So Far is one of those games that everyone is supposed to play. It's the
source of numerous jokes and references in other games; it is the longest (and
some would say the most serious and most angst-ridden) of Zarf's games, which
earns it attention in and of itself. And, written in 1996, it is old enough to
stand in the position of a classic in this brief community. (If the reviewer's
job is to tell people whether to play the game, I'm done now: you should,
absolutely. But you knew that.)
Because of its considerable reputation, I tried repeatedly to play it myself,
and failed the first four or five times. The opening of the game is involving--
almost oppressively so. I felt almost claustrophobic playing it, so vividly are
the crowd and the summer heat evoked, so that it was a relief to escape from the
first of the game's environments. At the same time, I had the sense that I had
left behind some important bit of plot, something that I could or should be
interacting with, and I wasn't sure whether I would ever be allowed to go back.
The subsequent puzzles stumped me, in part because I was trying to make logical
sense of the history of the worlds in which I was traveling, in part because I
am not particularly good at visualizing complex machinery in the way required to
manipulate it properly. One of the times I gave up, I complained to a friend
that this was a game that required to be read slowly.
I am no opponent of dense prose, and I don't mind spending time reading. But
I have always found that when I am deeply involved in a piece of interactive
fiction, a sense of urgency builds so that I am too impatient to read deeply and
receptively. I want short pieces of prose, not long paragraphs. And I don't want
flowery writing, either, or anything that stands between me and the most rapid
possible comprehension. How am I supposed to know what to do when I am busy
trying to ferret out the significance of lines upon lines of metaphor?
Correspondingly I try for brevity in my own IF writing; I try to layer
description through deep implementation, so that one description leads to
another rather than the first surface description hitting the player with pages
of prose. So I struggled with So Far, because my normal mode of playing IF is
one in which I bash at things in order to understand them. I explore and
summarize first, then tinker with the details to see what they will yield up.
And that's the wrong way to play this game, if one can talk about right and
wrong approaches. This is the kind of game where you not only have to read each
piece carefully and thoughtfully the first time, you also have to stand
permanently apart from what's going on. You're doing things that make no real
logical sense -- by the hundred, it seems. Graham Nelson's Player's Bill of
Rights is triumphantly defied by some of the acts of intuitive leaping,
save-and-restore decipherment, and hindsight required to get through the game
properly. Even so I only managed with liberal use of Lucian Smith's Invisiclues
and suggestions from friends on ifMUD. As Duncan Stevens says in his recent SPAG
review of the same game, _So Far_ works thematically, but the plot doesn't
entirely make sense.
So it's involving, as I said, because of the vivid landscapes and the
portentous sense of meaning that pervades everything, but it is perhaps not
immersive in the classic sense. The save-and-restore method of solving problems
is one that quickly teaches you to disregard your PC's life; danger is
diminished thereby. (Adam Cadre's _Varicella_ carries this effect perhaps to its
ultimate extreme, but it is present here as well.) I didn't feel that I was the
player character, exactly. After all, he would have had access to the background
knowledge to explain (and wouldn't that be convenient?) exactly what was going
on between himself and his beloved(?) Aessa, among other things. I the player
could only guess. The experience in that respect was a bit like reading a work
of static fiction in which much of the background is deliberately withheld. I'm
reminded of trying to read _The English Patient._ (I didn't like it as much as
the movie and stopped after page 2.)
Thus far we have fiendish puzzles, a density of prose and concept that
challenges the average approach to IF, and a certain amount of narrative
distance between player and PC. Something relatively inaccessible, in short. But
what the game gains by being obscure, by demanding intellectual attention at a
high order, is the ability to address itself to abstracts. Interactive fiction
is a medium that principally deals with the concrete: objects that you can pick
up and move around in standardized ways, without resorting to too complex or
elusive a vocabulary. Various people have proposed, for instance, NPC
interaction systems that would make use of complicated verbs such as PROVOKE,
APOLOGIZE, etc., but I have yet to see such a system that worked particularly
well, despite having tried to devise one myself. Likewise important choices of a
personal nature -- not choices about how to fend off the alligator who is about
to bite off your leg if you don't feed him the ham, but choices about ethics or
emotion -- have always to be cast in terms of physical actions. Jigsaw, Spider
and Web, and Tapestry all come to mind as having moments where the player's
moral choice is encapsulated in a physical action, the significance of which has
been carefully developed and spelled out in advance. What So Far achieves that
distinguishes itself even from these (which are themselves moments of high
artistry in the genre) is not teaching the player how to regard a single action
as representative of moral choice, but presenting the whole world in such a way
that it seems redolent of such choices, tying the physical environment
intimately to the emotional one in ways that are sometimes visible only in
retrospect.
To say that it relies on symbolic vocabulary is to understate the issue.
Jigsaw, for instance, relies on symbolic vocabulary as well, especially in the
endgame. But Nelson's symbols are isolated and recognizable, and stand out from
the landscape in their symbolic significance like a girl in a red dress. 'Note
this!' they say. And they are organized with a tidy symmetry, perfect and
mathematical, so that the meaning of anything unexplained may be worked out by
its relations to other symbols and the oppositions between them. Plotkin's
symbolism is merged wholly with the landscape; it *is* the landscape. The pieces
are polyvalent and connotative, any given thing suggesting an array of
connections and meanings, not denoting a single concept in its purity.
I am not sure whether any subsequent work has approached it in this regard. I
am not sure that anyone has tried.
