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highimpactsexi recently finished Photopia, a rather important interactive fiction title that has been compared to Citizen Kane in terms of how revolutionary it was and how "standard"/quaint it feels today.
and i wanna explore what i think about so-called influential titles through this game.
anything below the readmore should be regarded as spoiler territories. the game's short enough that you can come back to the post once you're done. or if you don't care, just read lol.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
influential titles are a rather strange beast because you come to them and think this must be groundbreaking. then, you play Asteroids and go "This is it? This is what made my favorite developers create games??? WHAT THE FUCK???"
even a seasoned writer on subculture media like me is vulnerable to this thinking. i've played titles like Portopia and never got how radical it must've been until i watched jeremy parish's wonderful account on the game. sometimes, you really need accounts from people who were there.
in my two week-long journey through interactive fiction, i've been reading titles that are now considered "canonical": from the cavernous Colossal Cave Adventure to the amusingly evocative Zork trilogy to some more modern classics like Toby's Nose and my father's long, long legs. there's a few i don't get the impact of (Scott Adams's titles only decipherable to me through the help of the Digital Antiquarian) and others like SPY INTRIGUE that made me wish more people play the games. lots of variety out there. i need to write about SPY INTRIGUE and porpentine's titles at some point too.
but here comes adam cadre's Photopia. i've played the short but memorable 9:05, an amusing take on interactive fiction limitations. but Photopia is different: it's seen as expanding the genre altogether.
as aaron reed writes on his article comparing the game to Citizen Kane,
Photopia’s success signaled that the soon-to-be-influential parser IF community was beginning to broaden its horizons: not looking exclusively inward or backward but out, toward new and different possible futures. Slowly at first, but with increasing momentum, story would begin to take prominence over puzzles in the games the community celebrated, which in turn would influence larger conversations about what successful interactive narratives could look like. A decade after Photopia , browser text games like Fallen London were telling complex interactive stories without anything like traditional puzzles; Twine-based hypertext stories, most of them puzzleless, would soon become increasingly popular. Even games that kept using the technical scaffold of Infocom’s Z-machine let many of its affordances for locked doors, expiring light sources, scoring points, and unexpected deaths grow dusty and disused. Photopia was not the sole cause of all these changes, of course, any more than Citizen Kane changed cinema single-handedly; and the evolution took place over decades, not in a single moment. But in the years since, Photopia has come to stand in for that fictional moment of transition, a fulcrum which many felt shifting even then.
this is the guy's second work and he basically showed people in the scene that they didn't have to do silly puzzles. they can do all the weird stories that people today are exploring in engines like Twine. many articles have spilled blood about how influential it is for good reason.
but what i find intriguing to me is reed's comparison to Citizen Kane. as an ex-film school student, i had to watch the goddamn movie many times. it's honestly not a bad movie and i still like certain parts of it. i even watched parts of The Battle Over Citizen Kane, a documentary that explores the production behind the movie and kinda a must-watch for film students. but i also echo the general sentiment the movie doesn't feel "groundbreaking".
it's only "groundbreaking" to the people who lived through this.
the idea that you could make a satirical biopic of a corporate magnate on film is pretty common these days. Citizen Kane was also the first movie to really employ low angles due to technical innovations like "burrowing so the camera can be lowered to point upwards"; now, low angles are just a staple of the cinematographer's language. its nonlinear storytelling (a journalist talks to several people to get a bigger picture of who the main character is) is also standard practice; Ace Combat games like Zero love that shit. it's a movie that has aged poorly because everyone who was livid from how radical and innovative it was has been using that shit since forever.
but while i think reed's comparison is interesting, i do wonder if it would be closer to the influence Visual Arts's Kanon had on japanese visual novels. there's two main things that make the comparison more worthwhile than one might think:
1) both titles signal to readers and developers that the potential of storytelling can be furthered if people are more willing to drop the "game-like" design and focus more on "narratives" 2) their linearity is the instrument to make you cry at the ending
> DROP GAMEPLAY
as much as i love the more "interactive" games in visual novels, adventure games, and IF in general, not all stories work with interactivity. influential adventure games like YU-NO use their game design to make exploration interesting, but titles like Nijuuei sport so many choices that a walkthrough may not convince people to play it (exception: titles like France Shoujo use the crazy branching to make every story personal ala Choose-Your-Own Adventure).
