WHAT? NO PUZZLES?

                       by Bev Truter

After a prolonged fling with The Settlers I have returned to my
first love - text adventures. While playing through some of the
old 1996 Inform games I'd stashed away in a disk box for a rainy
night, I came across three examples of the "new" style of puzzle-
less text adventure; or interactive fiction, as our American
cousins prefer to call them. Hmmmm...I'm not too sure about this
puzzle- less stuff, as up to now I'd assumed that it was the
puzzles, problems, call them what you will, that gave text games
their very reason for existence. After all, how can you "play" a
game when there are no puzzles to solve, no objects to collect and
no clear goal to reach? In some cases there's not even a
conventional "end" to the game, so it's unclear when, or indeed
if, you have finished it.

The current thought seems to be that interactive fiction *can* be
played as a game, even when the only goal is to advance the plot
in response to your inputs, resulting in a sort of
choose-your-story kind of game. Some of these puzzle-less I-F
games are well- written pieces, and interesting to play around
with for a few minutes - I suppose basic human curiosity makes us
wonder what will eventually happen in the story - how will it end?
Will it end?  Personally though, I still find the traditional text
adventures more appealing - give me a good old treasure-hunt any
day - but I wonder if there is anyone out there who prefers this
type of pure storytelling I-F to the kind that contains puzzles?

In case anyone's wondering what on earth I'm talking about, here
are brief reviews/descriptions of four puzzle-less games: Aisle,
In The End, The Space Under The Window and Aunt Nancy's House.

AISLE by Sam Barlow

The introduction to Aisle reads "You are about to read a story. Or
rather, part of a story. You will be asked to define the story by
controlling one instant in the life of the man whose story it is.
Your intervention will begin and end the story, but be warned;
there are many stories and not all of the stories are about the
same man."

Well, actually the stories *are* about the same man, although not
in the same time perhaps. It's difficult to tell, as the "story"
jumps haphazardly from past to present, depending on your input.
You can enter only a single input (a word or a sentence), then the
story ends, and restarts with the initial opening scene. There is
only one location (an aisle in the supermarket), one character to
interact with (that's if you can count a one-sentence input as
"interaction") and no items to manipulate. The parser does
understand a fair amount of words though, and you can glean some
interesting information by typing "think about xxx", where "xxx"
is something mentioned in the single location. Since the "story"
finishes after each input from the player it's hard to decide if
there is actually a conclusive ending; or do you just stop when
you're bored?

Story summary: Very depressed/depressing man muses about a past
relationship that went wrong.

Sheer curiosity might keep you plugging away at this game for
about 10 minutes at most, by which time you'll have discovered all
you want to know about the somewhat self-pitying central character
in this little tale of woe. I did actually find one "ending" that
seemed marginally more satisfactory than the other endings, but I
never did find out exactly what had happened in the past to make
this man so miserable, and to be honest, I didn't care.

IN THE END by Joe Mason

This was an Inform entry in the 1996 I-F competition on the
Internet. There is no SAVE function in this game (not necessary,
for reasons which will gradually become obvious); and typing SAVE
gets the response "life doesn't work that way." Without giving away
too much of the plot, you begin ITE in a church, attending the
funeral of one of your friends. You can drive from the church to
your home, a bar, a supermarket; or you can give a young woman a
lift to her house. You can EXAMINE people and objects around you to
gain an insight into your life and character, and that's about it.

The author discusses ITE in an "about the story" section as
follows: "In The End is first and foremost an attempt to write a
work of interactive fiction, rather than an adventure game. My
main goal with this story is to explore a certain aspect of the
human soul, but this will hopefully be made clear through the
story itself. This is not a text adventure in the traditional
sense; indeed, it is not an adventure at all. One reoccurring
thread on r.a.i-f is the question of whether a work of I-F can
survive without the puzzles that make it an 'adventure'. Many
people believe that these puzzles are necessary in order to
provide obstacles for the reader and thus draw them in; and there
has never been a successful piece of I-F which does not use them.

Even stories which focus on the plot have obstacles and challenges
to provide tension, and without them the plot tends to stagnate.
However, this inevitably limits the potential audience of I-F
because it discourages the casual reader. Only people of the
mindset to enjoy solving these puzzles would have the patience to
figure out what must be done to advance the plot. In The End will
be, I hope, the first successful puzzle-less I-F....Even if this
effort is successful, we still will not know whether a story which
gets its tension from other sources can work without having its
obstacles translated into 'puzzles'.... So I have presented a
world to explore - not because it is necessary to explore the
world in order to solve problems encountered in it, but simply for
the sake of exploring, finding its nuances, and discovering what
drives it."

