all things devours -- interview

An interview with Paul O'Brian of the Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games.
Originally appearing in SPAG Issue #39 -- 2004 IF Competition Special.

SPAG:
Your nom de IF is "half sick of shadows." I know it's a reference to Tennyson's "Lady Of Shallot," but what does it mean to you?

half:
I have always liked the idea of having two names. Clearly one must be chosen at birth by your parents, but it is hard to make it particularly fit you, since they cannot know what you will become. With the widespread use of pseudonyms on the net, I thought it was a good chance to try to craft a new name. I experimented with various possibilities, rereading many pieces of poetry that are dear to me and settled upon 'half sick of shadows', which I now use a little on the net. It feels right to me, but as with poetry in general, it is difficult to say exactly why. It is a description -- rather like old names with meanings such as 'Strong' or 'Beloved of God' -- but it is more finely wrought and more appropriate. It speaks of restlessness, dissatisfaction with lies or imitations, yearning for truth and reality. Even the natural abbreviation 'half' tells something of longing and absence. As with all poetry, it loses something in the analysis, but I am happy with it.

SPAG:
How did you first become introduced to IF?

half:
Playing Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on a Mac Plus as a child. I (shame) had not yet been introduced to the books and thus needed a lot of help to get as far as I did, but it was clearly a most ingenious game. I really loved the level of involvement and the baroque gameplay.

SPAG:
In your "All Things Devours Wrap-Up" essay (posted on rec.games.int-fiction), you say you've only completed six IF games: Shade, Galatea, I-0, 9:05, Common Ground, and The Frenetic Five vs. Mr Redundancy Man. What drew you to those games to start with?

half:
Well, yes, when I look at them now, they do seem a rather strange collection. I think a slashdot story reintroduced me to IF and through that I found Shade and Galatea. They were something of an epiphany, being much more like small works of art than like games. I had often reflected sadly on the fact that interactive media was so heavily based around 'beating' puzzles or tests of reflexes. I recalled that it had
taken film a while to become a medium for art and hoped that we would see high quality interactive art too. By 'art' I don't mean anything particularly avant garde, just something that communicates or inspires genuine emotion. Once I had refamiliarised myself with the parser and IF conventions (an atmosphere-breaking task if ever there was one) Shade and Galatea delivered in spades.

I then found the others via positive reviews (Emily Short's site and Baf's guide?) and because they were quite short. I thought I-O, 9:05 and The Frenetic Five were very fun and I half connected emotionally with Common Ground. I think there was insufficient connection with the characters for the final dilemma to have much punch, but there were many moments that were very nice. While I never experimented much with it at the time, the partial recording and replaying of the player's actions gave me the germ of the idea for All Things Devours.

SPAG:

I'm impressed at the game's intricate design, and even more impressed that you were able to complete it in only two and a half months. What procedure did you follow for putting the code together?

half:

Once I had the idea of a time travel game I came up with a time travel dynamic that would make sense and a few appropriate puzzles. I then planned an environment and map to base them in and got coding. I guess the fact that I had done a lot of programming in the past helped a lot with this part and, once I had implemented a version of those self-opening doors from the lovely DM4, I considered myself proficient in Inform and started the long process of getting the time travel to work. Actually, the recording and replaying of movement is quite easy, but the keeping track of all the objects and actions and bizarre paradoxes took a while to get right. I had to keep testing it myself and trying to break it. I also discovered a raft of interesting things along the way, such as the fact that after time travelling n times, you can have 2 to the power of n copies of a given item.

Eventually, with the deadline drawing very near I filled out the descriptions and ending text until I was satisfied and submitted it. I enjoyed the writing and would have liked to spend longer on it, but without a deadline I guess it never would have been finished. I do mean this, for I would not have written it without the focus of a conveniently timed competition.

