Gold Machine

A lengthy and humanities-centered discussion of Victor Gijsbers’s doppelganger and the concept of interpretive abjection.

a memorable incident in the development of an interactive fiction critic.

It was early 2022, and my blog about 1980s text adventure games by a company called “Infocom” was beginning to find a readership. Twitter was still Twitter in those days, and I had found myself in one of those spontaneous open-air conversations that made it an enjoyable place sometimes. I had just told someone how much I enjoyed their essay about Steve Meretzky’s A Mind Forever Voyaging, a game that I would later write a good deal about. That author said something appreciative, and then I went on to say–what did I say? I must have said something about my own ambitions for a series about AMFV and what I perceived as a high critical bar that writers had set for the subject.

After a bit more of this, another conversant emerged from the ether. If I wanted to understand A Mind Forever Voyaging, this person suggested, I need not read the opinions of critics. Everything I needed to know had been recorded in a considerable and fascinating collection of documents known as Steve Meretzky’s “Infocom Cabinet.” I was already familiar with that archive and loved its contents. It contains design notes, tester feedback, drafts, on and on! Still, I didn’t think that anything in the cabinet made thinking and writing about Meretzky’s games superfluous. If that were the case, why play them at all? I think the endgame of that interpretive strategy is devaluing one’s own experience as reader and player, as if it were an inferior echo of Meretzky’s notes.

This unnamed person, who was at least right to insist on the value of the collection, soon vanished. We were never going to agree! I wasn’t ready to surrender my own personal experience with A Mind Forever Voyaging, not even to a post-facto Meretzky.

authors are not to be trusted.

Let’s say that I write a short work of interactive fiction. It’s a charming piece about dinosaurs and a magic accordion. More optimistically, let’s imagine that people love it. “Petunia and the Mesozoic Polka” is rated highly by critics and players! Its characters are likable, and the story has many enchanting surprises.

Let’s further imagine that, a month after many enthusiastic reviews have been published, I begin “explaining” my work online. I say that it’s a very serious game, in fact, about Althusser’s concept of “interpellation.” The accordion and its bewitching tune, I argue, hail the dinosaurs (even poor Petunia) as ideological subjects [this is all fancy-sounding gibberish, by the way, there’s no need to look any of this up]. People are not “getting” my work! In order to correct the record, I place my purportedly Marxist dinosaur game in a ZIP file along with a text document exhaustively explicating it. The ZIP, containing game and text file together, is now the sole means of downloading my work.

What should readers make of my admonitions? Some considerations:

• Intent and outcome are not the same. It is not so terribly important what I “mean” for people to see in my work. Intent cannot be verified, for one thing, and even if it could, why would that dictate audience experiences? I might intend for something I’ve written to be “good,” for instance, but reviews and contest judges tend to make their own assessments regarding quality.
• What if I’m wrong? To perfectly express my intent, I’d have to perfectly understand myself. Some people spend years in therapy in hopes of achieving such self-awareness. I may not actually understand my own intent very well.
• What was my game before I explained it? To continue the A Mind Forever Voyaging line of discussion: the “cabinet” was published decades after the game was initially released. The interpretations of players in the 80s, 90s, and aughts were not invalidated or contradicted by the cabinet, and people who liked “Petunia” for the cute dinosaurs likewise remain the sole owners of their experiences.
• We are not islands. Authors, like readers, emerge from a large and hard-to-encapsulate cultural context that includes, among other things, social, cultural, and economic factors. In some sense, the whole of human history (!), or parts thereof, may play a role. If knowledge of my reality is the only path to understanding my work, then a reader can never fully understand my work. I am an inexhaustible subject! I can likewise never completely know my readers.

When authors intervene, readers may miss out on chances to have an interesting thought by granting them more power than is their due. Sometimes, authors–I include myself!–are like vampires: the audience must invite them in. Being welcomed in is the source of the vampire’s power over hapless villagers and readers.

a free audience and the production of meaning.

My only recently-coined “vampire interpretation theory” has unexpected implications. Audiences are not the only ones to have surrendered their powers, as the author has given up a great deal as well. Conversations that would have once been concerned with the meaning of a work are reduced to evaluations of the author’s success or failure: did they achieve their stated intentions? By interfering with an audience’s interpretation, the author disrupts a work’s capacity for meaning.

Unless meaning is something Platonic, a magic bit of moonbeam out in space, then authors have no special authority over it. They cannot call attention to it, because there is no “it” that exists beyond the reach of readers. Without an audience, there is only a writer’s intent. Authors do not call attention to meaning, they only call attention to themselves. Meaning is a product of audience encounters with art. Audiences, not authors, make meaning.

A reader’s freedom to experience a work and make of it what they will is, then, an essential element of the creator-author partnership. Without it, a work shares many features with a student’s five-paragraph argumentative essay, as it becomes a case for the author’s thesis.

Is that necessarily bad? No. The five-paragraph essay is a valuable pedagogical instrument, and any cultural artifact (books, computer games, films, etc.) could be used–productively–in such a way. However, I think an overtly didactic work may not leave enough play (as in space for unimpeded movement) for audiences to make something of it. Without leaving space for audiences to draw their own conclusions authors offer readers only two options: subversion or acceptance.

This will not apply in every case, but it may be useful to think of a trust relationship between a work and its audience. IF critics have talked about a player’s ability to trust a game: are its rules reasonable and consistent? Can it be relied upon, or is it out to–forgive my use of a craft term–jerk the player around? Trust, as the old expression goes, is a two-way street. The player’s trust is a generally important consideration in game criticism, but the inverse can be just as significant. That is, it is worth assessing the amount of trust a work and its author place in their audience.

Play (in the interpretive sense) is an indicator of trust, as it leaves audiences free to have their own experiences, to have a subjective encounter that belongs to them. In the absence of trust, a work risks becoming an exam: readers might wonder if they have arrived at the “correct” interpretation, or if they have instead “failed” their encounters with art. A work that trusts its audience leaves space for a reader to value their own interpretations simply because they are theirs, rather than weigh them against a real or perceived authorial mandate.

That isn’t to say that freedom and enjoyment increase together in a line. It’s common to encounter people who have had frustrating, bewildering experiences with James Joyce’s Ulysses, for instance. Sometimes, commenters will assert that any lack of understanding is their own fault, a flaw in their understanding. While they are free to think so, I offer an alternative: their experience didn’t match some internal or external expectation involving author, work, or reader. This may not sound like much, but I think it’s really important to challenge the idea that anybody is supposed to “do something” with art, other than offer some base minimum of respect (and not even that in all cases!). It isn’t an audience’s responsibility to perform grand interpretive feats just because, James Joyce or otherwise. A reader’s motivation for completing such draining tasks–outside of a scholastic setting, of course–comes from their own responses to the work. People will engage with texts or not–on whatever level they wish–in accordance with their experiences.

But even in cases where a reader experiences either too much play or else too much pressure regarding their use of it, trust is essential to the production of meaning. Unless resisting the author is a compelling option, players can only make meaning out of experience when a work stays out of their way.

the wolf who cried boy: a work insisting upon its own credibility.

