Gold Machine

When bad things happen to all sorts of people.

The Tragic Plane Crash and Other Myths

“Tragedy” is a word that gets repeated often in our media. When something horrific happens, it is called a tragedy. Plane crashes, we are told, are tragedies, and so are collapsing buildings. You might think I’m going somewhere pedantic and uninteresting with this, but even if you’re right, bear with me a moment. Yes, “tragedy” is a specific literary genre with many subtypes, and plane crashes aren’t tragic in a literary sense. Pointing out semantic inaccuracies and going no further would be a little pedantic, I admit.

Let’s go further, then.

Distinguishing Characteristics of the Tragic Form

It can be hard to determine what unifies works as different as, say, Hamlet and Antigone. An easy yet unsatisfying answer is that they aren’t comedies. There are bad things happening, certainly: Prince Hamlet’s father has been murdered and Polynices has been denied a proper burial. In isolation, these events are like forest fires or earthquakes in that they lack a narrative context that would afford them significance beyond and above apparent awfulness.

In Hamlet, that narrative framing consists of the title character’s efforts to bring his father’s killer(s) to justice. The play emerges from Aristotelian tradition: Hamlet is indecisive–and a little unlucky, perhaps. He recognizes what has held him back, and faces death. In the wake of his death, the peace of the Kingdom of Denmark is restored under the leadership of Fortinbras:

Let four captains
Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royally: and, for his passage,
The soldiers’ music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.

Antigone, is not about some “great man.” Despite a high body count, the path forward is less clear. Creon, the king whose decisions have led to the play’s many negative events, recognizes his failures and appears to despair. The play nevertheless concludes with an affirmation of the moral and ethical values of Greek society:

Reason is by far the most important part of
Happiness. As for the gods, you
Must take care not to misstep in any way.
A boastful man’s mighty words
Are paid for by mighty blows.
In old age he teaches his wisdom.

While it may not be initially clear what unifies these two dramas beyond “not comedy” and the occurrence of negative events, their attitudes toward the cosmic and ethical implications of the horrific are ultimately quite similar. That is, in both tragedies are framing techniques that transform absurdities into evidence of a morally determinate and orderly world. Through tragedy, capricious disaster becomes comprehensible and–rather optimistically–a step on a path toward social harmony and cohesion. One might object that Antigone doesn’t offer the kind of reconciliation that Hamlet does, but that’s more a matter of mechanism rather than one of effect.

In isolation, these events are like forest fires or earthquakes in that they lack a narrative context that would afford them significance beyond and above apparent awfulness.

In the tragedies of ancient Greece, the social order is represented by the chorus, which editorializes and reacts to events as they occur on-stage. The tragic is thereby elevated to ethical and moral contexts. According to Nietzsche, audiences could experience sympathetic catharsis through the response of the chorus. Nietzsche notwithstanding, the chorus asserted an ethical or cosmic framework that invested horrific absurdity with meaning.

In other words, a unifying feature of the tragic is its ability to reconcile horror with a human-centered view of progression toward some hoped-for ethical or moral end-state. The tragic is ultimately a denial of the absurd. I don’t resist what feels like overuse of the word “tragic” because I like correcting people. I resist it because it sanitizes horror by pretending it is part of some grand trajectory. Tragedy is a constructed thing that reflects an idea about the way our universe works. The absurd is never tragic. Absurdity is, in fact, a joke at tragedy’s expense.

The Concluding Events of Trinity

I haven’t forgotten: this series of thirteen (thirteen!) posts is about Trinity, the Infocom game by Brian Moriarty. Before tying things together, let’s consider the ending of Trinity. Having gathered ruby, bag of crumbs, lemming, walkie-talkie, and lamp, we are prepared to cross into the land of the dead. And cross we do: there is a river, a ferryman, and we are dressed for the occasion.

>enter dory
The dory tips alarmingly as you climb aboard.

The oarsman glances at the burial shroud you're wearing with silent approval, and stretches out his skeletal hand expectantly.

>give coin to oarsman
The oarsman accepts the silver coin and nods at you solemnly.

The ghostly shades begin to converge on the dory. One by one, they step into the vessel, hand the oarsman a silver coin, and take a seat.

The oarsman pushes away from the beach.

Planes of mist close in around the dory, drawing it deeper into the gloom. The only sound is the rhythmic slurp of the oar as it plies the dark, oily water.

A vague outline emerges beyond the helm. It slowly resolves into a spit of sand, damp and cheerless in the surrounding murk.

The oarsman swings the dory around and lands it with barely a jolt. One by one, the shades slink out of the vessel and drift across the sand like leaves on a breath of wind. Something in the oarsman's gaze compels you to follow them.

