Q. How do you make fiction "interactive"?

A. I dunno. Ask Hitchhiker's Doug Adams.

Shay Addams

Born in Cambridge, England, in 1952, Douglas Adams attended Cambridge University, where he collaborated with many of the comedy writers who later created "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and "Not the Nine O'clock News" for British television. After graduating in 1974, Adams penned several episodes of the "Dr. Who" TV series before finding time to write a radio show called "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." The show's cult following turned into an international audience when Adams' book version was published in America in the early '80s. He recently completed So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish, which picks up where the Hitchhikers triology left off. Adams had just finished the screenplay for the book when he discussed his adventure game adaptation of Hitchhiker's Guide and its potential effect on the digital watch industry and civilization as we know it.

Q: What was the first adventure game you played?

A: Original Adventure [the first adventure game, by Crowther and Woods], on The Source about a year-and-a-half ago while living in Los Angeles. I guess my first commercial game was Suspended. That was the only one I actually played to the bitter end and completely finished. I played Deadline and Zork I and Starcross about the same time, but never finished them.

Q: What about graphic games?

A: I'm not so interested in graphic games. I think text is better for the imagination. There's a role for graphics in the games if they do things that are kind of incidental to the story, but I wouldn't like to see not-very-well-realized sort of cartoon figures of the characters in the story. That would spoil it for me. I think, "Well I can imagine better than that. Why not just give me the text?"

Q: Are adventure games popular in England?

A: Yes, they are. I haven't played any of them. The thing is, in England there are more home computers per capita than anywhere else in the world. But they're mostly very small machines, Sinclairs, and an awful lot of them don't have disk drives and don't have a lot of memory. So games that require a lot of disk space and memory have not made commercial in roads in England. The Infocom games are pretty much a cult thing there. When I was doing Hitchhiker, I phoned around all the English bulletin boards to see what the level of awareness of Infocom was. It was very strong, but amongst a fanatical minority.

Q: You mention telecomputing. What's it like in England?

A: Not nearly as developed as in the U.S. for one simple reason: getting modems is a lot more difficult and expensive. If a modem runs at 1200 baud it won't run at 300 baud. They're two completely different standards. And the reason for this is that British Telecom has had (although they'll shortly lose it) a monopoly on anything to do with the phone system. And they're terribly, terribly slow and old-fashioned and don't like the idea of people having modems.

When I was working on the game [from England], with Steve [Infocom's Meretzky] in Boston, we did a lot of It by electronic mail.

Q: How does writing an adventure differ from writing a novel?

A: I suppose it's more a difference of degree than a fundamental difference. When you're writing a book you're constantly aware of the reactions you're trying to provoke in the reader: how you intend to play with or manipulate those reactions, and the surprises you're going to spring: whether you want to lull them into a sense of false security in which they think they know what's going on. You just have a much greater ability to do that when you're writing an adventure game, because you're actually soliciting the reaction from the player, and the program will then know how to deal with that response. So you're fooling around with the reader/player a great deal more. Which is a natural extension of what you're doing when you're writing.

Q: What do you project for the future of adventure games as interactive fiction?

A: I feel that it's a completely new medium that we've only got one toe in — and there's a whole ocean out there. We're still very much constrained, I feel, by the traditional forms of novel writing. One doesn't necessarily need to be. I don't think breakthroughs come through suddenly, but that each time one sits down to work out a problem or the structure of an adventure game, I think you turn around the next comer and see another possibility and you turn another corner and you see another possibility. And every now and then it's as if you go past a little window or a little crack in the wall and you see a whole vast vista of possibilities. I think adventure games could become a very, very extraordinary and different, Imaginative form of storytelling.

Q: Will it someday replace books?

A: People are always asking that silly question. Of course not. People said that about books when radio came out, and the same thing about radio when TV came out. But I think we keep on adding new media for storytelling. And none of them is killed by new forms. There's something particularly distinctive about the experience of reading a book; it's like nothing else. And nothing else will replace it. Something else may add to it, but noth ing's going to replace it. I suppose TV dealt quite a nasty body blow to radio, which is a shame because I think radio is a much better medium than television. In the words of a small boy who was asked the difference between the two, "In radio the scenery is better." That's the strength of all text games — the scenery is better than that of graphic games.

I think there's an awful long way for adventure games, interactive fiction, whatever you want to call it, to go. And I hope that more people will come into that field from outside the computer field. Up until now, it's been rather like, well, imagine if everything ever written on a typewriter had been written by the guys who invented the typewriter.

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