Andrew Plotkin posted on rec.arts.int-fiction a few years ago a list of implicit assumptions common to most IF, suggesting that experimental IF works might set about subverting those assumptions. Plotkin's Space Under the Window pushed the limits of IF, to be sure, but in a rather straightforward way; there, the author forced the player to give up the usual mode of interacting with the game environment. Spider and Web, though no less subversive in its way, is altogether more subtle--and Plotkin overturns the tropes of standard IF to great effect.

As it would be altogether too hard to discuss otherwise, I'll describe the essential structure--the outer layer, as it were--of the game: as a spy sent to investigate an enemy laboratory, you have been caught and are recounting your actions to your interrogator. But you recount them not verbally, but as replayed scenes in your mind picked up by a mind probe--and therefore you play out the recreations as conventional IF narrative, or so it seems at first. Moreover, your interrogator interrupts you constantly to inform you that you have gotten the scene "wrong," or to interject comments when you do get it right, and there's therefore a sense that you're discovering what you've already done. The confusion of narratives that arises is done with remarkable skill: after all, the effect of the scene is that the interrogator is asking you, for the most part, to confirm what he already knows, and therefore the point of most of the exercise, as far as he's concerned, is less to learn anything than to have you submit to his coercion, repeat what he's telling you. (The interrogator describes it that way: "It comes down to telling stories. You spin me a story, and I listen....This verse isn't yet right.") Critical theory meets IF, in other words: the controlling ideology enforces its rule by forcing the controlled to repeat--and play out, over and over again--the narrative. The idea, at least for critical theorists, came down from Marx, but it has a life of its own by now. If Foucault wrote in this medium, he'd more than likely write something like this. (Discipline and Punish in IF form? Internalized panopticons? Could happen.) The experience of playing it is unique and vaguely reminiscent of 1984--it forces the player not only to accept someone else's account of a certain truth, in this case his own memories, but to replay them in conformity with what he's told--and the feeling is often unnerving.

At any rate, Plotkin uses this premise skillfully, often in ways that can't be revealed here lest they spoil the fun. Among the more amusing moments is the opening scene in the city streets, which, like everything else, you're replaying for the interrogator's benefit--and you therefore throw in some ingratiating sentiment laced with sarcasm: "And however much of the capital city is crusted with squat brick and faceless concrete hulks, there are still flashes of its historic charm." Later, a subtle dig at the enemy regime: "The alley is quite empty, bare even of trash. (Your guidebook warned you: the police are as efficient about litter laws as about everything else they do.)" Later repetitions of the scene cut out most of the rhapsodizing about the city's charms, as if in acknowledgment that the interrogator doesn't want to hear it. The temporal confusions abound: this is one work of IF where much of the action has already happened at the beginning of the game, and the story technique is works far better than the "flashback" sequences common in film. The slow-developing plot is frustrating at times--the player is often reduced to thinking "_why_ would I have done that?", and not all the questions get resolved. But there is method to Plotkin's madness, as always, and the twists are calculated for maximum effect.

Spider and Web owes its setting and plot to Cold War spy movies and novels, in a sense. It gradually becomes apparent that you're after a mysterious device, a weapon of sorts: they have it, you want it or alternately don't want them to have it, it's essential to the balance of power, etc. (And a certain less-than-credible scene toward the end recalls one of the silliest features of action movies.) There is also a certain debt to science fiction, though, in the wealth of gadgetry that you carry around--you bring a toolcase with you--and in the endgame, which requires that you figure out a whole host of devices at high speed in a way reminiscent of lots of SF. Particularly since so much of the plot turns on understanding the properties of gadgets, it's tempting to make them the real point of the story--and yet good science fiction, despite appearances, is often less about neat technology than about the human conflicts that it brings about, and Spider and Web is no different. At one point, your interrogator--oddly candid, but I suppose he has to be for the story to go anywhere--acknowledges that the new weapon, rather than enabling a supposed "clean war", would actually make the ongoing war even more chaotic and enable dangerous abuses of power, but then acknowledges that he still participates in building and developing the weapon. (The tension, in critical theory terms: the figure who wields the power admits his doubts about the validity or appeal of the dominant ideology, thereby deconstructing that ideology's claim to exclusive truth and legitimating dissent. Well, maybe.) Implicitly, technology becomes an end in itself, divorced from its desired ends--or, alternately, avoiding a certain technological advance is more risky than pursuing it, lest one's side lose the destructive advantage. The latter echoes Cold War deterrence theory, while the former is an element in most dystopian visions (Fahrenheit 451, for example). At any rate, the endgame underscores the importance of the backstory; players should probably go back to old save positions once they near the end simply to make sense of some of the earlier speeches.

