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


29 Nov 1995 04:02:22 GMT

Ok, how about this:

we're talking about IF as played on a monitor, which limits the audience
to those who don't mind hours in front of the screen. We're habituated
to it. IF is also puzzle-oriented, i.e. often logical (giving a lot of
leeway here) rather than deeply evocative. It's clever. Thoughtful.

imagine the genre though a few years hence on a portable unit that the
casual user can enjoy as much as a paperback book - something with the
appeal of paper, the feel of it perhaps, but an easily held, easily
manipulated folding screen that's voice activated so no keyboard. In
short, let's not limit our imaginations to the current (passing)
structures of symbol manipulation.

now imagine a "game" that proceeds intuitively through dialog and
interaction of complex characters, deepening as it progresses,
striking the right balance between length of scene and enticement to the
next scene, the implicit complexity of the game lending itself to the
maze-like complexity of human beings and their interaction.

don't sell the genre short, even if it's being kept alive for the moment
in a quiet corner of cyberspace. The potential of the form is explosive.

just as movie attendence is greater, not less, with VCRs, and book
publishing is more rather than less alive after PCs, the VR machines will
produce one kind of art, IF another. Radio was written off as dead a long
time ago and look at it go ...