i don't have much knowledge about the history of more narrative, less game-like interactive fiction titles, but from what i've read of reed's piece, it seems like Kanon might be a good comparison here.
if you play 90s titles like Doukyuusei, you'd be exposed to a lot of "gameplay" that remains mind-boggling to modern visual novel players. like, you have to walk and figure out the flags and schedules. in order to modernize the game, the remake introduces QOL updates primarily found in their Easy Mode and even displaces the entire adventure gameplay segment to turn it into a pure vn (i don't recommend it btw). from personal experience, my partner actually is concerned in messing things up even with Easy Mode on. that's how different these adventure games are to the modern player.
the corollary to that in western interactive fiction is the parser-based games, especially if they're more puzzle-oriented. people were very inspired by infocom titles and so on. walkthroughs or at least hintbooks are usually necessary for modern players to even solve the first puzzle, let alone finish the game. of course, many people (even infocom staff) never finished the games. they seemed to have seen these games more as toys, not as puzzle-driven narrative games like i and many others do.
the gameplay/puzzle parser paradigm is important to consider because this was the stuff everyone was working in until they encountered their respective titles: Kanon and Photopia. these two titles must've been impressive to conceive back in the day... they're titles that say, "You don't need gameplay to tell a good story. You can just use specific mechanics from the engines to make it interactive enough that you feel compelled by the story."
and in that sense, it's this interactivity what makes them different from traditional print literature as well. jordan magnuson concocted an interesting experiment for Photopia: miffed that people kept calling the game simply a short story, he decided to copy and paste the entire script and read the story as a traditional short story.
his conclusion? it sucked.
and that shouldn't be surprising: the story has not been written as something we passively read as an audience. it uses the second-person perspective and you're typing in commands, therefore you have a stronger (illusory) connection to the many characters you play as.
the same can be said with Kanon, though even more intuitively. the title features multi-route structure, which is hard to replicate in print form (certainly, CYOA works exist but they're not as long as that). as the spiritual successor of ONE, it also gives each route its unique flavor. while titles like YU-NO had already done this to some extent, Kanon was the title that codified the heroines route structure that have terrorized visual novels since. while its legacy remains questionable, it was at the very least a new way to introduce readers and designers the power of connecting to fictional characters.
the tl;dr is that in stripping the "gameplay" and keeping the remains of interactivity, these two works have carved out something special and unique in their own mediums/genres. for that alone, they're undeniably impressive.
JebBush2016: Please cry
but they also share a funny similarity that's definitely worth commenting on: the reader is so married to the narrative structure these titles are pioneering that the Sad Ending comes at you hard and fast. they don't feel very earned.
i won't spoil too much on Kanon since i'm working off age-old memories but suffice to say, i think routes like makoto's feel very off to me. you not only have to buy the strange plotting that may have questionable implications, but also you need to suspend your disbelief so hard that you don't feel "betrayed" by the narrative. the tricks Kanon employs are so obvious they kinda hurt.
this is the same with Photopia but perhaps worse. much ink has been spilled about the kind of "emotional manipulation" of this work, but i think emily short's curt review states it best:
I personally found it wavered between effective and manipulative, with the main character too saintly to be true.
Photopia has the "isn't she a saint" feeling all over the text. it is almost impossible to avoid because the structure demands it. most episodes are narrated by a character who has a connection to this special girl: her two parents, the boy who had a crush on her, the child who admired her when she babysat her, the kid's dad who's driving her home before the car crash took their lives... the story is about this circle of people who will grieve for her because they have a personal connection to her and we never get to see her side of things.
and the way the structure accomplishes this is by revealing the artifice of interactive fiction. on that note, this reviewer hidden in usenet groups and uncovered by reed had something really interesting to say:
Several people have mentioned Adam's great use of "guiding" you in situations that appear open-ended, but I don't think anyone's yet commented on the one that really freaked me out. I was driving Alley home and talking to her about how much my daughter liked her, when suddenly, in the middle of the conversation, I realized, "Oh no, we're going to crash! Maybe I have the opportunity to change what will happen!" I typed "STOP" and instantly was hit by the other car. I had this awful feeling of being just barely too late. Of course I quickly realized that it must have been coded to crash at whatever intersection I tried to stop, but for a moment at least it really seemed like things could have been different, if only I had been paying more attention. For me, it was the most emotionally charged moment of the competition.
