Gold Machine

What’s a Trinity made of?

Time Caves

While I’ve said that Spellbreaker is Infocom’s last, great game in the Zork universe, Trinity is undoubtedly the last great Zorkian game published by Infocom. “Zorkian” in the sense that it is what Graham Nelson has called a “cave game,” one whose roots can be traced back to Zork, and, preceding that, Crowther’s and Woods’s Adventure. Nelson’s initial usage of the term in the Inform Design Manual 4 is meant literally (347), referring to generic Tolkein-esque elements in a cave setting, but those early games evince design strategies and tropes that transcend setting.

For instance, it has a three-act structure, with a “narrow” prologue or introductory section, a “wide,” exploration-heavy middle game, and a final, “master” game that is clearly distinct from the rest of the story. Spellbreaker, for instance, has the dramatic opening in the Borphee Guild Hall, followed by exploration across a wide, fractured geography. Once all problems have been solved, the game narrows for a final confrontation with the Shadow. Zork III (and the original PDP Zork) concludes in a confrontation with the Dungeon Master in a narrow geographic area.

While I’ve said that Spellbreaker is Infocom’s last, great game in the Zork universe, Trinity is undoubtedly the last great Zorkian game published by Infocom.

For many readers and players, the adjective “Zorkian” has other implications. One might expect cheap or frequent fail states, unwinnable (sometimes undetectably so) playthroughs, smirking narrators, and obtuse geographies (unreciprocated exits and one-way passages). Depending on the player, reactions will range from sentimental affection to profound loathing, as any trip to the Interactive Fiction Database might indicate.

In multiple senses, then, Trinity is Infocom’s last, great Zorkian adventure. I see it as point of connection between the original cave games of old and what I call the “accessibly literary puzzlers” of today. Mixed in with Trinity‘s deaths, missable items, and optimization puzzles is an insistent intertextuality that is, I think, a hallmark of post-commercial interactive fiction from the 1990s and 2000s. Whatever Graham Nelson’s strategies for puzzle design in games like Jigsaw and Curses might have been, their overtly literary moments–encounters with the works of Proust, Eliot, and the like–have a precedent in Trinity.

I also see in Trinity a heroic avatar of mimetic fidelity, a quality that, over the years, has perhaps been overvalued. By “mimetic fidelity,” I simply mean that it presents credible figures of life. What could be more credible and real than history, than the fixed past? Infocom’s own promotional material for Trinity, along with Moriarty’s bibliography, seem to suggest that a faithful recreation of a historic geography elevates a work. Other critics, we have seen, feel the same way. In any case, Trinity really does seem to be the junction point that connects the classically Zorkian with the resurgent works–critical and artistic–of the 1990s and 2000s.

It is, if we choose to meet it where it is, a place to look both ahead and back.

Narration in The First Act of Trinity

Trinity opens memorably:

Sharp words between the superpowers. Tanks in East Berlin. And now, reports the BBC, rumors of a satellite blackout. It's enough to spoil your continental breakfast.

But the world will have to wait. This is the last day of your $599 London Getaway Package, and you're determined to soak up as much of that authentic English ambience as you can. So you've left the tour bus behind, ditched the camera and escaped to Hyde Park for a contemplative stroll through the Kensington Gardens.

In a small space, we learn a lot about the protagonist (henceforth called “Wabewalker”) and, perhaps, the American psyche. This is a person who characterizes vacations in terms of their price. They (I do not believe a binary gender is ever specified) also evince what I call “atomic resignation.” That is, it really seems that many Americans had accepted nuclear war as an inevitability. Then-president Ronald Reagan was incredibly popular despite his constant provocations of the Soviets. There was no use getting upset about that, we must have thought. What can one do?

This is a person who characterizes vacations in terms of their price.

The Wabewalker is barely even distracted by recent bellicosities in the news. It can be hard to know, and this will continue to be difficult to know, when the narrator is characterizing the protagonist as opposed to satirizing them. Was the Wabewalker really in danger of having their breakfast ruined? At the very beginning, we are called to distinguish between description and editorialization. This seems important in a work so openly concerned with historical fact, with research and accuracy.

Before long–if we are to progress–the Wabewalker examines a sundial, and is rewarded with a quote from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:

“And ‘the wabe’ is the grass-plot round a sun-dial, I suppose?” said Alice, surprised at her own ingenuity.

“Of course it is. It’s called ‘wabe,’ you know, because it goes a long way before it, and a long way behind it—”

Who recites these passages? The narrator? Moriarty? The protagonist, perhaps? The quotations appear in large, solid-filled blocks that blot out the text on the page. Do they exist in the world of the game at all? Perhaps Moriarty is speaking to the screen, speaking to the audience, and the Wabewalker never hears or sees them at all.

When air raid sirens begin, a few minutes later, a voice speaks, seemingly from nowhere:

A gentle voice whispers in your ear. "It's time."

I’ve written at length about the rhetorical situation of Infocom games, usually characterizing them in terms of writer, audience, and subject matter. On such occasions, I have expressed interest in narrative indeterminacy: player agency, I’ve said, makes the subject matter of a game unstable. But what if the narration, itself, is unstable? These literary intrusions, editorializing narrations, the insistent intertextuality of historical sources, mysterious voices, and, later in the game, the baffling assertion that the past is simultaneously fixed and untethered all serve to create a sense of bewilderment. What can be real or certain in Trinity?

This confusion is not a flaw; rather, it is core to my reading of Trinity. I think this work sabotages its own efforts to participate in “truth,” historical or otherwise, but, in doing so, it speaks to greater and more profound realities.

These literary intrusions, editorializing narrations, the insistent intertextuality of historical sources, mysterious voices, and, later, the baffling assertion that the past is simultaneously fixed and untethered all serve to create a sense of bewilderment.

Many commentators have noted that the logic of Trinity‘s story does not cohere, and this is said especially with regard to its ending. We are a long way from that ending, but I will say now that Trinity‘s insistent historicization can be misleading. It ultimately isn’t rewarding to read Trinity in terms of preceding and succeeding dominoes in a long row. This work is concerned with making or participating in the past, which is messy, elusive, and, despite what we might want to believe, largely subjective.

If the Wabewalker sticks around long enough, they will see themselves–London, too–destroyed in nuclear fire. The narrator’s prose is succinct and poetic:

The west wind falls silent, and a new star flashes to life over the doomed city.

This narrator, who employs ironic figuration (“new star”) and editorializes (“doomed city”), seems to speak from a majestic vista outside of history or causality. We will later be told that the story of Trinity can only end one way, that it ended before we even began to play. What are these deaths, then, and who is talking about them? This is the first of what will likely be many. Did they ever happen? Did we experience them at all? There are 26 deaths events in Trinity‘s source code (Release 12), each of which must simultaneously occur and never occur.

This is to say nothing of the various unwinnable conditions that Trinity permits.

Precautions Must Be Taken

I said, long ago, that it is a mistake to read A Mind Forever Voyaging too literally. Some critics have expounded at length regarding the “unrealistic” nature of Perry Simm’s psychology, for instance, asserting that he would go insane in the way that Harlan Ellison’s AM did once he became self-aware. The easy way to avoid this sort of thing spoiling your good time is to recognize that A Mind Forever Voyaging is not a rigorous thought experiment about artificial intelligence technologies. Likewise, Trinity is a game about ideas rather than facts, bibliography notwithstanding, and it is useful to distinguish between history generally and historical detail.

Perhaps I mean to say that it is about causation rather than causes.

Next

General discussion of Trinity‘s narrative will continue with its “wide” middle in the surreal region of the Wabe.