Boy that’s not a comfortable game title, is it.
Back in 1983, the game studio Infocom was pumping out text adventure games for a bunch of platforms, which included one of the eventual ‘winners’ of the home computer platform, DOS. That meant that even ten years later, you could buy a ‘remaster’ compilation of their games. Designed for a time well before, with assets entirely in text, the Infocom Collection presented 20 games, that once were each a disk, all fitting neatly on a single 3.5 inch floppy disk, with enough extra room for some manuals and ways to circumvent the copy protection, which was, for these games, necessary.
See, Infocom explored manual copy protection pretty broadly, by releasing games with ‘feelies’ – in-universe items from the game that were immersive, or necessary for making the game function, or both, and the fact they didn’t tell you either way made puzzles more complex. Was it necessary to have a fuzzy worm for some puzzle at some point? What information could that convey? Was there a number on this bus ticket somewhere? What about this pamphlet of the fake university you were dealing with?
These toys, these feelies, being relevant to the game they were from meant that while you played the game, you were now on the lookout for signifiers of these objects. Sometimes you would pick up an item in the game that was represented, literally, by an object in the box, and then you could examine it in depth and that could give you game information that was useful for unlocking a lock or giving a password or something, somewhere in the game. And sometimes, you wouldn’t learn anything vital for the game.
It just made you think a lot about the experience of the game.
And the game of Infidel uses this in a way that sets it apart in a big way from Infocom games of the genre. Particularly, it uses it to inform a character.
One thing that text adventure games of the Infocom era did a lot of was to impose the player as the character that drives the story. You were often presented with a situation with no meaningful backstory or origin point – the famous opening of Zork is just you starting out next to a house and a mailbox, with almost no information presented before you delve into the Great Underground Empire. As the games increased in complexity, they’d take swings at more background, like the Sorcerer game series setting you up with an introduction that brought you into the world as a trained wizard (but also, importantly, still treated complex ideas in the universe as if you wouldn’t recognise them, because you, the player, were not of this world the way the protagonist was described as being).
In some games, you could even have some rudimentary customisation, including picking a gender. Despite these modest changes though, most of these games did not impose on you in any way, not as characters or personalities: You were the protagonist, who was usually charged with some need (because nobody else was available to do it), or escaping from something bad (because the game’s best response mechanism was to kill you). Mostly, these changes could change some pronouns and maybe, based on some random input early on, change some variables slightly, but the games didn’t have a lot of room under the hood to make complex changes for the most part. This is the kind of engine where you have a limit on the number of variables you can track, for example, and limited to some silly number like 24 or whatever.
This overall meant that these games tended towards a simple progression system, where you were trying to get from a point where you knew nothing to an escape or a solution that praised you for what you knew and what you’d done, with very little of the personal character engaged. It’s a lot like Twine games now, where storing information about the player is difficult, so you instead build a game as a sort of ghost train, where the story proceeds without you, and you have to just sit and ride along.
And then, with all this setup, we have the assumed, standard design of an Infocom adventure game; you played a generic nobody, escaping some bad situation and cheating death, because that was the only way the game could say you messed up.
Infidel did a lot of things differently.
First of all, the main character of Infidel you’re playing has a very specific identity. They’re not a mysterious nobody, they’re a specific somebody, and that somebody is a total arsehole. You start the game with a description of the painful headache and pounding dehydration you’re experiencing because your entire caravan out to the dig site you were going to investigate were that mad at how awful you were. You were bad and you sucked and they know it and they wanted to get the hell away from you fast.
This then plays into a game that’s about digging for treasure; getting into a tomb, solving its puzzles, managing your way through its complex demands, and at no point needing to talk to a person. The puzzles talk about who you are, how you are, revealing bit by bit the history that the feelies also outline: After all, you have a note from the people who ditched you in the desert that could be summarised as ‘boy, you suck.’ That’s a real note! That’s one of the things you can sit there and turn over in your hands as you try to work out if it’s useful to breaking into a pyramid to know that a group of natives from the area think you’re a complete dickhead.
The ending of Infidel is its final deviation, too; because you get to the treasure at the heart of the pyramid, you solve its puzzles, and you stand before your goal, only to discover that your finding of it broke the entrance. You’re trapped there. You’re trapped there with no recourse but to wait until you use up all the air and die, and the last moments of the game are your character reflecting on how much you suck, and how this is your fault because of the choices you made in the game.
These choices that you, the player, could not make. Choices that were not part of the game, but its backstory.
Infidel deserves a special place in the Infocom pantheon, for doing something so interesting and different, and it definitely stands in my mind as a point of the history of games when I have, earliest, found people complaining about Games Making You Feel Powerful And You Getting Your Way, and how it felt unsatisfying to finish a game about robbing a tomb where things went badly for you.
It’s not a new conversation.