"things could have been different" and "if only I had been paying attention"... these remarks feel very strange to read today for modern players used to sequences that railroad us to tragedy. indeed, the best usage of choices in interactive fiction and visual novels now involves choosing between terrible choices or having a good choice that would resolve everything be blanked out (ahem, White Album 2). and yet, this scene must've felt visceral because nothing like it ever existed.
yet, in this very same section, the reviewer is aware "it must have been coded to crash". it's too much a setpiece to avoid colliding with. this leads to people claiming this game's about futility and predestination, though i agree with gijsberg that read's too reductive.
instead, it is more blatantly critical of how interactive fiction doesn't give you much freedom. there are Clannad-like interludes where the player goes through a fantasy text adventure game that reminds me of shit by scott adams; however, you aren't able to go far. and then, you realize you're wendy, the kid being babysat by allison, and you're actually being guided by allison herself. allison is playing dungeon master while you are the "co-author".
this co-authorship is rather nominal however. while people like me have written strongly about co-authorship in terms of player freedom/expression, we are still heavily guided by the designer much like wendy's playdate being guided by allison. as reed writes,
When we play Photopia, we’re telling a story together—and that matters; we’re a real part of the chain of retellings—but Cadre is the one doing most of the work. In this interpretation, it’s stories, not sandboxes—real or illusory—that really matter.
i take a more critical approach than reed's appreciative one here. all games are us (re)telling a story together to a degree, but we also need to be respected as co-authors too. for many of us who feel frustrated by the ending, we feel "betrayed" in our attempts at co-authorship when we "write" ourselves into the futile fate allison will have. much of the anger and sadness that emerge from this comes from how much we believe that this co-authorship is "fair", which will always be subjective.
same goes with Kanon: is this bittersweet ending worth it, did the characters earn it, etc. what we really mean is "Did reader and designer agree that their collaboration is fair and that's why we accept these terms and conditions?" this is pretty much the essence of the common critique of "emotional manipulation".
and i expect the more aware you are with the tricks, the more you'd find it hard to suspend your disbelief and think this collaboration with the author is fair as a player. and it is perhaps worse when the expectations of "influential games" are so overwhelming you expect the balance to still work. either the player feels respected and the storytelling acceptable or they don't.
so when you start to realize how the work requires you to connect the dots between these different anecdotes and everyone just talks about how good she is, i feel like you must fall into that either/or deal. it's perhaps more surprising if you didn't know more about this kind of storytelling. but i can imagine that surprise will still lead to some rather extreme opinions.
which was indeed what cadre expected before he woke up and realized he won the IFComp award that year.
under the influences
of course, if you're someone modern who still feel the Feels from Kanon and Photopia, that's pretty cool and important. i myself think Photopia is neat, though i am somewhat underwhelmed. i'm mostly referring to the discourses surrounding these games as microcosms on the discussions around "influential" titles.
there's many classics that remain fun to read, but there's so many others where you kinda go "Is that it?" as i wrote in the intro, i'm interested in why we tend to go "Is that it?"
some of it may face the same problems that titles like Citizen Kane had: everyone just kept stealing the techniques, so anything radical just feel off. works like Neuromancer just feel like they're important because they're the first to arrive on the scene. meanwhile, titles like Kanon and Photopia are quaint because their structure is so transparent to folks like me that they feel lacking. and then, there's the unfortunate The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde where the entire story revolved around the twist, that they're actually the same person, and the cat's out of the bag with that one for ages now.
what all these titles share is influence. much like how you can trace allison's video game storytelling skills to her parents' fascination with the stars and photopias, you can see how we got here today. while many people plan to write to remembered for all of posterity, we don't know how our legacies will be remembered. there's no way adam cadre thought his work would later inspire the creation of so many twine stories because twine hadn't existed yet. all he had was the works prior to his creation.
and i feel strongly about certain works that influenced me that may not prove to be relevant to people today too. i don't think i'm that boomer, but works that spoke to me in the 90s and 00s probably don't hit as hard as they would to someone living today. i can imagine something like Evangelion losing its relevance someday when people finally stopped angsting as hard -- indeed, some elements there are already dated like SEELE (even Super Mario RPG referenced shinji's i can't run away and that came out in the same year as Eva...). the same can be said with what i thought was the perennial 3d mario game: Super Mario 64. for a classic platformer, people today can't make sense of the control scheme. and it might just feel empty and plain today for anyone trying it today for the first time. people might not get why so many of us boomers like to watch mario 64 speedruns and pannekoek doing weird shit. no one really knows what a "timeless" work is until time actually passed.
