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


5 Dec 1995 01:43:00 GMT

>
>I am going to take the liberty of saying that both of these viewpoints
>are silly.
>
>The potential for text IF is not explosive. Neither is it dying. (I'll
>get back to non-text IF later.)

In defense of myself: if someone said the potential of the Internet was
explosive a year before Mosaic came on the scene, many people would have
had difficulty imagining the possibilities. Mosaic made the Internet (1)
user friendly (2) easily accessible (3) capable of realizing the
potential of its form (4) that aspect of computing which is
"communication" as opposed to "computing" suddenly the primary
manifestation of the machine. I repeat: the potential of IF is explosive
-- provided that game-making shells are created that are (1) user
friendly (2) easily accessible (3) capable of realizing the potential of
the form etc.

I am thinking of IF less as games and more as literature - a particularly
potent kind of literary exploration with a multiplicity of horizons.
Before Shakespearee used a common form - the popular drama - to reveal
its potential, no one dreamed that serious literature would happen that
way. While it was happening, most did not know it was literature.
Literature was "classic," e.g. Homer. Shakespeare made no attempt to
preserve his own plays. The Shakespeare of IF hasn't shown up yet, and
most of us might not even notice if she/he did.

Do not limit your imagination re: IF to what has come before. As the man
at Decca said, "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way
out," as Decca rejected the Beatles. Or, "Everything that can be invented
has been invented" (the Commissioner of the US Office of Patents in 1899)
and on and on ...