color wheel round and round
An unintentional secret: I'm a big fan of interactive fiction. Always have been, since the days pure text adventure started to fade and point-and-click adventures weren't quite point-and-click. The genre has never truly died; it's merely gotten more niche and more literary. It's been thirty years but you still see phrases like "You see a maze of twisty little passages, all alike" on T-shirts and bumper stickers, and a small army of writers are still cranking out this stuff. Regrettable that the general public lost interest in the genre before it really came into its own because some of the stuff that's been written since puts even the early '80s classics to shame. Modern IF...not so much a game genre, anymore, as much as a hybrid of gaming and fiction in its own right.
Take Photopia, for example. (Play it in your browser! It's longer than most IF games but still short.) The praise for this game has been hyperbolic, sometimes distastefully so, and the essays on its influence absurdly pretentious--if I hear the world "ludonarrative" one more time I'm going to have to throttle someone--but no one can doubt that it has had a huge impact on games as a medium for storytelling, as opposed to just "games" in the pre-computing sense of the word, and has created many of the interactive storytelling tropes we now take for granted (like menu-based dialogue, and NPCs telling their stories by playing the game). The story wouldn't edge out something like House of Leaves for brilliant experimental fiction, but it is unquestioningly very good, and if you are a fan of IF or don't generally enjoy video games, you will find it to be an unusual and amazing treat.
Why haven't I written any IF yet? Given that it's the most direct intersection between computer games and traditional fiction, it seems like something I was born to do.
Hmm.
Take Photopia, for example. (Play it in your browser! It's longer than most IF games but still short.) The praise for this game has been hyperbolic, sometimes distastefully so, and the essays on its influence absurdly pretentious--if I hear the world "ludonarrative" one more time I'm going to have to throttle someone--but no one can doubt that it has had a huge impact on games as a medium for storytelling, as opposed to just "games" in the pre-computing sense of the word, and has created many of the interactive storytelling tropes we now take for granted (like menu-based dialogue, and NPCs telling their stories by playing the game). The story wouldn't edge out something like House of Leaves for brilliant experimental fiction, but it is unquestioningly very good, and if you are a fan of IF or don't generally enjoy video games, you will find it to be an unusual and amazing treat.
Why haven't I written any IF yet? Given that it's the most direct intersection between computer games and traditional fiction, it seems like something I was born to do.
Hmm.