and honestly, i wonder if the "timeless" works will one day not be as timeless anymore. the more people generalize the particularity of a work, the more it becomes standard and banal. they don't feel as fresh as they used to be.
but there are some titles like Saihate no Ima and Metal Gear Solid 2 where they're able to become more relevant as time goes on. obviously, such stories deserve their own post, but like the other "influential" titles like Photopia, it's not like the people were out there predicting the future. they tasted the present and realized this was what's gonna happen.
indeed, i think it is wise to parrot reed's take that (historically) significant titles are more like indicators of paradigm shifts. their "revolution" comes from them spearheading what's already in the airwaves; they're clearing their throats and demanding radical revolutions for the subcultures they're in. everyone was energized when they first heard these words and they wrote their own works and so on.
but today, revisiting these works is sometimes a strange ordeal. you know the History (or at least, you can read about it) and you can only hear the winds of what was once a battlefield where the results are as clear as the sky. to me, it is like my east asian ass family and me visiting gettysburg; we got to see the graveyards of famous presidents and all, but we can only imagine how important they were to us history. our imagination's so limited that we only know the name lincoln and that's about it. and even then, he was the guy who kinda did something important? we didn't know the details. and even if we do, we just don't have that cultural memory. it's blank to us, even if we should be grateful to it. that's how i feel about visiting certain classics like Photopia in general.
i try to get into these people's shoes when they first see these works. it's helped some works, but most times, i get frustrated. playing retro games isn't always fun. i find it difficult to play most atari games and i can't really imagine the fascination behind Space Invaders at all. i've read a lot about it and i still don't get it. i'm at a loss trying to understand how i should approach it and fit the square peg of what i've experienced (or imagined people experienced then) into the round hole of what i see in front of me. it just doesn't work sometimes and i always think it's a failure on my part.
conclusion
which is to say, i enjoy learning about influential titles and experiencing them for my own interests. but there's many times when i feel stuck and incapable of imagining historical memories and realities. i've seen a lot of tricks derived from Photopia and i can imagine i wouldn't have gotten the appeal if i never bothered playing the precursors to modern IF -- i'd have a similar negative reaction to Portopia.
i can dig through the sand and find something "deep" to say. for example, i found it interesting how cadre was already poking at how flimsy co-authorship in video games was and this was a 1998 work. games are still young, but in 1998, games must be a fucking infant. it's undeniably impressive how cadre was able to bring up how illusory interactivity was; the reader is still at the expense of the author. there's something original about this approach that may be worth bringing up (and many people did).
but for me, the bigger impact it will have on me is recognizing the rather obvious truth: that influence is restricted to time and place. even works that get rediscovered and reinterpreted as "timeless" works of art are really works that talk to people in that moment ... and in the future, it may be another thing at some point. charting the intellectual lineage of a genre/medium will always lead to this conclusion, often in surprising ways to me at least. i always go "woah, people found this radical. i just think it's boring."
and even when i found something i enjoyed like the Zork trilogy, it seemed like what i loved about those games (the digital cartography one must do to navigate the game) is different from what people experienced back then (i can talk to a computer and it says funny things in return!). i imagine anyone reading my articles on older media will disagree with how i view things because i just check out stuff with "modern sensibilities" and i wasn't in the moment. and that's gonna be fine because i feel the same about how people view some of my own favorite works i grew up with.
it leads me to quite the quandary: how do i understand historically significant works like this? how do i see the labor-power in this game? it feels like i can only defer to those who have written more eloquently and deeply about the work than i would ever do.
and to echo plotkin's memorable review of the game, "This, I think, will do." he wasn't able to parse his thoughts about this groundbreaking work and how it was signalling a real change. i can't say anything interesting because all i see is the "source code" for so many texts and adventures to come, with nothing personally resonating with me.
"this, i think, will do" is perhaps the only thing i can really say about an influential work that doesn't give me anything to work off from except commentary on trends. it feels so apt to say something so little yet so potent when we come across works like this.
