Critical Essay about Robert DiChiara's "A Sucker in Spades," by Dene Grigar
A Sucker in Spades & Transitional Media
by Dene Grigar
The question I get asked a lot is: Why do I care so much about early interactive media, particularly since they are generally relegated to the black and white (or green on green) environment of a computer monitor (and a small one, at that), are text-heavy, and whose images–-if they exist at all––are comprised of ASCII art, and mood, augmented by 8-bit sound (if there is any sound at all)? This is a valid question in light of contemporary interactive storytelling techniques that involve robustly immersive environments created with Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and 3D technologies.
It boils down to this: I am fascinated with the way ideas develop over time and contribute to approaches, techniques, and technologies used today. A case in point is Robert DiChiara’s detective-adventure game, A Sucker in Spades, which serves as an example of transitional media during the formation of electronic literature.
It boils down to this: I am fascinated with the way ideas develop over time and contribute to approaches, techniques, and technologies used today. A case in point is Robert DiChiara’s detective-adventure game, A Sucker in Spades, which serves as an example of transitional media during the formation of electronic literature.
Published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in 1988, A Sucker in Spades is based on the author’s “choose your own adventure” narrative called "A Sucker in Spades” published along with two others in DiChiara's collection, Hard Boiled: Three Tough Cases for a Private Eye with Smarts, in 1985.
The publication dates of the book and hypertext are telling because already, by 1985, Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky’s The Hitchhickers Guide to the Galaxy had been released for the Apple II and Commodore computers; a year later Thomas Disch’s Amnesia would be released by Electronic Arts (EA). [1] In other words, DiChiara’s work tapped into the Adventure Game craze at the beginning of the genre’s popularity. [2]
By the time A Sucker in Spades landed at Eastgate System, Inc. EA had already lost money on Amnesia and would never publish a work by a prominent literary artist again. But Bernstein’s company was different in that it specialized on interactive media with a literary focus and had developed, by 1988, its own literary platform, Hypergate. As mentioned elsewhere, [3] Hypergate was programmed with FORTH, a language created in 1970 by Chuck Moore used in 1984 for the development of first Macintosh and which also formed the basis for EA’s game, Starflight (1986). As the title screen also suggests––with the mention of Think Technologies––the work was also produced with Think C, a C programming language needed for MacOS programming. In 1988 Bernstein published his own work, The Election of 1912 (with Erin Sweeney, featured in this volume) on the Hypergate platform and had begun working with science fiction writer Sarah Smith on the production of her own interactive narrative, King of Space, released in 1991.
It is obvious to readers at the outset that DiChiara’s work constitutes an adventure. After booting up the work on a Macintosh SE, running system 6.0.3––readers encounter the work’s title screen before being taken to an introductory screen that reads,
“Never Be Fooled Again!” Tired of being played for a sap? Does old routine get on your nerves? The ACE Lie Detector course is what you need to get to the top of the field!”
Also found on this screen is a list of items one would purchase from the grocery store. Below on the bottom right hand side is the direction to “CLEAN OFF DESK.” Clicking on it takes readers to a form where they can describe themselves. Decisions made by readers affect the storyline. For example, if readers choose “female” as their gender, then they will not be able to accomplish some of the tasks required to move the story along. In effect, readers play a detective who must solve a mystery, interacting with people and visiting various places along the way, ultimately racking up points for the sophistication of their investigation. As they do, items are grayed out and sometimes replaced with new opportunities, making for a complex game environment.
A Sucker in Spades also involves managing assets. Readers can decide just how much “muscle,” “magnetism,” and “moxie” they need to overpower, overcome, and outwit the story’s antagonists. For example, when encountering the femme fatale Amanda, readers may decide to use their magnetism to get the answers they need and can adjust their percentages based on that decision. Making the wrong decision costs points and possibly readers’ ability to solve the mystery.
Gameplay lasts about 30 minutes. During that time readers can potentially encounter 10 different characters and visit 10 different places, making five to seven major decisions about the case. One of the scores readers can earn when playing poorly is 15, which categorizes a reader as a “near-sighted peeper.”
In keeping with the genre of the hard-boiled detective novels of the 1930s, A Sucker in Spades maintains the language of The Maltese Falcon (Re: Sam Spade) and others where women are “dames” and men who fall for them, “saps,” where gumshoes have loyal secretaries, and where the police are determined to stop interlopers––like Private Eyes––from interfering with their cases. A wicked sense of humor prevails in the work. It pokes fun, for example, at the genre’s sexism, drawing attention to changing roles of women in the late 20th Century. When readers play as a “female” trying to gain a clue needed for solving the case, they receive the message:
“Uh, oh, the secretary goofed. A dame shouldn’t have been assigned to this case; it’s too politically incorrect and potentially explosive. Reassign this case to a male colleague, please.”
No one is beyond scrutiny in A Sucker in Spades. The police, criminals, secretaries, femme fatales––even staid librarians––are fair game for a story that requires only 395K of space.
Like the two other works Eastgate Systems, Inc. produced with Hypergate, A Sucker in Spades was never migrated to Storyspace, the software and interactive-hypertext platform Bernstein went on to build his company’s reputation on; or to the CD-ROM format when that technology became available; or for the PC environment when the company began publishing works for the Windows operating system. A Sucker in Spades, like Bernstein and Sweeney’s and Smith’s, remains inaccessible today and under-appreciated because of it. In truth, all three serve as transitional works for the hypertext literature that would soon follow. In a sense Hypergate works are, on a evolutionary scale, that moment when interactive media branched into, on one side, Storyspace literature, and the other, interactive games. Only one other work published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. matched the aesthetic and the gameful quality of the Hypergate works: John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse, published in 1993. It is interesting to note that it was not created with Storyspace but instead with the the close relative of Hypergate, Hypercard. To fully understand why Michael Joyce’s afternoon: a story had such impact as a work of digital fiction, one has to know about the interactive media that preceded it and, so, see how it fit into Eastgate Systems, Inc.’s vision of "serious hypertext" and introduced its own unique literary genre.
Notes
[1] For more information about Amnesia, see the chapter about it in Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volume 1, published by the lab in 2018: https://scalar.usc.edu/works/rebooting-electronic-literature/thomas-m-dischs-amnesia.
[2] The heyday is estimated to be between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s.
[3] I have written about Hypergate in the chapter about Amnesia (mentioned previously) but also in the chapter about Sarah Smith’s King of Space. See https://scalar.usc.edu/works/rebooting-electronic-literature/sarah-smiths-king-of-space.
Acknowledgements
This essay is derived from a previous one produced in February 2020. In developing the research for both, I would like to acknowledge Holly Slocum, the Electronic Literature Lab's Project Manager, for suggesting we study DiChiara’s work. I also thank Sarah Smith for donating this copy of DiChiara’s electronic literature to The NEXT for study by other scholars and Mark Bernstein for responding to my question about the publishing history of A Sucker in Spades. It was difficult to find information about it since it is referenced (very briefly) only in three places: 1) Robert Coover’s “End of Books,” NYT, June 21, 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/21/books/the-end-of-books.html; 2) The Electronic Labyrinth, http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0200.html, though the site incorrectly states that the work is “Storyspace fiction;” and 3) in the bibliography found in Bernstein et al’s “Architectures for volatile hypertext,” published in ACM, Hypertext ‘91. Strangely, the work does not show up in WorldCat.