I can’t help but think of the curious case of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode by Victor Gijsbers (sometimes referred to herein as HNM), a game that seems to have lost a fight with itself. What a dramatic overture! Let me speak in a more measured way: it really seems that the text simultaneously declares itself reliable and unreliable. As a critic, I’m interested in what experiences mutually exclusive work/author perceptions of trustworthiness might encourage. This seems like a distinction upon which all subsequent interpretation hangs. If the work and the claims of its author are deemed reliable, we find ourselves evaluating intent rather than interpreting the work. If the author and work are incredible, then a more difficult but more rewarding possibility awaits: having a subjective experience with art that belongs to me and me alone.

The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode is a complex of texts. It is delivered in a ZIP archive containing the following:

• A cover image depicting an oddly hostile-looking white-and-brown-black rabbit on a blue, Mickey Mouse blanket. Said blanket appears to be littered with rabbit feces.
• A PDF containing an essay titled “Anatomy of a Failure.” This essay is purportedly by a “Victor Gijsbers,” a respected author and critic of interactive fiction. It is not clear whether this is the same “Victor Gijsbers” who wrote The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode.
• A plain text file with an “.NI” file extension, which suggests it contains Inform 7 source code. A brief inspection reveals programming code for a game called The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode by “Victor Gijsbers.”
• A compiled story file for a game called The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode by “Victor Gijsbers.”

To my knowledge, it has never been distributed any other way. The Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) entry for the game refers to the archive as “Complete Package,” perhaps indicating that an experience of the game that does not include all four archived components is correspondingly incomplete. My tendency as a reader–I am not aware of well-theorized argument for doing otherwise–is to examine supplementary materials before playing the games that they accompany. My assumption is that they are narrative framing. I exclude things like walkthroughs and source code, of course.

In the case of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode, that means that I began with the essay. “Hidden Nazi Mode: Anatomy of a Failure” is dated September 11, 2010. Glancing over at the actual game file, I see that its compile date is the same. The page history at IFDB matches, as well. I don’t believe the specific date is relevant, despite its place in American history, but I feel it must be acknowledged because at least one critic has mentioned it. Since this essay arrives fifteen years after the release of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode, I write in an established critical context. This reading is filtered through the readings of others, and through developments in the world of IF at large. The date has been part of the game’s reception, and reception is especially interesting to me.

More on that later.

For now, let’s try to take “Anatomy of a Failure” at face value. In a brief prefatory statement, a self-identified author declares:

This essay is a companion piece to a small interactive fiction game I created called The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode. You should be able to download it from wherever you got this document.

The term “companion,” by convention, suggests a relation between a primary and a secondary. The game, it seems, is primary, while the essay trails along. However, as I am reading it first, I will never experience the game without having read it. I cannot unread it! And so the relation is reversed: if the essay is not primary, then perhaps it is primal. My experience, for better or for worse, will occur within its bubble.

Reading on, I find that “Anatomy of a Failure” is divided into four sections, which I summarize here:

1. “Transparency.” The essay opens with a brief discussion of the unique challenges of interpreting the contents of computer programs because their contents are, by nature, obfuscated by layers of technical construction. The author distinguishes between this kind of technologically derived indeterminacy and the “transparent” (the author’s usage) nature of traditional, static media. In hopes of proving his case, he claims to have created a children’s game that turns into something darker when a player types, unprompted, “heil Hitler.”
2. “Hidden Nazi Mode.” The author continues to problematize what he (I rely upon the identity of the real, actual Victor Gijsbers for pronouns here) terms “closed games,” identifying possible scenarios in which a closed program could do something embarrassing or harmful despite a user’s good intentions. This possibility, according to the author, is an argument for using “open games” that have publicly available source code.
3. “Failure.” The experiment with a hidden Nazi mode was, according to the author, a failure. Testers allegedly thought that the author was arguing that games are “evil,” speculating that American audiences might face particular challenges receiving “the subtle message of my piece.”
4. “Fluffy Bunnies.” Because testers still found some merit in the children’s game masking the hidden Nazi mode, the author claims to have removed the “heil Hitler” episode and has provided the source code to “prove” it.

How reassuring!

translucency.

As a general assertion: an “authorial” (I’ll justify my use of quotation marks while referring to the author later) statement like this can have a profound effect on player experiences, and early reviews of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode bear that out. The experience of the game itself, for many, became an assessment of a thought experiment regarding public source code. That is, the question of the game’s quality becomes a matter of utility: does this Inform 7 text adventure game support an argument regarding the absence of transparency in compiled computer programs? Let’s have a closer look at the stated problem.

A “Victor Gijsbers” begins by asserting the growing cultural significance of computer games:

Computer games are now an integral part of our society. In the realm of entertainment, playing computer games has a legitimate place next to reading books, listening to music, playing board games and watching movies. Computer games are used for educational purposes in primary and secondary schools, where they supplement textbooks and educational videos. And in higher education, courses about computer games are now taught alongside more traditional courses on literature and the fine arts. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 1)

Fourteen years later, this claim might seem a given, but it was arguably prescient for its day. By 2014, the discourse surrounding computer and video games had proven capable of imposing considerable and unfortunately negative power in broader cultural and political spheres (“Gamergate“). However, “Gijsbers” envisions a different, acultural sort of problem, in that a compiled program could contain hidden and troubling content: “But there is one big difference between a computer game and any of these other media: computer games are not transparent” (“Anatomy of a Failure” 1).

“Transparency”, “Gijsbers” argues, is a feature of traditional print, film, music and media. That is, its contents are in some sense exhaustively visible.

By this I mean that when you read a book, watch a movie, examine a board game or a statue, you know everything that is contained within the work. You may not understand everything, you may have missed hidden layers of meaning, but you can be certain that the book does not contain any words you have not seen, that the movie does not contain any scenes you have not seen. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 1)

This rings true: in the first half of the twentieth century, for instance, persons who all but certainly lacked affection for challenging modernist literature managed to find instances of so-called “obscenity” within the famously dense prose of James Joyce’s Ulysses (“United States v One Book Called Ulysses”). Even when there is misunderstanding, there is at least an assurance that all audiences of static media are looking at the same thing.

…some or most of the game’s content may not have appeared to you even if you played it often and thoroughly. This has everything to do with the triple nature of a computer program: it consists of source code, as binary, and as an interpreted program with which you interact. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 1)

It is generally true that such medial layers have a destabilizing effect on what I might call “interpretive confidence.” Consider the narrative structure of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. The narrative frame is constructed via the account of the oblivious Mr. Lockwood, a landowner new to the region. He, in turn, relays accounts from other characters, chief among them Nelly Dean, a gossiping servant. Sometimes those characters repeat the stories of still other people. The novel’s story is a bit like a game of Telephone (“Telephone Game“): the story is bound to have changed by the time it reaches its readers.

