This week I played Jason McIntosh’s “The Warbler’s Nest”. The game is considered interactive fiction, a game genre that involves the player typing in phrases in order to participate in a dialogue with the system, commanding a character with writing. When I first sat down to play this game I was confused, I had no idea what I was supposed to do, I had to look at the game’s “help and hints” in order to get started. Once I understood the game play, I still had a hard time getting a hang of the game and remained pretty confused about why I was playing for quite a while. I found the game to be frustrating, a general trend of my gaming experience. I often got stuck, without any idea as to what I was supposed to do next and with little understanding of what commands would register with the game. I felt like there was so little I could do to move forward with just my keyboard as a tool. Thinking about it now, this is a very interesting conclusion to come to. Some could argue that there are many more tools in a keyboard than in a console and that your options as a player are limitless as you are fully responsible for what you enter into the game. However, this is not the case with interactive fiction, your choices are in fact limited. When you type something that does not register with the game or does not advance you, the game responds with unhelpful lines of text hinting at the fact that you are doing something wrong in a very frustrating way. In the end, I was able to get the baby free of the chair and successfully throw it in the river, a positively satisfying close to what had been a tedious process.

When I had finished the game I felt that I had just finished reading a short story. Interactive fiction is just as its name describes, it tells a story through your conversation with the computer. However, I didn’t feel like I was driving the story much like a player often does when playing other video games due to the variety of choices and outcomes. Instead, I felt like I was trying to guess the story that had already been written, and I’m not sure I would describe this process as ‘fun’. I’m not entirely sure what the maker of “The Warbler’s Nest” wanted me as a player to get out of his game, I feel like I could have understood his story simply by reading it rather than playing through it. To then end, I’m also not sure where interactive fiction can be most effective. As I said before, I didn’t think it was particularly fun, so maybe the point is to work through the narrative in order to fully understand it’s development. So here my question is, why did McIntosh choose interactive fiction as the medium for his narrative? Why not simply write a short story?