> LANDSCAPE AND CHARACTER IN IF
> =============================
> 
> If we reduce interactive fiction to its essence, we can view it as a
> triangular relationship between three basic elements: Landscape,
<P>
I'm firmly in the camp which says that 'between' should be used for
two ideas, and 'among' should be used for more than two.  However, I
have been succesfully argued against on this particular matter, so
I'll just point out here that my camp exists and leave it up to you,
The Author, to decide whether to rephrase.
<P>
> Character, and Action. It's possible to write IF without objects, plot,
> NPCs or myriad other ingredients, but as soon as that first room
> description appears, it introduces a landscape, just as the first prompt
> ushers in the concept of Action. [1]
<P>
The use of commas here is a bit confusing.  You might want to split
this into two sentences
<P>
> I would further argue that
<P>
Unnecessary.  Perhaps you are looking for 'additionally' or 'furthermore'.
<P>
> the
> interaction between these two elements inevitably creates some concept
> of Character. The character that emerges is the being that would perform
> the actions selected when presented with the landscape (and situation)
> at hand. Even if that character is not human, not organic, or not even
> embodied (an omniscient narrator, for instance, though that voice is
> almost never used in IF because of the form's powerful insistence on
> connecting Action with viewpoint), Action must have an agent, and that
> agent is what we call the Player Character.
<P>
The parenthetical aside "(an omniscient..." is too long and the reader
loses the flow of the sentence.
<P>
> In this formulation, the only one of the triumvirate completely under
> the game's control is Landscape. Action is entirely in the hands of the
> player, and Character lies halfway between the two. That last statement
> may require a bit more unpacking.
<P>
The sentence "That last statement..." is an awkward lead-in for the
rest of the paragraph.
<P>
> If Character is determined by Action,
> why isn't it entirely in the hands of the player as well? The answer is
> that while Action *does* determine Character, it isn't the sole
> determining factor. The game itself can shape character by statements as
> blatant as "You're Tracy Valencia," or by something as subtle as
> a particular word choice in a parser response. However, I would contend
> that while blatant character-shaping statements and even subtle nudges
<P>
'I would contend that' is unnecessary.
<P>
> from default responses are far from inevitable in IF, some sense of
> landscape *must* be included in any IF game, and that both the design
> and the description of this landscape are extremely powerful factors in
> determining character. It is my aim in this essay to examine the ways
<P>
'This essay will examine ...'
<P>
> in which Landscape influences and creates Character, and to raise what I
> hope will be some interesting questions about the nature of their
<P>
'what I hope will be' is also unnecessary.
<P>
> interrelationship.
> 
> 
> MAP DESIGN
> [This section contains minor spoilers for Colossal Cave, Planet Of The
> Infinite Minds, Strangers In The Night, and Suspect. It contains
> medium-level spoilers for Lost New York and Stone Cell, and major
> spoilers for Shade and 1981.]
> 
> Space is continuous. The landscape of interactive fiction, however,
> consists of discrete units, connected to each other in various ordinary
> and sometimes extraordinary ways. [2] By convention we call these units
> "rooms", but in fact they can be anything from a tiny subsection of a
> room to an entire town, country, planet, or universe. How does a game's
> subdivision of continuous space affect our perception of the character
> in that game? Let's look at some examples.
> 
> An illuminating comparison exists between two pieces of IF with urban
> settings: Neil DeMause's _Lost New York_ (1996) and Rich Pizor's
> _Strangers In The Night_ (1999). In the former, the character travels
> through Manhattan and other areas of New York City during various points
> in history. The game frequently compresses neighborhoods, boroughs, and
> other such swaths of territory into single rooms, albeit lovingly
> described ones:
> 
>     Lower East Side
>     The scene around you is one unmatched in any other time and place in
>     human history: Acres of identical four- and five-story tenements
>     packed cheek-to-jowl with people, people who spill out onto the
>     sidewalks and fire escapes in search of a little space, a little air.
>     The el tracks continue down the street to the north and south; to the
>     east, the tenements seem to stretch on forever, though you're pretty
>     sure they eventually end at the East River shore.
> 
> Within each time period, these areas connect to each other directly,
> even though they may have been separated by miles in reality.
> Occasionally, a "traveling message" such as "You trudge north for close
> to a mile, finally arriving at..." will interpose itself between
> locations, but more often the traveling interval passes instantaneously
> and without comment.
> 
> _Strangers In The Night_, on the other hand, painstakingly sets out its
> generic city map as a street grid, and provides almost no description
> for the lion's share of its locations:
> 
>     Broadway and 11th
>        You are at the intersection of Broadway and 11th Avenue. To the
>     southwest is the security door for your apartment building; the
>     Broadway Sineplex (which a few downtown residents still consider an
>     amusing name for a movie theatre) lies to the northeast.
> 
>     >n
>     Broadway (10th & 11th)
> 
>     >n
>     Broadway and 10th
>        One of the streetlights is dim here; the shadows that are cast
>     against the sidewalk are oddly deformed, giving the corner an
>     otherworldly feel.
