+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
                 ON JIGSAW and 'I' - part 1
       +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
           by Graham Nelson (nelson@vax.ox.ac.uk)

First printed in the defunct XYZZY magazine and downloaded from
the IF Archives. Graham wrote the game Jigsaw, reviewed by Bev in
Issue 47. I'll start by reprinting that here, then his article.

                            ***

      JIGSAW - an Interactive History by Graham Nelson
          A Text Adventure on SynTax disk PCPD 992

                    Review by Bev Truter

Graham Nelson, the creator of Inform, has certainly put an
enormous amount of hard work, background research and sheer effort
into programming this huge game. Jigsaw is huge in all senses of
the word - geographically large at about 165 locations, and huge
in scope and coverage of some of the major events in history in
the 20th century.  Written with Inform, it has all the style and
ease of use that seem to be the trademark of most Inform games
I've played so far. Graham obviously intended Jigsaw to be a
serious work of fiction - it certainly deals with events in time
in a thought-provoking way; and wanted to push the boundaries of
interactive fiction beyond the usual limits. Well, all very
laudable, but it does make for a rather heavy-handed dogmatic
approach to some historical events; and all those Latin quotations
written on various objects could be uncharitably interpreted as a
tad pretentious....

There are two .Z5 files in Jigsaw, the first (jigsaw~1.z5) being a
large file with menus and sub-menus covering all aspects of Jigsaw
- instructions, credits, release notes, info about the author,
legalities, etc. There is also a section in this file which
translates all those Latin quotes, both genuine and fake, which
you'll come across in the game. The most interesting section here
is the sub-menu titled Footnotes - after completing each of the
time zones you can read what really happened in each famous event
you visited in the game, and this is where you realize the
incredible amount of research Graham put into getting every detail
in Jigsaw exactly right; from rooms, people, clothing, to even the
most obscure little-known facts about some famous people.

The second .Z5 file (jigsaw~2.z5) is the game itself, and there
are no on-line hints or help - the solution I refer to later on is
one I downloaded from the 'Net. This particular version of Jigsaw
is the 3rd release, and although most bugs have been eradicated,
one minor bug remains - HINT: Discard any uniform you might be
wearing immediately after use, or you might run into problems
later on.

Jigsaw begins at a New Year's Eve party in Century Park in 1999 -
it is 16 minutes to midnight, and you've wandered away from the
rest of the crowd to be on your own away from the noisy throngs of
people. A mysterious figure dressed in black suddenly appears,
then vanishes tantalizingly, leaving behind one piece of a jigsaw
puzzle. In a nearby chapel there's a statue of a local celebrity,
Grad Kaldecki; and in a corner of the park there's a large
pyramid-shaped monument dedicated to his memory. You'll have to
find a way of entering the monument before the clock strikes
midnight, otherwise you simply see the New Year ushered in, and
the beginning of the 21st century before the game ends.

Once inside the monument, you discover a large jigsaw board,
designed to hold 16 pieces of a jigsaw, which is the means of
travelling through time to various episodes or zones in the 20th
century. It turns out that Kaldecki built himself a time-machine,
with the intention of travelling to certain events in history and
altering them. He died before accomplishing this, and one of his
students, the mysterious Black, is attempting to fulfil his
wishes.  It's your task to prevent Black from fiddling about with
some major historical events to change the outcome, and to ensure
that history does indeed remain the same. Unfortunately, you seem
to arrive in each time zone always one step behind Black - can you
discover what Black has done, and rectify it so that history
remains unchanged?  As Graham puts it, the aim of the game is to
`solve' each temporal crisis successfully.

There is a rigid mathematical structure underlying this game - 16
time zones to visit, 16 pieces of the jigsaw to find and put in
place on the board, and 16 animals to sketch as part of a sub-
plot.  The endgame takes place in The Land, which has 16
locations, and each piece you put correctly on the board opens up
one of the locations in The Land. Another theme that develops
through the game is the relationship between you and Black -
Black's sex is never revealed, although it becomes obvious at one
point that you (dressed all in white for the party) are the
opposite sex to Black - bang goes one person's theory who wrote to
rec.arts.i-f about it, that Black and yourself are two gay guys.
Personally, I always play adventures as a male - automatic
assumption, I suppose, given that most adventures are
male-oriented; and I assumed Black was male as well, so it came as
a nasty shock to discover otherwise, and I had great difficulty
altering my perception of our genders.  I simply couldn't swap my
sex to female halfway through the game, and Black persistently
remained male in my imagination - so perhaps the `2 gay guys'
theory has some basis after all.<g>.

Although getting into the monument took me ages, the first 3 or 4
areas in time are relatively easy to solve, and the Titanic zone
is particularly memorable, with incredibly vivid descriptions of
the doomed and sinking ship. A sense of urgency and the need to
hurry is sustained throughout the game, and the tension that
builds right from the start of Jigsaw is cleverly maintained.

