Pairs of paratexts and a pared-back text.
Paratext in the 8-bit Era
While Infocom is remembered fondly for its packaging and documentation, other game publishers of the 1980s and 1990s extended the texts and contexts of their products through pack-ins and in-universe content. It was fairly common for games–even those packaged without frills or extras–to ship with manuals written with an in-universe or mimetic voice. Consider this short passage from the manual for Telarium’s Nine Princes in Amber (1985):
The Language of Amber
Artful communication is of great importance in Amber, and the Thari language reflects this, for half of our verbs are “communication” verbs.
Though dialogue must be precise and short, by its nature it suggests a great deal more than is actually spoken.
Even if the results were sometimes imprecise, manuals were often leveraged as a means to extending the narrative frame of a game.
At other times, the presentation limitations of platforms mandated that manuals provide essential information about the contents of a game’s world. For instance, most (all?) players of Atari’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982) would have needed the detailed descriptions and narrative backgrounding included with its manual to understand what the game was attempting to dramatize.
In those early days, paratext was often the only way to gamify certain types of narrative complexity. When approached creatively, paratext could serve as more than a bandaid, instead creating one-of-a-kind gaming experiences. An early and transformational example is, of course, Infocom’s Deadline. What began as a way to work around the presentation and memory limitations of 1982 microcomputers became a well-wrought narrative innovation.
The best packages of those days turned technical limitations into opportunity and, just as my favorite poets do, make the most of constraint.
Temple of Apshai (1979)
Automated Simulation’s (later Epyx) Temple of Apshai, one of the first computer role-playing games sold for home micros, shipped with a manual positively stuffed with text descriptions for rooms, treasures, traps, and enemies. Setting aside very real considerations of memory and storage, there simply wasn’t anywhere within the game’s interface for presenting these various quantities of text.
We are in “room no. 3,” and here is the manual’s description:
Room Three-A finely carved and painted mural fills the east wall of the passage, opposite the opening, depicting men tilling the soil. A ransacked backpack rests under the mural. A roaring sound can be heard from the north.
The on-screen enemy, a skeleton, is described as follows:
Skeletons-are the animated skeletons of men which now stalk the underground passages in search of victims. They are said to devour the soul of their victim as it exits the dying body.
Temple of Apshai hasn’t aged very well, mechanically. Long load times, eccentric controls, and repetitive play will likely limit its audience to historians and nostalgiacs, but this manual is both more interesting and less difficult to consume. The designers’ commitment to atmosphere and mood is nothing short of stunning. A significant portion of the manual’s supplemental text has no ludic function (some of it provides hints regarding secret doors and traps). There are 233 room descriptions in total, as well as 73 treasure descriptions and 25 monster descriptions. Considering its vintage, Temple of Apshai is a vividly-rendered place despite its highly constrained computing and presentation context.
Pool of Radiance (1988)
SSI’s landmark CRPG Pool of Radiance shipped with an “Adventurer’s Journal”” containing texts and drawings discovered in-game. Like Temple of Apshai, PoR‘s interface was not suited to displaying these paratexts. Players would additionally need to refer back to these texts during play, which would have necessitated a kind of “journal” interface that was almost certainly beyond reach.
Compare this interface with the content of the journal, and it becomes clear why paratext was a necessary solution to one of PoR‘s design challenges.
Like Temple of Apshai, PoR features paratext that is not merely compensatory but additive. The “Adventurer’s Journal” adds worldbuilding and narrative framework to what would otherwise be a more abstract, rules-based simulation.
Moonmist (1986)
The paratext accompanying Moonmist is something of a mixed success. Its gray box packaging includes a letter from the protagonist’s friend Tamara, a copy of Legendary Ghosts of Cornwall by a “Lady Lisbeth Norris,” a “Welcome to Tresyllian Castle” brochure, and, curiously, a Moonmist iron-on.
Legendary Ghosts of Cornwall
Although its “Festeron Public Library” inset (cf Zork trilogy and Wishbringer) doesn’t quite land as an Easter egg, this collection of ghost stories is a fun read with appealing, woodcut-style illustrations. Effectively contextualizing the legend of Tresyllian “White Lady” within a wider cultural phenomenon of what faraway Americans might imagine as a “haunted England,” the ghost stories foster a stronger sense of place.
A Letter from Tamara
Tamara’s letter consists of three pages of handwritten cursive on cream-colored Tresyllian Castle stationary. It’s a massive exposition dump, as every in-game character (and two besides) gets a paragraph of their own. We learn, for instance, about Tamara’s feelings toward Iris Vane:
One person I could do without is Iris Vane (she’s really called the Honorable Iris Vane, but you won’t catch ME calling her that). She’s a Mayfair debutante who came on as an instant friend of mine. But there’s something bitchy about her, and I think she’s secretly in love with Jack. I guess castles breed romantic tangles… ❤️❤️❤️
The use of “bitchy” is a bit jarring, I think, in a text that deliberately aims for the younger side of young adult, but I suppose we 1980s kids grew up fast. Tamara is also weirdly glib about the untimely death of Deirdre, one of the mysteries the protagonist sets out to unravel.