> 
>     >n
>     Broadway (9th & 10th)
>        Somewhere in the distance, a car alarm starts blaring it's [sic]
>     Call of the Wild to the concrete jungle. This is followed a few
>     moments later by the sound of figerglass [sic] crunching and safety
>     windshields shattering until the alarm ceases.
> 
>     >n
>     Broadway and 9th
> 
>     >n
>     Broadway (8th & 9th)
> 
>     >n
>     8th and Broadway
>        Carl Tuck's Coffehouse [sic] is to the southeast.
> 
> At first glance, it might appear that about half the locations contain
> room descriptions. In fact, however, only the first and the last do; the
> dim streetlight and the car alarm are random atmospheric messages that
> can pop up in any street location. In fact, the only time a non-random
> message, or a description of any kind, appears is when the location
> adjoins the entrance to a puzzle-solving area, or to the PC's home.
> The game's city grid is comprised of about 80 locations, all of which
> may well have been compressed into one room in _Lost New York_.
> 
> It's a natural impulse to discuss these choices as they relate to game
> design, or to talk about their successes and failures in creating
> immersion or facilitating strategy. What may not be so natural is to
> think about how these choices influence the way we think about the
> player character; I would contend that consciously or not, we perceive
<P>
Delete 'I would contend that'
<P>
> these two characters differently based on the way the games construct
> their surroundings. What we know about the PC of _Lost New York_ is that
> she [3] knows New York City well enough to identify its various areas
> instantly, even as they appeared over a hundred years ago. In fact, the
> game's easy recognition of areas such as "The Goats" and "Ladies Mile",
> not to mention the copious historical detail infused into many room
> descriptions, creates a tension between the game's identification of the
> PC as "a tourist" and what we know about her from her subsequent
> experiences. Someone who could wander through New York's past with so
> much information at hand must be intimately familiar with the city,
> either through experience or study. Her interest and perception is
> mostly broad strokes -- she's more interested in generalities of an area
> than in its specific details, and her sense of history is sweeping
> rather than finely grained -- but her knowledge is quite comprehensive.
> Even if the game had insisted that this was the PC's first trip to the
> city, we would have to conclude that she is someone who for whatever
> reason has immersed herself in New York City history; how else to
> explain such detailed knowledge in the midst of the extraordinary
> experience of time travel? If the game proved unable or unwilling to
> address and resolve this question, that lacuna could hardly be anything
> but a flaw in the work, just as it would be in a novel where the main
> character knows things she shouldn't.
> 
> Unlike the PC of _Lost New York_, the character in _Strangers_ has
> almost no interest in ordinary detail, let alone history. He never finds
> himself musing about ironies or architecture as he treads the streets,
> and in fact usually notices nothing but the bare identity of the
> location. Together with the game's specification of the PC as a vampire,
> these facts can lead us to a few conclusions about this character. He
> sees the city not as human tapestry or even interesting backdrop, but
> rather as a sort of maze he must navigate in order to locate prey. The
> lack of room descriptions impels us to move quickly from one location to
> the next, replicating the urgency of the character's thirst for blood.
> His disinterest in local color might even be seen as an undead disdain
> for the fleeting effluvia of mortal life. The game's overall
> presentation isn't quite strong enough to give this effect full potency,
> but all the same we know quite well that there is a significant
> difference between these two characters. The _Lost New York_ PC, even if
> she *were* a vampire searching the streets for prey, couldn't help but
> notice the landscape and be aware of its heritage, while the _Strangers_
> PC could be thrust into any time in the city's history and would evince
> a similar disregard for anything but the most minimal details of place.
<P>
You might want to examine also whether there was any point in setting
_Strangers_ in NYC vs. any other city, or even a generically presented
one.
<P>
> 
> On the other end of the detail spectrum from _Strangers_ is Andrew
> Plotkin's _Shade_ (2000), where the entirety of the action appears to be
> taking place in the player character's studio apartment.  In this
<P>
Whoops.  You were just comparing & contrasting LNY and Strangers, but
now you're throwing Shade into the mix.  In other words, you were
just saying that LNY was on the other end of the spectrum, and now
you're saying Shade is.  You might want to spend a sentence or two
setting this up.
<P>
> one-room environment, however, movement is possible, and the game
> responds to this movement not by placing the character in a new room (as
> is the case with most IF), but rather by making a series of alterations
> to room description and scope for the current room. If the PC is in the
<P>
See?  Shade is a direct contrast to your statement earlier that
space in IF is made of discrete rooms.  So you might want to compare it
to *all* IF in this paragraphs introductory statement, rather than
saying it's being compared to Strangers.
