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All That ErasmatazzCrawford's 'AI' game engine earns an erazzberryby Neil deMause For the last couple of years that I've been following the interactive fiction Usenet newsgroups, I've noticed occasional posts referring to the Erasmatron, a supposed next-generation approach to IF. The brainchild of Chris Crawford, author of such Mac games as Balance of Power and Trust & Betrayal, this Erasmathingy was promised to be a "computer story generation system and method using a network of re-usable substories," featuring "attribute-based social simulation." It all sounded mildly intriguing, even though my own tastes for quantum leaps forward in IF development involve more spellchecking and fewer games with dragons in them. Still, I never got around to checking out the Erasmagizmo, in large part thanks to my distaste for firing up Netscape except in dire emergencies, like a new Cecil Adams column. Then, one foggy Thanksgiving eve, someone directed me to an article in Wired magazine in which Crawford described an interactive world where the plot runs free of its author's mere imagining, a world populated with characters equipped with 21 traits: Timidity, Dutifulness, Magnanimity, Gullibility, Loyalty, Enviousness, Pride, Love, Hunger, Insecurity, Integrity, Lovability, Dominance, Competence, Loquacity, Initiative, Greed, Libido, Sexiness, Nurturance, Temper, and Joviality. (What, no bile, melancholy, or spleen?) Also included were a series of quotes from Crawford that ranged from the grandiose ("A century from now, they'll look back on us and laugh at our misconceptions even as they mythologize our achievements.") to the bizarre ("We're at the nativity of a profound intellectual revolution -- what a privilege!"). But hey, who am I to deny a visionary his eccentricities? They laughed at Einstein, after all! They laughed at the Marx Brothers! They even laughed at Hitler, and boy, were they sorry! So, on the off chance that Chris Crawford really was about to launch an IF anschluss of epic proportions, I visited his erasmatazz.com to download the first- ever Erasmagame: Laura J. Mixon's Shattertown Sky. Fortunately, I was at work at the time, with its T-1 line, because Erasmogoods are huge: more than 5 megs for the stuffed game file of Shattertown Sky. That the accompanying Erasmaganza interpreter clocked in at a mere 400K was little consolation as I waited for Stuffit Expander to gnaw its way through the downloaded archive. I eagerly double-clicked on the Shattertown Sky game file; then I selected it again from Erasmaganza's File menu. (Crawford, despite being a Mac-only programmer, has apparently yet to learn how to make an Erasmadocument open automatically when double- clicked.) And entered into an interface straight out of...WorldBuilder? Sure enough, that's what it looked like. The same multiple text and graphics windows, the same cramped type and impenetrable menus (inventory as items in a pull-down menu?) as that late, unlamented '80s-era Mac game development system. The ErasmaGUI, though, has one significant difference: where WorldBuilder made at least a passing attempt at parsing English commands (generally responding with such helpful prods as "Huh?" and "What?"), the Erasmafoozle dispenses entirely with typed input, offering only a single window with multiple-choice options like "I exit" or "I coolly greet Poot." On very special occasions, it spits forth a mouthful of text, then leaves you with a single highlighted phrase on which to click: "(Do nothing.)" This left the detailed post-apocalyptic dystopia crafted by Mixon largely beyond my reach -- though the game clearly displayed "Gramma Mara is asleep on her mattress, snoring lightly, her so-precious handgun cradled in the crook of her arm," I had but a single button to click: "I dig around for a clean pair of pants and shirt, and put them on." I dutifully clicked. Instantly, there appeared before me the cartoon head of Gramma herself, wrinkles menacingly ablaze. I screamed. The interactivity of Erasmaworks, it soon became clear, is concentrated in one narrow arena: character emotions. The options for dealing with Granny were limited to three variations on "hello," with different inflections: "I coolly greet Mara," "'hello there, Mara!'" "'Hi, Mara,' I say glumly." (I picked the last of these; Gramma obligingly bared her teeth. I screamed again.) Once I had dispatched Granny, I went on to meet a series of Shattertown denizens, all presented in that same Mike Judge- meets-Thunderbirds-Are-Go! perspective, all equally uninterested in anything beyond whether I was being (check one) surly, indifferent, or flirtatious. After a few rounds of insults (one character, the eponymous Doc, went so far as to call me a "dog dummy"), I finally managed to pick a fight with a local lowlife named Oliver. Things quickly escalated, until I finally took out poor Oliver with a knife to the gut -- whereupon I was presented with the provocative option "I remove the Nothing from Oliver's body and stuff it in my bag." There was more to Shattertown Sky -- the random- sounding stories told by the characters when I stopped pummeling them long enough to listen ("Cat asked Aaron for help. 'What happened?' he asked. She replied, 'I've been injured.' 'Perhaps we can work something out,' he told her, 'if you make it worth my while.'"), the madly ticking clock that spun out of control in the corner of the screen, to no apparent end. But to be honest, by this point I was laughing so hard I could barely type straight, so I mercifully put the Orgasmotron (damn, I *knew* I'd slip and type that) out of its misery. While a good deal of the blame must be laid at the feet of Mixon's, er, colorful writing style, the E-tron itself is a major part of the problem: when your only options are a prepackaged set of emotional signifiers, it quickly begins to feel like an animatronic Choose Your Own Adventure book -- hey, even Monkey Island at least let you pick stuff up. Chris Crawford's new gizmo may yet find a niche in the panoply of game development systems, but one thing is clear: the revolution will not be Erasmatized.
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