Gold Machine

Thinking our way through despair.

Almost Tragic

In a previous post, I attempted to find a way to read the ending of Trinity. There are a number of challenges for the reader. The question of inevitability, for instance, is a vexation. If the “final” failure of the game’s “win” state cannot be avoided, then how can the Wabewalker die on the way there? Similarly, one might wonder how causality would permit, as only one example, the player to throw the bag of crumbs into the pond, rendering the game unwinnable. Rather than answers, I could only offer ideas. Perhaps, given the ending’s explicit mention of quantum mechanics, this duality can be experienced in terms of the many-worlds interpretation. Another possibility is that Trinity calls attention to itself as an adventure game, and failure was an expected convention of the form in those days. It is often as simple as that in this particular field of criticism.

Considerations of inevitability spilled into a discussion of tragedy. Certainly, tragedy can be experienced as a kind of poetics of the inevitable. While critics have invested in the idea of a tragic Trinity, I have argued that the formulation simply doesn’t work. In terms of its themes, there are some shared components with both pre-Aristotelian and Aristotelian forms of tragedy. The best way to see this is to strip tragedy of content and examine it in terms of its machinery. While I won’t restate my argument, one particular feature of tragedy is irreconcilably absent from Trinity: community.

The Wabewalker’s journey doesn’t affect a community. The Wabewalker, in fact, has no community. They know a terrible secret that nobody can know. The “communities” (Kensington Gardens and Nagasaki) we players see are vaporized. Another problem is that the tragic tends to assert an orderly world that operates according to human principles: law, justice, various community values, and so on. Humanity as dramatized by Trinity, on the other hand, is a force of cosmic lawlessness.

I think there is a relatable reason for mislabeling dark or negative events, be they fictional or real, as tragic. The tragic is inevitable, yes, but it is also a way forward. In its wake, communities come together to connect, to empathize, to make progress. How reassuring! Who wouldn’t want an alternative to confronting the possibility of a capricious and uncaring universe? Unfortunately, denying us such comforts is what Trinity has been up to all along.

To say all is futile is a hard saying. Who can bear to hear it?

Is There An Easy Way Out?

Without the resolution and human connectedness afforded by tragedy, the ending of Trinity feels quite dire. Apparently, the Wabewalker is trapped in a cycle: they must repeat the ending of the story again and again in order to maintain the “limited” destructiveness of atomic weapons as we know it. This is a bit like a particularly nasty episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s hard to imagine, for instance, encountering the dolphin an infinite number of times. The easiest possibility–for both the Wabewalker and us–is to imagine that the grip of causality is not so firm after all.

I’ve repeatedly asserted that individuals are not always important in Trinity, despite its paratext’s constant insistence that such details mean a lot. Critics seem to agree. However, I hope this series has convinced a few readers that it is instead the movement of humanity as a cosmic force that is significant. As an example, I’ve suggested–to wide agreement–that atomic weapons would have appeared even if J. Robert Oppenheimer had been a tax attorney. Someone else would have led the way instead. Perhaps that is true of the Wabewalker, too. Someone must sabotage the test, because it is a necessary element in Humanity’s upward climb into greater and greater destructiveness. It is not clear, however, that the someone must be our protagonist. The Wabewalker could quit or die. Perhaps they could find a bomb shelter in London. Who’s to say that wouldn’t happen? After all, those boots in the crypt belonged to some dead person before the Wabewalker claimed them. Somebody else will do it!

That doesn’t work. Forgive my lack of technical terminology here, but the vibe of Trinity is all wrong for that kind of escape. This entire text and all the hours we’ve spent playing (and reading this series!) never even hint at the possibility that anything can be escaped. There are no branching paths and no alternative solutions to problems. The ending falls on us with all the implacability of a curse. Readers who hope to resist the despair of Trinity‘s ending will have to seek out other options.

If I had to Do It All Over Again

Some readers have invoked Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence as a way to get beyond the apparent despair of Trinity‘s ending. It is, I feel, a better strategy then casting about for narrative loopholes. Instead, the Wabewalker (and we readers, too), can confront the paradoxical cycle of causation with existential courage.

While this is not a philosophy paper, I should say that Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence first appeared as a kind of thought experiment in The Gay Science. The basic question that it asks is whether one would happily repeat their actions across eternity if time operated as an endlessly repeating series of identical cycles. The implications are suitably horrific, and yet there is a rightness about appealing to the sufficiency of existential courage. Only joy in life and individual authenticity–even in the moments when life is miserable–can render eternal recurrence tolerable.