OK. We get the point. The author has written a story, or chunk of
I-F without puzzles, so that we can wander about in his story,
play it to the end (yes, this game *does* have a definite end) and
explore the world he has created. But my feeling is that ITE would
have worked better as a short story published in a book; something
to read through on paper rather that play through as a "game". As
a published short story it wouldn't have suffered the huge
drawback of having to play the role of the central character - a
thoroughly morose, unlikeable sod. For all the agonizing and
philosophizing and angst you have to endure as the central
character (an American male, about 40-ish I guessed), it was
impossible to identify with him. I didn't like the role I was
playing, I didn't like the world I was exploring and I couldn't
stand the mood the author created.

Story summary: Extremely depressed/depressing man muses about the
futility of life in general, and the pointlessness of his own
existence in particular.

And finally, it doesn't matter what you input for the first half
of this game, the plot just trundles along on auto-pilot until you
leave the church. Examining objects or talking to people gives
exactly the same response as typing WAIT for the first 10 moves.
No, Joe.  This was definitely not an enjoyable experience for me.
Interesting perhaps, but also depressing.

THE SPACE UNDER THE WINDOW by Andrew Plotkin

This little story/game intrigued me more than the previous two,
and I have no idea why. Verbs such as "get", "drop, "open" and
even "examine" are not understood by the parser and get no
response. Instead, you must type in the names of objects that
appear in the narrative (eg, 'window') to change the course of the
story and advance the plot. Typing "look" redisplays the current
text on the screen, but doesn't cause you to look around the
location in the usual way. When you type in a word that refers to
an object in the text, it might send you "backwards" through the
plot to a previous scene; and typing in the same word a second
time might alter the course of events.  I discovered it was
possible to progress up to a certain point in SPACE, but then I
got stuck in a series of repetitive loops. Did I reach the end? I
honestly don't know. At one point three asterisks (***) appeared
below the response to my input, but it didn't seem to be a
conventional "end" to the game. During the course of the story you
gradually learn more about your surroundings (basically 3
locations, although most of the action takes place in the indoor
location, the "room".)

Story summary: Silent/morose man seems incapable of communicating
with the other person in a relationship heading for disaster.

Your character's motives and the behaviour of the other character
in the game remained a mystery; I never managed to discover WHY
she was so angry with me, or what I had done (or not done?) to
cause this anger. I suppose it was this element of an unsolved
mystery that kept me fascinated with SPACE for about 15 minutes,
but then boredom set in. With no puzzles to solve, no way to push
the plot along any further, and no idea of whether I'd "finished"
the game or not, I lost interest and wandered off to play
something more traditional. Something with puzzles. Something like
EXCUSE ME....now there's something that certainly *does* have
puzzles.

But hang on a sec, I'll try to end this article on a slightly less
depressing note by commenting on another puzzle-less game I played
from the 1998 I-F competition. I was so unimpressed with it at the
time of playing that I promptly deleted it from floppy and hard
drive, but in comparison to the above dark and brooding games,
this one looks positively cheerful.


AUNT NANCY'S HOUSE by Nate Schwartzman

No puzzles. No score. No plot. No game characters. All there is to
do in this short effort is wander around a house, read the room
descriptions and examine the various household objects - a few
piles of toys, a television set and a telephone, I think. After a
while I began to think it was me being thick - perhaps there was a
brilliant story and puzzles lurking in there somewhere, and I'd
missed it all completely? No such luck. I checked with a friend
who had played this game, and that indeed was it. ANH must be the
most boring "game" on record; but at least it wasn't miserable or
morbid.

Lack of puzzles aside, all the above games were not fun to play. I
don't mean that games should be bursting at the seams with humour,
wit or jokes; I mean they should at least be enjoyable to play,
otherwise what's the point of playing a text game? Although these
puzzle-less games may provide a few minutes' worth of
entertainment for the player, and may be interesting experiments
for authors wanting to break new ground and try something
different, I can't see them replacing traditional text games that
have a variety of puzzles, a myriad of locations and some
interesting objects to fiddle with.
















                              - o -