Recognizing

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Recognizing Problems in Planetfall

At the beginning of one popular work of interactive fiction, Steve Meretzky's Planetfall (1983, Infocom), the reader must exercise a metacomponent that textbooks seldom ask students to use but that Sternberg considers essential to intelligent behavior, the ability to recognize and define the nature of a problem. Here is the beginning of the story:

"Another routine day of drudgery aboard the stellar patrol ship Feinstein. This morning's assignment for a certain lowly ensign seventh class: scrubbing the filthy metal deck at the port end of Level Nine. With your patrol-issue self-contained multi-purpose scrub-brush you shine the floor with a diligence born of the knowledge that at any moment dreaded Ensign First Class Blather, the bane of your shipboard existence, could appear."

What exactly are the problems here? Well, one problem seems to be to get the deck clean, a problem that seems to call for persistent scrubbing, and so we might try typing in at the computer keyboard, "Scrub deck." If we do so, the program responds with the not-too-exciting, "The deck looks a little cleaner now." But perhaps a more important problem we face here is a lack of knowledge of our surroundings. Maybe we should activate a knowledge acquisition component and explore. Our location at the start of the story, Level Nine, offers two exits, a corridor to starboard and a gangway leading up. If we go up to Level Eight, we meet another character, the aforementioned "dreaded Ensign Blather," who assigns us twenty demerits and belligerently orders us to return to our post. Here we have another apparent problem, which may suggest solutions such as obedience, arguing, or a punch in thejaw. In interactive fiction, we can try out any or all of these approaches. If we do so, we find that punching Blather causes him to dismember us (not to worry, though; in interactive fiction, death is just the program's way of telling us we've taken a misstep), that arguing with Blather at length causes us to be thrown into the brig, and that going back to work leads to a comic encounter with a broccoli-like alien ambassador who drips slime all over the deck we're shining. Eventually, though, we learn that the last of these approaches works best, since the ship we are on soon explodes and our position on Deck Nine proves especially convenient to an escape pod. In the pod, of course, we must again identify the nature of the problem(s) we face and try to deal with them; and only after we land on the planet to which the pod takes us, will we figure out that the central problem of the story is to bring the planet's inhabitants back to life and to return to the stellar patrol.

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