Deirdre’s death is really fueling the imaginations of some of the castle servants. Supposedly this place is haunted by an ancient ghost called the White Lady. Now they’re saying that the White Lady has been seen in the newer Residential Wing of the castle (like any good ghost she used to stick to the old section) and that she looks just like Deirdre. WHOO-EE-OOO!
Now, perhaps “servants” do have overactive imaginations, and alleged ghost sightings might be funny, but Deirdre’s death is untimely and its circumstances are mysterious. In Tamara’s defense, she isn’t the only one who hasn’t let Deirdre’s death get in the way of a laugh or two. I’ll revisit this in a future post.
The prose is clearly utilitarian, and one imagines its author(s) running down a checklist of things to explicate. I don’t object, though. A lot of content in the Pool of Radiance “Adventurer’s Journal” similarly prioritizes function, and the game is nevertheless better because of that paratext. The same can be said of Tamara’s letter: it adds useful content in a way that the in-game text of an Infocom game could not. The formatting, obviously, would have been impossible and likely undesirable. Likewise, craft conventions would prohibit this kind of worldbuilding avalanche. Finally, the form of this text—a letter—has a useful function, possessing as it does an in-universe rationale and distinctive (for good or ill) voice.
While the content of the letter may invite future criticisms, Tamara’s missive is more additive than compensatory.
The Moonmist Iron-on
There’s no use overthinking the inclusion of a Moonmist t-shirt iron-on. It may not be useful to think about it at all. While I don’t typically criticize games in terms of mimetic fidelity, I am comfortable supposing that the fancy castle people of this story do not wear t-shirts to dinner parties, if they wear them at all.
“Welcome to Tresyllian Castle”
Moonmist’s most commented-upon paratext is the tourist brochure that Tamara encloses with her letter. It effectively approximates the rhetoric of such documents, reading more naturally than Tamara’s latter. Even if it also has a distinct utilitarian feel, tourist brochures are by their very nature utilitarian. This representative snippet from the document’s conclusion is the type of does exactly what we might ask of it, as we are, after all, tourists:
It is in Cornwall that King Arthur held court, at a spot now known as Camelford. Across these moors rode Galahad and Lancelot. On these shores Iseult pined for her lost love, Tristram. And on these mighty cliffs Jack killed the giants Cormoran, Galligantus, and Thunderbore.
The provided map is a little undercooked for my tastes, with seven rooms labeled “bedroom.” Nevertheless, it will likely come in handy for navigating a game world that is only intermittently vivid (cf the previous post in this series).
It might surprise readers that most critical assessments of this document, which seems perfectly fine on its face, tilt negatively. The reason for this is, as we have previously discussed, is that Moonmist frequently feels underimplemented by the standards of its day. I have suggested that Infocom’s idea of expansion embraced breadth rather than depth, and that players would likely have preferred one fulfilling game over four unfulfilling ones.
I return to this critical thesis because many rooms in Moonmist are barely described at all. They are instead described in the tourist brochure. Consider, for instance, the in-game description of the sitting room:
It looks even lovelier than it sounds in the tourist brochure.
It’s a comfy place to read a book, play the piano, or just relax.
Meanwhile, in the tourist brochure, we find this:
The Sitting room is a delightful time to spend an idle afternoon. It is filled with warm colors and invitingly comfortable furniture. The yellow silk brocade has covered the walls for over a hundred years, and the faded carpet patterned with peacocks and chrusanthemums was purchased in India by Lady Gayle Tresyllian in 1912.
A guest at the castle might write a letter at the Louis XV writing desk that once belonged to Marie Antoinette. Or play a romantic melody on the grand piano especially built by the Klugenhofer Klavierwerke in Germany. Or curl up with a book on the window seat, charmingly decorated with small carved wyverns projecting like gargoyles from either end.
Some of this content would be overkill for a parser game of the time (many players might think it’s too much for a contemporary game). Such descriptive generosity would have a natural home in a feelie. However, many of the nouns mentioned only in the brochure are, in fact, implemented in-game. The only way for a player to know about them is to consult the brochure.
In this post, I’ve attempted to demonstrate the value of including essential in-game information in paratext. Why have players criticized this practice in Moonmist, while accepting the examples explored above? In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Pool of Radiance, and Temple of Apshai, paratext overcame the limits of their mediums to enhance player experience.
Most reviewers of Moonmist, on the other hand, seem to resent consulting paratext for room descriptions and implemented nouns. Parser games are expected to provide this information as a matter of course. While I have always asserted that packaging and pack-ins are essential to any Infocom experience, I do not think that they should substitute for what most people consider the most basic features of a parser game. While Temple of Apshai had no ready means of printing descriptive text, the same thing cannot be said of an Infocom game releasing nine years after the PDP version of Zork first appeared.
Why did this happen? While copy protection might have been a consideration, Moonmist clocks in at the absolute size limit for the Commodore 64 and could not have contained more descriptive passages. The tourist brochure is an effective piece of in-universe text, but its rhetorical situation has negatively affected its reception over the years. I hope that contextualizing Moonmist among more effective games of the 8-bit era can explain why.
Next
What actually is in Moonmist, then? Is there even anything to talk about? My answer is “yes,” even if its sparse gameplay probably cannot fill an essay on its own. While I would hate to spoil any surprises, I’m sure we can find something to discuss. Stay tuned for the conclusion of this series, “Dead Girl.”