Since I have never played interactive fiction, I found myself frustrated many times while I played the different games. In Violet, I got stuck trying to get the pen above the sprinkler. With Varicella, once I got water, explored the rooms, and found the plane tickets, I did not know what to do next. I felt like the frustrated writer in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler because I could not figure out the trigger words to keep the story going. Indeed, in Violet, I was acting out the story of a frustrate writer. With interactive fiction, I could not simply follow the linear path of a novel, but I had to work my way through the story. I had to think about the story, pick up on the clues it was giving me, and piece the puzzle together. Violet summed it up for me nicely: when I tried to “think about” something, Violet would always shoot back “we really need to focus on action today.” I found that physically sketching a map for the castle in Bronze, helped me remember where I had and had not been which helped eliminate some of my frustration.
However, there were so many different options to choose from that finding the right verb that the program would recognize, or getting something other than “you can’t see any such thing” was difficult. So although I was interacting with the story, I did not have complete control over it. Violet was more than ready to tell me when I could not do something, like break the window. And even if listening to Julia in Violet was entertaining, what I really wanted to do was help this guy finish his paper.
Being able to interact with the story, however, allowed for multiple stories to unfold which is something you cannot get reading a conventional novel. In Violet, I could have gone outside the office and my “relationship” would have been over and thus the game. I could also leave the story with my frustrated writer falling through the floor. The story could have possibly turned out different if I had not smashed the stool in Violet. In this way, interactive fiction gave me the options to somewhat shape the story into the one I wanted. And if it did not turn out the way I wanted it to, I could “undo” the last command or I could reload a save game and choose a different path.
I’m impressed by how far you got along in both games. I was never able to continue writing let alone find water, which was really frustrating. But I did like “Bronze” – good idea on sketching a map. I felt that “Bronze” was really challenging and exciting whereas the other two games were, at least to me, dull and frustrating. Based on the fact that multiple stories could unfold in IF, could it be said that House of Leave is similar to IF in the sense that it also has multiple stories that unfolds all at once? There is the story of Zampano, Johnny, Navidson, Karen, Bill, and so on. The differences are that you can’t “undo” certain scenes, and its in codex form.
Good point in the similarities between IF and House of Leaves. I think there’s also the difference of what stories the reader is actually witness to in each case. In House of Leaves, the reader sees all the stories at once and can pick which way they want to experience them, whereas with IF, a reader is only capable of seeing the stories they can imagine or create themselves. So much of IF is dependent on the reader’s imagination that its almost impossible for a reader to see all of the stories at once.