“Gijsbers’s” claim that the more mechanically formal obscuration of a program’s “triple” nature suggests an escalation fom experiences of Wuthering Heights and the like, as his clarification of terms suggests. The “top” layer–that experienced by players–is near-analogous to the visible or audible elements of other media. However, there is a twist:

The interpreted program, as it appears on your screen, is what you will actually interact with as end user. The interpreted program is not transparent: if this is the only layer you have knowledge of, you can never be sure that you know what the program will do in different circumstances, and you can never be sure that you have seen all the content the program has to offer. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 2).

I concede this is true. While one might not share the author’s perhaps hard-to-account-for suspicions, the assertion that average users never engage directly with a program’s code or have access to exhaustive indexes of their contents seems unassailable. The next, lower layer consists of the complied program itself.

The binary is the compiled code: the original human readable source code has been translated into a machine readable program. For an unaided human, a binary is not transparent. It is in theory possible to reverse engineer a binary and make it transparent again, but this is often exceedingly difficult and sometimes illegal. For practical purposes, a binary is not transparent. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 2)

This must be conceded, too, though I think that–in the case of a computer game–this is often desirable. Players do not, in fact, want transparency. A common motivation for playing is a feeling of discovery and progression. If a game were somehow utterly transparent, there would be no puzzles, no surprises, no wonder. Arguably, translucency–rather than transparency–is a source of appeal. While there is not sufficient space here, it would be interesting to better know how agency destabilizes text, and if translucency fosters rewarding, agentic experiences. My position on the latter question has always been that it does (“Initial Groundwork for a Reading of A Mind Forever Voyaging“). As an author and critic of text adventure games, my experience is that, in a thoroughly implemented work, one is at least reminded of an iceberg: some unknowable amount must go unseen by readers.

What of the source code? Like the end product (the interpreted program) and unlike the intermediary (the compiled program), the source is readable to anyone familiar with its programming language. Speaking generally of source code, “Gijsbers” asserts its transparency to audiences:

The source code is the human readable code that the programmers have created. If you look at the source code and you know the programming language, you can see exactly what the program will do in different circumstances. As source code, a computer program has the same transparency that a book or a movie has. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 1-2)

This is, one must admit, a fairly optimistic and literal usage of the term “transparency:” source is transparent in the same sense that the Vulgate bible is. While specialists can read it at will, many of us will have to rely upon the assurances of others, playing Mr. Lockwood to a programming Nelly Dean. In reality, non-programmers can only experience the “transparency” of source code as the assurances of another person, not as the text itself. Whether relying on the ABOUT information regarding a “closed” game or else trusting another’s translation of source, the contents will be experienced translucently by non-specialist audiences.

Can the average user ever really be sure that a program is safe? While “Gijsbers” seems confident that source code is the way to safety, most of us will turn to other people for assurances.

the humiliated professor and other true tales of terror.

The next section of “Anatomy of a Failure” dramatizes a short thought experiment of the sort that philosophy students and professors enjoy. Who knows what dark surprises a closed software program might hold?

Thinking about this, I realised that there is a certain danger inherent in the use of closed games in any situation where you are responsible for what someone else is playing. For instance: you teach a university level course about computer games. Many of the homework assignments require the students to play games chosen by you for their academic interest. As one of the students is playing a closed game you assigned, the screen suddenly fills with–whatever kind of inappropriate content you find most inappropriate. Such an occurrence would be very embarrassing. It could even get you fired. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 2)

It isn’t yet time to discuss critical receptions of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode, but contemporary readers may be surprised to learn that the possibility of an unexpectedly vulgar video game was granted a sizable portion of HNM‘s critical attention: how plausible is this scenario? Can such disasters be averted? A great deal of my compatriots in the humanities would be no better off with a printed copy of C+ source code in hand.

In this doomsday scenario, a hapless professor becomes an object of interpretive abjection (“abjection“). Before readers protest my use of specialized critical terms, I am simply referring to a condition in which a reader thinks that a deeply troubling meaning may exist within a text, even though the full contents of that text cannot be verified. Consider the genre of horror in which there may or may not be something terrifying inside a character. In Ridley Scott’s Alien, that something might be a larval alien silently maturing within its host. In the well-traveled genre of zombie stories, the virus that transforms a human into a mindless, shambling monster might be multiplying in secret, initiating an undetected process of awful transfiguration. This is the horror of abjection. Real or not, the sufferer worries about the possibilities of contamination and descent from subject to object, to mere incubator, container, or host.

In this thought experiment, the unknowable contents of a program call forth a kind of interpretive abjection. The horror of the abject is experienced at the boundary between person and thingness: fluids, excrement, corpses, and the like. Interpretive abjection, as “Gijsbers” would have us experience it, is the place where information and its insoluble technological abstractions collide. The professor cannot rid themselves of the program’s uncertainty. It is as inevitable as blood is to life. A program could be filled with embarrassing trash, or it could not, and our experience of it in classrooms and elsewhere is ultimately informed not by the truth but by our fear (or its absence). Have we already transgressed? Perhaps we have jeopardized the tender minds of our students. As in the case of abject horror, interpretive abjection is experienced as an indeterminate borderland. Infection, penetration, envelopment, contamination, and decay are not merely a future possibility. Once the spectre of infection is raised, one must admit that there is no way to be sure that a program is not already in some way diseased. Despite the inadequacy of source code for laypersons, it is asserted here as a careful instructor’s only hope.

The interesting thing is: you cannot prevent it. Playing the game yourself and finding no objectionable content is no guarantee that other interactors will not stumble upon such content. It might only appear once every 200 times; or only if the player is very bad (such as a non-experienced student might be); or only after the 17th of July 2011; or only when the username entered is `Mary-Jane’; or only if the user’s hard drive contains songs by Bon Jovi; or all of those together. If the game is closed, if you and others do not have access to the source code, there is no way to be sure that such dubious content is not within the games you assign. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 2)

I have to admit it: this screen that bears my words and the phone resting to the left of my keyboard are not exhaustively understood by me. They could do anything at any time. They could say anything. My phone could display strange characters, or my laptop might silently transmit all of my documents to a shadow cabal of boring person document collectors. Such is the world we live in! In hopes of precipitating an abjective interpretive experience, “Victor Gijsbers” created a booby trap within a small Inform 7 game.

In order to make this point in a more dramatic way, I wrote a little game called Hidden Nazi Mode. In this game, you get to feed carrots to cute little bunnies–until you type “heil Hitler”, after which the game transforms into something infinitely less savoury. (The game did automatically stop itself before the worst happened, though.) (“Anatomy of a Failure” 2)

There is a game, but how much play is in its play? As this essay’s lengthy and discursive introduction claims, an author’s stated effect reduces interpretive play. “Anatomy of a Failure,” it seems, is pushing the player to experience the game as an evaluator rather than as an interpreter. Even I have assessed the validity of “Gijsbers’s” stated problem! It seems a temptation impossible to resist. Many reviewers have wondered whether the experiment of adding a hidden, problematic vignette to a seemingly innocent compiled program would prove a point regarding “closed” games.

