He’s no Lear, that’s for sure.
Infidel (1983)
Implemented by Mike Berlyn
Packaging, Documentation, and Extras: Infidel
Infidel folio packaging (MoCAGH)
Infidel grey box packaging (MoCAGH)
Infidel Invisiclues map (MoCAGH)
(Note: For best results, open MoCAGH images in a new tab)
The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog: Infidel
Z-Code Invisiclues (open with an interpreter like Frotz)
Nathan Simpson’s List of Bugs: Infidel
SPECIFICATIONS:
(Courtesy of the Infocom Fact Sheet and this forum post). For comparison’s sake, Zork I‘s specifications follow in parentheses (this idea comes from the excellent Eaten by a Grue podcast).
Rooms: 77 (110)
Vocabulary: 613 (697)
Takeable Objects: 57 (60)
Size: 93.6KB (76KB)
Total Word Count (outputted text): 16,620 (14,214)
OPENING CRAWL
You wake slowly, sit up in your bunk, look around the tent, and try to ignore the pounding in your head, the cottony taste in your mouth, and the ache in your stomach. The droning of a plane's engine breaks the stillness and you realize that things outside are quiet -- too quiet. You know that this can mean only one thing: your workmen have deserted you. They complained over the last few weeks, grumbling about the small pay and lack of food, and your inability to locate the pyramid. And after what you stupidly did yesterday, trying to make them work on a holy day, their leaving is understandable.
The Professor's map was just an ancient map -- as worthless as an ice cube in the Arctic without an instrument fine enough to accurately measure longitude and latitude. You knew that the site was nearby. You dug, and you ordered the workers to dig, even without the box. As you listen to the plane and rub your aching eyes, you pray they left you supplies enough to find the pyramid and to survive, and that the plane's carrying the long-overdue box.
INFIDEL
Copyright 1983 by Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
INFIDEL is a trademark of Infocom, Inc.
Release 22 / Serial number 830916
Your Tent
(You are in the army cot.)
You are in your tent. Golden rays of the sun filter through the open tent flaps on the southern wall, but no breeze makes its way through. The dry, searing heat in the tent would be bearable if only the air stirred, even a little.
At the foot of the cot is a large, unwieldy trunk. The trunk is closed and locked with a padlock.
This essay spoils the endings of Infidel and An American Tragedy. I am an American, and I sometimes use “us” or “we” in that sense.
American Essay: A Critical Introduction to Infidel
The title of Theodore Dreiser’s corpulent and relentlessly deadpan 1925 novel An American Tragedy implies that American tragedies are distinct and separate from their European (Greek, Shakespearean, etc.) ancestors. Over the years, American artists (and others) have delineated the things that define us (and that we, in turn, define) as exceptional. A few decades later, the American (there it goes again!) Beat Poets would enthuse over the adjective: American night, American wilderness, American River. Tom Petty sang of an “American Girl.” For Paul Simon, it was an “American Tune.” If Dreiser were given to flights of poetic fancy, we might read him as we read the Beats, declaring as they did a new sort of night/wilderness/tragedy/mouthwash that is unspoiled, open, and seemingly inexhaustible.
Those of us familiar with Dreiser know that he is not a writer governed by poetic impulse.
If we are to take Dreiser seriously, though, we must recognize that an Americanized tragedy is an impoverished one. It is a bit like American cheese, or American healthcare. Clyde, the supposed “hero” of An American Tragedy, is a product of American economic, class, and ideological machinery: empty-headed, self-involved, and resentful. The American tragedy, to Dreiser, is not the tragic fall of a person. Rather, it seems the waste and misery of American tragedy is a consequence of negative social forces.
Rather than getting caught up in a bunch of nonsense about Aristotle, I will say that classical tragedy and American tragedy differ in three very important ways:
- In classical tragedy, the tragic figure has a reciprocal relationship with society. Their decisions affect the lives of others and vice versa. In American tragedy, society, which is indifferent to the lives of its citizens, affects the tragic figure but cannot be affected by them.
- In classical tragedy, the death of the tragic figure brings society together. They grieve and move forward. In American tragedy, the death is just one more ugly thing in an already-ugly world.
