(c) The Washington Post
STYLE
Thursday, December 22, 1983
The Arts/Television/Classified C 1
*Through the Zorking Glass*
Home Computer Games to Plot Your Own Adventure
By Curt Suplee
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- You are stooped in a fetid, gore-slathered grotto
far underground. Through the murk a troll appears and leaps to split
your gizzard with an axe. You're holding the jeweled egg, the elfin
sword, the brass lantern and a brown sack smelling of hot peppers. The
axe descends. Half a hundred options seethe in your skull. Clamped in
panic, you stare at the keyboard. And on a sudden desperate whim,
type: *Throw the sack at the troll.*
Your disk drive snickers, the video screen pulses and flares:
*The troll, who is remarkably coordinated, catches the brown sack and
not having the most discriminating taste, gleefully eats it. The flat
of the troll's axe hits you on the head ... I'm afraid you are dead.*
Rats.
If it's 2 in the morning, this must be Zork. Not even Ted Koppel can
keep the nation up so late -- or so long, with an average play-time of
30 hours. Yet the plot-it-yourself all-prose adventure is America's
best-selling personal-computer game and the simplest of 10
cranium-spraining odysseys from the house of Infocom. Its programs now
hold seven of the top 20 game slots on the jealously watched Softsel
Hot List -- and all without a single picture.
Instead, they have tapped the most powerful image-generator known: the
human mind. "One of our groups is working with graphics products,"
says Infocom president Joel Berez, 29. "But we're going to stick with
text. Your imagination is much richer than the rather crude graphics
available on microcomputers."
Sounds simple as failing off a floppy. But to harness that capacity, a
team of software shamans has had to travel to the outmost eerie
perimeters of artificial-intelligence research. And to evolve a new
hybrid genus: the writer-programmer whose cosmos is both in and out of
his control. Game author Dave Lebling puts it this way: "Shakespeare
did not have to worry about what happens if Hamlet decides to kill
Claudius in Act I."
The Birth of a Notion
You are standing in the bland-hued hallway of Infocom. To the west is
a wooden door, ajar. Behind it, Berez and production manager Michael
Dornbrook, 31, are plotting expansion. To the north is a rack of
computer magazines, edges thumbed to fluff. To the south, an open
corridor leads out of this warren of tech-biz office suites and into
the placid shoppe-scape of Cambridge. To the east is a closed door.
Behind it the game writers are holding their weekly conclave. At
intervals, a blast of hilarity rattles the jamb: deep rasping sobs of
laughter, a tremulo of giggles, a tweetering scree like a jungle bird.
Then the sound of chalk on a blackboard.
*Walk west and enter the office.*
"It all began," Berez is saying, in the mid-'70s at MIT's Laboratory
for Computer Science, where a dozen researchers -- among them Berez,
Marc Blank and Dave Lebling -- were developing programming tools for
interactive artificial-intelligence problems. "You have to understand
that we always had a competitive feeling that our people could do many
things better than anybody else." (American programming primacy is
split like the medieval papacy between Cambridge and the West Coast.
At present, the top doggies in business software [Lotus] and education
[Spinnaker] are also in Cambridge.) So when a strange new
dungeons-and-dangers game called Adventure -- now $24.95 from Norell
Data Systems in Los Angeles -- popped up on the mainframe one day, the
boys were cranked.
Especially Blank, now 29, a high-strung polymath and Infocom's vice
president for product development. He was designing and developing
MDL (known as Muddle), a high-level language for computers, while
commuting to MIT from Albert Einstein Medical School in New York.
Blank and Lebling (now 34 and still affiliated with MIT) began writing
their own game, replacing the two-word commands ("take sword") with
more complex syntax. By 1978, cybernauts all over the country were
playing the game, which was kept under the heading Zork -- "one of
Marc's nonsense words," says Dornbrook.
But by 1979, the MIT bunch was breaking up; so Berez and Blank -- who
had just finished his MD -- decided to start a company, sell the game
and keep the gang together. Testers were recruited (MIT-vets
Dornbrook, his then-roommate Steve Meretzky and Stuart Galley -- the
latter two now game authors) and Zork was licensed to a rookie outfit
called Personal Software for marketing. There it might have remained
had Personal Software not invented a financial program called VisiCalc
-- which flared into acclaim and helped detonate the personal-computer
boom. The company became VisiCorp, now an industry giant, and dumped
Zork as unbecoming to their new image. Infocom swallowed hard and in
1981 went it alone. The rest is very lucrative history. And very hard
work.