The Alpha door leads to a place of beginnings: the Trinity test site in New Mexico. The Wabewalker has arrived to… what? Stop atomic weapons from being invented? We can return to that in a bit. A simple answer that will satisfy most players is, as I have said in the past, take everything, go everywhere, solve everything, win. At first, we players are motivated by negatives. There are some wires that we can’t cut, and an electrical box held shut with screws.

Trinity as a mechanical experience is the subject of a future podcast, so let’s focus on the text and its themes for now. Sometimes, interaction and meaning are inseparable; I’ll honor that here when necessary. Anecdotally, I–recalling my play experience thirty years ago–had no idea what my objective at the Trinity test site was. Since a map of the area was included with retail copies of the game, I did assume that New Mexico, 1945 was my destination. There are no other remaining doors, after all (in practice, you can go through the Omega door much sooner, but an unwinnable state is the outcome)!

Once there, the wandering starts. Since the map–I believe this is not only deliberate but clever–emphasizes the McDonald Ranch, players might be motivated to go there first. It’s there that the lemming meets its fateful end. A player’s impression of this geography will largely depend on their answer to a question previously asked here: “Is historicity and aesthetic virtue?” Moriarty has managed to write a great many rooms without relying upon nouns. Most of the space occupying this massive endgame area is sparsely described and frequently resistant to all attempts at interaction. Removed from its context, this geography would almost certainly fare poorly with reviewers as lifeless and dull.

Northwest of Ranch
You're at the northwest corner of a stone wall. A closed iron gate leads in to a dilapidated ranch house.

A paved road bears northwest into the desert. Other paths curve east and south, along the wall's perimeter.

>open gate
You open the iron gate.

>se
Back Yard
This patch of dust lies within the elbow of the ranch house, and is enclosed by a stone wall to the north and west.

An open hallway leads south, into the house. There's also a closed screen door to the east, and an open iron gate in the northwest corner of the stone wall.

If this doesn’t seem too bad, bear in mind that this ranch–not including the rest of the site–consists of a rather incredible 27 rooms. While the road runner is moving around and occasionally doing things, that poor bird has a lot less to work with than Floyd did. It really does seem that the intended appeal or interest is historicity. It’s an interesting and novel strategy, craft-wise. In other media, the genre of period drama largely involves visually lush sets and costumes. That doesn’t work here, because this is an empty place whose most compelling features–mountains and desert–resist interaction entirely. There is a pervasive flatness in which descriptive prose, Trinity‘s most compelling element, cannot thrive. When combined with a general lack of interactivity, I experience New Mexico more as a themed game board than as a place.

A simple answer that will satisfy most players is, as I have said in the past, take everything, go everywhere, solve everything, win.

My impression is that critics feel historical accuracy is enough, craft-wise, for this endgame. Certainly, I haven’t encountered reviews that are particularly critical of these barren landscapes. A podcast about the mechanical nature of Trinity‘s endgame is coming soon, so I won’t spend too time developing my thoughts here. For now, I think it might be enough to say that a lack of vividness left myself as a young player experiencing New Mexico more as a treatment of historical fact rather than as a dramatic, narrative presentation.

The voices emerging from the walkie talkie are a notable exception:

>flip breaker
You close the handle of the circuit breaker.

"Hold on, Able. X just woke up again."

A sigh of relief. "Sounds like a wet line somewhere."

"The kid's keepin' an eye on it, Pittsburg. If it dies again before the sequencer takes over, we're gonna have to scrub."

"Roger, Baker. Lotta crossed fingers up here."

[Your score just went up by 1 point. The total is now 88 out of 100.]

The roadrunner emits a brief squawk.

"Oscillograph check," squeaks the talkie.

In the end, our magically-enhanced sprint around the New Mexico desert yielded some suitably adventure gamey adventure game knickknacks: a knife, a screwdriver, a key, and a pair of binoculars. The Wabewalker, thus equipped, has everything needed to fail to prevent the Trinity test.

Failing Up

“Everything needed to fail” is a strange formulation. This is an Infocom game, after all, and the typical player has been failing a lot. There are 25 ways to die in Trinity. This is a seemingly modest number: Zork I has 26, even though it is less than half the size of Trinity. However, 19 of those Zork I deaths involve jokes, unmotivated actions, or exist only for error handling. That leaves seven. Trinity, by contrast, has only one death caused by unmotivated action (kissing the barrow wight). In total, then, Trinity contains 24 deaths based on “serious” game conditions. The entire Zork trilogy, by contrast, 46. The Zork number involves some duplicate, grue-related deaths, of course.