As a game, Spider and Web works well. The interrogator's comments act as a sort of hint system for much of the game, since your various mistakes draw out comments that indicate what he's looking for and narrow down the scope of your actions through repeated tries. As such, the game is fairly short and most of it isn't all that hard; it's only toward the end that the Zarfian side comes out and the player needs real intuition to keep up. (As with other Zarf works, furthermore, the hardest points are the most satisfying to solve--they're rewarded in one way or another.) There are a few points where the interrogator's responses don't quite seem to match your actions, and it isn't quite clear at those points whether he just doesn't care about the discrepancies or whether there are bugs afoot. The ultimate ending is something of a letdown, at least in terms of spy-novel victory-for-your-side expectations, though it certainly fits the Zarf ethos. On the whole, the puzzles are unique and well crafted; there is nothing arbitrarily thrown in to require puzzle-solving, and the obtacles feel logical enough. There's even some humor, unlikely as it sounds: the interrogator is equipped with plenty of sarcastic jabs. (At one point, if you claim that the guards lied about something: "Ah. They'll be hurt to hear so.") The atmosphere is likewise effective: the halls are cold but not obtrusively so. As seems to happen in many Plotkin games, a key shift in mood is marked by the lights going out and the player's having to stumble around in "dimness" (the word, in particular, reminded me of Space Under the Window); though the dimming doesn't accompany changes in the landscape, as happened in Change in the Weather, it does serve to heighten tension and set the final events of the game in motion. Technically proficient, with a well-developed story, Spider and Web is a solid game.

But Plotkin is not, precisely, known in the IF community for conventional solid games, and Spider and Web doesn't really fit many categories. The spy-adventure aspect is subverted by the moral ambiguities: it isn't clear that arranging for your side to have the weapon would be an altogether good thing, and it becomes obvious that the interrogator is driven to develop it more by political necessity--the regime demands it--than by personal fascination with the possibilities. Indeed, one event toward the end suggests that the power game is what really matters, that the technology is expendable; the real value of the thing lies in simply having it while the other side doesn't. A development parallel to the story of the weapon, moreover--call it one of the plot layers--suggests that technology still can't keep up with human ingenuity, in that a large part of the game turns on outsmarting a device that your captors rely on. While there are science fiction elements, the game turns on the interrogation and the conflict it masks rather than the technological/speculative bits; the specter of the omniscient questioner who manipulates his captives into saying what he wants recalls, among other things, Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Most importantly, unlike the bulk of IF, the player cannot identify a clear goal for the protagonist, or necessarily even assume that he understands what the protagonist is thinking at any given time; the feeling of discovering rather than creating a story recurs on several levels. Put another way, the game sharply limits how much innovation you can give the set script, sometimes because you have to match the interrogator's account and sometimes because every move is vital, as in Change in the Weather. Throughout the story, discovering what you're "meant" to be doing means discovering what your own character is up to, sometimes in surprising ways, and the effect is occasionally similar to coming gradually out of a total loss of memory.

There is much that's worth pondering over the course of Spider and Web: the various competing narratives keep the player guessing (some of the techniques reminded me of Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, though I'm sure they're not unique), and the game is well-crafted on every level. Anyone who has enjoyed Plotkin's previous efforts should without a doubt check this one out.