However, my initial enthusiasm for the whole game gradually waned,
as each zone becomes increasingly difficult to solve, and at least
4 zones involve those infuriating pull levers and push buttons
type of puzzles that I abhor. At least three of the zones are weak
on plot and puzzles, and seem irrelevant to the story development
- all zones are beautifully described, well-written and
painstakingly researched - but the Beatles, Suffragettes and Suez
zones appear to be there simply as padding or window-dressing. The
endgame, played out in The Land, also seems a weak section of the
overall game - instead of being a magnificent semi-climax before
the Epilogue, it veers off into an illogical Charlie Chaplinesque
routine of chasing around in hot pursuit of a particular object.
It looked almost as though Graham had a whole set of puzzles left
over that he couldn't squeeze into the main section of the game,
so decided to lump them together in a rather garbled and confused
endgame.

Jigsaw poses some interesting questions - if you could change
history in some way, should you? Or would it be better to leave
everything to repeat itself in the same pattern - even World War
1?  Playing the part of White, running around after Black to make
sure history repeats itself exactly as it should, I had the uneasy
sensation I was somehow on the wrong side in a few instances.
Jigsaw also attempts to deal with, or at least provide food for
thought on, some of The Big Issues of Life, such as Art, Poetry,
Literature, War v Peace, Nature v Technology ......... hey, and
there was I, just thinking that text adventures were meant to be
about fun and entertainment .....

Well, I'm still not too sure about Jigsaw. I have very ambivalent
feelings about it. It's certainly a vast, interesting,
well-written game, but is it really enjoyable? Dunno. I thoroughly
enjoyed it up to 37%, struggled determinedly on minus the solution
to 55% and still found it fascinating; then gave up after 2
particularly difficult and boring scenes and relentlessly used the
solution to get through to the endgame. Did the Epilogue all on my
own though, so ended up fairly flushed with success. To sum up, I
suppose for me Jigsaw's attempt to be different is its downfall -
its seriousness and sombre mood means there are no light touches,
and even a few attempts at humour provide only a brief
interruption to the overall feeling of worry about what mess will
be waiting to be cleared up in the next zone, after Black has done
his/her usual meddling.

ENJOYMENT - 7/10 ATMOSPHERE - 8/10 LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY - 8/10
FINAL COMMENT - Immense, impressive and interesting.

                          - o -

1.
I am now a fictional character (which is ironic, considering that
the characters in my new game, Jigsaw, are mostly real.) There are
people on the 'Net who claim that mild-mannered Graham Nelson is
only a cover identity for a shadowy group of hackers plotting
revolution (or, I hope, moderate conservatism) in the world of
interactive fiction. I can only say that mine isn't the sort of
name anyone would invent. (My mother did do her best to make me
sound like a pseudonym, as she first wanted to christen me Piers
or Cadwallidah: but my father vetoed both, earning my everlasting
gratitude.)

Who am "I," though? Why do you, the reader of that paragraph,
imagine yourself not as Graham Nelson but as someone stuck in a
broken-down lift with Graham Nelson? Possibly my purple prose is
inimitable; perhaps it just all sounds very unlikely, so that you
can't imagine yourself in my shoes. (I am only wearing two,
incidentally, not eight or 10.) But suppose I write: "I tried to
play Zork today but I got badly stuck. I'll never understand that
Bank of Zork puzzle!"  Now, admit it, you've spent days like this,
but you still don't think of my words as applying to you unless I
actually gesture out of the page at you (the way I'm doing in this
sentence). "I" means different things to you and me. The people we
speak of are intermediaries between us (even if those people are
ourselves).

Literature is like a game of chess in which the writer and reader
sit across a board of characters in quite artificial situations.
As the game is the only contact between the two, they're both
trying to make it seem real. If the writer is a poet, he'll be
trying to make himself one of the pieces, though this never quite
happens (Dante the poet is not quite the same person as Dante, the
pilgrim in his poem). He puts his chair very close to the board
and the reader's far away. This enables him to move the pieces in
sudden maneuvers of doubtful legality and still get away with it.

The novel reverses this, as the writer sits casually back from the
board (lighting a cigarette in a long holder, like Ian Fleming)
and hopes that the reader will draw in closer, hunching over the
pieces.  The novelist dictates the moves, telling the story
through someone on the board. Either it's one of the central
figures, so the tale is a first- person narrative ("Reader, I
married him," says Jane Eyre to anyone trapped in a lift with
her). Or there is a reclusive story-teller who knows all ("Emma
then felt it indispensable to bid him good- night") but whose
personality only occasionally glints in her observations
("...nobody could possibly imagine unquiet slumbers for the
sleepers in that quiet earth"). By choosing who will speak, the
novelist draws in or holds back the reader.

I like to think of the playwright as hiding under the table,
moving the pieces about with magnets. To the reader, the chair
opposite is empty. There is only play, so the reader doesn't feel
self- conscious in imagining himself a pawn on the back rank of
the board:  nobody of consequence, but at least a witness, someone
who was there.

An adventure game is far more radical. The reader -- that is, the
player -- is not pawn but Queen, and suddenly finds himself having
to actively play. (Though, just as Dante the poet must be
distinguished from Dante the pilgrim, so in the rest of this
article I distinguish "player" from "central character".) It is a
text fulfilling Roland Barthes's dream: divorced from its author,
such that it is the act of reading which is creative, different
for every reader.  Reading can also be exhausting work and not
everyone likes being partly responsible for the plot. No wonder
the archives are full of "walkthrough" solutions.

To be concluded next issue














                              - o -