Miscommunication in Interactive Fictions

Bryan Alexander (19) explains interactive fiction as similar to hypertext fiction, but designed to be used with simple prompts like "walk" and "get." In this way readers feel more entangled in the created environment.

My Struggle with Struggle
The balance tips from any kind of plot points toward struggling through an environment. There are many gamers who love this kind of ergodic fiction just as many readers love deciphering Emily Dickinson poems or reading Ulysses by James Joyce. I love a challenge at first, but I'm not very adept at the language of games so I usually end up stuck in a dead end, which occurred for me here reading Colossal Cave Adventure by Willie Crowther (converted, adapted, standardized and essentially preserved by six other people). I got stuck in the cave unable to figure out what to do between a snake and a dwarf.  In my final minutes I tried every word I could think of to further the story. I kept encountering obstacles in communication, such as,

And my heart sank every time I read that. And I read that a lot. My words cannot be applied. So sad. Game stories seem more attractive to closed system thinkers versus open system thinkers. Closed system thinkers are really good at working within systems, memorizing the rules and figuring out how the virtual world works very quickly. It's a valuable skill. I don't have it. These folks tend to be good at math, music and science. Open system thinkers struggle with limited parameters and prefer to make endless synonym guesses and proposing preposterous actions like "bottle the mist" and "cage the snake" which seemed reasonable to me but I simply received an explanation about what mist was and the admonishment, "You can't be serious."

Differences from Traditional Paper Novels
Interactive fictions like this are very literal versus figurative. Navigating the story requires very literal descriptions of the environment, which you would never read in a paper novel. Imagine a trip to intercept a network of spies that began, "Reilly woke up in a bedroom. Reilly got out of bed and walked to the door. There was a door to the kitchen and a door to the outside. Reilly went outside." Interactive fiction is more in-the-moment and so there is less time or room for much more than grabbing, moving around and encountering things. So normally this kind of reader has a higher tolerance for piles of physical detail.

Differences from Hypertext
I know it limits my choices, but for branching stories I prefer hypertext stories like Quing's Quest, The Death of Videogames. 

I have a sense that all branching stories (hypertext or prompt-based) are finitely limited by design. Programmers must anticipate and write scenarios for each possibility. Prompt-based fictions just give us the illusion of endless choice. I know there are only a few real options at the end of each prompt of text. Why should I have to guess what those options are?

Works Cited

Alexander, Bryan. The New Digital Storytelling. Santa Barbara, Praeger, 2017.

Crowther, Willie. “Colossal Cave Adventure.” Halt and Catch Fire, https://www.amc.com/shows/halt-and-catch-fire/exclusives/colossal-cave-adventure. Accessed 21 February 2019.

"Open vs. Closed Thinking Systems." 11 November 2014. Unidentified author. uBeme Blog, https://ubeme.com/brainstormcafe/2014/11/11/open-vs-closed-thinking-modes. Accessed 21 February 2019.

Squinkifer, Dietrich. "Quing's Quest, The Death of Videogames." Electric Literature Organization, http://collection.eliterature.org/3/work.html?work=quings-quest-vii. Accessed 21 February 2019.