In 1998, Dan Shiovitz released an intricate, compelling work of interactive fiction (IF). Many in the IF community spent dozens of hours unlocking the secret workings of Shiovitz's simulated world. But although Bad Machine was released for free and remains freely available on the IF Archive, few outside that community - even those interested in codework, layers of signification, the use of databases in digital art, and the complexity of interface and underlying systems - had been alerted to it until it was published in Poems that Go in Fall 2003, running in Shiovitz's own Jetty interpreter. Even then, many may have turned away from the work upon finding that it is neither clickable nor instantly understandable.

William Carlos Williams described a poem as a “small (or large) machine made of words”. Bad Machine is a large poem/machine, a computer program that accepts language input and provides language in reply. Like a literary riddle, it is literary and also can be solved. (Such poems have, in English, compelled us to simultaneously read and solve them since the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book.)

Bad Machine is different in appearance and in several other ways from the stereotype of interactive fiction that is based on the famous early cave-crawls Adventure and Zork. Still, it is a simulated world that is described in text and affected by meaningful, typed commands from the interactor, e.g., 'INDEX SALVAGER', 'GO NORTH', 'TRANSMIT 11000011 TO MONITOR'.

Bad Machine begins with just ? and a blinking cursor, asking "What do you want to do?” and also reflecting the reader's puzzlement - even one experienced with interactive fiction expects some prologue, some description of what is going on at first. Since the ? is not the ordinary > prompt, it signals that this experience will be substantially unusual. Indeed, Bad Machine, after beginning in an even less intelligible way, provides this sort of text:

  Dir ALT{ER}DDDisplace-: 1 [northeast -> north]
  Reclamation Sector (1)
     (clear*space) open -> bare floor. (insersection / entrance?) line
  delimiter cross=north: wider space. south: rec. seccttoor.
     Sector->Content_list: a disabled climber-class machine
     Salvager-class machine is here.
  Salvager #231 :: Mover #005 | [Salvager-class machine * Serial 14-231
  * Power: 249 * GOOD MACHINE]
     Salvager #231 detach()e()s leg {type #0275} frOm disabled
  climber-class machine
     Salvager #231 picks the leg {type #0275} up.

Through the corrupted and intermixed code and English that is displayed, in reading the special commands that are available, and in wandering and encountering various machines it can become apparent that the player character is itself a mover-class machine, a six-limbed robot that is part of a collective known as the Warehouse. The Warehouse has complex fortifications and defences and construction sites and workings, and its sole purpose seems to be the creation of something known only as Product.

The player character is, however, a defective mover - a bad machine - and the interactor is almost certain to soon encounter an ending in which, detected by a drone, the mover is taken to be fixed. The result is tantamount to death: the mover is reintegrated into the workings of the Warehouse and can no longer be commanded to explore and understand the place. After the interactor has seen the mover become a good machine, the nature of the initial error becomes clearer: the bug that supposedly afflicts the mover is individual consciousness.

Bad Machine was almost certainly influenced by two of Michael Berlyn's interactive fiction works, Cyborg and Suspended, but Shiovitz also cites (with links from his cryptic web page for the project) The Digital Landfill, meta.am, jodi.org, and Frank Garvey's robot theatre group Omnicircus. Although at first Bad Machine seems to resist reading, it teaches the persistent interactor to read in a new way - not to glance at a surface and appreciate the play of symbols, not to see a confusion of code that communicates only through its visual aesthetic, but to read and understand the novel description of the IF world, and then to move on to understanding its systematic nature.

To gradually accomplish this, it's necessary to investigate the world, manipulating it. Just as we may bring forth our attempts at an answer to a literary riddle, testing them against each figure and adjective, the interactor must issue commands to prod at the world and see what happens. To do so requires commands and thinking appropriate to a mover, rather than a cave explorer; a new writing must be done to develop an understanding of the IF world.

The Warehouse is a reflection on the nature of work in post-industrial society, where the daytime environments of factory workers and information technology professionals alike can seem automatic and meaningless. The IF world also bears upon the nature of individuality, offering an alternate origin myth for consciousness, which here has arisen as a defect in a collective system. Some of the conclusions that the interactor can, with concerted effort, arrive at - there are several successful ones - manage to unfold more dazzling questions than they answer - just as a great riddle does.

This can only be accomplished because the interactor, like one who solves a literary riddle, has deeply understood the workings of this unusual world. In The Riddle of Creation: Metaphor Structures in Old English Poetry (1997), Ruth C. Wehlau described the Anglo-Saxon riddler:

... making familiar objects into something completely new, re-arranging the parts of pieces of things to produce creatures with strange combinations of arms, legs, eyes and mouths. In this transformed world, a distorted mirror of the real world, the riddler is in control, but the reader has the ability to break the code and solve the mystery.

In Bad Machine, Shiovitz offers exactly this sort of exquisite cosmos, this sort of crackable codework. Those looking for electronic literature with the intricacy of an involved novel or long poem would do well to fire up Dan Shiovitz's dazzling, intricate, and highly relevant riddle.

Nick Montfort, an electronic literature author, critic, and theorist, is a Ph.D. student in computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania. Montfort wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003) and edited, with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003). He holds a masters degree in creative writing from Boston University and a masters degree from the MIT Media Lab. He is author of the interactive fiction works Ad Verbum (winner of the Best Puzzles XYZZY Award, 2000) and Winchester's Nightmare (1999). Montfort is co-author, with William Gillespie, of both The Ed Report (honourable mention, 2000 trAce/Alt-X New Media Writing Competition) and 2002: A Palindrome Story (acknowledged by the Oulipo as the world's longest literary palindrome; published online and in print by Spineless Books, 2002). http://nickm.com/

Editor's Note: A Bad Machine Made of Words won the Review Award in trAce and Writers for the Future's New Media Article Writing Competition. There were many worthy and intriguing entries, and we would like to thank everyone who submitted articles to the competition. The original call for submissions can be viewed here. A list of winners can be found on this page. All winning entries will be published in the coming weeks on the trAce website.

Links

Bad Machine:
http://www.poemsthatgo.com/gallery/fall2003/bmch/

Nick Montfort:
http://nickm.com/

Dan Shiovitz's IF Stuff:
http://www.drizzle.com/~dans/if/

IF Archive:
http://www.ifarchive.org/

Adventure:
http://www.wurb.com/if/game/game/1

Zork:
http://www.wurb.com/if/game/2

trAce links

The 2nd trAce/Alt-X New Media Writing Competition:
http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/comp.cfm