Miming the Mind
Artificial intelligence programming seeks to synthesize the process of
human decision-making. The most primitive form is either/or branching:
In interactive arcade games, you either hit the alien ship or don't;
in simple medical diagnostic programs, you show a fever or not.
Infocom, however, offers not only 10 directions of travel and a wide
range of actions (read, wave, burn, drop, give to, climb up, look
under, etc.) but the power to act irrationally -- e.g., lobbing the
chow sack at the troll. "We're testing one new game now," says
Dornbrook, "in which the player is able to turn himself into a bat.
But he's also capable of traveling under water. So naturally,
somebody turned himself into a bat under water. We're trying to decide
what to do."
All of which would be impossible, Blank says, without two tools. (A
favored programmer's word -- as if it were palpable as mallets and
awls.) The first is Infocom's proprietary programming language, ZIL
(Zork Interactive Language). In so-called "rule-" or "frame-based"
systems -- like the medical example above -- the facts fed in by the
operator proceed through a sequential, hierarchical route called
"chaining" to reach a conclusion.
An alternative method is list processing (hence LISP). The Info-folks
intimate that ZIL is of this latter type and akin to Muddle; beyond
that, they are mum. Such systems do not require a fixed sequence of
stages. Whereas the basic unit of rule-based programs is a word or
number (female, blood pressure 120/80) LISP-like systems employ
symbols for clusters of characteristics or definitions of states
(i.e., all the activities associated with the verb "burn"). When new
data arrive (the player encounters a rock and types *Burn the rock*),
the program examines the associations between "rock" and "burn" -- and
finding no match, generates an appropriate response: "You're nuts."
Of course, the lists themselves may contain lists; and many routines
are "recursive" -- that is, start themselves automatically. Picture a
possible universe of 255 objects (each with its string of
characteristics) and a vocabulary of 600 words (each of which has
various possible associations with the objects), and you begin to see
the scope of the problem.
Not to mention the "parser," which allows the program to understand
whole sentences like "Pick up the troll-wand and the rubber gerbil and
give them to the Bog Monster. Then follow the magic chicken." Or
permits game-players to address characters individually -- "Monica,
tell me about the muddy footprints." The very mention of this arcane
appliance, now in its fifth rewrite, provokes a horrified awe even in
writer-programmer Michael Berlyn: "It's clearly the most complicated,
convoluted, disgusting piece of code that's ever been written. And
modifying it means handling it like a bomb -- but with a sledgehammer
at the same time."
Forget about popping it in your Atari. The games are developed and
"debugged" on Infocom's almighty mainframe DEC-20, the biggest
byte-bender in Digital Equipment's fleet, compared to which your IBM
PC is dumb as a toaster. The program is compiled -- translated into
chip-legible binary code -- and then adapted to 15 different computers
by adding a "kernel" allowing each machine to interpret the code.
The Write Stuff
All of which somewhat narrows the range of potential authors. "I can't
tell you how lucky we've been that we have good writers who are also
programmers," says Berlyn, 34 (Suspended, Infidel, Enchanter), the
group's gregarious de facto spokesman. You can see it in the hybrids
spread around this conference table: The rumpled, linty look and
blinky, oblivious aura of the cyborg; but a brightness of eye evincing
acquaintance with reality. Especially in Berlyn, a sci-fi novelist
("Crystal Phoenix," "The Integrated Man"), former head of a software
house in Colorado and the only non-MIT alumnus, who fled East out of
raw zeal for Zork. "I sat down at an Apple years ago, played it, and
said *'Next'!* I was hooked, I needed more -- and there weren't any!"
A typical syndrome, it seems, as each springs to tell the others'
stories. "What you're seeing in action," says Berlyn, "is the way we
work as a team." Lebling, 34 (Starcross, Zork I & II), is a programmer
and "frustrated writer" with a background in political science.
