Gold Machine

Canonicity before an indeterminate audience.

IFDB Data: Rating Trinity over the Years

In our recent discussion of audience attitudes toward Trinity in the years since its release, I wrote:

Trinity has not changed, obviously, but audience reception of it has. Nevertheless, it has enjoyed a staying power that Planetfall has not. What is it about Trinity that has held audiences in thrall across the long years?

Mike Russo, a well-regarded reviewer and author of contemporary IF, retrieved the IFDB rating history for Trinity. There are some interesting things to think about there! I’ve graphed both reviews per year and average rating per year on a single chart. I have to share it as a photo here, but the data is available in this spreadsheet.

Some notes:

• The ratings count for 2008 has been clipped for scaling purposes. The actual value is 19. This presumably reflects a “backlog” of ratings from people who played the game before IFDB existed.
• Ratings have not fluctuated wildly over the years. There’s no dramatic drop that would completely explain performance shifts on the “Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time” polls:
  • 2011: 10th place (tie)
  • 2015: 32nd place (tie)
  • 2019: 4th place (tie)
  • 2023: 21st place (tie)
• The period between 2015 and 2019 seems to be of particular interest.

Since this second part of our survey deals with reviews and reactions spanning 2011 to now, we can consider both polling and rating information in our analysis.

Audience and Critical Responses

While the number of ratings at IFDB had stabilized, writing about Trinity in blogs or even IFDB reviews tapered off in 2011. In fact, my searching only turned up one piece of writing about Trinity in years ranging from 2010 to 2015: a retrospective “30 Best Text-Adventures/Interactive-Fiction Games Over 5 Decades” by “Toddziak.”

The game is quite though-provoking without shoving the message right into your face. What’s more, it’s well-written, entertaining and with hard, but rewarding puzzles. Basically, it would be a shame not to play it even once.

Trinity continued to enjoy very positive ratings and was rated the tenth-best game of all time in that year’s poll. Perhaps it was believed that there was nothing new to say. It was, many believed, Infocom’s best game, as it showcased inventive puzzles with its wry, evocative prose.

There was, fans would soon learn, more–a lot more–to say about Trinity.

Historicizing History

The flow of Trinity-related discourse would shift following Jimmy Maher’s massive series of posts regarding it (the series begins here). It is an astounding nine posts long and almost certainly more than 20,000 words. The comments sections of each essay, populous enough to make any other Infocom critic writhe with envy, speak to the success of this series.

These posts appeared in the beginning of 2015, too late to influence voting in the “Best IF of All Time” poll held that same year, but it’s hard to avoid imagining it affecting the subsequent 2019 poll. Maher’s critical lens is an unusual one. These many posts are not always–perhaps “not usually” would be more accurate–about the game as a game or as work of fiction. Rather, they are deeply concerned with the historical realities of the atomic bomb’s scientific and material genesis. This is all of a set, of course, with the New Zork Times‘s own insistence upon the historical rigor with which author Brian Moriarty invested his authorial process (c.f. post one in this series!).

As a lot of you might guess, I’m more interested in what audiences thought about the history of the bomb or about historical research generally than these essays are. How did these perceptions influence player experiences? Judging from responses to Maher’s series of posts, it would seem that many readers do find a connection between historical “truth” (a slippery thing) and artistic merit. This is a subject for another day, but it would be impossible to talk about critical reactions to Trinity without mentioning the Maher posts. It may be the largest amount of text associated with a single Infocom game (though my own series on A Mind Forever Voyaging might be a competitor) and was completely unprecedented at the time. The emphasis upon history, an academic discipline, must have lent it a credibility that no other Infocom game could match, especially not on Maher’s terms.

Fresh on the heels of Maher’s posts, Andrew Plotkin speculated (with input from his readership) as to how he might have handled the ending of Trinity, had he made the game himself. This is the not kind of thing that many people can carry off, but Plotkin is one of the few that can. It’s too soon (I want to talk about the ending in a future post) to dive into that, but I will say that I agree with his assertion that “the plot logic of the ending doesn’t really hold together.”

