Judy Malloy, Editor

Andrew Plotkin
Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home
Inform 7

cover image for Andrew Plotkin's Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home

On Authoring Software he writes about his IF Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home. (2010) Created with Inform 7, Heliopause, winner of the 2010 XYZZY Awards for Best Writing, presents the reader, as do most IFs, with narrative descriptions and prompts. The process is continually interactive; the reader navigates the story by entering text phrases at the prompts; the story responds:

The Outer Marches
The bright worlds fade behind you. Nebulae drift past.

Heliopause is primarily concerned with tone. Its language is drawn from the lyrical science fiction of the early 1970s (which was itself concerned with evoking high fantasy and fable into the science-fictional mode). I obliquely reference Jack Williamson and George R. R. Martin; Vance and Zelazny lurk inescapably behind them.

The language distances the story, already made distant in time and space, and so does the SFnal scene-setting. The form of space travel, the level of technology, even the species of the protagonist -- all are presented allusively, as fabulous imagery rather than speculative fact. The game then marks this distance to the IF player in two ways: First, the scale of presentation: a game location is not the breadth of one room or hallway, as in traditional IF, but one planet, then one solar system, then one nebula or cluster of stars. Second, the model of interaction: rather than pedestrian compass-based movement, the player must adjust a starship's course using the metaphors of wind and sail.

The action verbs may be drawn from IF stock (PULL SAIL, DROP ANCHOR) or the low cultural understanding of sailing stories (HOIST SAIL, WEIGH ANCHOR -- I accept ARRRR but forgot to include YOHO). By either path the player must move beyond standard IF usage and engage some imagination, with results that are clearer in game mechanics (raising the anchor always means departing from a planet) than in engineering specifics (the anchor is "a disk of whirling strange matter", with no hard-SF infodump beyond that).

The form of the story supports this tonal distancing. It has the strict threefold repetition of a fairy tale, and the choices of navigation are illusory; the player will visit three locations in order and then a fourth. The player's primary agency lies in understanding the navigational mechanics well enough to solve some simple puzzles. (Perhaps not simple enough. I suspect less puzzle-oriented players will be pulled by these out of the lyrical mode into the analytical, if not the frustrated and giving-up modes.) Once the climax is reached, the player must pull the three earlier rewards of the game together, in straightforward fairy-tale closure, to reach the conclusion. (A second, unmarked ending choice is available. I added this after feedback from expert players who found the original structure a bit too strict.)

I built the game using Inform 7, with no technical innovation beyond a few text buffers optimized for my particular needs. The largest part of my effort lay in building the game's large store of non-standard actions, (mostly dealing with the sails and anchor) and the larger range of phrasings a player might try to invoke them.

As usual for IF, the effort goes into making the player's commands work the first time, so that the player never notices how much effort went in. I spent some time on procedurally-generated descriptions, to give the effect of an infinitely varying field of stars, but these remain brief and are not intended to occupy the player's attention. (My earlier work Hunter, in Darkness went further in that direction.)

Heliopause probably does not add new dimension to the genre of interactive fiction, but it attempts to push the boundaries of practice (and the player's expectations) in interesting ways -- in the scale of the model world, and the range of real-world activities that can be expressed in IF idiom. If its literary homage makes the effort more memorable, then I have achieved my goal.

Index

Writers and Artists
Talk about Their Work
and the Software They
use to Create Their Work

Mark Amerika
Stefan Muller Arisona
Mark Bernstein: __Interview wirh Mark Bernstein
Alan Bigelow
Jay Bushman
J. R. Carpenter
M.D. Coverley
Steve Ersinghaus
Caitlin Fisher
Chris Funkhouser
Susan M. Gibb
Dene Grigar
Fox Harrell
Dylan Harris
William Harris
Ian Hatcher
Adriene Jenik
Chris Joseph
Rob Kendall
Antoinette LaFarge
Deena Larsen
Donna Leishman
Judy Malloy
Mark C. Marino
Mez
Ethan Miller
Nick Montfort
__and Stephanie Strickland
Judd Morrissey
Stuart Moulthrop
Alexander Mouton
Karen O'Rourke
Regina Pinto
Andrew Plotkin
Kate Pullinger
Sonya Rapoport:
__Interview with Sonya Rapoport
Aaron Reed
Scott Rettberg
Jim Rosenberg
Stephanie Strickland
and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo
__Nick Montford and Stephanie Strickland
Sue Thomas
Eugenio Tisselli
Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Joel Weishaus
Nanette Wylde