Galley, 39 (The Witness), studied physics and worked on his college
newspaper before MIT and Infocom; Meretzky, the youngest at 26
(Planetfall), took architecture and engineering before embarking on
film scripts and technical writing. If the games share a propensity to
sardonic wit and stylistic burlesque, well, says Berlyn, "a lot of it
is because the people originally involved weren't computer nerds."
In fact Meretzky "hated computers," Dornbrook says, "and was
constantly complaining about this Apple I had on the table" to test
the early Zork. "I was appalled," says Meretzky. "Most of the people I
knew who used computers were totally boring and never talked about
anything else." The image was reinforced, Lebling recalls, when the
original Zorksters would convene at a Chinese restaurant to talk tech.
("For some reason," he says, "all computer programmers love Chinese
food." "I've got a theory," Galley injects: "It's because Chinese
dinners are modular." A round of knowing laughter.) Anyway, "we
thought, wouldn't it be great if poor Steve had to sit through this."
He did -- and much more. "Pretty soon," says Dornbrook, "I'd come home
and notice that things were moving around on the table." Meretzky was
a goner. "So when Mark did Deadline, and needed someone to test it, I
did. Six months later I started writing."
A single writer originates each project, but the process soon becomes
collaborative, with solutions and scenarios proffered, swapped. or
stolen. ("Occasionally," says Galley, "we hate each other.") But
generally, says Berlyn, "the ambiance is like a dorm room where people
will be wandering through the halls, coffee cup in hand, zombielike,
and say, 'Do you mind if I sit and watch you work?' " So in the case
of Suspended, "I did not in any way, shape or form write the whole
thing," says Berlyn, although "whoever has the responsibility gets the
credit." Once the writer gets his theme, goal and adversary approved,
he begins with a blank screen, an uncreatured void with four compass
directions. "You get to wander around in this pristine universe
you've created," says Berlyn. Geography is added, then traps and
hostile characters, the prose descriptions fattening with the
complexity of the problem.
Up to a point, it's routine back-plotting, says Berlyn. Infidel begins
on the desert, in a tent with a locked chest, "so I can either give
them a key or allow them to break the lock. So what do I give them to
break it with?" But "at certain stages," Lebling says, "you are about
as close to being a full-fledged programmer as anybody writing an
accounts-payable package." With comparably maddening problems.
To wit: Say a player is permitted to get a knife and a loaf of bread.
"Suppose he cuts the bread in half, and then *that* piece in half, and
then tosses one piece five feet away?" Not only will the program have
to stop the player from slicing away indefinitely like Zeno's paradox,
but the tossed piece suddenly becomes part of the interactive
geography. Why would anybody start whacking at the loaf? "The point,"
says Berlyn, "is that someone will want to do it." (Hence deceased
characters customarily disappear in a vaporous puff, lest their
corpses become one more item to throw, take, etc.)
Moreover, the games usually feature a berserk antagonist programmed to
appear occasionally. In Zork II Lebling created the esteemed Wizard of
Frobozz. "He's a little bit senile," says Lebling, "and he's forgotten
all the spells he used to know except those thatstart with F." So he
casts enchantments like "fumble" -- causing them to drop things -- or
"fluoresce," which causes them to light up. Worse yet, certain events
are programmed to occur at random. "In Zork II, I've got a topiary
garden. Every so often out of the corner of your eye, you can see one
of the animals move. One time out of 300, it will attack."
Cerebral Limits
The cerebral strain is such that "a lot of our humor and snide remarks
are a frustrated response" to the imagined demands of players, says
Berlyn. "It's like, 'Hey -- you're asking the impossible." And they
do: In cascades of mail and as many as 400 phone calls a day for
hints. "There's a lot they shelter us from," says Meretzky. Berlyn
groans. "I get calls at home. This voice goes, *'Hellloooooo?'* and my
wife says, 'This is *not* someone we know.' " Still, "there's this
person grovelling on the other end, saying, 'Please, *please!* I need
help. There are 18 of us...'"
Do they worry about propagating that addiction? "Yeah," says Berlyn.
"We're up all night biting our nails." Not even the chorus of carpers
warning that America's nippers are turning into microchip golem? A
pause, a whiff of burnt umbrage. "You mean," Berlyn shoots back, "that
Johnny will never be able to read? Not in our games. You mean Johnny
will never be able to think his way out of a paper bag?" He's got a
point; and Infocom's got a trophy case of awards from parents'
associations. Besides, the next generation of boggles is even more
demanding.
