by Erik Davis
One design feature of D&D would prove particularly important for later computer culture. Rather than control armies from above, participants chose to “play” individual characters created from a menu of races and player classes. You might doff the imaginary cap of a mace-wielding dwarf named Glorp, whose unique characteristics were defined by a statistically determined array of skills, spells, weapons, and traits. Banding together with other role-playing fellows, you and Glorp would explore a neomedieval world filled with underground labyrinths and catacombs. With no ultimate goal in mind, you and your merry crew would scavenge for treasure or magic scrolls, dodge traps, kill enemies, and avoid the death-dealing forces that could ax your character at any moment.
With their invention of the fantasy role-playing game (or RPG), Gygax and Arneson had not simply churned out another world in the Middle-Earth mold. They had built tools for other “subcreators” to use, tools capable of constructing otherworldly realms that transformed players into participants. As a category, the word “fantasy” certainly describes the dark, fairy-tale logic mined by D&D and the lion’s share of RPGs that followed in its enormously successful wake. But D&D was also phantasmic in its very techniques, for the game “took place” not on a board but in the creative psyches of its players. No longer did combatants loom over strategic maps from the god’s-eye view of opposing generals; now they wandered chartless inside a simulated mental world conjured by the godlike game lord and bard known as the Dungeon Master. Acting as oral demiurge, the DM led his players, room by room, through a unique world carved out of his own imagination and D&D’s loose rules of composition.
To envision the Dungeon Master’s secondary world, D&D players exploited the same powers of creative imagination used and misused by occultists past and present. Indeed, the tips given in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook sound almost like instructions for a New Age visualization, or a B-movie form of the ars memoria:
As [the Dungeon Master] describes your surroundings, try to picture them mentally. Close your eyes and construct the walls of the maze around yourself. Imagine the hobgoblin as [the DM] describes it whooping and gamboling down the corridor toward you. Now imagine how you would react in that situation and tell [the DM] what you are going to do.25
Though most simulation gamers were simply having a blast, many a Pagan was born during those long nights in the den swilling Coca-Cola and eviscerating trolls. Besides the occult arcana that stuff the handbooks of D&D and many RPGs, role-playing games operationally resemble magical rituals, which also take place within a bounded space and time ruled by the imaginative exploration of deeply mythological scenarios. This is not to say that gamers believe in their secondary worlds; instead, they program them, using an elaborate symbolic machinery in order to solidify and organize the plastic material of the imagination. For most RPGs, this machinery includes thick rulebooks of lore, statistical tables, occasional maps, and a set of weirdly shaped dice that determine the outcome of various contests by forcing the hand of chance.
Tolkien would probably recoil at all this rigmarole, so far from the fairy stories he loved and so reminiscent of the “vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician.” But God only knows what the man would have thought of the DEC PDP-10 mainframe computer that would provide the next and arguably strangest operating system for Fairy. In the mid-1970s, a researcher named Don Woods was working at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab—the kind of California think tank where the rooms were named after Middle-Earth locales and the printer was outfitted with three elven fonts. Woods came across a primitive text-only adventure game hacked together by Will Crowther, one of the bright guys behind early network computing. Expanding on Crowther’s program, Don Woods designed a knock-off of D&D called, variously, ADVENT, Adventure, or Colossal Cave. Unlike D&D combatants, Adventure players went solo into an underworld cartography described by screenfuls of computer text (“YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE”). Typing simple commands (“GO NORTH,” “TAKE WAND,” “KILL DRAGON”) prompted responses from the impish program (“KILL THE DRAGON WITH WHAT, YOUR BARE HANDS?”) and gave you the chance to crack the elaborate puzzles that stood between you and the next treasure chest or underworld chamber. As Steven Levy noted, “Each ‘room’ of the adventure was like a computer subroutine, presenting a logical problem you’d have to solve.”26
Besides laying down the basic framework for scads of future adventure games, Adventure showed how successfully a laborious and scientific device like the computer could suspend disbelief and simulate a magical world. The program’s well-defined descriptions allowed you to project yourself into the simple prose the way you could dive into a pulpy SF novel, and its logical loops and algorithms brought the “symbolic machinery” of its secondary world one step closer to natural law. As Julian Dibbell explains, “for anyone in the midst of exploring it, the world of Adventure was as hardwired as gravity, and almost as convincing.”27 By transforming the PDP-10 into both dungeon and dungeon master, Crowther and Woods not only had established a particularly addictive mode of interacting with digital code, but had forged a new kind of imaginal space in the bowels of the computer.
With the blessings of its creators, pirate copies of the program rapidly circulated through various research communities linked through the ARPANET, the ancestor of today’s Internet. According to Dave Lebling, “All work ceased throughout almost the entire country at these research sites. It was almost like an infection.”28 Recognizing a potentially lucrative addiction when he saw one, Lebling later took Colossal Cave out of its open network environment and retooled it into Zork, a successful consumer product that helped kick-start the computer game industry. While the vivid and engrossing graphics of today’s games have pushed text-based adventures like Zork to the margins, the digital imagery of sword and sorcery continues to clang away in World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs and console games.