SPAG:

Okay, this is a very geeky question about ATD (and maybe slightly spoilery too): was the alarm button just a red herring? I thought for sure it would turn off the alarm while it was ringing, but all it would ever do for me is to turn the alarm on, which of course I didn't want. Was there something clever I could use it for that I just didn't come up with?

half:

Ah, yes. The alarm button. It was originally added because it is the type of thing one finds on a security desk, but it soon found a use. There is a puzzle that can be solved using the alarm button, but it can also be solved without it. When I release a post competition version (early this year sometime) it will have a 'difficult' mode in which it will necessarily play a part, since the other solution will be blocked. I liked the non-linearity of the puzzles in ATD, and want to make the more difficult mode partly to bring the more obscure solutions to the fore. To partly answer your question, the only thing pressing it does is to set off the alarm (it does absolutely nothing if the alarm is already going). There is a reason you might want to do this, but I'm afraid I shouldn't spoil it yet.

SPAG:

I see from your web page that you're a graduate student in philosophy at Oxford. Could you talk a little about the intersections you see between your academic interests and the subject matter of All Things Devours?

half:

I have actually just been writing an essay connected to the philosophy of time and did read an article or two on time travel during my research. While I haven't really looked into the issue in any detail academically, it is quite a luxury to be studying a discipline where such topics regularly appear. One of the nice things about studying at Oxford is the wealth of guest lectures. The great philosophy of physics group here attract equally prestigious visiting philosophers and we end up with great seminars involving the foundations of quantum mechanics, space-time, chance and so on. Very fun.

There are many other areas that I have looked at quite closely, including personal identity over time, non-standard models of computation and, more and more, moral philosophy. I had never really thought of getting direct inspiration from any of these areas that I study, but now that I think about it, there are quite a few possibilities (especially with the moral philosophy). I suppose All Things Devours came more from my desire to get to the bottom of an issue, asking a lot of questions and trying to work out the answers: a desire that is probably shared by a lot of philosophers and quite a few IF authors too. I know that ATD is exactly the type of game I would have loved to play, and it was great to hear the reactions from a few of the other students at College and from all the reviewers out there in the ether.

SPAG:

In your wrap-up essay, you mention that you don't know whether you'll write any more IF. If you don't, where do you see yourself focusing your creative energies?

half:

Well, philosophy (and academia in general) offer a lot of interesting puzzles of their own and I always have a few things ticking over at any particular time. It also tends to follow you everywhere -- you can be listening to a gig somewhere and mull over some thought experiment or find a hidden contradiction somewhere. I actually get most of my original work done out of hours: then there is just the matter of writing and research...

Oh, and I do quite a bit of photography too. It is something I have dabbled in for the past few years and lets me try my hand at capturing a little of the beauty around me. You can see some of it here if you like.

As to whether or not I'll write any more IF -- well, I'd like to, but I'm just so busy. We'll see.

SPAG:

What did you think about this year's competition? Any favorite games?

half:

Unfortunately, I have reached the most intensely busy period of my course and have had almost no time to try them. I did play Mingsheng though, and thought it was wonderfully atmospheric and marred only by a little episode of:

>N
The door is in the way.
>OPEN DOOR
With what?
>KEY
You unlock the door.
>N
The door is in the way.
>OPEN DOOR
You open the door.
>N

The Inform library really needs to update the default door behaviour...

SPAG:

Any advice you'd care to offer for prospective competition entrants?

half:

Well, implementing doors nicely will help... If in Inform, just copy the appropriate bits from the DM4. Reading the reviews from the last year will also help, as you could then be aware of the clichés and the classic bugs and player frustrations. Every entry really must pay attention to these things and have some adequate writing which has been well proofread. This really is the baseline requirement, but should guarantee you don't come in the bottom five or so.

Obviously, however, you need some actual positives too: there must be a reason you are writing it. At this point it gets very difficult to advise since there are so many avenues to take, but surely going out and playing/experiencing more works of IF would help. I look forward to doing so myself when my workload eases off.