Compared to Zork (251.3 KB), Trinity (255 KB) isn’t particularly deadly, even after correcting for joke or unfair deaths (by “unfair” I’m referring to things like getting FLOATed by the Wizard of Frobozz while in the hot air balloon). Comparing “zombie states,” conditions that lead to unwinnable play sessions, makes for a closer match. Trinity has 27 unwinnable game states, while the Zork trilogy has 35. What does this mean? Trinity is no Zork Trilogy, that’s for sure, but there certainly are a lot of ways to “evit” a story about inevitability. Any serious effort to assess the ending of Trinity–it’s proven to be rather divisive–must at least acknowledge this apparent contradiction.

[perhaps the real story here is the outlandish deadliness of Zork II, which features 28 “fair,” play-motivated deaths. That’s ten more than those found in Zork I and Zork III combined! You can see all the data here in this Intfiction thread.]

In what seems like a lifetime ago, I wrote about experiencing Deadline in a multiversal sense (my series on Deadline remains one of my favorites). It is certainly possible that a narrative that refers to the game’s concluding events as “quantum steam” might hinge upon the many-worlds interpretation/theory (MWI). The problem with a MWI reading of Trinity is that it narratively asserts a deterministically-constructed present. That is, the destructiveness of the atomic weapons of the Wabewalker’s present day is fixed and predictable. The outcome of Trinity‘s story is stasis: the win state is that the bombs are only as bad as we have always assumed them to be.

The main way we could twist ourselves into a MWI reading of the text is to imagine that in each of the failure states, the bomb is incapable of blowing up New Mexico. Somehow, the Wabewalker’s intervention–separate from their existence generally–engenders a counterfactual potency of atomic weaponry. Let’s think back to the opening:

>examine statue
The statue portrays a carefree little boy playing a set of pipes.
A gleam overhead catches your eye.

Oh, dear. A missile is hanging motionless in the sky.

>examine missile
The missile isn't completely motionless. It's falling very, very slowly towards the Long Water.

Your eyes follow the missile's trajectory downward, where you notice another peculiar phenomenon. It looks like a white door, suspended just above the surface of the water.

A flock of ravens glides into view! They circle over the Long Water and disappear through the open white door.

The missile continues its slow descent.

I believe this is the only in-game moment in which an atomic weapon horses around in this way. Why is it different? This isn’t a purely rhetorical question: it’s clearly dramatic and very hard to miss. Perhaps it is merely Trinity‘s first assertion of surreality, a textual feature that is one of its compelling strengths. The major mechanical and dramatic benefit is that the Wabewalker wouldn’t otherwise have time to gather their possessions and wade to the door if the missile were travelling at, well, missile speed. That seems like a rather boring and rote reading, though. Perhaps, hanging onto the physics for a bit longer, this is a major point of divergence, not whether the Wabewalker lives or not (another divergence) but whether the strength of the weapons has an expected default state or a greatly empowered state that the protagonist must adjust in order to “establish the past” (a phrase quoted from Spellbreaker‘s Invisiclues).

The outcome of Trinity‘s story is stasis: the win state is that the bombs are only as bad as we have always assumed them to be.

The chief shortcoming of such a reading is that it isn’t scaffolded in any way. That is, my experience of it is that it seems like a way to “back into” a reading in hopes of accounting for an outcome. It doesn’t actually describe the in-process narrative, and “feasible” has never been a synonym for “satisfactory.” I think we’ve come too far and worked too hard to stop there.

A third option is that Trinity is an adventure game, and it was convention for adventure games to regularly feature death and unwinnable states. This sounds like a cop-out, I’m sure. Perhaps it comes across as an even worse copout than a many-worlds interpretation… interpretation. It isn’t, though, because Trinity does in fact take pains to make adventure game tropes a prominent and interesting feature of the text. In fact, I’ve frequently mentioned the “adventure game logic” of Trinity, which seems to both utilize and criticize an ethos of taking, using, and winning. This attitude is most directly dramatized in the hut where a map and a “book of hours” recreate the map and transcript elements featured in Trinity‘s own manual. While most critics tend to emphasize its nature as a historical record, thereby suggesting that the player’s actions are historical and therefore fixed, it’s sometimes best to take things at face value.

We are, at present, attempting to solve the juxtaposition of a stated, fixed outcome with wildly unfixed actions and events that exclude that outcome entirely. Why would the book and map make such an assertion of fixed action? Elsewhere, I’ve argued that while persons and individual actions might vary, some forces (like humanity) always find a way. The book is far more interesting as a humorous and darkly ironic comment on adventure games, their protagonists, and, yes, their players.

I don’t actually want to discard this reading. Trinity is a subversion of narrative expectations of the adventure game genre. It lampoons the idea that every problem is soluble. More seriously, Trinity suggests that a chief problem with humanity is a widely-held belief that we (as represented by the Wabewalker) have a right to think of creation (lemming, skink, dolphin) as a resource we can exploit callously for whatever noble end we might be pursuing. The ironic subversion of “victory,” first explored by Infocom in Mike Berlyn’s Infidel, takes on new life and power here.

