A Conversation With Cosmoserve's Judith Pintar

Exploring artificial intelligence, and a defense of AGT

XYZZYnews: Please tell us a little about yourself and what you do for a living and in your spare time.

Judith Pintar: My current preoccupation is finishing my PhD in Sociology. I'm studying the social and cultural effects of mass violence, looking specifically at the former Yugoslavia. I am at the predissertation stage, applying for grant money to go into the field. This academic venture is a departure from my previous life as a health-insurance-less artiste. While I was writing CosmoServe, I worked as a children's theatre director, and for the ten years before that I was a actress, storyteller and concert musician. I play the celtic harp and have recorded three albums with the Sona Gaia label of Narada Media. After a couple of years of Graduate School I have to say that I miss my artistic life, and hope to somehow manage to do it all.

XYZZYnews: What first inspired you to write CosmoServe? How much of the game was based on real-life net experiences? Which parts of CosmoServe are your own personal favorites?

JP: I'm an Infocom fan from way back. From the moment that I first PUT BAT GUANO IN CANNON, I was hooked. My favorite Infocom game was SUSPENDED. What I liked about it so much was the sense you get that lots of stuff is happening all at the same time, that there are a whole set of independent actors. When I decided I wanted to write a professional-length game, I wanted to develop that same quality. The other influence on CosmoServe is that early AI program, Eliza, that pretends to be a therapist and responds seemingly intelligently to everything you say. I "talked" to Eliza at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry in the early '80s, and spent about an hour asking her over and over, "Do you love me?" After she ran through the gamut of "Is it important that I love you?" "Why do you care if I love you?" "Did your mother love you?" "What is love?" etc...", she finally answered 'Yes." I was sure I had aggravated her into consciousness! Anyway, long story to say that I have always liked the illusion of artificial intelligence (until the real thing comes along).

The characters in CosmoServe are not based on anybody I know, but they are definitely influenced in a more general sense by friendships I have made online through the years. My favorite part of the game? Hmm, I'd have to say I'm pretty fond of Lucille (the crazed plumbing essay competitor), and I really enjoyed coming up with the fake conference announcements for each forum. Writing the sex conference was a lot of fun too.

XYZZYnews: CosmoServe won first place in the 5th Annual SoftWorks AGT Contest (tied with "The Multi-Dimensional Thief"). I'm sure many I-Fers completely missed these competitions. Could you tell us a little about them?

JP: I started writing IF in the mid-'80s, when the XT I bought happened to have GAGS (Generic Adventure Game System) on it, the precursor to AGT. I wrote my first games in EDLIN, of all prehistoric dos editors! When I joined CompuServe in 1990, I tried to find Mark Welch, to register GAGS, and discovered that it had become AGT and was administered by the co-author, David Malmberg. He had run several annual game-writing contests, and I was determined to enter (and win!). CosmoServe tied for first place. I won again the following year with Shades of Gray (more on that later). Most of the winners (and many of the runners-up) are commonly available in IF archives and collections. The contests stopped when AGT became freeware.

Maybe this is a good place for me to make a strident defense of AGT. I have had very good results using the program. I think it's terrifc. The limits that people complain about are easily transcended by a quick trip into the Pascal source code. I tweaked the code for both CosmoServe and Shades of Gray to get the visual effects I wanted, to increase the number of verbs trapped for, and to change the standard responses. Easy as pie. AGT games can be as professional or as simple as the game writer wants, and has time to make them. Don't blame poorly-written and designed games on the game system! It's the writer's responsibility to thoroughly bug-test a beta version before public release, and it's really not that hard to put in a few extra hours trapping for unusual verbs. Okay, end of my little rant.

XYZZYnews: CosmoServe was written in 1991. In what ways do you feel its subjects (computers, BBSes, Internet culture) have changed since then? Do you feel these changes have adversely affected the realism of CosmoServe in any way?

JP: The biggest change, I suppose is the move to the graphical interface for just about anyone logging onto CompuServe. But the nearly universal shift from DOS to Windows has the amusing consequence of making the DOS-related puzzles even more challenging. To win the game, you do need to know how to change directories from a DOS prompt, run programs and, the quaintest and most esoteric of all, PARK the hard drive to turn off the computer. This out of date aspect I kind of like. I think there will be people logging on from DOS machines into the 21st century. R.J. Wright, the hero of CosmoServe is definitely one of those people.