"The one I'm doing now," Meretzky says, "is a time-travel game where
you meet yourself in the future and have to exchange objects. It's
probably the most complicated problem we've ever worked on,"
especially since the quest runs through "a coal mine where there are
27 different things to worry about." He lets that sit for a second.
"But nothing that's not in a day's work."
Case in point: Suspended, so viciously complex it makes air-traffic
control look like mah-jongg. In ZIL, says Berlyn, "there's a program
that's running all the time that knows the state of the universe and
all its variables and acts accordingly. In Suspended, I broke it." In
the game, a player, immobilized in cryogenic suspension, must repair
the damaged life-support systems of an artificial planet by directing
six different robots -- each of which has unique capabilities and
deficiencies. Each moves independently of the others (and of the
player!), and one is used to query the planet-computer's main data
base. All the while, the ecosphere erodes and the death toll rises.
Infocom estimates a minimum of 30 hours to reach a conclusion. Berlyn
-- who like the others enjoys playing the games as much as writing
them -- didn't know the limits of Suspended until it had been tested.
Even now, he gets "far from the best score."
The Witness -- written in a Raymond Chandler lampoon style -- gives
the player-detective 12 hours to solve a crime and the ability to
interrogate characters, examine evidence, and to decide whether or not
to answer a ringing telephone -- and if so, to choose what to say. It
follows the super-seller, Deadline, as the second in Infocom's mystery
series. A mere 30 different endings are possible, and a set of
newspaper headlines at the end show you how close you were to the
ideal solution.
This fall the company stretched its sci-fi line with Planetfall, a
comedy space adventure in which an enlisted man (armed only with a
broom and a robot sidekick named Floyd) tackles the terrors of a
strange planet. (The player must not only eat and sleep at prudent
intervals, but interpret his own dreams.) And it started two new
series: a fantasy line (Enchanter) in which a fledgling wizard must
acquire a repertory of spells to subjugate an evil warlock; and a
Tales of Advent ture line (Infidel) wherein the player-archeologist
makes his way to the core of a lost sacred pyramid."
Juggling the code in the monster mainframe, writers can complete a
game in three months. (It would take three or four years, Blank says,
to write one like Deadline in standard machine language -- "and then
you'd only have it running on one computer.") But that's only the
beginning. For the next two months the programs are given "to our
employes, who are paid to really beat on 'em," says Dornbrook. Their
error reports and suggestions are compiled in a "bug book" that can
reach 1,200 pages.
The games are fixed, embellished, then shipped out to a second tier of
a dozen outside testers. When they reply, the program is re-edited
again. "We've even had the ending of the game changed at this point,"
says Dornbrook. (One player objected that Infidel unfairly rewarded
the arrogant ethnocentrism of the anthropologist. The staff concurred,
and the game altered accordingly.) Still, "every game goes out buggy,"
says Blank, and is constantly being modified: Zork I is now at Version
75.
"We're not standing still," Meretzky says. "We're pushing back the
envelope." With games? A visitor, amused at this heroic allusion to
"The Right Stuff," guffaws. Into silence. If the product is
entertainment, the process is serious. And each is pushing his own
way. Galley wants to see "more *human* interaction, a romance story
maybe"; Blank a program so sophisticated that one could, say, dicker
with a shopkeeper over the price of an item. Meretkzy likes temporal
realism demanding "sleeping and eating and different things taking
different lengths of time." And Berlyn prefers "six characters running
at the same time." But in the end, it's the public whose wishes count.
"Reviews mean infinitely more to us than to a novelist," says Berlyn.
"In games, you don't know what people like until they *do* it."
Hard-Sell Software
It takes annual sales of approximately 20,000 copies to make a game a
best-seller. Infocom's, most at $50 each, grossed nearly $6 million
this year -- up 400 percent, Berez says, from 1982. No wonder
Softline, the computer-game magazine, now carries a special "Zorktalk"
column; or that Addison-Wesley has just signed to distribute the games
to booksellers. And this spring Infocom will release a new line for
ages 8 to 13. Lately, "we've made an attempt to separate the
programming from the actual game writing," says Berez, "and our
intention was to bring in big-name writers." So far they've secured a
weathered yarnwright from the Tom Swift and Hardy Boys book series.
