Twisty Little Passages by Nick Montfort, MIT Press, $29.95/拢19.95, ISBN 0262134365 Reviewed by Mike Holderness
INTERACTIVE fiction promises so much. When the original game Adventure said you were in a maze of 鈥渢wisty little passages, all alike鈥� and asked what you wanted to do, it heralded a new form of fiction, perhaps a text that is truly a conversation between reader and author.
In Twisty Little Passages, Nick Montfort, co-editor of The New Media Reader (reviewed on 22 March 2003, p 54) and a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, proposes that the riddle is the key literary precedent to interactive fiction. This is, he acknowledges, dangerous ground: riddles have of late been looked down on by (English-language) literary criticism just as 鈥渕ere computer games鈥� have. But he argues convincingly that riddling is the essence of poetry, in which readers extract and invest meaning beyond the bare text. And if the form was good enough for the 18th-century poet and satirist Jonathan Swift鈥�
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Perhaps for the sake of manageability, perhaps in the spirit of creating a new academic discipline, Montfort restricts his discussion to text-based dialogues. This reviewer confesses that the last 鈥渃omputer game鈥� he touched was the 1980鈥檚 Leather Goddesses of Phobos 鈥� not as raunchy as you might fear or hope, but firmly within this ambit. The restriction seems odd, however. Has Montfort not even watched someone play Grand Theft Auto? Or construct a Sims world? Those experiences do look like rich interactive fiction.
Is it inevitable that a nascent art form based on new technology will focus on the medium at the expense of the message? At least one author in an oral tradition (Socrates, as recorded by Plato) complained about the limitations of newfangled written works.
After a promising start outlining such questions, Montfort answers this question with an implicit 鈥測es鈥� by spending two-thirds of the book on a thorough fan鈥檚 history of the interactive fiction genre, complete with company and hardware history. I look forward to his future development of the deep literary and philosophical questions the form should raise about the improvisation of narrative and identity.