GET LAMP - Michael S. Gentry (in English)

 

Get Lamp is a documentary about interactive fiction (a genre that includes text adventures) filmed by computer historian Jason Scott of textfiles.com. Scott conducted the interviews between February 2006 and February 2008, and the documentary was released in July 2010. The documentary and its hours of bonus episodes and footage contain material from about 80 interviews with developers, designers, and players of interactive fiction. The bonus film includes a nearly 50-minute documentary on Infocom, the best-known commercial publisher of interactive fiction.

Source: Wikipédia

*

I plan to publish on this blog, not exact transcripts, for copyright reasons, but summaries of the filmed interviews that make up the film Get Lamp, and whose review in the French video game press is, to my knowledge, nil or close to nil.

I start with Michael S. Gentry, author of Anchorhead – a game I started playing once and for all (without a priori any solution and therefore without knowing if I'll ever finish it...) during this confinement. My notes do not necessarily follow the chronological order of the interview, but they do reflect the substance of what was said.

– Mike Gentry does not say that he is opposed to the notion of "game" per se, but it is not his primary concern, if by game we mean the presence of puzzles to confront as a player; mainly because as a player he is not very good at it. When he started working on Anchorhead, he conceived of his puzzles as valves, as bridges from one chapter of the game to the next. This notion of the passage of time in the game, of a situation that evolves without any possible return, is dear to him.

– He points out that he has no training as a programmer and took up Inform as a self-taught student, learning just enough to bring his world to life on the screen. Gentry expresses interest in Inform because it allows him to write his own code, compile it, and even play it; Inform 7 makes things even simpler with its natural language and is really the best tool for people who are primarily authors, not primarily programmers.

– His original desire was to write interactive fiction; the story came later, writing down scene ideas and trying to figure out how to tie them together into a story. Anyway, the original intention was to make a game. So the story was designed from the beginning to be interactive.

– He likes story games that try to approach storytelling in an original way and cites Shrapnel, 9:05 and Varicella by Adam Cadre. Shrapnel in particular, where the player has to keep starting the game over to really get into the story. Gentry insists that the story told by this game could not be told in "normal" fiction.

– On the roots of his desire to write interactive fiction, Gentry refers to the movie Tron and the whole culture of the time when you could see talking computers, with which humans could establish communication. He calls the premise of Zork, in this context, "brilliant".

– Gentry wrote the game for his wife, or at least made her the heroine of the story (note: he himself appears as the heroine's husband). He reports that she liked to read it, but stopped playing, discouraged, at each puzzle she could not find the solution. So he made an arrangement with her to reveal the solutions as she went along, if she felt the need, as long as she kept playing.

– Since the first version of the game was written for the Z-Machine, the memory limitations (512 KB) were quickly felt, and were a source of frustration for Gentry, who says that on the one hand he is rather indifferent to the notion of portability (he is not interested in playing a Z-Machine game on a calculator) and on the other hand he is very attached to details. He defines himself as very visual oriented and says that he would have liked, if a description evoked dead leaves on the sidewalk, to be able to implement as many corresponding objects, only to be described if the player wanted to examine them more closely.

- He also said that his perspective has changed and that he would write more vague descriptions, leaving room for the player's imagination.

*

Some personal thoughts:

– When Michael Gentry defines himself as visual-oriented, I wonder what an interactive fiction could be where the descriptions would give almost no objective information about the world around the character, but essentially his thoughts, memories, emotions...

– It is very interesting to remember that interactive fiction allows for stories to be told that are real stories, but could NOT be told in a book. Aisle, by Sam Barlow, is also an example. The interactivity and the way the story moves forward, in ways that are totally different from what a linear reading allows, are part of the story. They are not simply playful mechanics applied to a short story or a novel.