Deprecated Elegance

My god, people, it’s freezing out there. The little weather bug on my screen is telling me it’s 17 degrees outside, which I don’t believe. It’s Pluto-like out there. People are literally stepping out of their homes bundled up in 13 layers of modern fabrics and instantly just sitting down on the sidewalk to fall asleep and freeze to death.

At the supermarket checkout a few days ago I saw one of the tabloids declaring that a secret prophecy recently discovered in the tomb of St. Peter informed the horrified world that the End Times began on 1/1/09, and when I went outside in search of coffee this morning, damn, I believed it. The End Times: Now with more cold!

When it’s cold like this, naturally enough, I put on three pairs of socks, lay in a supply of whiskey, and sit on the couch to watch bad movies. Last night I watched The Darjeeling Limited whilst the Duchess was out for the evening. I kinda knew it wasn’t going to be terribly good; Wes Anderson is becoming a tragic figure. I’ve actually never seen Bottle Rocket (because I am lame) but I adored Rushmore; thought The Royal Tenenbaums to be better than most other people thought, apparently; wanted to kill myself after watching The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou; and didn’t even bother seeing TDL in theaters, as I expected it to stink up the place.

Still, Rushmore remains one of my favorite films, so I’ll probably always give Wes a flyer, at least when his movies come on TV for free. So I watched. TDL isn’t a good movie; it’s like watching a New Yorker short story come to life, with boring characters you can’t imagine caring about, prissy little family themes only the people involved in could possibly be affected by, and bizarre dialogue and actions no real person would ever undertake. And this has always been part and parcel of Anderson’s films, but he handled it better in the past, somehow. Maybe it’s just the fact that we all get a little sloppy when we go over the same themes over and over again.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because of the train.

The Darjeeling Limited, in the film, is a fictional train in India which the characters board, and it got me thinking about trains, and how technological advances don’t always improve things. Trains for instance: Sure, planes are faster and cars allow us more freedom of movement, but trains retain a certain majesty and beauty that can never be replaced, no matter how fast our alternatives become.

And this, naturally enough, got me to thinking about Text Adventures.

Depending on how old you are, you may or may not remember text Adventures like Zork, Enchanter, or Suspended (all by a company called Infocom). We’re talking late 1970s, early 1980s here. Text Adventures were born out of an era where computers were not graphics powerhouses, and games had to rely on words more than pictures. Ever since PC-manufacturers began pumping out Video cards with lots of RAM and processing power – ever since games like Wolf3D and the like – text adventures became relics, because they used, well, text to create a universe instead of polygons and bump-mapping.

I love Text Adventures, and am only mildly embarrassed to admit it. Oh, I like a good gib-filled FPS game too, but when I was a wee nerd back The Day, I played a lot of TAs, and enjoyed them immensely. This is one example of how technological advances have left something beautiful behind – you don’t need much computing power to run a Text Adventure, but that doesn’t mean anything. TAs are their own little species, and just like trains the pleasures they offer have little to do with the technological advances of the times.

Recently, I’ve been playing with Inform7, which is a programming language specifically for creating Text Adventures using natural language. You program the game using declarative English sentences, like so:

The Stateroom is a room. “Staterooms aboard a spaceship, even one as luxurious as the Thaleia, are tight, cramped affairs, and this one is no exception. There is barely enough room for you and the furniture. The door to the hallway is locked tight for now. East is your bathroom.”

And that’s it, you just created a room with a description. It’s a little more complex than that if you want to create anything interesting, but in general you get by just by typing exactly what you mean, and man, that’s genius. Jeff’s love for programming languages and Text Adventures satisfied all at once! Jeff is, obviously, a nerd.

Naturally, the next thought is, could I write an entire novel as a Text Adventure? The answer is, of course I could. The real question is whether this is a good idea.  Personally, I don’t really want interactivity in my stories; I enjoyed TAs as games, not as stories, even though story-telling is obviously a big part of their appeal. But I don’t really want to be responsible for figuring out how the protagonist gets out of a scrape – I want the author to surprise me with the answer while I sit around drinking beer. That’s the ancient covenant we have with authors, and I’m sticking to it.

Of course, making a Text Adventure out of a story you’ve already written, that’s an entirely different matter. . .and might be fun.