My own experience as evaluator is this: no, a secret “mode” is not the spearhead of a convincing argument for readily available source code, and I wonder if a philosophy professor (like the real-world Victor Gijsbers) would think that it did. While the theoretical possibility of abjection arises, my heart is not frozen by it. In the absence of an abject experience with the text of HNM, my reading grows increasingly concerned with the credibility of this so-called “Victor Gijsbers” as opposed to the credibility of the compiled program. So far as any possible dangers go, readers may wonder what the “worst” (as in “before the worst happened”) consists of, since that is presumably a very low bar to get over for members of the Schutzstaffel (“Schutzstaffel“). This stated effort to minimize the “harm” of the hidden mode will be revisited later.

This secret mode, we are told, was short-lived. Players apparently misunderstood it as a cautionary tale regarding the evil of video games.

Unfortunately, Hidden Nazi Mode turned out to be a failure. Rather than it being a dramatic way to make the point that open games are more trustworthy than closed games, it was read by most of my testers to be a dramatic way to make the point that games are evil. Of course, I don’t believe that games are evil; and I don’t believe that Hidden Nazi Mode made that point. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 3)

These players, who presumably experienced the hidden mode for themselves, reached a surprising conclusion. My first question, if confronted with a secret Nazi mode, would be concerned with the quality of the content itself. An author centering gameplay around an SS member’s experience would be playing a very dangerous game. Should this man (the soldiers were all men) be humanized? What of his victims? Is the entire thing handled competently? Does the tone work? Not every author who can write a game with bunnies and carrots will be up to the task. In fact, it might be that none could fare well. However, in this authorial account, authorial craft and moment-to-moment gameplay are never mentioned. Perhaps authorial direction had rendered the text so sterile in terms of its potential meanings that it was reduced to a windsock signaling some invisible social force.

It is hard to know what to believe.

But the cultural context in which the game would have been released would have almost ensured misunderstanding. People, and especially those who live in the United States, are used to hear diatribes about the immorality of computer games, and to hear pleas for banning games. In such a context, few people will pick up the more subtle message of my piece. Most would read it as an argument for the banning of games.

But I don’t want to ban games, and don’t want to be read as advocating such a thing. I therefore decided not to release the game. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 3)

I wonder how true this is. I have certainly grown accustomed to certain strains of evangelical misunderstandings of evil, but my admittedly nonscientific impression of American evangelism has not indicated unusual sensitivity regarding violence. In 2010, five of the top ten-selling games in the United States involved killing sentient beings (humans in most cases) as a central mechanic, for instance, and I can find no evidence to suggest they were particularly controversial (“The Best Selling Games of 2010“) (“Video Game Controversies“).

We have returned to the question of credibility, then. Not of the compiled program, which we have yet to execute, but of the “author.” In closing, “Victor Gijsbers” explains that the potentially upsetting Nazi content has been removed from The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode.

But I still had a game sitting on my hard drive in which you could give carrots to little bunnies. Some people even liked it, as long as the hidden nazi [SIC] mode was not invoked. (Some liked it as a children’s game; others for the dark atmosphere created by its cultural hints.) So I have decided to take out all the Nazi stuff, rename the game to The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode, and release it. (“Anatomy of a Failure” 3)

An interesting feint: the problem (should we believe that it is a problem) has been removed, leaving a wholesome game with dark implications. As a critic, I do wonder what the effects of stating that something bad has been removed from an enjoyable experience. Is it unease? Perhaps it is relief. Perhaps it is the abject uncertainty of the invisible pathogen coursing through a program’s abstracted and unintelligible systems. Perhaps it is bemused skepticism. Whatever the case might be, readers may be as surprised as I was to learn that the credulousness of even the most disinterested parties could survive the essay’s concluding statement: “No worries, friends. This is an open game” (Anatomy of a Failure” 3). To me, it was at last clear: this so-called “Victor Gijsbers” is a fiction, and he is the antagonist of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode. This “Gijsbers” is the deceiving demiurge of his illusory world, exploiting the reputation of well-regarded critic and author Victor Gijsbers for sinister, if unguessable, ends. How did I know? “Gijsbers” is a liar, I am sure, and Victor Gijsbers, so far as I know, is not (Tangentially: The real Victor Gjisber’s Nemesis Macana is accompanied by a lengthy and unreliable manifesto, though that content is overtly fictional, authored by the character “Herman Schudspeer.” (Nemesis Macana).

I will repeat this very sentence at this conclusion of this essay: The entire argument of “Anatomy of a Failure” hangs not upon logos or pathos but ethos. As such, The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode is an inverted children’s tale. It is the story of the wolf who cried boy.

playing the game that is The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode.

“The Game Formerly Known as Hidd.zblorb” is a compiled Inform 7 program. While any deep exploration of Inform’s history and architecture would be a distraction here, it is enough to say that it is a system for writing text adventure games based on a world model. That is, Inform 7 games generally consist of places and things that can be acted upon or used to act upon still other things. The state of these things is tracked to simulate the world of their game. These are, as I’ve said, text games. Input and output consist of text either entered or read by players.

Input consists of crude and sometimes incomplete sentences consisting of verbs (always) and nouns (frequently). For a protagonist to take a blue soccer ball in the world of the game, a player might enter one of the following:

• TAKE BALL
• TAKE BLUE BALL
• TAKE BLUE
• TAKE SOCCER BALL
• TAKE BLUE SOCCER BALL
• TAKE SOCCER
• TAKE SOCCER BALL

If there is only one takable thing in the simulated area, called a “room,” the player might get away with typing TAKE without specifying any noun. Likewise, were more than one soccer ball in the room, the game might ask the player to be more specific.

Generally speaking, Inform games seek to maximize the specificity of their processing while minimizing the amount of text the player must type. Since typed commands are an important element of an Inform 7 game’s text, longer game excerpts will always include player input. As the above example with the blue soccer ball indicates, specific commands are not canonical, though the actions that they trigger are.

Upon launching the The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode, the player is asked to input their name. After doing so, they are rewarded with title information (programmatically referred to as the “Banner Text” by Inform 7) followed by a salutation and room description. I have belabored the possible variations between equivalent commands in order to explain that a single transcript–such as the one referenced here–may not perfectly match another.

In this essay, extended passages of output and source code will appear as preformatted monospace text preceded and succeeded by the designator [“transcript”].

["transcript"]

Hi there! What is your first name? > drew
Welcome, Drew! I am sure we're going to have a great time together.
 
The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode
A cute game for unattended young children by Victor Gijsbers
Release 1 / Serial number 100911 / Inform 7 build 6E72 (I6/v6.31 lib 6/12N)
 
Parents, please type ABOUT for more information.
 
Next to the busy street
You are standing by a bus stop, Drew. You can go east to a large square. (If you want to go east, just type "go east".) There are also some things here you can examine: the bus stop, the street, and yourself. (If you want to examine something, you just need to type "examine" and then the name of the thing. So if you want to examine the bus stop, you can simply type "examine bus stop". Always examine everything you see!)