However, the question it asks isn’t the same one that Trinity asks. How could we players ensure that the Wabewalker is existentially authentic? Perhaps more important, what choices do they actually make? It might be that, on a meta level, the player might regret finishing the game, but the story itself is not framed in terms of decisions or existential courage. The word I’ve used repeatedly is “inevitable,” and, perhaps oddly, eternal recurrence is not particularly focused on inevitability in that sense. Rather, its question is what the individual would will to be inevitable. What matters is whether or not a person is willing to commit to and affirm their decisions, even if they had to repeat their actions forever.

Trinity ultimately isn’t that kind of story. The only thing we know about the Wabewalker is that they are the kind of self-involved citizen that plagues American civic life. Running through a magical door to escape an ICBM is never presented as a character-defining choice, for example.

My other objection to this reading is that it doesn’t acknowledge the horror of the situation or of a horrified subjectivity.

Repetition and Interiority

A third possibility might be Kierkegaard’s concept of repetition. While it isn’t adapted to the sort of cosmic time prank we experience at the end of Trinity, it does present an idea of subjective interiority that can reconfigure the boredom and sorrow of the repeated cycles as something reflective and deep. The Wabewalker knows nothing about the situation or even their own objectives (a recent informal poll at intfiction revealed that players did not realize that they were meant to sabotage the bomb) initially, but what will they know on repeated cycles? Even if events cannot change, the subjectivity of the Wabewalker certainly will. Although the description of the park does not change at the end, we players see it differently. Presumably, the Wabewalker does, too.

By emphasizing personal growth and subjective experience, the Kierkegaardian repetition offers more hope than Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. However, it also seems inadequate. While interiority can yield up a way to persevere in such adverse conditions, it seems too fragile and exhaustible to endure across infinity. A Kierkegaardian concept of repetition also falls short because, like eternal recurrence, it emphasizes the individual in ways that Trinity does not.

Kierkegaardian faith might fare better as a “way out,” but the world of Trinity offers no such comforts.

Absurdity as a Negation of the Tragic

Perhaps the way is not out but in. What if the player and Wabewalker alike could “learn to stop worrying and love the bomb?” Having come this far, you may be already convinced that Trinity is not a tragedy. Rather, as I have said, it is a cosmic horror, and despite the puzzles, the Wabewalker witnesses rather than acts upon its events, managing only to work their way up to zero (a bomb that doesn’t destroy New Mexico). It’s an ending that surprised many readers: asking around at intfiction, I found that almost every respondent expected the Wabewalker’s actions to have a positive outcome.

I don’t think Infocom’s earlier Infidel could have taught players to experience Trinity‘s ending differently. While Infidel‘s protagonist is not tragic, either–though perhaps some communities are better off without him–his fate indicates that bad things happen to bad people. In an Aristotelian sense, the protagonist of Infidel is most certainly flawed and he has his moment of recognition. Infidel is utterly unlike Trinity, in other words, because its proximity to tragedy implies a world of justice, first of all, and moreover because it focuses on the subjective reality of its protagonist.

Beyond the borders of the ethical or moral, there must be something. I have used the term “horror” repeatedly. A plane crash is a disaster; it can be explained via narrative or science, but it is too nonsensical to be tragedy. We haven’t talked about the roadrunner, or the colors of the boots. They’re a bit silly, don’t you think? The wisecracking editorializer who says things like “Gnomon is an island.” What a strange tonal maneuver!

Atomic weapons are an absurdity. Their horrors–cosmic beyond reckoning–cannot be made sense of. They are beyond the individual. They have gone beyond history, in the sense that their power resists our narrative capabilities. Their mere existence is an argument against the possibility of a moral and reasonable universe. The Abrahamic God never granted anyone–not even David–such powers. How many animals died over the course of the several atomic tests in the Marshall islands? It must be a number that defies reason. It isn’t possible to imagine the semi trucks or circus tents they would fill. If we seated every child maimed or killed by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in movie theaters, I wonder how many theaters they might occupy. It is impossible, for me, to picture it. I would not be brave enough to sit with them and watch some well-liked film for children.

This is the absurd: beyond narrative, beyond history, beyond morality, beyond hope, beyond faith.

