I wake up in a hotel room, and that’s about all I know. I’ve forgotten not just where I am but who I am—and also where my clothes are. I search the dresser and the bathroom—no luck. A knock on the door breeds urgency, then panic. I try speaking to the visitor through the closed door, but in this memory-less place, I don’t know how. The knocking returns, more insistent this time. I try to put on a towel, at least, but somehow I don’t know how to do that either. Succumbing to what feels like my doom, I open the door and, thankfully, find a maid who is amused, not horrified, to see me in this state. She moves to a different room, and I keep searching—in the closet, on the nightstand—for an outfit that I can only hope includes pants. Still no luck. I reapproach the towel and, this time, figure it out. My new look would “barely pass muster in a sauna,” the voice in my head observes, but it’s better than nothing. Not sure what else to do, I step into the hallway, and, as the door closes behind me with a click, I realize I’ve forgotten one more thing: the room key.
And just as I begin to wonder how I can get out of this next jam, the world freezes in place. I’ve hit the 15-minute playtime limit for this presentation of Thomas M. Disch’s Amnesia, a vintage text-only video game that’s currently getting a second playthrough in Yale’s Hanke Exhibition Gallery, where it’s the focus of Remembering Amnesia: Rebooting the First Computerized Novel.
As the exhibition’s clever title indicates, the game, published in 1986, isn’t just a game; it’s a novel—the first of its kind according to curator Claire Fox, who has a great title herself (Software Preservation and Emulation Librarian) and will be leading an opening reception this evening. While other novels had already been adapted to the interactive fiction medium—in which the story advances and develops based on text prompts exchanged between the novel and its reader, necessitating the use of a computer—none before Disch’s had been written specifically for the format.
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Firsts should be remembered, yet this one seems all but forgotten. Upon Disch’s suicide in 2008, obituaries in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Independent, The Guardian and The Telegraph examined his long career as a paper novelist, but they mention his digital achievement only in passing, and none of them acknowledge its special place in history. Even glowing reviews that were printed at the time of Amnesia’s release, three of which are displayed as part of the show, seem not quite to grasp its historical significance.
Remembering Amnesia corrects the record, using key archival objects—many of them drawn from the Beinecke Library’s collections—to tell the story behind the tale (and make broader points about the history of technology): a partially printed-out floppy disk journal in which Disch despaired over the abandonment of the project by its first intended publisher; an analog notebook he used to plot things out; an original copy of the game itself, from the outer packaging to the inner floppy disks to an “X-street indexer” tool (which apparently proved invaluable as players navigated Manhattan, the game’s larger setting); and even the now-ancient-looking computer Disch used from 1984 on, topped off by a contemporaneous publicity photo of Disch holding up a copy of Amnesia with that very computer behind him.
Of course, being first isn’t the same as being good, but from what I’ve experienced, Amnesia is better than good. The writing is as good as it gets, and the programming feels impressive even today. The novel can reportedly recognize 1,700 words with enough syntactical sophistication to engage in “near-conversational English,” throughout a story composed of thousands of locations, while keeping track of the time (and all the ways it affects the surrounding cityscape). Thus, unlike a paper novel, which is only rereadable in a cursory sense, Amnesia offers endless replay value. In the reading and playing, one learns how to better read and play it, allowing its unknown possibilities to blossom more beautifully and confidently on the next go-around.
Which is why, on my second playthrough, I felt more playful—and fared much better. I still couldn’t find any proper clothing, but I did discover that I could wrap myself in a large bedsheet instead of the skimpy towel, albeit not before the maid arrived. I turned on the TV and flipped through several channels, finding hard news, soft porn and Wheel of Fortune. I opened the hotel brochure on the dresser but not the Gideon Bible (definitely next time). I looked out the window, finding a postcard view, and called the front desk to ask if someone could bring me clothes; instead they recommended Bloomingdale’s at 59th and Lexington. Sensing my time was almost up, I left the room, this time with the key, and walked down the hallway, where a dramatic turn I won’t spoil awakened me even further to the possibilities of the format.
Given the time limit, you can only scratch the surface of what it’s like to read and play Amnesia at Remembering Amnesia. Even so, if you’re like me, it’s an experience you won’t soon forget.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims.