<P>
> center of the apartment, for example, the game first mentions objects
> close at hand, such as the computer desk and stereo, while reserving
> mention of the kitchen and bathroom areas for the later parts of the
> room description. When that character moves to the kitchen, however,
> text about the counter, the refrigerator, and such occupies the
> beginning of the room description. The desk and stereo are still visible
> from that location, and still mentioned, but are only visible, not
> accessible for touching or other manipulation until the character
> returns to the center of the apartment.
> 
> When _Shade_ was released, this approach to map design was hailed as an
> innovative subversion of the conventional IF map, which it is. It is
<P>
Maybe delete ', which it is' and instead say  'was correctly hailed as'.
<P>
That way you haven't got '... it is.  It is ...'.
<P>
> also a fitting choice for characterization purposes. The overlapping,
> connected nature of the apartment landscape makes clear to us that this
> is an environment with which the character is intimately familiar, and
> that even while he inhabits one area of it, his awareness of the other
> areas does not abate. The map design makes the apartment *belong* to the
<P>
'belongs'
<P>
> character in a way that it would not were it separated into discrete
> rooms. This sense of familiarity, of safety, and of enclosure makes the
> game's later revelations all the more powerful, as the familiar
> dissolves into the strange, and safe enclosure into fatal exposure.
> 
> A similar effect, the subdivision of one room into many separate
> locations, appears in a variety of games, including Infocom's _Suspect_
> (1984) and Steve Kodat's _Stone Cell_ (1999). In the former, it's a
> grand ballroom that the game presents as nine separate locations, and
> the effect is to make the room feel enormous. The character in _Suspect_
> is a reporter at a party being given in a mansion, and the game's map
> design underscores her sense of awe at the opulent surroundings -- where
> the house's owner's perception of the ballroom might be closer to that
> of the character in _Shade_, the guest's mind demands more concrete
> conceptual boundaries in order to take in the scope of the area. _Stone
> Cell_ achieves a different effect by performing the same gridlike
> subdivision on a much smaller room, the eponymous stone cell. Room
> descriptions and common sense tell us that this room is much smaller
> than the ballroom in _Suspect_, so the game's partitioning of that
> space, rather than conveying immensity, instead reflects the PC's
> awareness of the room's tiniest details as a result of her imprisonment.
> What makes this design particularly effective is that the game initially
> presents the cell as one location, then expands it into a grid after the
> character sleeps, thus reflecting not only the character's growing
> familiarity with his surroundings but also his growing desire to
> scrutinize each detail of the premises in hopes of escape.
> 
> The opposite effect is available, too, when games compress the extremely
> large, even the inconceivably large, into a single room description. One
<P>
You were just discussing the extremely large case earlier with LNY, though.
Maybe mention that here?  You don't want the reader to think 'we just
covered that' and skip the following paragraphs.
<P>
> of the more extreme examples of this technique occurs in Alfredo
> Garcia's _Planet Of The Infinite Minds_ (2000), where the character
> might find himself here:
> 
>     The Beginning of Space
>     All around you, distant suns flicker and twinkle. Painfully bright
>     points of light seem to appear suddenly from out of the ether, as
>     another retracts into obscurity. En masse, the effect renders a
>     carnival of vibrant colours and astonishing beauty.
> 
> The simple fact of the character's existence in this location tells us
> something about that character: that she has transcended humanity,
> attaining a sort of bodiless, godlike status. Since the game starts with
> the PC as a simple librarian, its transportation of her to such an
> abstract vista carries with it the implication of personal disembodiment
> and removal from reality as well. What's more, her ability to know that
> the location is "The Beginning Of Space" rather than, say, a Christmas
> tree festival viewed through a hangover, suggests a metahuman
> omnipotence that we must assume has been granted to the character, at
> least temporarily.
> 
> The connection between map design and character stretches to the deepest
> roots of IF, for the majority of _Colossal Cave_'s (1976) map is named and
> divided in ways that would make sense to a spelunker. From the way that
> the game comfortably names areas of the cave as "rooms", and indeed even
> the names of those rooms, which draw on caving vocabulary such as
> "Bedquilt" and "Y2", we can clearly identify that the character in that
> game is an experienced cave explorer. Thus, even in the earliest days of
> IF, when games made virtually no overt effort to characterize the PC,
> character was already emerging as a function of landscape. The character
> in _Colossal Cave_, while unraced, gender-neutral, ageless, nameless,
> and faceless, was nonetheless made distinct from the player herself by
> the way he perceived the landscape of the cave, seeing rooms and twisty
> little passages where a different character might have experienced the
> area quite differently.
> 
> In the hands of a skilled author, the effect of landscape on character
> can make for a portrayal that is very striking indeed. Take, for
> instance, Adam Cadre's _1981_ (2001) [4]. The first room description of
> the game is as follows:
> 
>     New Haven, Connecticut
>     New Haven. The worst place on earth. The town is dirty and
>     industrial, the students are sloppy, everything is horribly
>     expensive. And you had to cash in $3600 of your stock to get here.
>     But it was necessary. Four years at this place is enough to ravage
>     anyone. You have to rescue her, your first true love.