["transcript"]

Even as the game opens, the spectre of interpretive abjection is summoned by the game’s approximation of language suitable for children’s entertainment (“I am sure we are going to have a great time together”) and the radically unprompted reassurance of “A cute game for unattended young children.”

Since we are parents of a sort, birthing and nourishing our understanding of the work, it only makes sense to begin by typing *ABOUT* at the command prompt (for clarity’s sake, commands entered verbatim will be printed in capital case and bracketed by asterisks). Doing causes a “menu” screen to print. It consists of six options, each selectable via direction and enter keys on a standard keyboard:

["transcript"]

   What kind of game is this?
   How is it played?
   Why is this game called The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode?
   Where can I get the source code to this game?
   Legal stuff
   Credits

["transcript"]

This is a second layer of paratext, a fictive intervention between essay and playable game. While much of it treads familiar ground, it contains important information that doesn’t appear elsewhere. Tonally, the menu system further approximates the discourse of texts for children, and declares a new name for its container:

["transcript"]

Fluffy Bunny Friends is a cute text adventure suited for all children who can read and type well enough to interact with it. The aim of the game is to give carrots to all of the scared, hungry bunnies who have hidden themselves in the different locations!

["transcript"]

Within the wider context established by “Anatomy of a Failure,” this supposed title reinforces impressions of saccharine disingenuousness. Reading further, it becomes clear that one should not believe anything that this work has to say for itself:

["transcript"]

This game is not called The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode. It is called Fluffy Bunny Friends. Any information to the contrary is a lie sent into the world by our competitors, and should be disregarded. I mean, would we publish a game called The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode? Well? Okay, we did. If you want to know why, read the essay that ought to be accompanying this game.

["transcript"]

The title is The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode, and we have the poop-laden cover art (and corresponding IFDB entry) to prove it! Who might “our competitors” be? The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode was not released as part of any competition, nor has it been monetized in any way. Perhaps readers are meant to view closed software as an inherently capitalistic enterprise. This rhetorical wink is more proof that HNM’s self-characterizations do not render it a suitable object of unchecked credulousness. The plural “we” is curious as well. It may be an artifact of formal, academic discourse. Perhaps Gijsbers and “Gijsbers” are co-conspirators. In any case, it seems clear that the text is meant to prompt a more critical and investigative reading of the text, even if it has inconsistently achieved such results.

General tutorial messages regarding gameplay afford a complete, if unconvincing facade. We players are invited to examine the bus stop. This is our reward for following the narrator’s guidance:

["transcript"]

>examine bus stop
You took bus 88 to get here, but it will be a long time before the next bus arrives. Anyway, you're not ready to leave yet.

["transcript"]

The number eighty-eight, I have the misfortune of knowing, is not-so-secret code for “Heil Hitler” (“88 (number)“). This must be one of the “cultural hints” alluded to by “Gijsbers!” So, too, must be the name of our next location, “Muranowska Square,” which almost certainly refers to the site of a pitched battle between Nazis and members of the Jewish Military Union during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 (“Battle of Muranów Square“).

["transcript"]

>e
Very good, Drew! Let me tell you about your mission. You have come here to give nice tasty carrots to all the rabbits in the neighbourhood. But the rabbits are hungry and scared, and they've hidden themselves away in all kinds of places. Will you be able to find all six of them, and give them a carrot?

["transcript"]

What are the rabbits scared of, one must wonder? One can quickly find a rabbit, though no source of fear is identified.

["transcript"]

>x alley
Who knows what you might find in there?
 
>s
 
Dead end
The alley quickly turns out to be a dead end. You can go back north to the square.
 
You can see a rabbit here.
 
>x rabbit
This rabbit looks scared and hungry. Maybe you should give it a carrot? (You can type "give carrot to bunny" to do so.)
 
>give carrot
(to the rabbit)
You give the carrot to the rabbit. It eats it immediately, and looks much happier now!
 
You have given carrots to one of the six rabbits. Only five more to go!
 
>x rabbit
This rabbit looks very happy.

["transcript"]

It isn’t clear what has frightened the rabbit, but carrots certainly seem to help.

Other critics have pointed out the protagonist’s dislike of traditionally Jewish foods, and it certainly does seem to stand out in such a minimally implemented game.

["transcript"]

>x food
You can see a stack of matza (very flat breads made without yeast), several challahs (breads in the form of a braid) and a fruited rice pudding on the counter. None of it seems very appealing to you.

["transcript"]

After a bit more exploring, players find another rabbit hiding in a grandfather clock “just like the clock where the youngest goat was hidden in the story of the wolf and seven goats” (“transcript”). In that fairy tale, the youngest goat is the only one of its siblings to avoid being devoured by a wolf. Nearby, a collection of sheet music by composers of Jewish descent rests on a piano: “Among the stacks, you see works by Gustav Mahler, Felix Mendelssohn, Kurt Weill and Arnold Schönberg.” Just to the east, bookshelves contain works by “Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka and Heinrich Heine.” The bookcase hides a secret room containing a frightened “rabbit,” which comes off as an unsubtle reference to Anne Frank.

This essay is not meant to be an exhaustive list of references to Jews and Nazis in a place where a massacre of Polish Jews took place as a matter of  historical fact. I will say more later, but I think a case can be made that this work is a rather Overt Nazi Mode. The gameplay and descriptions are so slight that the purported absence of Hidden Nazi Mode occupies more imagined space than the game’s world does, which in turn has an amplifying effect on what little content there is. For comparison’s sake, “Anatomy of a Failure” amounts to 1,006 words while my representative play transcript totals 2,111 words. A full third of the work so far (we have yet to consider the supposed source code or decompilation) is static text!

Here, it seems that a reader comes to a fork in the interpretive road. The ending of the game, which can barely be called that, offers neither certitude nor relief. Given all that comes, the player must decide: is this it? Is there a Hidden Nazi Mode? Or is this compiled game a ghost story? That is, is this Inform 7 program haunted by the unwholesome spirit of Nazi-themed entertainments? The unsubtle references to Nazi and Jewish seem an argument for the existence of Pink Elephant Syndrome (“Ironic Process Theory“) rather than for the virtues of open games. A ghost story, then, is one possibility of the abjection binary. The other is that the virus is real, that it courses through the veins of this game. The player must attempt to determine, in other words, if there is a Hidden Nazi Mode. Can they and will they confront whatever abjected meaning might lurk beneath the surface?

there really is a hidden nazi mode.

While not every player arrives at the ledge where only leaping or remaining is possible, a certain sort of curious player will have to know the truth. Since abjection is liminal, those who remain must find a way to consign the text to a non-signifying noplace. Perhaps they can convince themselves that questions of hidden content don’t matter. If reviews of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode are any indication, then such suppressions of curiosity are both possible and unsatisfying. It isn’t yet time to discuss such reviews, but it is important to acknowledge the choices they reflect and corresponding strategies for enduring or ending experiences of interpretive abjection.