Because Adventure does not hide its writing space behind graphic images, the game provides a particularly clear framework for grasping the phantasmic logic that shapes digital space. With that in mind, I ask you to dwell for a moment on one of the most archaic and venerable images in the history of computer culture, which also happens to be the first scene that Adventure throws the errant player’s way:
YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY.
At once schematic and concrete, these words conjure up the kind of internal landscape that you want to explore. But if we let the image sound the depths of literary memory, it takes us back to another traveler, stepping off of another road, about to begin another underworld quest:
When I had journeyed half our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.29
And so does Dante begin his descent into the colossal caverns of the Inferno, the first third of his Divine Comedy, the great allegorical poem of the Middle Ages.
Though it’s somewhat ridiculous to compare an Olympian work of imaginative poetry with a goofy computer game, the Dantesque link to digital space is compelling. For one thing, both the Inferno and Colossal Cave distinctly resemble the virtual data architectures of the ars memoria. As Crowther designed it, Colossal Cave actually fulfilled one of the classic recommendations for the old memory palaces: internalize the structure of an actual place (in this case, Kentucky’s Bedquilt Cave), and then add magical elements and properties. Yates suggests that Dante’s Divine Comedy may well have been a product of the art of memory, arguing that the poet’s intensely visual and nearly tactile journey through the structured layers of the afterworld fulfill the classical rule of “striking images on orders of places.”30
As Dante strolls through his Neoplatonic Catholic cosmology, his movements tell an archetypal narrative about the virtual soul and its passage from sin to salvation. At the same time, the poem’s image
s pack in a small encyclopedia of data: references to ancient mythology, Thomistic philosophy, autobiography, Italian poetry, the politics of Florence. The Divine Comedy is a poetic data space, something that the American poet laureate Robert Pinsky recognized in 1984, when he wrote an Adventure-style text-based computer game loosely modeled on the poem. Later, the Digital Dante Project at Columbia University began “translating” Dante’s text into a multimedia website that incorporated text, audio, video, and images into a nest of hyperlinks drawn from various commentaries. The Project picked the Divine Comedy to prototype their “twenty-first-century illumination” because “Dante the poet understood the power of images, the icons of a culture, and architectural spaces.”31
As such, Dante was also a master of allegory, that literary and pictorial mode that, at one level, uses concrete images, characters, or landscapes to represent the abstract relationship between ideas, usually of a moral or religious nature. For example, the envious souls who expiate their sins on the second terrace of Mount Purgatory have their eyes sewn shut with wire; this bizarre surface detail corresponds to, and reverses, the moral fault of gazing beyond the self with envy. Allegories are thus a rather paradoxical way of explaining concepts with symbols. As the literary scholar Angus Fletcher points out, allegories often take place in fantastic environments—a dreamland, a visionary otherworld, or a futuristic scenario where magic appears as superscience. At the same time, and unlike Dante’s poetry, allegories are usually dry and schematic, as they tend to follow the abstract or logical relationships between concepts rather than the unique drives of characters or the turbulent power of raw images. John Bunyan’s enormously popular Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress reads like a connect-the-dots catechism. In fact, some characters in allegorical texts are so programmatic that they were known in the trade as “allegorical machines.”
In some ways, Adventure (and the countless adventure games it spawned) sticks the user into a first-person allegory. Like Dante or the knights-errant in The Faerie Queene, whose environs Coleridge described as “mental space,” you wander through a rigorously structured but dreamlike landscape patched together from phantasms. These images usually possess more than a surface meaning, since they conceal clues and abstract relationships that, if figured out, will send you deeper into gamespace. The nonplayer characters you run into are also literally “machines”—programmed daemonic agents with whom you must struggle to make your way forward.
Of course, Adventure and its more barbaric descendants are hardly religious or even moral universes, though Lucas Arts’s 1996 game After Life did ask players to manage souls in a Dantesque world of hell, purgatory, and heaven. But if the images in these games do not encode virtues and vices, then what do they allegorize? Steven Levy gives us a hint in Hackers: “In a sense, Adventure was a metaphor for computer programming itself—the deep recesses you explored in the Adventure world were akin to the basic, most obscure levels of the machine that you’d be traveling in when you hacked in assembly code.”32 Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at MIT, also explained that Adventure fans “found an affinity between the aesthetics of building a large complex program, with its treelike structure, its subprograms and sub-subprograms, and working one’s way through a highly structured, constructed world of mazes and magic and secret, hidden rooms.”33 Adventure is not an allegorical machine; it’s an allegory of the machine.
Angus Fletcher defines allegory as “a fundamental process of encoding our speech,”34 and computers are nothing if not hierarchies of encoded language. At the bottom of this digital dungeon lie the physical circuits whose pulses of energy embody the basic binary code. Because the “machine language” that commands this code is hellish to hack, computer scientists long ago invented control jargons like assembly language and higher-order programming codes such as MS-DOS, Java, and C++. These latter tongues come relatively close to natural languages like English; a few well-placed words can command gobs of machine code. At the top level of this stack of lingo lies the sunlit world of the user interface, which in the case of Adventure was just a screen full of text and a simple parser that interpreted the actions that players typed in. The user interface is the level most of us noninitiates manipulate, often without a thought of the briar patch lurking below.