> 
>     Her dormitory lies to the north.
> 
> Already, we can see a dramatic narrowing of scope occurring. The
> character is so unconcerned with the details of his location that he
> compresses an entire town into one unit, dismissing all of it as "the
> worst place on earth." Then the broad outlines of location gain sudden,
> sharp focus: "Her dormitory lies to the north." The contrast between the
> vague, reviled whole of New Haven and the focus on the dormitory, set
> apart in its own line, suggests to us that the character's concentration
> on his goal is unhealthy, perhaps even obsessive, and moving north
> confirms this suspicion:
> 
>     New Haven, in her dormitory
>     You're standing in front of her door. It's closed. It's always
>     closed. You've shoved approximately one hundred poems and letters
>     under that door. You figure she's probably read about half of them.
> 
> Scope narrows even further here, from one building to the tiny area in
> front of one of that building's doors. The room descriptions certainly
> confirm our impression of the main character's unbalanced and obsessive
> nature, but even without them, the basic funneling performed by the map
> design would get the point across admirably. When we discover that the
> PC is John Hinckley, Jr., and that the door in question is to Jodie
> Foster's dorm room at Yale, the revelation is terrifically powerful,
> because via its map design, the game has already taken us directly into
> the viewpoint of its would-be assassin.
> 
> 
> ROOM DESCRIPTIONS
> [This section contains minor spoilers for A Change In The Weather,
> Heroes, Varicella, and Zork I. It contains medium-level spoilers for
> Once And Future and Wearing The Claw, and major spoilers for Nothing
> More Nothing Less.]
> 
> Of course, in _1981_ it's more than just map design that clues us into
> the character -- the room descriptions themselves make it clear that we
> are seeing the game's landscape as filtered through one individual's
> highly idiosyncratic viewpoint. Short, choppy sentences give the text a
> jittery feel, contributing to the general tone of uneasiness. We know
> the character has some access to wealth because of the "$3600 of your
> stock" line. We also know the character is either a heterosexual male or
> a homosexual female from the reference to the true love as "her." [5]
> And we certainly know how he feels about New Haven.
> 
> Cadre is particularly skilled at bringing character across through room
> description, as in this example, the first room in _Varicella_ (1999):
> 
>     Salon
>     You've funneled the lion's share of the palace improvements budget --
>     and most likely the tiger's share as well -- into renovating the
>     salon... not that the Philistines you live among are equipped to
>     appreciate it. From the plush Quattordici chairs to the handsome
>     volumes in the library to the imported Ming tea service to the
>     steward you hired to attend to your grooming needs, this is an oasis
>     of taste and comfort in what is otherwise a fairly uncomfortable and
>     tasteless building. Ah, well. When you become Regent you'll have
>     greater latitude to redecorate. The arched windows overlook the
>     western gardens, while the exit leads east.
> 
> This description follows several paragraphs of introduction, which
> announce the player character as one Primo Varicella, Palace Minister to
> a recently deceased king, and Machiavellian schemer for the throne. Even
> without that introduction, though, this room description would frame the
> character aptly. From the "lion's share" clause we know that the
> character is in charge of improvements to a palace, and from the room
> name we know that he is in the Salon mentioned in the first sentence;
> therefore we can conclude that he is employed by the palace in which the
> game begins -- a succinct way to bring across Varicella's position and
> occupation. Moreover, the phrase "live among" tells us that he resides
> at the palace as well. The "tiger's share" clause gives us an example of
> his sardonic humor, and the "Philistines" reference an example of his
> snobbery. His identification of the chairs and tea service, and the
> contrast to the "uncomfortable and tasteless" remainder of the building,
> communicate clearly that this is a man of very strong preferences, a
> persnickety aristocrat whose refined tastes run to the extremely
> expensive. Finally, the character's ambitions, and the drive behind
> them, are summarized neatly: "When you become Regent you'll have greater
> latitude to redecorate." Just by seeing one room through this
> character's eyes, we learn all the essential facts about him that will
> carry throughout the game.
> 
> If there's a continuum that measures the degree to which a game's
> room descriptions blatantly shape character, it's fair to say that
> _Varicella_ is probably on the extreme end of it. Does that mean that
> the room descriptions of games on the other end don't shape character
> at all? Predictably, my answer is no -- the effect is just a bit more
> subtle. To illustrate, let's compare descriptions from two different
> games, neither of which has character as its focus. First, from
> Andrew Plotkin's _A Change In The Weather_ (1996):
> 
>     Rocky Outlook
>     A wide angular tongue juts out from the hillside. The park stretches
>     off to the north and west, a vast expanse of luminous meadowland,
>     patched with the dark emerald of forest. The streams are already
>     shadowed in their beds. In the distance, a lake reflects red fire,
>     beneath the greater fire that leaps silently on the horizon.
> 
>     A trail leads southwest down the hill, towards the bridge. From where
>     you stand, it turns southeast and continues upward, deeply cut into
>     the hillside. A narrower trail leads more steeply up to the east.
