Twisty Little Passages

Twisty Little Passages, by Nick Montfort, addresses a much needed gap in gaming analysis and history: that of interactive fiction. The precursor to Multi-User Dungeons, interactive fiction was a form of text-based interactive game that sprang to life in tandem with the rise of the personal computer. Single player in scope but capable of taking its players anywhere the programmers could imagine, it relied primarily on the written word to share its world. Although the games initially started with VERB NOUN responses (e.g., "get book", "read book", etc.), they eventually advanced to natural language parsers.

Throughout the book is a history of interactive fiction and its development through the eighties and nineties. It also analyzes the comparisons between hypertext fiction and interactive fiction and the inequalities in how the two or treated. If you can't guess, interactive fiction isn't treated very well.

Montfort seems to have an axe to grind, citing shoddy research that conflates certain interactive fiction as being fantasy adventure games and confuses the origins of Adventure (or ADVENT). Montfort corrects all these misperceptions and more through personal interviews with Will Crowther, creator of Adventure, and Dave Lebling, one of the creators of Zork.

Twisty Little Passages seeks to redress these inconsistencies, positing that interactive fiction is more than just a game but a form of literature in its own right. Montfort makes a convincing argument, but then as an administrator of RetroMUD for over a decade, I'm one of the converted. It's unlikely that literature snobs are reading his book.

Although occasionally defensive in tone, Montfort's retrospect and analysis of interactive fiction is a welcome addition to any game developer's library. It's important to know what went before, and this book addresses an important part of gaming history that has been all but forgotten.