The Dearth of Tragedy

Cards on the table: I don’t think that Trinity is a tragedy, by any definition. There have been interesting and thought-provoking efforts to interpret in that way, but they all seem to fall short. Let’s first talk about what works. The tragic in its familiar conceptions is inevitable. Considering Trinity as a tragedy can’t solve the problem of failure states, but it absolutely does assert that “success,” once achieved, was inevitable. This is, I must insist, separate from varied historical details, which are in many cases both important and insignificant. J. Robert Oppenheimer, whom the Wabewalker spies through binoculars, is essential to the story that we have. However, he is not necessarily essential to the invention of atomic weapons generally. We cannot say if he is essential to the attack on London or not, though I believe Trinity suggests that an attack cannot be stopped, details aside.

>cut blue with knife
[the blue wire]

[Your score just went up by 5 points. The total is now 100 out of 100.]

You slide the blade of the steak knife under the blue wire and pull back on it as hard as you can. The thick insulation cracks under the strain, stretches, frays and splits...

Snap! A shower of sparks erupts from the enclosure. You lose your balance and fall backwards to the floor.

"X-unit just went out again," shouts a voice.

"Which line is it, Baker?"

"Kid's board says it's the positive. The others look okay. We're lettin' it go, Able. The sequencer's running."

The walkie-talkie emits a burst of static.

"Congratulations."

You turn, but see no one.

"Zero minus fifteen seconds," crackles the walkie-talkie.

"You should be proud of yourself." Where is that voice coming from? "This gadget would've blown New Mexico right off the map if you hadn't stopped it. Imagine the embarrassment."

A burst of static. "Minus ten seconds."

The space around you articulates. It's not as scary the second time.
"Of course, there's the problem of causality," continues the voice. "If Harry doesn't get his A-bomb, the future that created you cannot occur. And you can't sabotage the test if you're never born, can you?"

The walkie-talkie is fading away. "Five seconds. Four."

The voice chuckles amiably. "Not to worry, though. Nature doesn't know the word 'paradox.' Gotta bleed off that quantum steam somehow. Why, I wouldn't be surprised to see a good-sized bang every time they shoot off one of these gizmos. Just enough fireworks to keep the historians happy."

The cosmic versus the individual is a pleasing duality in Trinity that can be aligned with expectations of tragedy. Antigone, as already mentioned, can be thought of in three parts: the individual, dramatic action of the play, a cosmic response (in this case, the wrath of Zeus at the violation of his law), an outcome that is faithful to its own cosmology (Creon’s despair). Hamlet features similar mappings. The chief difference, content-wise, appears to be the nature–not presence or absence–of cosmic forces.

Trinity is well-aligned with this model for interpretation: narrative as depicted in terms of player action; a cosmic, unstoppable force (humanity), and thematically faithful outcome (irony, futility). It is easy to argue from these features that Trinity participates in the tragic. Even if proponents and detractors have looked at the problem in terms of a great Aristotelian divide, the truth is that there are core factors in both conceptions of tragedy that correspond to the narrative experience of Trinity.

Cards on the table: I don’t think that Trinity is a tragedy, by any definition.

A problem with a tragic conception of Trinity, no matter how promising it might appear, is that it is missing what might be the most important element of tragedy: community. The isolation of the Wabewalker is anathema to tragedy. Tragedy is communal in nature. While many emphasize the fatal flaw of Aristotelian heroes, in my Hamlet example above an equally important consideration is the way tragedy clears a path for communities to come together, heal, and move forward. This is a familiar structure that audiences can anticipate. There is, in fact, something ritualistic about the structures and outcomes of Aristotelian tragedy. The characters and audiences may share a sense of relief, or progress. Such tragic configurations imply a grand, progressive structure of the universe.

Likewise, as suggested above, a community is mirrored more immediately in ancient drama via the reactions of the chorus. Instead of Aristotelian tragedy’s ritualized or rigid templates for character and action, the chorus affirms and dramatizes community experiences. While presentation may differ, both ancient and Aristotelian conceptions of tragedy are centered around the emotional, moral, and ethical lives of a community.

The Wabewalker is not tragic because they are alone. There is no one to react, and there is no community to repair or recover. Trinity, it must be said, is a rather byzantine rendition of a forest fire. Is this loss? As I suggested a few thousand words ago, there is a human desire to make disaster meaningful, to contextualize it within a larger narrative that moves forward and upward. Perhaps horror is not merely a brief and recoverable trip on our climb up the stairs. Perhaps it is as bad as it looks, after all.

Let’s not bowdlerize, excuse, or rehabilitate disaster here. Hard things are hard, and what heroic spirit can endure them? There must be something we can make of this ending, something honest.

Next

Theaters of absurdity and war.