A Sucker in Spades––Hardboiled Text Game of Robert DiChiara
One dead body, two femme fatales, local mafia, and a lone private eye roaming the labyrinth of L.A. from one click of the mouse to another. A Sucker in Spades by Robert DiChiara, is the second eliterature works published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in 1988 on a the Hypergate platform. It offers a solid dose of digital, postmodern adventure within the recognisable convention of hard-boiled fiction and film-noir genres. At the same time it prefigures future forms of interactive entertainment.
On a narrative level, in imagery and style A Sucker in Spades is immersed in the hard-boiled genre, although with an added element of irony, humor, pastiche, and parody. On the level of poetics and the mechanics of narrative discourse the work points toward future forms of interactive storytelling.
