Genre Explorations: Wordplay

Greetings! Hope you enjoy this excerpt from Further Explorations, the recently-released companion volume to 50 Years of Text Games. Enjoy!

Among Infocom’s classic text games, one stands out as distinctly unique. Rather than searching for treasure or exploring a mysterious world, in Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It [1987] you’re looking for homonyms, clichés, and puns. What you explore is not so much a world as the words used to describe it. 

Dessert Aisle
An imposing, broad-shouldered adult moose, dark chocolate from hoof to antler, stands here chewing its thick brown cud and blocking part of this narrow aisle.

>examine moose
Your teeth ache just looking at this massive bulk of ruminating mammalian chocolate.

>examine mousse
There’s a sudden, belching “poof” of smoke, and the odor of burnt chocolate. […]

You can see chocolate mousse here.

The power of language to embrace contradictions and playfully conflate signs with signifiers has long been a strength of textual storytelling. From metaphors to riddles, and in puns and parables, words can delight by hiding one meaning in another or remaining ambiguous in what they convey. Text games, unique in interactive storytelling, can embrace this ambiguity too, with results delightful for providing both new kinds of lateral thinking challenges as well as meanings that pop like optical illusions between one interpretation and another. In one section of Nord and Bert you transform objects by recognizing spoonerisms (to unlock a door, you must turn a can of peas into a pan of keys). Another only accepts commands in the form of clichés (you can teach an old dog new tricks, make a mountain from a molehill, and put a cart before a gift horse you’ve looked in the mouth).

Inscribed on the brown grass is a toolman. The toolman smiles softly.

(from Dan Schmidt’s For a Change)

Infocom had embraced the unique gifts of words-as-interface in a different way with its game Enchanter [1983], which built a core mechanic into the space between typing words and causing actions. In addition to traditional verbs like GET or TOUCH, Enchanter teaches new verbs with magical effects , changing the world not through the implied intermediary of character action but directly as a result of the invocation you type, with magic words like NITFOL (to speak the language of animals) or FROTZ (make something glow). Players slowly unlock a new language for manipulating their simulated reality, leading to walkthroughs that seem baffling to the uninitiated:

GNUSTO the MELBOR, then learn MELBOR, VAXUM and ZIFMIA. Walk west twice, north twice and east to the first mirror room. Wait here for an adventurer to appear, then ZIFMIA him, MELBOR yourself, and VAXUM him.

Enchanter proved popular, spawning sequels and, later, amateur games further exploring the mechanics of magic words and secret vocabularies. In Suveh Nux [David Fisher 2007], the player must learn not only magical verbs but the secret names of nouns in order to work spells, and can infer rules and structure to intuit magical actions never explicitly taught, soon forming complete magical sentences like AVEH HAIAK TOLANISU.

In other games, instead of using words to alter objects, players use objects to alter words. Emily Short’s Counterfeit Monkey  [2012] lets the player add or remove letters from items to alter their form, in a world defined by “observer-consensus reality” rather than “immutable cosmology.” The game’s title comes from a scam wherein a K-remover can transform a group of primates into a stack of illicit cash. In play, you’ll need to do things like acquire a ticket by removing an H from a thicket, or arrange transport by converting some chard into a card and then a car. Andrew Schultz’s “Stale Tales Slate” series [Shuffling Around 2012 and sequels] involve a similar mechanic for manipulating reality, this time using anagrams: you can’t go north until you unscramble a thorn, and a magenta nametag is more useful when arranged as a gateman. Another twist comes in PataNoir [Simon Christiansen 2011], where metaphors and similes are just as real as any other objects, and you can use them to solve puzzles.

Shadows huddle in the corners, like dark pools of oil; the sickly yellow light from the desk lamp does little to dispel the darkness. A cigarette butt smolders in the ashtray, like the last embers from a dying camp fire.

>examine oil
Greasy black oil.

>get oil
You will need some kind of container to carry it.

>examine embers
A few glowing pieces of coal are left at the camp site.

>get embers
You carefully pick up one of the embers from the camp fire.

In some wordplay games, language doesn’t control your reality but the way you’re allowed to engage with it. Nick Montfort’s Ad Verbum [2000] has rooms which can only be described or manipulated in words beginning with a certain letter. You can go south to enter the Sloppy Salon, but a major challenge is figuring out a linguistically valid way to leave:

Simple social space, sadly spoiled. Some skewed situation’s sequel, surely. Seemingly, slovenly students sojourned—scraping, scratching, scuffing surfaces.

Stuff: ... stainless steel stapler... sizable sofa.

>get stapler
Stop! Stop! Show some sense. Scribble suitable strings.

>seize stapler
Seized.

>south
Sorry. Structural surroundings stop southern striding.

>north
Stop! Stop! Show some sense. Scribble suitable strings.

Another room in Ad Verbum forbids any use of the letter E. In a third, the Twin Bedroom, you can only interact in commands where the same word functions as both noun and verb: you can frame the frame or pile the pile, but you can’t frame the pile.

Shoving ... shoving ... sofa slides ... sofa shifts ... sofa successfully shoved! Salon seems sans sofa.

(from Ad Verbum)

Language can also deliberately obscure, for aesthetic effects or unique gameplay challenges. The Gostak [Carl Muckenhoupt 2001] unfolds in an entirely unfamiliar language players must use their intuitions about grammatical structure to understand and navigate. In Bad Machine [Dan Shiovitz 1998], the narrator is a malfunctioning robot in an immense automated factory, described with an idiosyncratic terminology that begins to make sense as you learn its rules and structure.

Reclamation Sector (2)
   Cleared area amongst to-be-reforged bodies; gap(s) movement(allow) west, north; other exits apparent lacking.
To the north you see salvager-class machine.

?west
Dir ALT{ER}DDDisplace-: 2 [west -> south]
(self.travelTo(loc) = nil && m$ve(her@) FAILED

?examine salvager
salvager-class machine IS~~ scaven=ing.

?examine me
Mover #005 :: Mover #005 | [Mover-class machine * Serial 27-005 * Power:  56 * GO0d M3CH!N*]
Mover-class id #005; surface invent: mobility 100% (full operation) [unit(s):  317 318 319 320 321 322, CPU active <***WARNING: bad=machine***>, torso normal [560], head normal [434].[...]

Descriptions don’t need to be so radically different to be overwhelming. The beguiling narration of For a Change [Dan Schmidt, 1999] seems close enough to English that it ought to make sense, but remains just strange enough to make exploring its world appropriately disorienting:

The land increases towards your head to the south, and decreases away from your feet to the north. Mobiles lead accordingly in both directions. [...] It is clear, after a time, that all things are shaded, everywhere. Thus the Wall.

Inscribed on the brown grass is a toolman.

The toolman smiles softly.

>examine toolman
The toolman is bright and misty. Thoughts and uses hang from his shoulders like birds.

The delights of these literary games come from marrying the playful flexibility of language with more gamelike pleasures of mastery and control. Guessing a riddle or a crossword clue provides a spark of satisfaction, but there’s generally nothing to do with that revelation. In an interactive world constructed purely of words, such an insight becomes part of a story, unlocking new revelations and the next chapter of a tale made refreshingly unique by the manner of its telling.

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If you enjoyed this, there’s more “Genre Explorations” chapters in Further Explorations, including deep dives on visual novels, one-room games, hacking sims, and adaptations, as well as close readings of text games from A Dark Room to Anchorhead. The original 50 Years of Text Games is also still available in print or digital editions!