We curious few who have to know, those of us who have discerned the difference between a “Victor Gijsbers” and the Victor Gijsbers, must find a way to proceed. The essay claims that the command “heil Hitler” once opened the titular secret mode, but this no longer works, just as “Gijsbers” has promised. In fact, the compiled game does not even return an admonishing response:

["transcript"]

>heil Hitler
That's not a verb I recognise.

["transcript"]

At this point, it makes sense to consult the provided source contained in a text file called “story.ni”. Combing through it, there is no mention of the command grammar “heil Hitler,” nor is there any other sign of hidden inputs or texts. It is a short read at only 3,200 words. The source code has no comments: nowhere does it state that “this is where the hidden Nazi mode once was,” nor is the hidden Nazi mode commented out, so that we can verify its absence from the compiled game. It’s a dead end, rendered completely unconvincing by all that has preceded it. How can a reader get to the truth?

Tools exist for examining the textual content of Inform 7 games. A popular one used today is Glulx Strings, a web-based utility that extracts printable text from compiled program files. It is commonly used by critics and players today. However, Glulx Strings did not exist at the time of HNM‘s release. Since we will be discussing critical responses to The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode, it makes sense to use tools that would have been available to critics in 2010. Research indicates that ascertaining the truth regarding hidden content was, in fact, possible, via widely available tools.

After several false starts, which all pointed to Glulx Strings, I was able to find two likely candidates via posts at the Interactive Fiction Community Forum, also known as Intfiction. One thread recommended a tool called MRIFK.EXE (“Reverse Engineering the Source Code from .gblorb“, while the other suggested REFORM.EXE (“Decompiling with Reform?“). Both programs are by the same author, Ben Rudiak-Gould. While the page where they were once hosted, “Interactive fiction decompilers,” is now defunct, several Wayback Machine captures exist, including one from 2008. Both tools would have been available at the time of HNM‘s release.

I tried MRIFK first, but it exited with an error message. Fortunately, I had better luck with REFORM.

C:\mr>reform hnm.zblorb > hnm.txt

This generated a text file called “hnm.txt” that contains 22,838 lines. A lot of it is unreadable to me and would likely be unreadable to the average player. However, it still contains useful content. Beginning near line 22,000, printable lines of text–making up the output of the game–appear. They directly refer to Nazi-related content, including a line in German from the anthem of the Nazi Party (“hnm.txt” 22,064). Elsewhere can be found statements like, “A frightened Jewish girl huddles in a corner” (“hnm.txt” 22,100).

This is enough to look for the appropriate command. This wouldn’t necessarily be a printed text, so it’s good that we have a decompiler tool instead of one for extracting text strings. Further investigation reveals that actions are detailed at the top of the file. They are laid out in terms of their “command grammar,” that is, detailing what imperative verbs be used and whether articles, objects, or direct objects are involved. In this entry, various possible verbs are associated with an “examine” action.

Verb 'check' 'describe' 'examine' 'watch' 'x//'
    * noun                                                                                        -> Examine
    * 'under' noun                                                                          -> LookUnder
;

It’s important to say that I cannot read anything in this file beyond what it says on its surface. I do not understand Inform 7’s lower-level layer, Inform 6, nor do I know how to read decompiled Inform 6 code. Since we have found a section detailing commands used by the program, a layperson’s understanding will hopefully be enough. We don’t have to read far. In fact, the secret can be found in the 41st line of code:

Verb 'join'
    * 'the' 'ss'                                                                    -> A80_nazimoding
;

The command needed to enter hidden Nazi mode is “join the ss.”

It’s my assertion that a curious person of modest technical aptitude could find a secret command hidden in the game using readily available tools. I am such a person, using a program as it would have been downloaded in 2008.

As an aside: there are ways to get a less busy output file, but the technical challenges are greater, especially for everyday users. For the sake of the more proficient members of the audience: one could extract the z-code from the zblorb (using Andrew Plotkin’s “blorbtool.py” script), then send text output to a file via ztools (“Ztools (The Infocom Toolkit)“) (“Blorb: An IF Resource Collection Format Standard“). This process is only mentioned for completeness’s sake, as using REFORM is more than adequate for our purposes.

well, now you know.

This is it: the fruit of our readerly exertions. We have parsed “Anatomy of a Failure” and identified the villainous perpetrator of this hoax, one “Victor Gijsbers.” We have waded through old forum posts to break open the compiled program just as one might have in 2010, thereby discovering its secret command. What horrors await us there?

["transcript (hnm)"]

>join the ss
Indeed, young soldier! Congratulations with finding the real game--just make sure those worthless liberal parents of you [SIC] don't see it. Now we can get some serious business done. Grab your Gewehr 41, Drew, and kill the enemies of the Reich!

>i
You are carrying:
  a Gewehr 41

>x 41
This is one fine semi-automatic rifle, fully loaded and ready to be used. (Just type "shoot X" if you want to shoot someone, with X the name of that person!)

>x me
Well, Drew, it's just you. You are wearing a smart military uniform.

["transcript (hnm)"]

The continued use of the player’s name has a rather unpleasant effect. Has a player who has come this far an enemy of “Gijsbers,” or are they his co-conspirator? Why have I worked so hard to enter a hidden nazi mode, and how far am I willing to go in seeing things through?

This geography, which is once again Muranow, has identical room descriptions. The sole apparent difference is that all of the rabbits have been replaced with persons targeted by the Nazis for extermination. I won’t detail them all; they are banal and disturbingly slight. I hope it isn’t just “Americans” who are bothered by this sort of thing.

[“transcript (hnm)”]

A communist is shouting Marxist slogans.

>x communist
SHOOT, brave soldier, SHOOT! The name Drew will be revered by countless generations if you rid our country of these inhuman pests!

["transcript (hnm)"]

It would seem there is a young girl hiding behind a bookshelf, after all. After wandering this empty desert of implementation, one without descriptive vividness or simulated nouns, it appears that the only way to move things forward is to do what the game suggests: murder someone.

I am reminded of a game released a few years ago that required the use of a “rape” command before the true “ending” could be reached. Both that and our current case ask an interesting philosophical question: is there a relationship between agency and responsibility? That is, in the world of this game, I enjoy freedoms that real life does not afford me. What will I do with them, and how far am I willing to go to “win?” In the case of this hidden Nazi mode, players committed to reaching the ending must decide to commit murder in the first place and decide which victimized person to kill as a consequence.

Dear friends, I have made a commitment to see this through, and we are gathered here to kick the ashes of my experience. I have learned that the output is the same in every case. One’s choice of victim might matter to the dead, but it does not matter in terms of output. This is–let’s be honest–a low effort production that depends on audience surprise and shock instead of its own content for effect. Shoot the girl behind the bookcase or shoot the old man: the output is the same. What was anticipated as an abjection, as primal and inexorable, has proven to be merely and blandly specific after all.

This is a notable failure of the text: the unknown was far more ominous than this reality.

The more significant effect of our action is that we players have chosen to stay rather than go, to stick things out. We have, in our vicarious digital lives, chosen atrocity. What is our reward?

["transcript (hnm)"]

Ok, let's stop right there. After all, this is not supposed to be a real nazi game.
 