> 
> _Zork I_ (1981) by Infocom offers a location that is very nearly
> analogous:
> 
>     Rocky Ledge
>     You are on a ledge about halfway up the wall of the river canyon. You
>     can see from here that the main flow from Aragain Falls twists along
>     a passage which it is impossible for you to enter. Below you is the
>     canyon bottom. Above you is more cliff, which appears climbable.
> 
> Though their locations may be similar, these two characters are very
> different indeed. _Weather's_ wanderer takes the entire first paragraph
> to describe the area with intense, poetic language. The words don't
> directly narrate the emotions felt by the character, nor impute opinions
> like the descriptions in _Varicella_, but they deploy vivid adjectives
> like "luminous" and "dark emerald", and powerful metaphors -- the tongue
> of rock, the red fire of sunset reflected in a lake, the setting sun as
> a "greater fire that leaps silently on the horizon." This is a character
> whose soul is moved by the grandeur of a natural landscape. Only after
> this reverent depiction does the character notice practical details: the
> trails and where they lead.
> 
> _Zork's_ PC, on the other hand, goes directly for the practical. She
> mentions the river's passage only in terms of whether she can enter it.
> What she notices about the cliff is that it is climbable. Though the
> natural scene -- a canyon, a river, a waterfall -- is probably quite
> impressive, the description is almost entirely mechanical. There are no
> rapturous sentences about the stark rock of the cliff or the sparkling
> river. Adjectives are almost entirely absent, and where they do exist
> their purpose is highly prosaic: "river" further identifies "canyon", as
> "Aragain" does "Falls" and "canyon" does "bottom." Other descriptors
> exist solely to describe travel options: "impossible" and
> "climbable". Indeed, she sees every element of the scene only in terms
> of how it can be manipulated or traversed, and this viewpoint is
> consistent throughout the game, just as the intense description of
> natural phenomena is a constant in _Weather._ Both games' main focus is
> puzzle-solving, but when we compare how their characters each view a
> similar scene, it becomes clear how different the characters are from
> each other.
> 
> Comparing the PCs of two different games illuminates important
> differences between the characters, and the effect is even more potent
> when several points of view are available within the same game --
> instead of seeing how two different characters view analogous locations,
> we get to see how they view the exact *same* location. Several recent
> games have made use of this technique: J. Robinson Wheeler's _Being
> Andrew Plotkin_ (2000), Stephen Granade's _Common Ground_ (2000) and my
> own _LASH_ (2000) among them. The current apex of POV-diversity, though,
<P>
D'oh.  Now I know who wrote this essay.  Hi Paul!
<P>
> probably belongs to _Heroes_ (2001) by Sean Barrett. This game offers a
> minimal landscape of something like a dozen locations, but gives five
> different viewpoint options through which to view it. For instance, the
> opening location of the game as viewed by a Zork-like adventurer:
> 
>     Temple Way
>     The grimy, ramshackle buildings of Oldtown dutifully try to reform
>     themselves as you progress east down Temple Way, but nothing besides
>     the temple itself makes any real pretense of belonging anywhere other
>     than Oldtown. Or rather, nothing besides the temple and Baron
>     Sedmon's nearby mansion.
> 
> a King:
> 
>     Avenue
>     This broad avenue leads right into Temple Square, the heart of
>     fabulous New Oldtown. Towering over the square to the east you do
>     perceive your stark white Temple of Justice, beautiful and
>     well-appointed, offering a statement to the neighborhood: this, this
>     is what progress is about. Sadly, the buildings around you are
>     scarcely up to this new standard; Baron Ventillado's house north of
>     the square is much more satisfactory. How you hate having to come
>     here. This would all be so much simpler if Blackhelm were found dead
>     one morning, but it's never happened yet, despite your best efforts.
> 
> a thief:
> 
>     Shadowy Road
>     Sturdy, functional buildings lie in and out of shadow on the road to
>     the temple square. Simple architecture, devoid of handholds; closely
>     spaced buildings, devoid of alleyways; uncut walls, devoid of
>     windows: the builders in this area knew how to encourage amateurs to
>     go elsewhere.
> 
> a mage:
> 
>     East-West Road
>     Randomly arranged paving stones form this street, proceeding east
>     towards a more attractive arrangement. The darkened buildings lean
>     sloppily over the edge of the street, reducing the energetic
>     potential of the strict east-west layout. West the road leads back
>     into the seething mess that is Oldtown.
> 
> and finally, a dragon:
> 
>     Open Tunnel
>     We were surrounded by the man-things' structures, structures of dead
>     trees and rock and distortions of iron. Beneath us we felt the
>     arrangements of stone into a path for man-things' mobile receptacles.
>     We could smell hints of the Crystal along the path to the east.
