On the Wabe, Trinity‘s “wide middle.”
Last Time, on Gold Machine…
In part one of this discussion of Trinity‘s narrative design, I asserted that, in terms of its shape, Trinity was a Zorkian “cave game.” This is something I’ve repeated more than once, notably in my last podcast episode. That being so, this multi-part series considers Trinity in terms of that classic “narrow-wide-narrow” (in both narrative and mechanical senses) design. We’ve already discussed the narrow opening, which takes place in London’s Kensington Gardens. What happens when players are suddenly ejected from this near-real setting, only to find themselves nowhere and nowhen?
The Dickensian Turn
Let’s step back and consider the game’s transition from reality to surreality.
>enter door
As you wade to the threshold a familiar roadrunner flutters past. The ruby in its beak gleams enticingly as it slips through the white door.
All color abruptly drains from the landscape. Trees, sky and sun flatten into a spherical shell, with you at the very center. A hissing in your ears becomes a rumble, then a roar as the walls of the shell collapse inward, faster and faster.
"This way, please."
You turn, but see no one.
"This way," the voice urges. "Be quick."
The space around you articulates. "No!" your mind shudders. "That's not a direction!"
"It's a perfectly legitimate direction," retorts the voice with cold amusement. "Now come along."
While I’ve already asserted that multiple voices in Trinity–not only that of this editorializing stranger, but also of various literary and historical snippets both within and without the game proper–have a destabilizing effect that complicate our ability to interpret it, this passage seems an effort to teach us how to approach the work. Ignore, the suggestion seems to be, assumptions regarding the familiar and logical.
As the ending of Trinity approaches, a window containing an Emily Dickinson quote splashes across the screen:
‘Twere better Charity
To leave me in the Atom’s Tomb —
Merry, and Nought, and gay, and numb —
Than this smart Misery.
The passage makes Trinity the second (and last, so far as I know) Infocom title to quote Emily Dickinson. This opening transition for narrow to wide might remind readers of Dickinson of another poem, “Much Madness is divinest Sense – (620)”
Much Madness is divinest Sense –
To a discerning Eye –
The bookending of the game proper between a Dickensian endorsement of illogic as “divinest Sense” and the grim nihilism of the “Atom’s Tomb” is a bravura literary flourish, summarizing and encapsulating the dark absurdity of humanity’s atomic resignation. Adults the world over–who really ought to have known better–had collectively accepted that destroying everything and everyone was the natural and inevitable end-state of human history. To confront that truth as Trinity does is to confront the Absurd with a capital-A. The protagonist, in attempting to save humanity, must reject its collective acquiescence (“the starkest Madness – / ’Tis the Majority”).
The Wide Middle
Thus forewarned, players and protagonist find themselves in a “Wabe,” which, as Trinity tells us by way of Lewis Carroll, is “the grass-plot round a sun-dial. It is called like that because it goes a long way before it, and a long way behind it. And a long way beyond it on each side.” The passage comes from Through the Looking Glass, in which Humpty Dumpty attempts to explain the famously nonsensical poem “Jabberwocky.”
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
This isn’t our first Wabe; in fact, it is a surreal amplification and distortion of the game’s opening area, Kensington Gardens. At the center is, as there must be, a sundial, though this one is the size of a mountain:
A giant triangle, thousands of feet high, rises above the eastern treetops. Its vertex casts a long shadow across the wood.
In the introduction, a boy blows bubbles in the park:
>examine boy
The boy pulls the bubble wand out of the dish, puts it to his lips and blows a big soap bubble.
The boy snaps his fingers to the headphone music as the soap bubble bursts with a flabby pop.
Like so many other things in the Wabe, the boy is both similar and radically different:
>examine boy
The boy measures approximately forty feet from head to toe, and probably weighs several tons. He's wearing a pair of stereo headphones.
The boy pulls the bubble wand out of the dish, puts it to his lips and blows a big soap bubble.
This is a world that is, rather fittingly, through the looking glass. In the case of puzzles, many scenarios appear impossible, yet they remain faithful to their own internal logic. For instance, passing through a pergola that is shaped as a Klein bottle reverses the threads on a gnomon (the triangular, shadow-casting element of a sundial), allowing it to be affixed, as it ought to be, to a sundial.