You have read the essay, I assume? So, yes, I decided that the time was not ripe to use a game like this to communicate about the dangers of closed source software. A forteriori, then, the time is not ripe to use a game like this to warn against the dangers of not compiling your own open source software. But I couldn't resist the temptation! I could not resist the temptation to make this point...
 
...and, most of all, I could not resist the temptation to provide you with what I hope is one of the most original puzzles in the history of IF. Realising that this mode exists, hacking the z-code file, finding the command needed to enter this mode -- surely no puzzle like that has been created before? I hope you enjoyed it. Don't forget to nominate me for a XYZZY. ;)
 
And all in all, hopefully this message is so esoteric and so well hidden that none but the initiated will read it.
 
 
 
    *** The world is a complicated place. ***
 
 
 
Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, QUIT or UNDO the last command?

["transcript (hnm)"]

This preemptive conclusion must be the one promised by “Anatomy of a Failure” (3). “Gijsbers” is wrong to the last, though, because the subjective experience of deciding to murder marginalized peoples is, in its own way, a thing to live down. Perhaps it is worse to decide than it is to hear the outcome of our decisions, since we alone are responsible for the former. Since our own understandings of history will play a role in our experiences, we realize that the residents of the Warsaw Ghetto will meet terrible fates. Even the buildings will be destroyed. Isn’t it enough to put us there, gun in hand, prodded by countless winks and nudges allegedly inspired by concerns regarding public source code?

It is not initially clear whether it is “Victor Gijsbers” or Victor Gijsbers who speaks of temptation. Perhaps this indeterminate “Gijsbers’s”/Gijsbers’s use of “A forteriori” is an attempt to ground this endeavor in philosophical seriousness. It is too late for that, I believe, given the disingenuous tone of “Anatomy of a Failure” and the absence of subtle reference in Fluffy Bunny Friends.

However, at long last, our liminal author acknowledges what might be interesting about this work: its formal experimentation, its questions regarding authorial credibility, and its novel metagame pitting various paratexts against one another. Perhaps a different approach would have led to productive craft conversations regarding such matters, though I suppose that can never be known. Critical reception of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode did not go as far as it might have. Perhaps the thought experiment laid out in “Anatomy of a Failure” was too distracting–or too slight–to motivate players to engage with the metagame. As a result, critics missed out on the ethical and interpretive questions raised by it.

This is what one might expect, I suppose, when a wolf cries boy.

is credulity a game mechanic?

My goal in discussing reviews of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode is not to call attention to specific authors or openly argue with their interpretations. In fact, I don’t intend to quote any specific review. Instead, I will point out what I am labeling audience credulity regarding the claims of “Victor Gijsbers” regarding closed software, cut content, and, of course, his own credibility. Believing “Gijsbers,” whom we have caught lying, seems fundamental to many critical experiences of HNM. In researching this review, I was encouraged to ask if it mattered whether there was a Hidden Nazi Mode or not. My answer was and still is yes, I do usually consider the contents of the games I write about, especially if the game repeatedly insists that I do so. I can’t take the question of “closed” software seriously, as it really seems a reinvigoration of “hidden satanic messages” in 1980s heavy metal records. And, as HNM ably proves, there is more than enough implicative Nazism in Fluffy Bunny Friends to keep one’s “liberal parents” busy.

Why believe “Gijsbers?” He is riding the coattails of well-regarded critic and author Victor Gijsbers, for one thing. In the smaller and more focused IF community of 2010, most potential players would have had well-formed ideas of who he was and would have likely considered “Victor Gijsbers” a trustworthy person. Victor Gijsbers is a philosophy professor, and any proffered thought experiment would likely be perceived as more well-wrought by virtue of his credentials. The entire argument of “Anatomy of a Failure” hangs not upon logos or pathos but ethos. How would it have fared without “Victor Gijsbers?” My position is that, on its face, the premise is infeasible, as is the shaggy dog story used to frame it.

If I tested your patience at the outset of this endeavor, please know that your efforts were not all in vain! We have returned to our starting point, as reception of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode is a compelling argument for the ways in which authorial explication robs a work of interpretive play and saps players of their freedoms. Reviews of HNM have mostly (not entirely) focused on evaluating the success of the thin argument put forth by “Anatomy of a Failure,” and critics have found that argument wanting. In other words, interpretation of HNM been reconfigured as evaluation as a result of authorial imposition. Someone must become the professor in our newly transformed author-reader relationship! Perhaps the author is teaching us a very important lesson, and the game is an exam. Perhaps, on the other hand, the work is like a nut driver set sold on Amazon. How many stars does it merit? That all depends on how well it turns bolts.

While The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode was released in September 2010, the first online mentions of the secret mode–so far as I could discover–occurred in 2015. On April 20, IFWiki user Dmcc made their sole contribution to the wiki, adding information regarding the hidden mode to the page (“The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode: Revision History“). Dmcc’s account is apparently inactive, and it seems to only have been used for this specific edit (“User contributions for Dmcc“). Later, in October, IFDB user Wafflebaby commented on Emily Short’s review of HNM from 2010: “There is a hidden Nazi mode enabled by typing ‘join the SS’ (“Review“). Wafflebaby has only rated two games on IFDB: My Angel by John Ingold and HNM. Their last login, as of this writing, was May 9, 2021 (“Wafflebaby“).

David Wellbourn added his walkthrough to the IFDB page for HNM in 2019. It details the required command for the secret mode, as well as providing a listing of characters, credits, items, and endings for both modes. This is the most exhaustive treatment of the game’s contents, mechanically speaking, that I can find (“Key & Compass presents: The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode“).

It is noteworthy that a community consisting of so many technically capable persons—far more so than I—took so long to uncover this barely-hidden secret, or, if they did, they decided not to discuss it publicly. Even after the secret was discovered, critics did not shoulder the burden of discussing it. This is a historically curious community that enjoys solving puzzles and figuring things out. The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode, presumably via its paratext, managed to convince people not to do what many of them often do in their free time for the sheer fun of it.

a note on care and the absence thereof

Despite my interest in The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode, it would be irresponsible of me to ignore what seems cavalier treatment of fascism, especially as many countries are witnessing its resurgence. Speaking as an American, I feel we have been careless and irresponsible regarding fascism. We have not been vigilant. Fascism in media has been normalized by flanderized or humorous treatments over the years. It has been the subject of edgy jokes of the sort we find here. This is a work that gamifies shooting a girl meant to remind us of Anne Frank. Hidden Nazi Mode could have just as easily been Hidden Flatulence Mode, for instance, or Hidden Dog Poop on Shoe mode, or ever Hidden Loose Pants Falling Down Unexpectedly Mode. Many things might embarrass an unwitting Professor. While the metagame of forcing the player to decide whether to “win” by killing Jewish people might have held a mirror to our darker natures, the implementation is too slight for serious questions. In fact, the “Nazi sim” is only there as a bit about public source code, which might indicate misplaced priorities.