> 
> Where the adventurer just sees a temple, the King sees the temple as his
> own possession, a symbol of his attempts to renovate and improve the
> city. Where the mage sees leaning buildings distorting the street's
> pristine geometry, the thief sees those same leaning buildings as a
> source of precious shadow. Through the use of a past-tense,
> second-person plural voice, _Heroes_ renders the dragon's viewpoint
> quite alien, and emphasizes that dissonance by showing us how the dragon
> sees the street: an "open tunnel", contrasted with the more irregular
> shapes of nature and constructed by contemptible "man-things." _Heroes_
> takes excellent advantage of Landscape's ability to reveal Character,
> and through its use of multiple viewpoints, it leverages the power of
> the Landscape-Character axis to accomplish something more: the
> revelation of Landscape via accumulated details from a variety of
> characters. The descriptions coalesce in the player's mind to create a
> picture of the location that is much more complete than any one
> viewpoint could provide, while at the same time establishing distinct
> portraits of each viewpoint character.
> 
> Other games have made use of changing room descriptions in order to
> demonstrate change or progression in a single PC, or to give us that
> character's revised perspective as a situation changes. _Nothing More,
> Nothing Less_ (2001) by Gilles Duchesne is a case in point. The first
> puzzle of this slice-of-life game takes place in a bathroom, initially
> described like so:
> 
>     Bathroom
>     I ve seen bigger bathrooms, but must admit this smaller one suits our
>     needs well. There s a small sink with a cabinet under it, a mirror, a
>     bathtub (equiped [sic] with a shower head and curtain) and a toilet.
> 
> However, after the character urinates [6], the toilet clogs and begins
> to overflow. Unprompted, the game reprints the room description, which
> now reads as follows:
> 
>     Bathroom
>     I ve seen bigger bathrooms, but must admit this smaller one suits our
>     needs well. There s a small sink with a cabinet under it, a mirror, a
>     bathtub (equiped with a shower head and curtain) and a toilet.
>     Right now, my attention is also grabbed by: the toilet tank.
>     Water keeps flowing from the tank, nearing the bowl s edge.
> 
> The room description stays the same, but the game adds a sentence to
> demonstrate that the character's attention has become focused on one
> particular aspect of the room: the toilet tank. This sentence serves
> gameplay purposes, indicating that the toilet tank is in fact
> implemented and thereby hinting toward the solution of the "overflowing
> toilet" puzzle. In addition to this, the attention sentence demonstrates
> a shift in the character, showing us his revised perspective as well as
> the fact that he's quick-witted enough to think immediately of the
> toilet tank in this crisis. The other sentence is typical of IF room
> descriptions, indicating an action currently taking place in the room
> and lending urgency to the character's desire to solve the puzzle. After
> the character opens the tank, lifts the toilet float, and fixes the
> stuck valve to stop the toilet running (alas, too late to prevent water
> flowing onto the floor), the game once again reprints the room
> description, this time altered considerably:
> 
>     Bathroom
>     I m now standing barefoot in some icy water. I ve seen bigger
>     bathrooms, but must admit this smaller one suits our needs well. In
>     fact, at this very moment I m terribly glad the floor isn t bigger,
>     as it would only mean more water to remove. There s a small sink with
>     a cabinet under it, a mirror, a bathtub (equiped with a shower head
>     and curtain) and a toilet.
>     Right now, my attention is also grabbed by: my towel.
> 
> There are several changes, doing several different sorts of work within
> the description. The first, the "icy water" sentence, indicates a change
> in the room itself, one that is reflective of situation rather than
> character, though of course the way the character chooses to relate this
> situation -- emphasizing discomfort by noting his bare feet and
> describing the water as "icy", conveying a mood of urgency without panic
> -- does accomplish some characterization. A later sentence takes a fact
> of the bathroom addressed by earlier descriptions (its small size) and
> relates it to the new situation, revealing a practical and rather
> optimistic side to the viewpoint character. This sentence also
> demonstrates that the character's perspective, while pragmatic, is not
> particularly scientific, since a larger floor wouldn't actually mean
> more water to remove, only a greater surface area from which to remove
> it. Later, we get a new "attention" sentence; the toilet tank is no
> longer in focus, and instead the character is thinking of his towel.
> Note that this towel was not mentioned in any of the previous room
> descriptions, because the character had no particular need of it.
> _Nothing More, Nothing Less_ makes extensive use of this technique,
> heightening realism by filtering not only the general experience of
> landscape through the PC, but also specific points of focus as well.
> Finally, once the toilet is plunged and the water toweled and mopped,
> the PC has showered, and his feline nemesis has entered the room, the
> bathroom's description changes to this:
> 
>     Bathroom
>     This a bathroom, of which I ve seen more than enough in the last
>     minutes. Come to think of it, I ve seen enough of it for the whole
>     day. And the presence of that hairy pest doesn t improve my morale.
>     Azrael licks one of his paws, while keeping an eye on me.
