Interview: Alex Kriss, creator of the text adventure Progression

When Alex Kriss created Progression, a text adventure that blurs the lines between 'story' and 'game', he spawned a small cult phenomenon: along with over fourteen thousand plays, players have come together to analyze the story on places like Jayisgames and PC Gamer.  I decided to sit down and talk with the writer about the game's true ending, its references to Zork, and the meaning of the title.

If you would like to listen to the interview in its entirety, check out the Soundcloud player below.  Otherwise, feel free to read the transcribed highlights.

...because I couldn't resist.

For me, one of the interesting things about Progression is the co-existence of game tropes (such as grinding) alongside more literary techniques. Do you consider Progression to be more of a short story or a video game? 

That's a good question.  I think it's a bit of both, and I think that these labels are not so clear cut anymore.  Part of what I was going for in some kind of meta way is the nature of the progression as you descend into this dungeon.  It starts out very literary and then becomes more game-like as you descend until, as you mentioned, it becomes this kind of grind with very little story, dialogue, characterization or really anything besides the mechanics of the game.

So I think it's both, and my hope is that people feel it plays with the tenuous line between the formats that we know really well—whether they are these RPG, adventure games or the short story. 

It's funny that you mention RPGs—I noticed that you at one point included a quote from Zork.  "You are standing in an open field west of a white house with a boarded front door.  There is a small mailbox here."  Why did you decide to include that reference?

A lot of people were confused by this, and some people liked this.  In fact, the feedback that I've gotten from the game has been really great and gratifying.  It's so cool to meet people like yourself who have really delved into [Progression.] So that quote and the styling that the game suddenly takes on—it becomes a black background with green text—it is all very much taken out of Zork.  And I mean it is literally stolen from Zork.  And again, I think that it is a very meta sort of moment.  And some people appreciate that and some people just think it's out of place. 




Again, I think that's the point in the game where I am starting to suggest there are multiple kinds of descents going on: there is the physical descent of your character into this dungeon, there is the sort of emotional descent as things get kind of baser and more raw and more intense between the player character and the things going on.  Then there is this kind of weird descent through the history of games, where we start off in this very postmodern, literary sense and then we go to something that almost mimics the old Scumm interface from the LucasArts games and then goes even further down into Zork and the old text adventure.



Along with the story of Erasmus and the Orlech, there's also some implementation of computing and *SPOILERS* one of the endings involves the player flying away on a spaceship.  Can you explain what you were going for with that second level of the story?

It's hard to say what I was really going for, so I'll answer this with a slight tangent.  One of the most gratifying things to come up since I published the game a few weeks ago was that a user on the site JayisGames spontaneously wrote a walkthrough—which is cool in of itself, because I used to do that for games I loved when I was kid— but this user also wrote a story interpretation.  It includes a lot of ideas that I think are really cool, some of which are very much in line with what I was consciously thinking about and other stuff which I'm not so sure I ever thought of (though they make total sense to me).  The way that I wrote this game, the way that I write creative fiction in general...it's hard to speak about what I was going for.  


But there was a goal I had, to give this story many different layers: the sense of you as a player playing this game, the sense of the character you're inhabiting going through these different levels of the dungeon and going through different iterations of their life as they die and are forced to replay the game again and again, and then the next outer layer with the 'spaceship' ending that you referred to.  Perhaps this entire dungeon fantasy world is happening inside the mind of the character.

And this is not something I necessarily thought of very deliberately from the beginning, but the user on this site made the suggestion that perhaps the player's character is infected throughout the entire play experience and maybe it's only when you're free, when you're flying away on the spaceship, that you've escaped the descent.

Personally, I found the most satisfying ending to be the 'Ascend' ending.  The Spaceship ending was almost too stunning.

Right.  You can't get the Spaceship ending until you have gotten the Ascend ending because I agree that it is a real left turn.  I wanted to make sure people had the emotional payoff of the Ascend ending before taking that other route.



One of the initial inspirations for the Spaceship ending is a very opaque shoutout to the original Silent Hill (which is one of my favorite video games). Silent Hill had a secret ending in which your character is abducted by a UFO. So the space ending is something I've always associated with Silent Hill—but that's another tangent.

The Ascend ending—well, hopefully that is the emotional payoff of the game.

Really the only thing I found frustrating about Progression was the five hundred experience points required to buy the gun.  Why did you decide to incorporate grinding into the game?

There are two answers to that.  The probably more honest one is that, you know, this wasn't so heavily play tested. I played it a lot and then when I first released it I sent it to my friends to check it out.  So I wasn't sure if five hundred was too much or not enough, or if things were not clear enough or if they should be changed.  So maybe it is too much or I should have made sure that it was obvious that the gun doesn't go away once you play through again.

But then the other answer is that frustration is part of the experience with this game. There's something kind of raw and interesting about it for people who are willing to suffer through. 

If you would also like to suffer through Progression, you can play it here.  For more information on the man behind the game, follow Alex on Twitter.

For more interviews:

Follow @LiteraryGaming