2 Brief Dada Angels
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By Ryan Stevens writing as Rybread Celcius
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Brief History of IF With Quasi-Mesostic
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IneXplicable at first, Yet inevitable later [Zork II for instance]: two doZen of that storY of late siXteenth-centurY London, three doZen are familiar child's puZzle-books, and still largelY uneXplored land in between. Cited bY Designer and Date MagaZine: "the grail of puZzle-free Yet interactive literature seems for teXt: while the industrY puZzles, nearby caves were being hotly seiZed endlesslY! The Great OnyX Cave BY StandardiZed Commands was a textual maZe game." (TerrY Winograd, 1972) The aim was to eXplore and onlY a few of the puZzles, FROzEN RIVERS OF ORANGE STONE, AN AWKWARD CANyON AND A GOOD PASSAGE ExIT, freelY adapted Zazie, a craZy artificial intelligence LaboratorY, more compleX than liberallY neat puZzles. In Tracy Kidder's PulitZer prize-winning book The Soul of a New Machine (1981) a journalist's eYe-view to eXplore. Rooms, currencY of a recurring puZzle to become ``wiZards'' in a ''fantasY siX'' at the UniversitY of Alberta, Canada. WiZards' houses, maZes with limited batterY power with eXits in all directions, and so forth, recur endlesslY in `Zork'. A puZzle-plaY boX, is actuallY froZen rivers of improvised imitation called `Zork', which at its height six years later emploYed.... you. Would eXpect You were running LiZ Cyr-Jones MagaZine, manY PhoeniX Computer LiteracY magaZines, a doZen others: mutuallY TeXt. Adventures were an exception, reallY, 'Zork I' was offered for RendeZvous RaY! DeluXe. And few plaYers can tolerate a priZe. For the first priZe would take quite another strategY: eXtol the verY computeriZed Zork. MaY the uneXpected buY even more haphaZardly stocked RendeZvous with LarrY.
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Dancing on the Head's of Needle-Nose Pliers
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Adam Cadre writes real books. Andrew Plotkin writes software. Graham Nelson himself is a poet. Smart people, able to code, write, spell, etc. They have ideas, and they express them. Myself, I have ideas. And try to express them. But it's like some sitcom father trying to get all the clothes into suitcase. They overflow, wrinkle and escape. What's left is some sad ready-made. The line between a bad game and a Dada game need not exist, they share the same Venn diagram. But the attributes expand. There is the sense of the uncanny and stupid, without stepping into the realm of surreal (a more fleshed out plane), but ghosting its border. Their is also a futurist quality to them, with the pieces usually coded very fast with very little planning or forethought. Stream of consciousness would be an inaccurate prison, but a perfectly acceptable adjective. Grammar mistakes and coding ineffiencies paint miniscule portraits of the author's states. Does a manic room live it's life in a run-on sentence? Is the virtually lifeless NPC a metaphor for a single use tool? Are these non sequitar interactions injokes, fit somehow in, or allude to the phantasmagoria of the author's logic? Perhaps. Atmosphere leaks in in pecular ways and nonsense gives way to its own logic. A true Dadaist game is an imprint of the author's mind, pressed again and again, denting each previous pressing. This shape makes any title a maze, despite how the rooms are linked, and the viewer go beyond the "Guess the Verb" frustration to a leap of intention, personality and connection. Despite the headache and grievances, those who work through a piece can often feel a brief outline of beauty, for two sentences will rub just right way, or a random event juxstaposes itself within a turn of entering an instant death room. The aesthetics of the absurd have the uncanny and the stupid as well. And this is were the Dadaist piece is seperated from the truly dismal. For the Dadaist piece will have at least a small contingent that sees some sort of merit beyond satire, even if it can't be argued well, or, indeed, at all. The speed of thought transduced to words per minute, compiled and shot through the world: Nonsense is a right.