And there'll be a game specifically for girls.
That may seem odd, since the nation's 4 million personal computers (a
$2.2 billion retail software market) are overwhelmingly run by males.
But astronaut Sally Ride, who braved the yawning vacuums of space,
says "Zork is going to drive me to my knees." And this month's Ms.
magazine lauds Deadline for promoting "logic, deductive reasoning and
other problem-solving skills."
To some, the skills are the problem. A Texas mom whose 11-year-old
twin sons got Deadline wrote Infocom in a lather of rage. "Now, after
two weeks of new questions directed at me regarding mixing alcohol and
drugs, murder and suicide," she wrote, "the real clincher came" when
one of the boys came in and "said his brother just 'raped someone in
the living room' while playing the game." What's a mother to do? She
decided to buy the game back from her kids. Infocom fired back that
if Deadline talks about drugs and mayhem, "so do virtually all
mysteries" and although the program understands the word "rape," "it
never uses the term itself." And the consequences are "arrest, prison
and disgrace. Not exactly encouragement."
But then, the tricks aren't for kids. Infocom's average player is
between 18 and 35, and Popular Computing's reviewer this month
concedes that it took him several nights and 30 pages of handwritten
notes to get through the first third of Suspended. Even the avid may
lack the time. "It's definitely addicting," says Abe Nainan, 22. who
works in a Bethesda computer store and used to take the games home.
"But I just refuse to do it any more. I need to do other things --
like eat dinner." Isn't Infocom shooting itself in the financial foot
with stuff that takes two work weeks to finish? "It's a concern,"
says Berez. "But the trade-off is, you want your customer to be
happy." Besides, "some people get disappointed if they finish." And of
those who do, says Dornbrook, "the average person doesn't see more
than two-thirds of the whole game. I doubt that anybody sees all of
it." How many outcomes are possible? "We once thought," says Berez,
"that it would make an interesting doctoral thesis."
Some of Infocom's success is owing to its lavishly baroque packaging.
The Witness comes with a replica of a 1938 newspaper (in one column of
which appears the game's fictional suicide) and a real matchbook;
Infidel has a parchment map, Planetfall a plastic ID card. They
contain invaluable clues, serve "to get you into the mood, the
context, before you even boot up the disk," says Dornbrook, and
discourage the disk-copying piracy now epidemic among home users:
Infocom's games are barely playable without the oversize, wierdly
textured and oddly folded documentation; and you'd go bonkers trying
to Xerox the stuff.
Of course, you'd probably go bonkers anyway, as Dornbrook found out.
Even in the early days, "we started getting letters and calls, peo-
pie saying, 'I'm confused!' They'd get totally lost and desperate." He
got the idea of selling maps, and when he went off to business school
in Chicago, he founded the Zork Users Group. "I figured this was
gonna be a few hours a week," but membership bulged to 20,000 and soon
ZUG offered a full range of Zorkiana: T-shirt transfers, bumper
stickers ("Rather Be Zorking"), maps and posters, with beer mugs and
more on tap. A veritable cultmeister. "I used to worry about things
like that. So I never announced my last name or signed an official
letter."
This year he rejoined the company. The T-shirts had to go ("We're
trying to develop a professional image," says Berez), but Infocom has
coopted ZUG's greatest hits: the maps and the chemico-cunning
InvisiClues, a $7.95 booklet in which two or three progressively more
obvious hints for each problem are written in invisible ink. Dosing
each line with a special felt-tip marker activates the "latent-image
process." Read 'em or weep.
Dornbrook believes Infocom's games are "the beginning of a new art
form," one that "could be a significant percentage of book reading 20
years from now.' Particularly since they're on the verge of "a major,
major increase in sophistication," a synapse-broiler of such
cabalistic complexity that 'I was thinking of marketing it as The Last
Game You'll Ever Play."
For Blank, there's another payoff. He'll sometimes surreptitiously
watch a player, and "the nicest thing anybody ever said while I was
watching is, "You can tell these guys really love what they're doing."
CAPTION: From left, game writers Berlyn, Galley, Lebling and Meretzky.
CAPTION: From left, Infocom's Berez, Blank and Dornbrook; photos by
Richard Howard for The Washington Post
