Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volume 4

Traversal of Robert DiChiara's "A Sucker in Spades"

These are videos of the Traversal of Robert DiChiara’s detective-interactive fiction hypertext, A Sucker in Spades. The Traversal is performed by Mariusz Pisarski, ELL Research Affiliate, via YouTube and Zoom, from London where he currently resides. Dene Grigar, the lab's Director, navigated the work from the lab at Washington State University Vancouver. The work was produced with the Hypergate authoring system, created by Mark Bernstein, and published by Bernstein’s company, Eastgate Systems, Inc. on a 3.5-inch floppy disk for Macintosh computers. For this event a Mac SE running System Software 6.0.7 was used. The performance was held on September 11, 2020.
 

Robert DiChiara’s Traversal of A Sucker in Spades, Part 1


Grigar introduces the Electronic Literature Lab and A Sucker in Spades, the second title published by Eastgate Systems and only one of three written in Hypergate. Originating from a print choose-your-own-adventure story, A Sucker in Spades borrows themes and vocabulary from film noir, most notably in the title, which references Dashiell Hammett's character Sam Spade. Grigar turns the event over to Pisarski, who sports an genre-appropriate detective fedora for the performance. After waiting for the work to load, Pisarski encounters the title screen and clicks the "Instructions" button to read the directions to A Sucker in Spades, which describes itself as being both like "a paper novel" and an "adventure game" that encourages the reader to make "Case Notes" and so participate in its writing. Returning to the landing page, Pisarski clicks the "Start" button and is prompted to create his protagonist among several choices. He settles on the default, but changes the hobby of the protagonist Colleen from "knitting" to "boxing" for "more of a contemporary female detective," choosing to retain the "21 gallons of fish" that she owns as a pet.   

Robert DiChiara’s Traversal of A Sucker in Spades, Part 2


The next screen is taken up by a digital drawing of a detective, which Pisarski clicks on in search of interactivity before clicking the "continue" button that brings him to a lexia describing the protagonist's meeting with a young female client. Continuing to click "continue," Pisarski moves through a series of lexias that linearly develop the plot and investigation further, most not illustrated and all written in the terse style of early 20th century American detective fiction. Upon reaching a dead body and a clue, which ends the beginning of the work, a screen pops up asking how Pisarski would like to divide 125 points among "Moxie," "Magnetism," and "Muscle." Since his character Colleen's hobby is boxing, Pisarski chooses "Muscle."  

Robert DiChiara’s Traversal of A Sucker in Spades, Part 3


Deciding to "hit the road" at the start of a new section, Pisarski is confronted with a pop-up saying "Something bad is about to happen!" and asking which of his three stats he's willing to lose some points for. He sacrifices Moxie. Continuing, Pisarski is offered a menu of "places to go," which he says pops up regularly and "could be random, but I am not sure." He chooses to go to the apartment address listed on a note found in the dead body's pocket. He is then forced to switch the gender of his character to male, when Pisarski is told “a dame shouldn’t have been assigned to this case; it’s too politically incorrect and potentially explosive." As his now-male character interrogates a woman at the apartment, Pisarski comments on the heavy use of American "idioms" in the text such as "clam up." Clicking on "Case Notes," PIsarski/Colleen is taken to a screen featuring three moveable windows over "a desk," each of which has a question on it that the reader is supposed to answer. After typing a note about a clue in one of the windows, Pisarski continues with the Traversal. 

Robert DiChiara’s Traversal of A Sucker in Spades, Part 4


Happening again on the menu of places to go, Pisarski choose the Post Office, where his character finds money transfer records. Confronted again by the "something bad is about to happen" warning, Pisarski decides to sacrifice Magnetism. Choosing next to go to the Public Library, Pisarski/Colleen is asked to decide between consulting an attractive librarian or searching through newspaper records himself. He consults her and finds the relevant newspaper article describing his suspects and their histories. Following his time at the library, Pisarski/Colleen drives to a dive bar and encounters another attractive woman, who––as she makes a move on the narrator––brings up the choice to use the Muscle or the Magnetism stat. Choosing the Magnetism stat, Pisarski/Colleen kisses the femme fatale. She then offers more information about the case.  

Robert DiChiara’s Traversal of A Sucker in Spades, Q&A, Part 1


Moving into the Q & A, Grigar asks Pisarski a question from the YouTube Chat posted by Richard Snyder about the hybrid game/novel form of A Sucker in Spades and whether Hypergate encourages that hybridity. Pisarski answers that already by then the RPG game-book was "a tired formula," but computers offered a chance to revitalize it by automating stat-tracking and doing a lot of the work the reader once had to do with pen and paper. Pisarski acknowledges, however, that "something is lost in the digital translation" because while a reader gets a sense of "accelerated exploration" with the computer's help, the onscreen graphics are less rich than in the game-book. Grigar then describes her sometimes-frustrating search for the authors and people behind the work, which Pisarski compares to the narrator's in-story search in A Sucker in Spades. From the chat, Kathleen Zoller asks Pisarski about his first experiences with electronic literature. He answers that living in Poland "behind the Iron Curtain" in 1985 he read a "paragraph game-book" in a Polish young-adult newspaper, and from then on was hooked on branching narratives and paragraph stories, which he rediscovered in the 1990s when encountering hypertexts like Judy Malloy's l0ve0ne and Stuart Moulthrop's Gyroscope. Dave from the audience then asks "what it would take to transfer a game like this into a Twine format?" and Pisarski answers that "you could quite easily recreate . . . A Sucker in Spades on the Twine platform." Dmitri in the audience then asks what changes "modern ideologies and technology" might bring to a work like A Sucker in Spades if it were made in 2020. Pisarski answers by saying that if it were made today, the work would probably need to be more "animated" and "show more" instead of just relying on text. A user named teendtso asks from the audience if the hypertext version of A Sucker in Spades captures everything from the original game-book version. Pisarski answers that "everything is migrated in terms of the main text," but the instructional "paratext elements" around the paragraphs are gone because the computer just does it all.   

Robert DiChiara’s Traversal of A Sucker in Spades, Q&A, Part 2


Dmitri from the audience asks about the recent trend in game environments towards more visual and less textual elements, and how Pisarski would compare these to the almost-exclusively textual environment of A Sucker in Spades. Pisarski praises the language of A Sucker in Spades, in which "every sentence is a gem" and suggests that for that reason it will be useful to the field of game studies to preserve the text. Grigar talks briefly about the trend of "writerly" games in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a movement that lost popularity with the arrival of the Web. Jess Jackson in the audience asks if Pisarski has ever played Dungeons & Dragons. Pisarski answers that he tried a few times but is more of "a World of Warcraft player, retired but always coming back." Grigar draws a link between the culture and interactive storytelling mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons and early hypertexts that were influenced by it. From the audience, teendtso asks whether Pisarski prefers the book or the Hypergate version of A Sucker in Spades, and Pisarski answers that each "has its own joys," but if he had to choose he would "take the book." The Q & A session concludes with Grigar and Pisarski thanking those who attended and those who helped to organize the event.  

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