weak points). Like Captain Marvel, I wanted him to have the determination of Mike Hammer, the street attitude of Jim Rockford, the taste in clothes of Sam Spade, the drop-dead good looks of Thomas Magnum, and the deductive powers of Jessica Fletcher -- I heard that! The ability to sift through clues is NOT gender-proprietary (get a dictionary quick. I want to know what I just said!). "The only thing I defined about Cliff was his outfit; it can be 102ø in the shade and Cliff will go outside in a trenchcoat! When you "read" the story, you can shape Cliff any way you wish. Short, tall, well-built, able to stop a clock with a single glance -- whatever. Text adventures call on the Graphics of the Mind (not unlike radio's Golden Age dramas). I designed a private investigator. You get to make Cliff as good-looking as you wish." Though the two Cliff Diver games are, basically, detective stories, there's humour in them too. Does the humour come easily? "Without being too philosophical, humor flows from everyone. Learning when to open the spigot, how full to fill the bucket, and when to close the spigot takes time. People waste what little time they have trying to locate a comic class, when they should be out looking around them, saying, "Now that's funny." My comic mentor would had to have been "the one, the only, Groucho!" The man had comedy/theater background and a sense of timing that couldn't be impersonated. None of today's comics come close. "I was never "class clown," but looking back over my shoulder today, I would have had to take up residence in the principle's office (do they still refer to him as 'head master' in England?). "I didn't want Cliff to be a bumbling, slapschtick kind of PI, nor a hard-nosed "I said FREEZE, dirtbag!" justice-fighter." @~Purchased Sight Unseen is being marketed as shareware. Do you @~find the shareware system works? "Through distribution groups, BBSs, national on-line services, and such, I can make Shareware function. The people who can make it work are the people who pick up Shareware programs AND register them. The beauty of Shareware is that, before you ever "buy" anything, you can try it; see if it even shakes hands with your system. That's the most important thing. Commercial programs cost so much in fancy packaging -- sealed fancy packaging -- never giving you the chance to ask, "Yeah, but will it work with MY computer?" You open the box, put it in your drive ... no luck ... "Oh we're sorry," the man at Customer Service says. "You opened it. We'll take it back for a $5 return fee, plus this, plus that..." These rare cases -- I won't say all commercial programs are this way -- are a real 3-aspirin headache. "Shareware won't pay the bills or afford you that 386 "dream system" you've wanted, but then, I never wanted that. I wanted people to enjoy my stories. "One last point about Shareware (I not good at keeping it short, am I?). If you pick up on a Shareware program, use it and say, "Pay for it? Why should I?", the author could be out there, taking the pins out of his design board and thinking, "Well, so much for that idea." Let him know that you picked up his program, if not with a check for the registration, then a letter telling him what you thought of his work. I know of at least one author who would love to hear from you." @~You have used the new Master's Edition of AGT for Purchased @~Sight Unseen. How much of an improvement do you find in it over @~the original program? "The return messages (what you heard from AGT based on what you did) for the first system were "etched in stone," so to speak; inalterable, unchangeable. v1.19 introduced the Standard file; a collection of responses that were sent to the runtime engine at compilation (along the lines of a boilerplate format). The author could rewrite this file, shaping the system to reflect his character's attitude. Now the character was more able to interact, instead of saying, "Ok, now let's step back and see what the system thinks of your idea." "The system is undergoing constant change. Graphics, sound, and music are being adapted. I see text adventures in the future, vastly improved!" @~What about your future plans? Is there another adventure in the @~pipeline? "Before heading across Market street (for some lunch) Cliff handed me a file folder, saying, "Here, copyboy, try to make some sense out of this." That was over six months ago and I'm only a third of the way through it. After this case, Cliff has told me he's going to take an extended vacation in, I think he said, the Big Sur area. At any rate, he's going to close up his office ... for a while. "I'm playing with the idea of a fantasy adventure on a complex scale; a logic twisting escapade where, somewhere in the course of the game, you discover not so much who you are, but what you are. Think about that. "Whoa, look at the time! You have to be on that ocean liner heading west in an hour and I have to be on a Greyhound headed south in less than twenty minutes. Oh no, don't do that ... it's my treat. Just leave the dishes on the end of bar. Allen started mopping five minutes ago -- Yeah, we're going, Allen ... thanks for the chow! (He likes to hear that. Makes him think the food is halfway decent, the big dreamer). "It was nice talking with you, Miss Medley. If I ever find myself in London, I'll--don't look at me like that ... I was joking! Thank you, again, for talking with me. Bye."