A Review of Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages
by Tevis Thompson

Though ‘interactive fiction’ is a potentially thorny term, given the ever-expanding continuum along which we might understand levels of interactivity, Nick Montfort relies on a rather specific definition within the realms of electronic literature for his Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction: “computer programs that display text, accept textual responses, and then display additional text in reaction to what has been typed” (vii). Of course, this includes the popular Zork and its short-lived progeny, but Montfort has a larger scope in mind than that encompassed by the brief commercial heyday of text adventures in the 80s; he traces not only the various ‘literary machines’ that preceded the first work of interactive fiction, Will Crowther’s Adventure, but also the independent community that continues to thrive in the absence of a viable IF market. 

To set the stage for this history, which occupies the second half of his book, Montfort first attempts to develop a vocabulary and framework for the interpretation of interactive fiction as a literary object.  Using a transcript from a session of Dan Schmidt’s IF work, For a Change (1999), Montfort parses the basic elements for the uninitiated – the commands, directives, replies, and reports that constitute the IF experience.  He also brings narratological considerations to bear on the session, delineating the various diegetic, extradiegetic, and sometimes hypodiegetic levels (within the story, outside the story, and the story-within-the-story, respectively) that structure the user’s navigation of the IF world.  Despite the weight of such unwieldy terms, Montfort’s descriptions are brisk and clear and render most IF rhetoric legible for the rest of his text.  While situating these IF elements in narrative theory, he does make a clear distinction about the way narrative is experienced during an IF session.  “It is the effect of the narrative in the process of being generated that is important, after all, not the quality of the text that is output when the session is over, and not the effect of any post hoc reading of that output text.” (14) This provides a rather direct warning about the dangers of simply reading a transcript in order to assess the literary qualities of a given IF work, but the author provides few details about how this process is to be meaningfully engaged as a process.

Instead, Montfort offers up the literary riddle as the crucial model for understanding the workings of interactive fiction.  “Both have a systematic world, are something to be solved, present challenge and appropriate difficulty, and join the literary and the puzzling.” (43) Exploring these qualities in both forms (with the slippage between the metaphoric world of the riddle and the simulated one of interactive fiction being my only real point of contention), as well as the history of the literary riddle, Montfort’s argument here is, if not wholly convincing, still extremely original and suggestive.  Aside from structural considerations, the criteria by which one judges the best riddles becomes applicable, at least in part, to interactive fiction.  “The riddle is best at giving a new perspective on something already familiar in certain ways, in reorganizing our perception or thinking.” (60) It is thus no surprise in the succeeding chapters that Montfort often judges most successful, compelling, or literary those works of interactive fiction that reinvest the world with a certain strangeness, meaningfully blurring diegetic levels or recalling the very mediated status of the narrative process.

Before launching into the IF history proper, Montfort briefly considers the forbearers of interactive fiction, those ‘literary machines’ that prepared the way for their computerized descendents.  The text generators considered range from ancient oracles (the I Ching) to the original cyber-therapist (the chatterbot ELIZA), from textual works of the avant-garde (Queneau’s 100,000,000,000,000 Poems and Oulipian algorithms) to those of popular culture (the Choose Your Own Adventure series and Dungeons and Dragons).  All of this culminates in a detailed history of the creation of the seminal Adventure by Will Crowther.  The remainder of the text, in fact, follows in this vein, tracing the formal innovations amidst the popular success of Zork and its sequels, the commercial reign of text adventure giant, Infocom, and the enthusiasm of the community of independents that has arisen in Infocom’s wake.

Twisty Little Passages ends with a rather brief chapter attempting to provide a cultural context within which to understand interactive fiction’s widespread effects on both videogames and electronic literature, despite its commercial demise.  Montfort also touches upon the critical discourse in which he hopes to engage both the established fan base and new users, ultimately legitimizing interactive fiction as an art form.

I’m very sympathetic to Montfort’s aim here, and while I require no convincing on this last point myself, I can’t help but want more in the end.  As an overview of the history of interactive fiction, the text is quite successful; not only does it establish a stable body of core titles while outlining the outer limits of experimentation in the field, it also wisely identifies exemplars of the form.  The undercurrent of genuine enthusiasm that permeates the text is infectious – and quite necessary if others are to join the author in championing the form (at times, I wished Montfort had just broken loose and rhapsodized, unapologetically, those complex affects that interactive fiction evokes in its users).  As a tool to galvanize current fans of interactive fiction or IF novices within the larger electronic literature community toward a more rigorous critical discourse, Twisty Little Passages deserves much credit.

But as a critical approach to interactive fiction itself (as the subtitle suggests), it proves less effective.  The compelling first half of the book does not even attempt to answer the many complex questions it raises about the form of interactive fiction before moving on to its history.  A telling moment occurs after the lengthy consideration of Adventure: “From the perspective of the interactor, a work of interactive fiction can itself be seen as a maze of twisty little textual passages…that is to be traversed.  But of course it is also a maze of simulated passages through an IF world; this is what distinguishes works in this form from hypertext fiction, chatterbots, and random poetry generators.” (91) In an apt justification of his own title, Montfort notes the formal similarities between the user’s simulated experience and the reader’s experience of text (and implicitly, IF’s structuration via computer programming), but he leaves this provocative insight unexplored.  What are the consequences of this similarity to the user experience, particularly compared to the other forms of electronic literature he names?  Given the soluble nature of most of the simulated twists, are textual knots considered, likewise, ultimately legible, just another aspect of a stable world of meaning?  Or can a destabilized (and destabilizing) textuality coexist with simulated (and often narrative) solubility?  What might the consequences be to user experience given such a coexistence?  The explicit gaming conventions of much interactive fiction evoke a playful approach to such tensions, and any approach to the form must take seriously its function as a game.  Montfort acknowledges this while discussing the literary riddle and IF’s historical context but makes little attempt himself to unravel interactive fiction’s unique union of text and play.

In the end, the conundrum that proves most difficult for Montfort to approach in his Twisty Little Passages is the fact that interactive fictions “are not, in fact, narratives, but…[they] produce narratives when a person interacts with them.” (23) Of course, we might describe printed books this way as well; narrative itself not being a stable object but a cognitive event, it’s the reading of the book that produces the narrative.  But clearly the way one interacts with interactive fiction differs, at least in part, from the traditional reading experience.  What Montfort seems to be claiming, significantly, is that interactive fiction criticism does not yet possess the rhetorical tools with which a user might adequately preserve some trace of the IF experience in the process of generating its narratives.  Reprinted transcripts of sessions do not suffice; they manage to merely gloss the level of involvement, the unique immersion in a simulated world, through which the very quality of the IF experience, and all that it might mean, arises.  I kept hoping Montfort would himself take a singular work (maybe the often cited A Mind Forever Voyaging) and unpack just how it works, translating the IF experience to the seemingly less interactive page.  Performing such an act of interpretation might better elucidate how IF’s interactivity differs from that of other textual forms – and how such interaction uniquely activates its human user as, himself, a narrative-producing machine.