Re: Marketing, was Re: Can I make money by writing IF?


29 Nov 1995 18:52:52 GMT

[Rereading what I've written here, I see that this isn't the most focused
post in the world. Apologies in advance if it bores you!]

I confess that I've been of two minds about IF lately. On the one hand,
we've seen more new, good games released in the past year than in the
previous two or three. And there's been a noticeable improvement in the
quality and quantity of IF criticism.

But there have been other changes too. I've been reading this group since
1990. I get the sense that the readership of the group has narrowed since
then, and that this group (collectively -- at least the minority who post)
has become fairly insular. I'm sensing a lot more definitions of IF
in opposition to the mainstream, like this one:

In article <49ht2q$23s5@thor.cmp.ilstu.edu>,
Christopher E. Forman <ceforma@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu> wrote:

>Most of the gaming community is stupid, allowing themselves to be coerced
>with pretty-looking pictures that they're too damn lazy to imagine
>themselves. We've got something better here. Text games are genuine art.

Graphical IF is very relevant to text IF. (So is static fiction, which
isn't discussed much here either.)

In my opinion, there are many excellent graphics games out there. I've
cited Full Throttle before. I think it's a step in the right direction for
graphical IF. No, the puzzles aren't that hard. The setting is not
extreme. The characters are not wonderfully novel. But it's a solid work
of interactive fiction, and it makes good use both of a graphical interface
and of pretty pictures and good voice acting.

Why can't IF just be good because it's good? Not because it *doesn't* have
graphics (which therefore must suck), or because it's not *too easy*, or
because it *doesn't require a Pentium to run*.

Text IF is just a different way of using words to tell a story. I don't
think you need puzzles, and I'm sure that though most of our games are
almost structurally indistinguishable (!) we've barely scratched the
surface.

Chris, I hope I am not misremembering here, but didn't you write the MST3K
game? I thought that was a brilliant little work. It captured the essence
of the show, but it did something much more significant as well: it showed
that you can have more than one voice in an IF work. You've got the game
telling you what's going on (which raises a somewhat interesting point:
what's that voice coming from -- a program, Matt Barringer's digital ghost,
an entity you must imagine is inside your computer, or your computer
itself?), and then you've got these robots yattering all the time, giving
you a completely different POV --- and it works!

I found it somewhat disheartening that no one touted these aspects of your
work. (Did I miss the relevant messages?) It's one reason I say that
perhaps we've gotten a bit narrowly focused of late. A game does not have
to be novella-sized or especially puzzling to be a fine piece of IF. Works
that break these traditions should (IMHO) prompt discussion just because
they do so!

Since there is no commercial potential for text IF, it should have no rules
authors must strictly adhere to. What is the point of limiting yourself
when so few people will reade your work anyway?!

>Keep the art form going. Someday it'll get the recognition it's deserved
>for years. Remember, genius is never understood in its own time.

I don't have such high hopes, but even if this stuff is all totally
ignored in 20 years, we can enjoy it now, right?

My own random thoughts:

I'd like to see more IF experiments like yours. My advice to authors is:
write whatever weird thing comes to mind. Work hard to make it conform to
your vision, but don't worry about what the typical IF fan will think.
Reviewers: there's merit in new forms, even if they aren't ultimately very
successful. Many people here have mentioned this in the context of
_Suspended_, so it's hardly a foreign concept.

Dave Baggett
__
dmb@ai.mit.edu
"Mr. Price: Please don't try to make things nice! The wrong notes are *right*."
--- Charles Ives (note to copyist on the autograph score of The Fourth of July)