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Infocom's sophisticated parsers have vocabularies of 600 to 1,200 words per game. In fact, the games are so talkative that the company refuses to illustrate the text of its adventures. Says Blank: "The pictures that your mind can make are better than any computer can create." While most other publishers provide computer-generated images that appear on the screen along with the written story, their games, for the most part, can accommodate only simple commands.
Pictures or no pictures, writing interactive fiction is not an easy task. Crichton and two associates labored for more than a year and a half to create Amazon; most of the time was spent developing the flow charts needed to provide the variations in the complex plot structure. For Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury supplied programmers with more than 100 possible responses to questions that players are able to pose to "Ray," an intelligent computer that figures heavily in the story line.
Does the participation of big-name novelists qualify interactive games as a true literary form? This question was addressed last month at a meeting of the Popular Culture Association in Louisville. Asked Peter Jordan, professor of English at Tennessee State University and chairman of one of two panel discussions on the subject: "Are these games just electronic Hula-Hoops? Or will they last and evolve into a significant new form of human expression?" Infocom's Blank hedged, defining adventure games as "a new medium that has its roots in the literary tradition, in the same way movies, plays and operas are based on literature." Panelist Susan Spence, an editor of Data Decisions, a computer magazine, was more direct. "The games are great," she said, "but I wouldn't call them literature."
Still, the games might help Americans become more literate. Bradbury is confident that he and his fellow authors can inject "strength, wit and magic" into the form. Then, he says, "by playing a literary game, people find out about literature along the way. When they're all done with the game, I hope their next stop will be the library."