In a sense, all user interfaces can be seen as interactive allegories of the computer. When Apple engineers introduced the Macintosh and its graphic user interface (GUI), they replaced the dry world of command lines and DOS prompts with a world of simple simulacra. The Mac cloaked the computer’s workings inside an audiovisual “desktop metaphor” whose folders, trashcans, and icons served as active and intuitive representations of the computer’s internal processes. These simulacra proved enormously popular among nontechnical people, and as computers and the Internet continue to saturate the world at large, we can expect user interfaces—including Internet browsers, websites, and program control panels—to plunge us ever deeper into such iconic simulations and to pull us further from the binary codespace where the action “really” lies. Perhaps our tame digital metaphors will one day bloom into allegorical landscapes, and desktops, windows, and browsers will open into three-dimensional worlds animated with daemonic agents and interdimensional portals that conceal an underlying layer of purely logical protocols.
Whether or not we are talking about desktop terminals or software packages or Web browsers, good interfaces mediate the hyperspace of information in ways familiar enough to keep us from getting lost but not so familiar that we remain rooted in the habits associated with other media or with the everyday world. Hypertext visionary Ted Nelson observed:
Once we leave behind “two-dimensionality” (virtual paper) and even “three-dimensionality” (virtual stacks), we step off the edge into another world, into the representation of the true structure and interconnectedness of information. To represent this true structure, we need to indicate multidimensional connection and multiple connections between entities.35
The notion that information possesses a “true structure” is a major motif in the metaphysics of information, but here Nelson asks a more basic question: how can one represent such a multidimensional world? Hoping to construct a vast and labyrinthine library of interlinked documents, Nelson pushed the envelope with the rather science-fiction notion of placing “wormholes” between documents, but the name of Nelson’s project—Xanadu—and the fact that it remains vaporware after decades of research indicate that such representations are still something of a holy grail. In fact, we still have not gotten much farther than the work of Alan Kay, the Xerox PARC researcher who invented the pull-down menus, folders, and point-and-click icons that Steve Jobs exploited for the Mac. In an article on interface design published in 1990, Kay was already criticizing the overreliance on simple visual metaphors like trashcans. Instead, he argued, magic and theater offered better models for the construction of robust user interfaces. For an example, Kay analyzed the now completely “natural” metaphor of the terminal screen as a piece of paper that we mark on. “Should we transfer the paper metaphor so perfectly that the screen is as hard as paper to erase and change? Clearly not. If it is to be like magical paper, then it is the magical part that is all important.”36
Kay’s emphasis on magic indicates that the supernatural metaphors that saturate technoculture may have a more substantive basis than the fondness that many hackers have for Sandman comic books or D&D. These metaphors arise and take power because, as William Irwin Thompson noted in a discussion of computer games, “the conventional worldview of materialism is not subtle enough to deal with the complexities of a multidimensional universe in which domains interpenetrate and are enfolded in one another.”37 The science-fiction author Vernor Vinge came to a similar conclusion in True Names, a brilliant novella whose vision of a networked virtual world predates Neuromancer by three years. Unlike the bright neon grid of Gibson’s cyberspace, the Other Plane of Vinge’s story is a Tolkienesque world of swamps, castles, and magic, a half-dre
amed environment that is generated partly through electronic cues that stimulate the “imagination and subconscious” of its electrode-wearing users. The hacker denizens of the Other Plane band together as covens of witches and warlocks, and at one point, a few of them discuss how magical metaphors came to dominate “data space”:
The Limey and Erythrina argued that sprites, reincarnation, spells, and castles were the natural tools here, more natural than the atomistic twentieth-century notions of data structures, programs, files, and communication protocols. It was, they argued, just more convenient for the mind to use the global ideas of magic as the tokens to manipulate this new environment.38
One reason for this convenience is that the allegorical and hieroglyphic language of magic works well with the fact that the Other Plane exists simultaneously on at least two levels of reality. Describing a character approaching the Coven, Vinge writes that while his conscious mind perceived a narrow row of stones, his “subconscious knew what the stones represented, handling the chaining of routines from one information net to another.”39 The Other Plane thus reverses our normal state of mind. Here it is the conscious mind that moves through a world of archetypal imagery, while the subconscious concerns itself with logical information processing.
As Vinge suggested, these technomagical conceits also function as strangely fit metaphors for the workaday world of computer programming itself. In Turing’s Man, Jay David Bolter quotes computer specialist Frederick Brooks: “The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.… Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself.”40 This is not a very satisfying description of poetry, but it certainly describes the virtual aspirations of the magician. No wonder that ace programmers and Unix weenies have long been called “wizards,” or that the semiautonomous Unix programs that kick into action on their own accord are known as “demons.” Steven Levy’s Hackers drips with loose references to spellcraft, while The New Hackers Dictionary gives definitions for “deep magic,” “heavy wizardry,” “incantation,” “voodoo programming,” and “casting the runes.”