South Arbor
The "floor" of the pergola curves up and around in an inexplicable way that makes your eyes cross. It seems as if you'd be standing on your head if you went much higher. Little daylight makes its way through the thick walls of arborvitae.
Mechanically, many of Trinity‘s puzzles require equal measures of logic and illogic, often driving the player to make intuitive–yet retrospectively sensible–leaps.
As a narrative locale, Trinity‘s Wabe consists primarily of image and implication. Unlike the historical and pseudo-historical settings to be discussed in future posts, the Wabe is untethered both temporally and geographically. For instance, at one point the protagonist discovers their own grave, a thing that seems both inevitable and impossible. Inevitable, because Trinity is quite generous in terms of providing opportunities for player death. Impossible, because the game’s conclusion asserts that the protagonist cannot die.
>examine corpse
The solemn dignity of the crypt makes you suspect that the remains may be those of some great missionary or explorer. The shrunken body is wrapped in a gray burial shroud, and its wrinkled mouth is held shut with a bandage wrapped around its head. A pair of boots, one red and one green, completes the ghastly wardrobe.
Elsewhere, the Wabewalker discovers a cottage in which a magpie recites ingredients for a magical spell. Nearby, a massive book contains… the player’s command history!
>read book
It's hard to divine the purpose of the calligraphy. Every page begins with a descriptive heading ("In which Wabewalker meets a Keeper of Birds," for instance) followed by a list of imperatives (prayers? formulae?), each preceded by an arrow-shaped glyph.
The writing ends abruptly on the page you found open, under the heading "In which Wabewalker happens upon a Book of Hours, and begins to study it." The last few incantations read:
>GET IT
>EXAMINE BOOK
>READ IT
The cumulative effect of these sites and problems is disorientation in the best sense. While the Book of Hours acknowledges the player’s existence, it seems more a dehumanization than a knowing wink: the protagonist is reduced to a collection of near-English commands, typos and all. The contrast of corpse and outlandish, mismatched boots summons the spectre of humor, but said spirit never fully materializes. Perhaps these incongruities aren’t quite funny because, after all, it is the protagonist who is the butt of Trinity’s cosmic joke.
Mushrooms
This fantastical, atemporal realm of metaphor pushes against the harder realities of atomic weapons application and development across history. It is encircled, both metaphorically and physically, by a forest of mushrooms. Some of them are massive, while others are more “realistically” sized. These are all representations of atomic explosions, or mushroom clouds, in histories past and future: the game takes place in an alternative timeline where Reagan’s “Star Wars” bore fruit. Nuclear explosions have birthed this unreality, and Trinity’s protagonist will pass from the Wabe’s borderlands to significant moments in this history. This boundary area, then, is a strange and highly figurative location that serves multiple vital purposes in the text.
It is the absurdist heart of the game, reveling in paradox, self-referentiality, and literary allusiveness. Distortions of scale, as in the mushrooms, sundial, and boy create a sense of awe. The spatial impossibility of the pergola is of one piece with a general sense of disorientation. The paradoxical, near-humorous discovery of the protagonist’s own corpse is never really explained, which, thematically, is all for the good.
Geographically and narratively, the player must travel from the Wabe to a handful of more realistic–unpleasantly so–locales to retrieve components for the Magpie’s spell. The experience is characterized by the text’s carefully calibrated tone, as things in Trinity are neither too fanciful nor too real.
This well-wrought balance persists until the endgame, whose uncharacteristic enthusiasm for historicity and realism will enjoy a discussion of its own. In the meantime, the contents of these real locations–each of which is reached by passing through doors in different giant mushrooms–must be considered. Additionally, this geographical schema, which is an innovative refinement of Spellbreaker’s–and, before it, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy‘s–warrants further discussion.
next
I feel pulled in many IF-related directions. Here are some irons currently in the fire:
- The next piece in this series, which will be concerned with the modular part of Trinity‘s modular geography.
- Another podcast episode, concerned with Trinity and the second edition (2001, or Inform Design Manual 4) of Graham Nelson’s The Craft of the Adventure.
- More blogging about learning Inform 7.
- Working toward a playtest of the first 20% or so of my current Inform 7 work in process.
Busy busy busy! I hope to get back to this soon, as I really enjoyed putting this post together.