Question #1: How did you get started with IF?
I played some IF when I was 6 or 7 years old, commercial games that ran on my parents' computers and then on a Vic 20. I really wanted to write my own, but at that point I didn't know how -- so when many years later I discovered a programming language for the purpose, I was very excited.
Question #2: In the games you've written, what's been the most challenging thing to program?
There are two kinds of challenging, in my experience:
-- there are things where it is very hard to think of exactly what you want the computer to do. You might have a general idea ("let the player throw things at other things, and have the things break or roll around depending on what they're made of or what shape they are"), but thinking of all the steps that the computer will have to follow takes a lot of experimenting and work.
In that sense, some of my hardest work went into the game Savoir-Faire, which has a very tricky magic system, and liquid objects that behave in complicated ways.
-- there are things where it is not as hard to tell the computer what to do, but you need a large amount of information for it to work with.
Conversation games like Galatea tend to be challenging in this way: the game needs a lot of different things for the character to say before it can put together a good conversation out of the pieces. Characters in an earlier game might have ten or twenty things that they can talk about. Galatea has hundreds -- and then for many of those topics, she has special responses for if you ask her the same questions over and over again, or under the right conditions. So that meant doing a lot of writing.
Question #3: What have you enjoyed the most about IF programming?
Well, I like the challenge of getting the computer to do what I want. Most of the time. Some of the time it is very frustrating.
Question #4: What made you want to write Galatea?
Actually, it was a test project -- I was writing the conversation code for a much larger game (which incidentally never got finished or released) and I wanted a little simple one-room piece in which to test it out. I knew that there was a contest called the IF Art Show coming up and that it accepted games that were just about single characters, in the "Portrait" category, so I decided to try making something for that category.
Question #5: I've heard that Galatea has more than one ending? How many different endings does it have?
The exact number probably depends on how you define "different ending", since some of the endings are very similar to one another and are just worded a little differently depending on exactly what the player did. But even counting out those similarities, there are several dozen.
Question #6: How was your thinking any different, programming Galatea, than other IF's of the past?
It's true that I had an idea to do something -- a game that was almost entirely about conversation -- that most people had not done before, and I had some ideas about how it would work that were also new. But, on the other hand, a lot of authors try new things in their work. So Galatea was an experiment, but it was one experiment among many.
Question #7: How have people's responses been toward Galatea?
Oh, very varied. Some people really love it; some people really hate it. I've gotten my most strongly worded fan mail and also my angriest email about this game.
At the time, it was seen as a bit of a breakthrough in conversation programming, but there are many conversation games since that do things at least equally complicated, too, so people who play it now may not find it as surprising as those who played it when it was released.
Question #8: When you write an Interactive Fiction game, how do you start? For me, I would program the rooms first, and then add the content.
That depends very much on what kind of game it is. I used the approach you described, for instance, when I was writing my game Bronze, which has a very large map and a lot of wandering around. I wanted to get the setting first. But for other games, I've started with something different -- for instance a conversation system or some magic code.
As a general rule, I try to begin my game by coding the part of it that I think is going to be the most difficult. That means I can find out quickly whether the idea is one I can execute, and I don't put a lot of time into doing the easy parts of a project and then run out of steam when I get to the harder parts.
Question #9: What is your most favorite IF ever?
That's a really hard question and I would probably change my mind depending on when you asked. But some of my favorites include "Anchorhead", which is a big horror game by Michael Gentry; "Plundered Hearts", which is a game about pirates and romance from the 80s; perhaps "Curses", a very hard and unfair puzzle game that I nonetheless enjoyed a lot. I also really like most of Andrew Plotkin's games.
Question #10: Are you working on any IF's now?
Yes, several. One is a retelling of the Snow White story, with a few twists. It's called "Alabaster", and I am hoping to be able to release it very soon. The other projects are a bit further from being done.
Question #11: Would you say that IF's have gotten better over the years? Overall? Or are you a fan of the more original Zork style games?
Yes, I think the best of recent IF shows an improvement over those earlier games. The puzzles are often fairer and the stories are often better put-together. Because of the way computers have improved, the games can also be larger and more detailed. And many more *kinds* of IF are being written.
That's not to say that the early work was bad, though, and it did have certain advantages as well. Most notably, games that were written to be sold had to go through lots of quality testing. These days, authors write and distribute their work for free, so the level of quality is a great deal more variable. Some games come out that are very carefully polished and prepared... and many others come out that aren't.
And I still have a soft spot in my heart for a well-done game of the old style. Zork and many of the other Infocom games show a wonderful inventiveness and sense of humor, and they're very absorbing to play.