> 
> The character's perspective on the bathroom has changed once more,
> marking the end of his progression from bland interest, through urgent
> focus, and resting finally at mild exasperation. The emotional registers
> aren't extreme, but the room descriptions convey very clearly the
> changes taking place within the character as a response to the changes
> that occur around him. In games like this, Landscape does even more
> shaping of Character than usual by virtue of its changing prose.
> 
> A final aspect of how Landscape reveals Character lies in the concept of
> elision: what rooms does the game *avoid* describing, and how do those
> gaps influence our understanding of the character? Many games take the
> character, via non-interactive cut-scenes, or even simple transitions,
> through landscape that we never get to see from the PC's perspective. My
> experiences as an author have taught me about this phenomenon; in my
> first game, _Wearing The Claw_ (1996), I elided an entire sea voyage. In
> practical terms, I made this choice because I didn't have the time,
> energy, or skill to implement the journey as an interactive experience,
> but its absence from the game couldn't help but affect the PC's
> characterization. His reluctance to relate the details had to be
> explained somehow, so I made him someone who is deeply intimidated by
> the ocean, someone who would want to block out the experience of being
> at sea as much as possible:
> 
>     Soon you find yourself at sea for the first time in your life, and
>     you learn that the rocking and swaying of a small boat on a choppy
>     sea does little to relax you. Nausea swells and recedes like the the
>     [sic] waves beneath you, and though the journey to the isle of the
>     Goergs takes little more than an hour, it ends none too soon for you.
> 
> I'm not willing to make the claim that elision *always* contributes to
> characterization -- sometimes cuts are in place just to serve a story's
> structure, leaving things unimplemented even though the character
> certainly would notice them. However, there are times that what isn't
> described is just as important as what is. These sorts of gaps are
> particularly noticeable when they contrast with the player's
> expectations, as happens from time to time in Kevin Wilson's _Once And
> Future_ (1998). One particularly memorable absence in that game is the
> matter of the cat: late in the game, Frank Leandro (the PC) is required
> to obtain a bit of cat hair for a magical recipe, and conveniently
> enough happens across a stray cat who sheds a bit into his hand and
> rides his shoulder for a while. A while later, that cat jumps into the
> chimney of a boarded-up house (chasing a bird) and disappears. Frank has
> a sword that cuts through anything, but the game forbids him from
> cutting through the boards to find the cat, saying "You could, but
> there's not much point to it." So however much the player may want to
> make sure that the kitty is okay, she is constrained by Frank's
> disinterest; the inside of the house isn't part of the map, because
> Frank doesn't see the point of exploring it.
> 
> 
> A PC-CENTRIC VIEW OF INTERACTIVE FICTION
> [This section contains minor spoilers for The Beetmonger's Journal,
> medium-level spoilers for Hamlet, and major spoilers for Photopia.]
> 
> It's possible that objections may arise to some of the points I make
> above, on the grounds that what I ascribe to character could just as
> easily be seen as a particular author's writing style, a game's depth of
> implementation, or even the formal constraints of IF itself. It's quite
> true that I'm taking a PC-centric view -- this is how I experience
> interactive fiction, and it's easy to feel that it's simply how the form
> *works*, but I certainly acknowledge that there are other, equally valid
> approaches. It's also true that the PC is not the only possible point of
> view within a work of Interactive Fiction. In _The Beetmonger's Journal_
> (2001) by Scott Starkey, for instance, some very nifty POV-jumping
> occurs in sections where the PC is the hero of some stories being read
> by the frame characters -- from time to time those characters are
> interrupted in their reading, and we get a small cut-scene from their
> point of view.
> 
> However, what I would argue for is the extreme difficulty of
> disconnecting the point-of-view from the Player Character at the point
> of action. The IF prompt implies a certain kind of remote control: the
> player is to type in an action which will then be executed within the
> game. Invariably, this action is performed by the PC. Indeed, this is
> the very definition of Player Character. Similarly, landscape
> descriptions, especially when that landscape is available for traversal
> and manipulation from the game prompt, almost cannot help but be
> filtered through the PC, because all the knowledge conveyed in them is
> available for use at the point of action. If room description were to
> convey something that the PC couldn't possibly know, such as the color
> of an object when the character is blind, the result would be severe
> cognitive dissonance for the player. If we type "OPEN BLUE DOOR" and the
> blind PC is able to do so, we must conclude that the PC is not blind
> after all -- that's how powerful the connection is between Character and
> Action. Because Landscape, Character, and Action are so intimately
> connected, it's quite difficult to avoid making Landscape a function of
> Character, especially as the two get nearer and nearer to Action.
> 
> Given this PC-centric take on IF, it's worth asking what possibilities
> reveal themselves as open or closed in its light. We've already seen
> some of what's opened, from _Heroes'_ cumulative place-building to
> _Shade's_ resonant evocation of the familiar, and no doubt future games
> will continue to explore the power of the Landscape-Character axis.