- In classical tragedy, there is an externally recognizable moral law that either does or should govern the universe. This law can be either religious or arrived at by reason. It is not important. What is important is that the denouement of classical tragedy involves a course correction–society moves, together, in the direction of that recognized good. In American tragedy, there is no “moral arc of the universe”–the death of its protagonists are seldom cathartic. The community does not heal, and death rarely has even a palliative effect.
My father, who taught community college English for 40 years (a rather thankless job), sometimes corrects the news or radio when he hears the word “tragedy.”
“That isn’t a tragedy,” he says. “It’s a bummer.”
Is Infidel a Tragedy? If so, What Kind?
Infidel is not what I would call a well-loved game, even though its primary mechanic–translating hieroglyphics–was novel and rewarding. While deaths are frequent, all but one are rather weightless and easily ameliorated by frequent saving of the kind required by 1980s adventure games.
It can’t be the packaging, either. Infidel‘s folio is a typically generous affair with several interesting and convincing items bundled inside.
No, what really seems to bother audiences–then and now–is the personality and fate of its protagonist, best summarized by an uncharacteristically dismissive Jimmy Maher: “We’re left with just a petty little person doing petty little things, and hoisted from his own petty little petard in consequence.” While many game reviewers of the 1980s saw Infidel as an aberration, many well-regarded critics of the next millennium damn it with faint praise, as if overcoming the momentum of convention is not sometimes an end in itself.
I have not already named the point of contention: the protagonist of Infidel, a lying, self-interested, colonizing jerk, dies at the end.
While I will save the details for next time, Infidel, rather incredibly, seems to take on the shape of neither classical nor American tragedy. Even though I often see it characterized as a tragedy, Infidel is most certainly a bummer. A bummer for whom? It was a bummer for those players and fans (I believe that there would be no literary readings of Infidel for over a decade) who hoped to once again realize their digitized fantasies of power and mastery. I’ll say this now: there are an uncountable number of games that congratulate players on their skill and character. It is rather ungenerous to insist that Infidel must do so, as well.
It is important to note that there were many fans of Infidel in its day, even if their voices were neither the loudest nor the most numerous. I was one such person. Perhaps some of you were, too.
Infidel: Are You not Entertained?
Infidel, then, is a bummer, and an innovative and transformational bummer at that. In many ways, it finishes the job that Zork III failed to do. Infidel is an exhaustive takedown of the treasure hunt oeuvre and of adventure gaming’s exaltation of self-interested desecration and looting. Like the comical Adventurer appearing in Enchanter, the protagonist of Infidel is not only a critique of games and their tropes. He is a critique of the adventure gaming audience, of us.
It is a shame that Infidel could not find a sufficiently numerous and tolerant audience. Berlyn’s work on Infidel was perceived–both internally and externally–as a botch. Infocom would not make many other attempts at characterization beyond the Zorkian self-insert model. Plundered Hearts, another game that dared to feature a specific person as a protagonist, was a colossal failure financially. It is not a power fantasy or a fantasy of mastery, either. So far as other negative or ambivalent endings go, I can only think of Trinity, which remains a highly qualified fantasy of mastery (we’ll get our chance to argue over that, so stick around!). Perhaps more important: the protagonist of Trinity, unlike that of Infidel, is not responsible for the game’s outcome. Rather, they are a sympathetic and hapless victim of circumstance.
Fan responses left Berlyn cowed and probably bitter. After an incredible and innovative start at Infocom (Suspended, Infidel), he sputtered out with the middling Cutthroats and the rather incomprehensible Fooblitzky.
So far as more contemporary audiences go, Infidel is rated just above the rather criminally underrated Deadline at the Interactive Fiction Database, where they both languish in the bottom half of the Infocom canon along with Seastalker, Journey, and The Witness. There are only two reader reviews (four and five stars), so we may never know why our silent peers prefer Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It.
>get knapsack
Since nearly all characterization of the protagonist occurs in Infidel‘s feelies, examining them should be especially productive. In next week’s essay, I’ll assess his character and discuss him in terms of Infidel‘s controversial ending. In the third and final essay, I’ll return to those old, Zorkian questions of colonization, fallen civilizations, and the ethical implications of treasure hunting looting.
Disagree? I imagine some of you must. Get in touch!