2015 and Beyond

Reviews of Trinity resumed following Maher’s series at The Digital Antiquarian. A review at IFDB (I’m not linking specific reviews at IFDB, since I can’t assume that posters desire the attention. You can find every IFDB review of Trinity here) obviously appreciates the craft elements, but ultimately measures the game and interactive fiction generally in terms of puzzles.

I made a point to beat the game without help, but it took me long hours, and a couple of times I was close to throwing the towel. But that’s what makes a great IF game in my opinion; Trinity strikes a perfect balance, which makes it very rewarding to play.

A 2016 reviewer remarks doesn’t mention history at all, instead focusing on atmosphere and puzzles.

I loved exploring the main area of Trinity, and accessing several of the mini-areas… The final area was a beast, although everything is fairly well hinted at. Or not…

An emerging idea is that Trinity afforded a model for many successful post-Infocom parser games, that of what I’ve taken to calling the “accessibly literary puzzler.” Graham Nelson’s Curses is an early example, and games in this oeuvre still do well in competitions. Trinity is what I consider an ultimate expression of the old, Zorkian “cave game” design, featuring as it does an expansive map with gated geographies, thing-centered interactivity, and pervasive humor (even a self-serious game like Trinity can be filled with wry, sardonic wisecracks). Since Moriarty quotes the apostle Matthew, I will paraphrase him: Trinity came not to abolish the Zorkian, but to fulfill it. It is the last great Zork game in terms of its structure, better than either Beyond Zork or Zork Zero.

A 2020 reviewer writes, rather forgivingly, of Trinity‘s unforgiving nature.

The Wonderland middle section is long but also tightly created with its dreamlike setting and classic Infocom humor and puzzles. This is a save-often, unforgiving type of IF but nothing too tricky.

This prompts an interesting craft question: we aging Infocom fans tend to excuse “zombificiation” (the phenomenon producing an unwinnable yet still active game) broadly rather than looking at individual cases. I’m fairly sure that the original Zork games had relatively few unwinnable states despite their reputations. Trinity, by comparison, is crowded with zombies; this nuclear apocalypse is also a zombie apocalypse! I’ve done some research on this, and I will dig it up for inclusion in a future post.

While less discussed in Interactive Fiction circles, the Adventurer’s Guild features six substantial posts from 2020. It is very nearly the exact opposite of Maher’s, often focusing on the moment-to-moment experience of play. It is a good presentation of the current critical consensus: Trinity is a well-written and atmospheric puzzle game with elusive imagery and action that are alternatingly frustrating and fascinating.

By 2021, at least one player was not open to Trinity‘s unforgiving style of play:

I can’t even count how many walking dead situations I encountered, including a couple that require restarting the game completely and obtaining items that are not exactly out of the way but also not obviously important either. While again this is expected for an 80s game, it still hurts the spirit of the experience to suggest the reason you aren’t able to save the world from atomic destruction is because you didn’t pick up a piece of paper in London right before the bomb dropped.

It is worth wondering why Trinity, Infocom’s most overtly literary work in terms of its ambitions, is also among its least forgiving. How did Brian Moriarty, a thoughtful designer, arrive at this approach? It is hard to imagine that something isn’t meant by all of the possible failures in a game that insists–rather insistently–upon the inevitability of its ending.

What Else?

It seems multiple valid avenues of critical inquiry have been uncovered. While not all of them merit a full post, I would like to at least look at the following:

• History and artistic merit
• Cruelty, art, and intent
• The literary puzzler as the peak of the “cave game” design model
• Inevitability, time, and repetition (the ending)

I think a brief summary of the story and setting should come next, just to establish my critical baseline.

Next

More Trinity! I apologize for more delays. I have been very busy with Inform 7 development (and writing about Inform development) and have not yet found a good balance between Gold Machine and making my own games. In order to avoid diluting what’s shared here, I’ve created a separate blog for Inform 7 content, and will likely add contemporary reviews to the mix at some later date. More on this later.