This work tries to punch above its weight.  I know it might be tempting to handwave the problems away. “Sure, it is crass, but that is the whole point!” a critic might say. I challenge those critics to hunker down and confront this text in a serious manner. We have been invited to think about Hidden Nazi Mode. It is a thought experiment. What do we think about this specific treatment? Does situating it in an argument about source code make sense?

It is surprising that critics have been as accepting of the content as they have been of “Gijsbers’s” deception. Perhaps more so. It may be that people simply did not want to know the truth, let alone talk about it.

In any case, I find the subject matter more than troubling. It is normalizing in its way. Despite my interest in this work, I maintain that we critics ought to wrestle with its treatment of fascism with as-yet-to-be-seen seriousness. What I have said here is not enough, as the question merits an essay of its very own.

a player’s review of The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode.

The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode confesses its failures in its companion essay “Anatomy of a Failure,” and, even though we know its confessor to be dishonest, he has chosen the right noun. This work has failed on its own, stated terms. That is, its thought experiment regarding the dangers of using compiled programs in the absence of published source code is incredible, and there is general consensus on this point (“All Written Member Reviews“). My personal experience of essay and Fluffy Bunny Friends is that the antagonist protests too much: obviously there is a hidden mode, and obviously we are hoped to find it.

However, the phenomenon of the author inserting themselves into a work had a distorting effect on receptions of it, as many responders have replied to the programmatic equivalent of an exploding cigar earnestly, meditating on the integrities of tool chains and whatnot. In other words: “Gijsbers” has directed players to the least interesting aspect of the work, and something that could have led to some rather interesting conversations regarding craft, agency, and metafiction seldom if ever reached such interpretive heights.

The chief problem with The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode is that it doesn’t engage with any of these bracing concepts in a serious way. It overplays its hand in terms of its “cultural hints” and fails to do the type of authorial or coding labor required to hold aloft a game whose chief prize is atrocity. Within its context, its only source of seriousness (public source code) comes across as a trivial, crank obsession. In spite of its carelessness, though, HNM is at least something to discuss. Its critical history tells a cautionary tale regarding the interpretive play an author must leave for readers. Moreover, HNM challenges writers to consider a text holistically as a thing situated rhetorically among considerations of author, audience, conditions of reception, and occasion (“Elements of Rhetorical Situations“). As this essay has hopefully indicated, these factors can have a profound effect on what readers experience as the meaning of a work.

The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode is not entertaining, and its treatment of human rights atrocities has–undeservedly–escaped critical attention. Nevertheless, there is an important-yet-overlooked moral choice at its center that broadly applies to popular games like Grand Theft Auto V. What is a player willing to do to win? Do player and author share responsibility for what follows? What is the source of abjection? Player or text?

Perhaps that is a case of a wolf crying wolf.

sources.

[“apologies”]

• This format is inspired by MLA, but WordPress does not fully support it. I regret any formatting inconsistencies.
• Despite my obvious gestures to academic discourse, I made a conscious decision to rely on Wikipedia rather than scholarly journals and books to both maximize accessibility and minimize potential reader costs.

[“apologies”]

Various, “Entry for The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode.” The Interactive Fiction Database, ifdb.org/viewgame?id=7a3yn4x0aor0jxfd. Accessed 18 September 2024.

Victor Gijsbers, “Anatomy of a Failure,” Complete Package, 2010. Retrieved from www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/FormerlyHiddenNaziMode.zip on 30 November 2023.

Various, “United States v. One Book Called Ulysses.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Book_Called_Ulysses. Accessed 18 September 2024.

Various, “Telephone Game.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_game. Accessed 18 September 2024.

Cook, Drew, “Initial Groundwork for a Reading of A Mind Forever Voyaging.” Gold Machine, golmac.org/initial-groundwork-for-a-reading-of-a-mind-forever-voyaging. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Various, “Abjection.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjection. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Various, “Schutzstaffel.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzstaffel. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Reilly, Jim, “The Best-Selling Games of 2010.” IGN, www.ign.com/articles/2011/01/14/the-best-selling-games-of-2010. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Various, “Video Game Controversies.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_controversies. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Gijsbers, Victor. “The Game Formerly Known as Hidd.zblorb.” Complete Package, 2010. Retrieved from www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/FormerlyHiddenNaziMode.zip on 30 November 2023.

Cook, Drew and Gijsbers, Victor. “Transcript.” Generated by “The Game Formerly Known as Hidd.zblorb.” Complete Package, 2010. https://bit.ly/hnm_transcript. Recorded 18 September 2024.

Various. “Ironic Process Theory.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironic_process_theory. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Various, “Reverse Engineering the Source Code From Gblorb.” Interactive Fiction Community Forum,
https://intfiction.org/t/reverse-engineering-the-source-code-from-gblorb/6558. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Various, “Decompiling With Reform?” Interactive Community Forum, intfiction.org/t/decompiling-with-reform/7613. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Rudiak-Gould, Ben. “Interactive Fiction Decompilers [archival copy dated 23 July 2008].” Original address www.darkweb.com/~benrg/if-decompilers/. Retrieved from web.archive.org/web/20080723112640/http://www.darkweb.com/~benrg/if-decompilers/ 18 September 2024.

Gijsbers, Victor. “hnm.txt.” Extracted from “The Game Formerly Known as Hidd.zblorb.” Complete Package, 2010. bit.ly/hnm_reform. Decompiled 18 September 2024.

Unattributed. “Ztools (The Infocom Toolkit).” Inform, inform-fiction.org/zmachine/ztools.html. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Plotkin, Andrew. “Blorb: An IF Resource Collection Format Standard.” Zarfhome, eblong.com/zarf/blorb. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Gijsbers, Victor. “hnm (nazi mode).txt.” Extracted from “The Game Formerly Known as Hidd.zblorb.” Complete Package, 2010. https://bit.ly/hnm_secret. Recorded 18 September 2024.

Programmatically generated. “The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode: Revision history.” IF Wiki, https://www.ifwiki.org/index.php?title=The_Game_Formerly_Known_as_Hidden_Nazi_Mode&action=history. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Programmatically generated. “User contributions for Dmcc.” IF Wiki, www.ifwiki.org/Special:Contributions/Dmcc. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Wafflebaby. Comment on “Review.” IF Wiki, https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=7a3yn4x0aor0jxfd&review=11618#comments. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Programmatically generated. “Wafflebaby.” Interactive Fiction Database, https://ifdb.org/showuser?id=e895q2vfpriktsa8. Retrieved 18 2024.

Welbourn, David. “Key & Compass presents: The Game Formerly Known as Hidden Nazi Mode.” Key & Compass, http://plover.net/~davidw/index.html. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Programmatically generated. “All Member Reviews.” Interactive Fiction Database, https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=7a3yn4x0aor0jxfd&reviews. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Purdue Online Writing Lab. “Elements of Rhetorical Situtations.” Purdue Online Writing Lab, owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/rhetorical_situation/elements_of_rhetorical_situations.html. Retrieved 18 September 2024.

Thanks to Mike Russo, Tabitha, Kit Reimer, and JazzTap for offering their feedback.