I recently participated in a one-on-one interactive fiction competition in which I served as Iron Chef Inform 7. The prompt was “a scroll that alters the world around it,” and I wrote a game called “The Van der Nagel Papyrus” which, if you haven’t played it, you will find much more interesting than this dumb post.

You should definitely play the game before reading this, and you should probably also read this post about puzzles and this post about Metroid beforehand for the sake of rhetorical cohesion.

Besides giving me a chance to rip off that incredible game called Blue Prince, working on “The Van der Nagel Papyrus” let me work out some ideas that I’ve been chewing on for a long time.

Over the years I’ve heard a few people say things along the lines of: Ryan’s games feel like he knows what I’m going to type next. It’s like we’re having a conversation. Once Jason McIntosh told me that in my games, “the narrator is a character in the story,” and I realized he was right, and then I started fiddling with that idea consciously. I don’t want to take myself out of the storytelling (unless that’s part of the premise). I want to be an active participant.

I usually write very linear games. Why bother making interactive fiction where the player can’t change the outcome of the story? Because the player can be an active participant. You’re not just making choices; you’re DOING STUFF: making discoveries, solving problems, screwing around. Well, no, that’s what your character is doing. The real gymnastics are in your head. You, the human, are doing much more meaningful things: learning, imagining, analyzing, synthesizing.

If you and I both embrace our roles as active participants, then an interactive fiction text adventure computer game can constitute a very complex relationship, one in which a considerable portion of the “communication” (maybe I should say “meaning”) occurs outside the text itself. The rewards we derive from that relationship depend on critical thinking, and they depend on trust.

Critical thinking, because that’s what allows us to create meaning out of a text instead of merely having meaning delivered to us. Because we don’t get as much out of deciding “this character is unlikeable; therefore, I dislike her” as we do by noticing/asking “this set of decisions by the author has made this character unlikeable; to what end?”

Trust, because you don’t get as much out of wondering “did Ryan do this on purpose?” as you do from considering “Ryan (probably) did this on purpose. Why?” We get the best experiences—I get the opportunity to communicate that which is unutterable outside of gameplay—when you trust me to execute my role as game-maker, and I trust you to execute your role as player.

If you trust me, then you know that a lapse in simulation doesn’t necessarily mean a game was constructed carelessly; it means the important part is somewhere else. You know that a sentence that’s obviously false can signify something true; you know that a small detail can point toward a big idea. You know that if there’s some part of a game you didn’t see, that doesn’t make your experience “incomplete”—it makes your experience yours.

Because I trust you, I can make games for you to engage with as intentional, artistic objects—not products to be consumed as entirely as possible and disposed of as quickly as possible. I can make games that are more complicated than they seem, because can I trust you to think about them. I can trust you to make intentional decisions about what parts of a game to engage with and what parts to leave to someone else, like in Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing. Because I trust you, I don’t have to spoil the whole joke of a game about a scroll that alters the world and an altar that scrolls the world by putting it in those terms.

And if you trust me to trust you, or at least if I trust you to trust me, then when I don’t say something, you know it’s because I know that you know that it goes without saying.