PAGE 2 - THE NEW ZORK TIMES - FALL 1984

(c) 1984 Infocom, Inc.

THEY'RE NEVER SATISFIED

by Dave Lebling

I had my first encounter with a professional play-tester two years ago, when I was writing Starcross. As I worked, every so often my concentration would be broken by a horrible cackling laugh from a few doors down the hall. Jerry had found another bug.

Infocom's Quality Control Department (informally, play-testers) makes sure our stories are bug-free before they get published. From the first, horrifically buggy version "thrown in the swimming pool," to the final, perfect (hah!) version that we ship, the play-testers pound away, searching for flaws.

It starts out very simply. Let's take Suspect for a victim ... oops, I mean an example. When a game first enters testing, it's a delicate thing, easily upset:

> BARTENDER, GIVE ME A DRINK
"Sorry, I've been hired to mix drinks and that's all."

> DANCE WITH ALICIA
Which Alicia do you mean, Alicia or the overcoat?

Veronica's body is slumped behind the desk, strangled with a lariat.

> TALK TO VERONICA
Veronica's body is listening.

Little bugs, you know? Things no one would notice. At this point the tester's job is fairly easy. The story is like a house of cards -- it looks pretty solid but the slightest touch collapses it:

Media Room
> ENTER
**FATAL ERROR: Pushdown Overflow**

Mysteries have a lot of scope for truly odd bugs, since they have so many characters running around. Throughout the testing process, I would get reports like:

"Duffy is having serious problems .... "
"Alicia isn't functioning too well .... "
"The detective seems stuck in the North Hallway .... "

Suspect has thirteen characters (counting you) and a few bit players, so at times it resembled a Marx brothers movie.

Testers are relentless. Once they find out they can talk to a corpse, you can confidently expect a list of all the other things that will listen to them: cars, tables, chairs, waste baskets, anything. This is sometimes called "rubbing it in."

They had a particularly gleeful time with poor Veronica's body. It's not enough that she's been murdered. No, first they decide to hide the body. Then, to make things worse, they carry her around, presumably slung over the shoulder.

> SHOW CORPSE TO MICHAEL
Michael doesn't appear interested.

Of course, Michael is only Veronica's husband; why would he be interested? After that, it was open season! Bodies everywhere:

"I carried Veronica's body into the Ballroom.  No one noticed."
"Sergeant Duffy walked right by while I was carrying the body.
He didn't notice it."
"I put the body in the chair in the Library.
Col. Marston came and went without seeing it."
"I picked up the body right in front of the detective. "

That wasn't enough:

> THROW CORPSE IN FIREPLACE
Veronica's body is now in the fireplace.

> ATTACK CORPSE WITH CROWBAR
Veronica's body jumps out of the way.

Eventually, that all got sorted out: Veronica stayed safely dead, and her party guests got less blase about corpses.

Producing a piece of interactive fiction is an odd combination of debugging a program and writing a story. Bug reports can concern anything from a stack overflow to a misplaced comma. There was a running battle (finally settled by Fowler's English Usage) over when a comma goes inside a quotation mark and when outside. By the same token, bugs can concern something as microcomputer-oriented as the stack size on the Atari implementation of the story. Some comments from testers would not be out of place in a report from an editor at a major book publisher:

"Alicia is acting out of character." 
"Why would Michael react that way when told about the murder?"
"Ostmann's motivations seem too obscure."

Some comments are directly keyed off of programming bugs that would make a BASIC programmer blush:

"Game prints garbage when Duffy enters room."
"You can drop Veronica's pulse on the floor."

There are several stages in implementing one of our stories. During the first stage, the author is so pleased that it works at all that any bug reports are welcomed. During this stage the typical bug concerns two rooms that connect in only one direction (you can go east from the first to the second but there is no way to go back).

During the second stage, all of the testers and several other game authors have had a chance to play it, and the really nasty comments come in. During this stage, bugs cause serious changes in the plot, and sub-plots are added or removed. This is when "debugging" is more like writing another draft of a novel than debugging a program. The plot is hardened into its final form, and outside testers are given their first crack at the story.

Finally comes the stage in which every bug is seen by the author as an imposition. I can always tell when a story is almost finished by my rising level of frustration at seeing new bugs in my mailbox. At some point, coming to the office in the morning becomes an exercise in procrastination. You see, at Infocom there is a hall with all the mailboxes in it, and you have to walk past the mailboxes to get to the coffee machine. The question becomes, "How much do I really want my first cup of coffee this morning?" You can always avert your eyes as you walk by the mailboxes, but that's almost too obvious. Better is to make a casual appraisal as you walk by. "Hmm. Looks like a fairly small stack this morning...." Then you can walk to the coffee machine with a clear conscience. Even a cup of yummy coffee won't improve things when you see "page 1 of 12" on the first bug report form.

Amazingly enough, it all works out in the end. Sometimes a full-page bug report will turn out to be caused by a simple little error, and you can check off three or four subsidiary bugs with one stroke. Sometimes a simple little thing you've glossed over three times as unimportant will be re-reported, and you realize it's more like the last six inches of a dragon's tail.

Best of all are the final few days before a story is shipped, when the volume of bugs drops to almost zero, and you realize that even the testers are reaching for things to report. Then, at long last you look in your mailbox and nothing's there! You say hello to the testers in the halls without terror, and there's nothing whatsoever to worry about.

Until the next game!

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