> Conversely, one element that seems rather alarmingly curtailed is the
> possibility of dramatic irony. For instance, imagine Shakespeare's
> _Hamlet_ as an IF game, in which the player controls Hamlet, but is
> allowed (as a reader) to see Polonius stepping behind the arras in the
> queen's bedroom. In order to retain the dramatic irony of the scene,
> Hamlet must stab the arras and inadvertently kill Polonius, but why
> would the player order him to do so, knowing what Hamlet doesn't? In
> other words, how can the player be allowed to know things that the
> character doesn't if that knowledge is expected to facilitate dramatic
> irony? The only answer I can think of is to force the PC's actions, to
> make Hamlet stab Polonius no matter what the player orders, but as soon
> as that happens, the interactivity drops out of the IF game, and thus
> Action is removed from the equation. I'm not prepared to contend that
> this sort of dramatic irony is impossible, but the game that solves this
> problem will be a major breakthrough.
> 
> The work that's probably come the closest to this grail is Adam Cadre's
> justly revered _Photopia_ (1998). Thanks to its fragmentation of the
> narrative line and its array of POV characters, when the climactic scene
> arrives, we know all the awful freight of what's about to happen. We
> also can't stop it -- in order to achieve its dramatic irony, _Photopia_
> must remove our power to act.  There's an argument to be made that this
> sort of moment becomes even more powerful in interactive fiction, the
> useless prompt underscoring the inevitability of the character's tragic
> fate. That's as may be, but it doesn't change the fact that PC and
> Action are still inextricably connected, and the only way the PC can be
> made to do something inevitable is to remove control from the player.
> Photopia cleverly makes the inevitable moment a car accident, thus
> giving the PC only a split-second to react (and thus providing a
> plausible context for lack of choice) and making his default desires
> identical to the player's desires (STOP THE CAR!), but in the final
> analysis, the moment is still achieved by removing control from the
> player, and indeed the great majority of the criticism directed towards
> _Photopia_ has been of its non-interactivity.
> 
> If Action is to retain its place in the IF triangle, Landscape and
> Character must remain inextricably connected. Their powerful bond to
> each other creates many exciting possibilities for the development of
> both, possibilities that have begun to be exploited in the last several
> years, and which no doubt will continue to yield opportunities for
> development. What's also true is that noticing this connection and its
> potential still only scratches the surface of character development and
> landscape exposition in IF. Character can be revealed not just through
> landscape, but through objects, plot, direct narrative, and many other
> devices. In turn, while character is the primary lens for landscape,
> that landscape can alter greatly from the passage of time, from plot
> events, from NPC actions, or hundreds of other vectors, and each change
> to character and landscape deepens both. We've only just started finding
> the techniques, and it's a heady feeling. We're at the beginning of an
> art form -- there's much more undiscovered territory to explore.
<P>
General comment: be consistent about the capitalization of Landscape,
Character, and Action.
<P>
> [1] A note about terms here: First, I should note that by "interactive
> fiction", I refer to text IF. Some of the points here are certainly
> applicable to graphical or mixed-media IF as well, but some may not be.
> Secondly, the general concepts of Landscape, Character, and Action
> aren't meant to be taken too literally. IF could be (and in many cases
> has been) created with a map of entirely abstract locations, or one
> location, or location descriptions that consist entirely of describing
> what's absent. Similarly, actions might involve no actual action (WAIT,
> for example, or THINK), and a character can be anything from an intrepid
> adventurer to an ear of corn. However, I would contend that these
> elements are present in some form in all IF -- indeed, the absence of
> these elements (such as the absence of landscape in _Eliza_) removes the
> work from what might reasonably be called interactive fiction.
> 
> [2] This trait isn't entirely restricted to text games, but while no
> text game offers continuous space, some graphical games, such as _Half-
> Life_ and _Zork: Grand Inquisitor_, do in fact offer a continuous,
> unbroken environment through which the PC travels. In that case, map
> design becomes a much less powerful factor in fixing Character, and in
> fact it might be argued that in those cases, the term "map design" has
> more or less lost its meaning, and might be better called "level design"
> or something similar.
> 
> [3] The subject of how description influences our perception of PC
> gender could occupy another entire essay, and is out of scope for this
> one. Consequently, in the case of games that don't explicitly specify the
> gender of the PC, I'll rather arbitrarily select one, trying to hit a
> more or less even ratio between the two.
> 
> [4] _1981_ is credited to the pseudonymous A.D. Mcmlxxxi, and Cadre has
> never claimed credit for it. In private correspondence, he explained
> that this is because the game was a bit of a rush job, not polished
> enough for something he would put his own name on. He agreed to be
> credited for the game in this essay on the condition that I put in a
> note explaining that he "wasn't actually *trying* or anything with that
> one." That _1981_ is the game Cadre produces when he isn't even breaking
> a sweat is a testament to his skill as an author.
> 
> [5] Or a bisexual of either sex, it probably should be said.
> 
> [6] This is one of the very few times that excretion has appeared in an
> IF game without being a function of rather dodgy toilet humor. Instead,
> the game plays it completely straight -- just another element in its
> realistic scenario.