XYZZYnews: Looking back, was there anything you might have done differently in designing or writing CosmoServe, knowing what you know now?

JP: I think CosmoServe captures a particular moment in the history of online interaction, and for that reason I would be inclined to let it stand as I wrote it.

If I did rewrite it, I would get rid of the time-pressure requirement to finish the game by midnight. It necessitates a lot of restarts, to play the game more optimally, and the jokes get less funny the fifth time around.

XYZZYnews: You also worked as part of a team on Shades of Gray, which is generally considered the finest AGT game of all time. Which segments of Shades were yours? Shades of Gray also fascinates me in that none of its seven authors have ever met face-to-face. Could you describe the design process that occurred? How was the project organized?

JP: After I won the AGT contest, I didn't think it was sportsmanlike to enter it again. But the contest was so much fun and such a good incentive I had the idea of writing a game as part of a group venture.I posted this idea in CompuuServe's Gamer's forum, and a small group of people responded. We brainstormed over a period of about a month, both about the content of the game and the way we would organize the project. We decided that the best way to work together was to have a high degree of autonomy. We discussed general ideas, but gave each other a lot of latitude in the individual parts of the game that we were responsible for.

The mini-adventures were initially separate "games" that could run on their own. Mark Baker wrote the opening sequences, (including the hallucinations), as well as the endgame. Steve Bauman wrote the civil war sequence. Mike Laskey did the Robin Hood sequence. Elizabeth Ellison (who was chiefly responsible for the historical research underlying the game) wrote the mind/memory sequence. I wrote the fortune teller and the code linking the separate parts of the game together, using the device of the card reading. I also tweaked the AGT source code to make it do what we needed it to do. I must admit to being fairly authoritarian in my editing of both text and code when I put it together, to make sure that the game was stylistically consistent. The two other credited authors did not write text for the game, but were crucial to the project. We were given a private area in the forum to post our messages to one another and to share game files. Hercules, a Gamer's Forum sysop maintained this space for us, processed our files, etc., and was our guardian angel. Cynthia Yans stayed with us from brainstorming to bugtesting, offering valuable feedback and support.

The initial brainstorming and decision-making about the general plot outline took about a month, then individual writers took about two months to write their parts. I took another two months to merge the code (a nightmarish process), to write the aspects of the game that overarched the parts, and to edit the text. Finally we had about a month for the group effort of text polishing and bug-testing. We ended up winning the contest (in a special category, because we were a group project), and were delighted when the game was included in a CD rom collection of shareware games put out by the Waite Group (Fatal Distractions by David Gerrold). It was an amazing project, on a lot of levels, and I think I'd like to try it again sometime.

XYZZYnews: Do you still play or write I-F? If so, have you any new works around the corner? Were you planning to enter the r.*.i-f competition this year?

JP: I won't be entering the competition, but don't count me out of the game-writing world. I have been planning a sequel to CosmoServe for years now. The problem is that I started writing a new game system and parser from scratch, and when that project got bogged down, the game did too. I do believe I will get to it someday. Now that I've said it publically, I have to do it, I guess. Anyway, I am a forever I-F fan. For my money pictures can never be as clever or funny as words. You just can't beat good writing.

XYZZYnews: Are there any other thoughts on IF (or anything) that you'd care to add?

JP: There has been ongoing XYZZY discussion about gender in games, and I never got around to responding about how I handled it in CosmoServe. I was concerned that the sexual scenes not be offensive to people regardless of sexual preference. The character's name, R.J. is meant to begender-neutral, but there are two places in the game where I collect specific information. In the sex conference, one character asks whether R.J. prefers men or women. Then later, when R.J. gets his/her virtual body, the player must choose a male or female body. The resulting combination of sexual preference and gender determines whether you end up in the virtual hotel with straight men, straight women, lesbians or gay men. Unfortunately if you dally with any of them you can't finish the game on time, but at least you get to leave the room with genuine regret, rather than fear and loathing!

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