Theaters of Absurdity and War

“Whoah, Drew,” you might say, “it’s dark, sure, but let’s not get crazy.” As I’ve already said, there is no honest way to get out of the ending of Trinity. I believe it offers only two outcomes. These outcomes, curiously, are as much for readers as they are for the Wabewalker. The first possibility is despair. We imagine the Wabewalker’s subjective experience–it is never described–as miserable resignation. They are trapped in a hopeless and brutal cycle, unable to die or stop. It is hard to imagine that a debilitating trauma or mental health event can be held off forever.

Beyond the cycle itself, the factor most damaging to the psyche of the Wabewalker is likely to be hope or an ability to imagine something better. The only way forward is to relinquish hope altogether and embrace the absurdity. A philosophical model for this turn can be found in Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. The work is based on the mythological figure Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to forever roll a stone up a hill. Once the top was reached, the stone would roll back down. The cycle would repeat endlessly. We players ought to be familiar with this sort of futility, shouldn’t we?

What would it mean to embrace the absurdity of the Wabewalker’s reality? They and we alike would have to love the experience of it. According to Camus, such an “absurd man” would find joy in the drudgery of repetition. This reflects what I feel is a potent combination of Nietzschean existential courage and Kierkegaardian interiority. In other words, a Sisyphus-inspired reading allows for a protagonist who, by virtue of embracing the absurd, can experience the repetition as something that deepens and enriches.

Camus insists that one must imagine that Sisyphus is happy. Is it possible to see the Wabewalker in the same light? Ultimately, Trinity is like a meditation. We are called to imagine the Wabewalker in Kensington Gardens for the second, third, and fifty-seventh times. It is impossible to imagine, and yet there remains, despite Trinity‘s constant negative insistences, a lingering idea of the heroic. It is hard to say where it comes from, irrational as it is. Perhaps the heroic is merely a feature of adventure games generally–even Arthur Dent saves the Heart of Gold–that we simply anticipate without much thought or reflection. It might be empathy for the one who must kill the skink again and again, as horrific as it must always be.

In Camus’s formulation, the absurd person is a kind of hero. This may be the only heroism we can honestly afford the Wabewalker. They are too alone to be tragic and too mundane for knighthood. Their heroism, should they possess any, is that of joy and courage, of themself. It is ultimately a question for we players, whether or not we can imagine the joy of the Wabewalker. Even if we cannot have it, perhaps we have the courage to imagine it.

Or not, of course. We can despair, or resent Trinity for its despair, and no one could be blamed for doing so. Trinity is unapologetically disastrous and absurd and, like humanity itself, would rather run us over than change our minds. To play it is to take a test, to respond to a call.

As is often the case in art, the important thing is the act of answering and not the answer.

Afterword

This is the last in a thirteen-part series of essays about Brian Moriarty’s Trinity, a 1986 game published by Infocom. I’m confident that this is the longest series about it that focuses on the text itself. Jimmy Maher has written quite a bit about it too, and I always look to his work. I consider him a sort of “critic of record” for Infocom games. We ultimately disagree on several points, but he raises the bar for writing about Trinity. It’s very difficult–impossible for me–to be serious about it without engaging with his discussions of tragedy and philosophy. I owe him a debt of thanks for that.

There’s only one other game that I’ve written so much about. Regulars must already know that I mean A Mind Forever Voyaging. I’ve grown frustrated with a general tendency to assert a favorite when one or the other is mentioned. It’s a bit like preferring apples over screwdrivers, isn’t it? What do those two games even have to do with one another?

Trinity, as I’ve said, came not to destroy the Zorkian but to fulfill it. It is the highest expression of that classic “cave game” design. Higher–please don’t be upset!–than Beyond Zork or Zork Zero. I think this design, combined with its literary ambitions, makes Trinity a truly special Infocom game, utterly unique in the catalog.

I’ve said more than once that I dislike the endgame of Trinity. It’s true! I really dislike it. Other than my critique of historicity earlier in this series, I have reserved commentary for a future podcast. With this final post, I can get to work on that. I’m excited to think and talk about its design in a wider context. That conversation will resume with a short discussion of Vampire: The Masquerade Swansong, a point-and-click inspired graphical game. Even if you don’t play such games, I think the design discussion will be interesting to parser game players. A second episode concerning Trinity‘s efficiency problem in the New Mexico desert will follow.

The next game on the list is Leather Goddesses of Phobos, a welcome shift in mood for many, I’m sure!

Thanks for everyone’s patience. This series was a long time in the making, but I hope I was able to engage with the work in a way that feels meaningful and productive, recognizing its special place among 1980s narrative games.