I don't think anyone (certainly not I) was questioning the artistic aspects
of IF. However, the question remains: what kind of art is it? Is it Michael
Jackson or Handel? Is it Spielberg or Ingmar Bergman? Is it Dick Francis or
Tolstoy? (And of course there are continuous shades of grey between the
extremes.)
Every IF game I've played so far has essentially been entertainment. In
other words, IF seems to fall on the "popular" side of the art spectrum:
Jackson/Spielberg/Francis. (For the record, I've never played any Infocom
games - I don't have a PC. I've only played TADS and Inform games on the
university computer.) Some games are better than others, just as some
popular authors/filmmakers/etc. are better than others. Saying that "IF is
a diversion" is not a criticism of IF. Popular music is no less "artistic"
than classical music. However, popular music should not be judged using the
same criteria as classical music. It should be judged based on how well it
does what it is designed to do. The same applies to IF.
Can IF go beyond being just a "crossword puzzle genre"? I have my doubts,
as I've expressed in previous posts. I suspect that the limitations of IF
are more severe than those of other artistic media. In particular, the
interactivity seems to me to ultimately be a barrier rather than an
advantage. For example, take _Lethe_ (which I haven't finished yet - I'm
stuck about 2/3 - 3/4 of the way through). In order to flesh out the
character(s) and the motivation, Dan has resorted to making the player read
at least half-a-dozen screenfuls of text, during which the player does
nothing. In other words, there is no 'I', just 'F'. So he too has run up
against the limitations of IF: the 'I' gets in the way of what he wants to
say.
Still, Jacob and Dan have argued rather eloquently that the 'I' can
actually be used to allow the reader/player to experience *more* (or at
least differently) than in ordinary fiction. (I especially liked Dan's
example of how *I* kill Caesar, not Brutus.) It'll be interesting to see if
indeed this comes about.
David London