Re: "Serious" IF (was Re: Gareth's competition comments)


15 Oct 1995 20:06:22 GMT

Look, I think it's perfectly appropriate for there to be different
"genres" of i-f, some of them "serious" (or "artistic" or whatever you
want to call it), some not. And some people will only like games that
have elegant prose, others will only like games that have great puzzles,
others will only like games that make them laugh. And *that's okay*.

Two of my favorite authors are Marge Piercy and Douglas Adams. I don't
enjoy them for remotely similar reasons, but I consider both of their
writings to be great fiction -- and sometimes I'm in the mood for one,
sometimes for the other.

All this talk about what makes good i-f has been very interesting (and
helpful, as I work on my next project), but before we start getting all
absolutist in the search for the perfect i-f canon, I think we should
acknowledge that *most* of this comes down to a matter of taste.
("Detective" excepted, of course.)

For some reason, this competition has loosed a lot of tongues in this
newsgroup. Used to be, everyone bent over backwards to praise authors
just for having produced a game. Lately, though, there's been a lot more
sniping at games and less constructive criticism, and this latest trend
of arguing over what constitutes "real" i-f similarly seems more likely
to scare people off from writing games than to encourage them to do so.

(All IMHO, of course.)

Neil