Interactive Fiction, Passively

PMOG:The Passively Multiplayer Online Game

An interesting feature of Pmog ‘missions’ is the way that so many of them are really guided tours of specialty websites (e.g. this one). This is a handy approach if, say, you teach via distance and you want to show your students what constitutes ‘good’ research sites.

Yet, that’s really nothing a powerpoint couldn’t already do. An interesting variant on these missions is the ‘puzzle’ mission, where creators exploit a glitch in the game to create breaks in the flow of the mission. The only way to progress is to solve the riddle to learn what website to go to next - whereupon the mission resumes.  Some of these, like ‘The Mystery Machine‘, require you to read the page to fill in the blanks: each word represents a letter in an ultimate URL. If you’ve got the right letters and you complete the last URL, the resulting webpage represents the ‘Victory!’ screen.  Others are more complex, more devious. My own mission, ‘The Case of the Missing … Something” depends on anagrams of URLs (which is mean, I know). I can’t solve ‘The Lost Gold of Dr. Nes‘, since it depends on a gamer’s knowledge of nintendo, but the principle is good.  ‘Meet Felix Klein‘ takes the player on a tour through various flickr photographs to create a kind of visual story. No puzzle, but it certainly *feels* like an old-style text adventure.

All of these represent a new twist on “interactive fiction”, with the fiction layered on top of the day-to-day internet (perhaps a riff on augment reality, too?).  In a way, they are like the ‘Prisoner Escape from the Tower of London‘ game created by mscape: the fiction intersects with daily life to create the game, with events being triggered by your physical or virtual location in the game space. Unlike regular interactive fiction, the game creator does not control that game space - other people intrude (in Pmog, other players might lay, for reasons unrelated to the mission you happen to be on, mines or portals on pages within a mission, which could -perhaps- prevent you from completing it).

The archaeological angle: simple show and tell of vetted sites is good, for starters. Using Pmog (or other AR) to create layers of information/meaning on top of the information is even better. You could imagine a student creating a pmog mission on curse-tablets. This might begin as simple show and tell. Other students could then play the mission, leaving mines on pages they think are ‘bad’ (poor information, bad research, whatever) or portals to ‘good’ sites… the game records the play, and the meta-analysis afterwards with the prof would spark a deeper discussion. Inserting puzzles into the mission would force a deeper engagement still, and completing a puzzle mission would constitute a formative assessment exercise.  Creating missions could also be exercises in public archaeology for the students,  if built around a decent resource (say the British Museum, or Chaco Canyon).

What I’m arguing for is that we, as educators, need to be using things like Pmog to get our students to engage with online materials in a deeper fashion. They are too often uncritical users of what they find. They need to interact passively.

Canadians on the Nile

The first piece of interactive fiction that I wrote (and continue to work on) puts far too many words into the mouth of Major Boulton. I need to make the conversation there far more natural - a menu system has been suggested, so I’m slowly learning how to implement that. The general idea of the piece is for it to be a one or two room rambling conversation, over the course of which, the player discovers truths about the Northwest Rebellion.

In the interests of overloading my work schedule, I’ve started working on a second piece, that isn’t quite so literal. In ‘Canadians on the Nile’, I’m taking my inspiration from the expedition to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum by using logdrivers and river men from the Ottawa Valley to Manitoba to navigate the Nile (living in the Ottawa Valley as I do, this is one of my favourite historical episodes). This one is less ‘faithful’ that the Northwest Rebellion, since I’m putting words into my characters’ mouths that they didn’t actually say…  Right now, there are two non-player characters, in the opening scene which ends with the player’s enlistment. Ideally, there’d be several npcs for the player to interact with, learning the historical background, etc… and then self-contained episodes reflecting the real historical course of the expedition. Eventually.

Here’s what I’ve got so far.  (…the though occurs: I’m a Romanist, by training… why am I not trying Roman themes…?)

Northwest Rebellion - early stages work of an Interactive Fiction approach to writing history

One of the neat things about the Great Canadian Mysteries series is how ‘doing history’ is constructed as ’solving’ a mystery, by examining the primary historical documents. In the interactive fiction (IF) below - which is only an early *early* draft - I am trying to accomplish the same thing. Here, the ‘game’ will be to explore and construct and interpretation of the Northwest Rebellion, by interacting with the historical characters who were there… and who speak to you in their own words. Just about anything Major Charles Boulton says come from his own published historical reminisces. Now, an interactive fiction requires plot, pacing, a story arc, etc… or can it simply be as simple as ‘talking’ with a simulated person…? Right now, this IF just shows how such a writing of history could be accomplished. I need to program the non-player character of Major Boulton with a bit of artificial intelligence so that he can respond to a wide variety of interactions with the player. My model is Emily Short’s Galatea, which won the 2006 IF prize. I don’t want this work to be a simple kind of chatterbot.

So, here’s an early version of the Major Charles Boulton and the Northwest Rebellion Interactive Historical Fiction, by Shawn Graham.

Damnatio Memoriae, a work of Interactive Fiction by Emily Short

I am, amongst other things, interested in interactive fiction for teaching, learning, and research. And of course I’m not a dried-up old prune: I like these things to be fun too!

Emily Short is currently one of the best writers of interactive fiction - here’s a piece by her with a Roman flavour, ‘Damnatio Memoriae’

“14 AD. Agrippa Postumus, grandson of the recently-deceased Augustus, tries to avoid death at the hands of the next emperor, Tiberius. At his disposal: a couple of old manuscripts, a lamp, and a recalcitrant slave. And a powerful knowledge of the Art of Venus Genetrix, of course — the magic eventually known as the Lavori d’Aracne.

Damnatio Memoriae belongs to a series with the author’s previous game Savoir-Faire; though it can stand alone, the game’s mechanics will make most sense to players already familiar with that work.

It is a fast, timed game, taking only a few minutes to play once, but probably requiring multiple attempts to bring to a satisfactory conclusion.”

Twisty Little Passages

Have just got myself a copy of Nick Montfort’s “Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction”. He’s analysing interactive fiction - sometimes text adventures, sometimes not - from a narratology point of view, which is quite interesting. Especially the first bit, where he’s talking about the different ‘voices’ in the fiction…. makes me think of the role of the chorus in Greek tragedy… Speaking of things classical, I’ll be speaking at the Classical Association of Canada Annual General Meeting at Memorial University in Newfoundland in a few months - here’s my abstract:

“Why Read About Rome When You Can Build It?” Simulations, Gaming, and Classics

It is no coincidence that a huge number of commercial game titles feature Classical themes. People enjoy these games not least because they are entranced by the subject matter. This is an opportunity for us as educators, but we have to reflect carefully on how to take the advantage. Done well, the incorporation of games can lead to increased levels of literacy, domain knowledge, and critical thinking skills. For distance students in particular, online simulations and games provide a level of immersion that has been demonstrated to improve their learning to a level above that of traditional classroom experiences.

However, sometimes, games and simulations used in a learning context achieve precious little in terms of the resources invested. In this paper therefore I suggest a rationale and methodology for embedding simulations and games in the teaching of Classics. I will also present the design for a prototype of a text-based adventure game written in Latin, for improving students’ ability to read the ancient language naturally.”