http://www.antimodal.com/archives/68 Art, technology, and hype from the desk of Brandon Rickman Fri, 01 Jun 2007 04:37:30 -0400 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8 hourly 1 http://www.antimodal.com/archives/68/comment-page-1#comment-95 nick Sat, 28 Aug 2004 14:36:15 +0000 http://www.antimodal.com/archives/68#comment-95 Brandon, thanks for your thoughtful review. I'm glad you liked the beginning of the book, and wish the rest of it had been of as much interest. Although it's too late to offer you any solace, I'll at least explain one of my decisions: The coverage of chapter 5, about Infocom, is as broad as it is because I felt Infocom was very important as an institution. Such a wide range of interesting IF was developed at Infocom, by people talking to each other about ideas, sharing code, and all working with the same editor and testers. I could have picked out the usual suspects for literary discussion (Trinity, AMFV) or only talked about a few popular favorites (Planetfall, Hitchhiker's Guide), but I wanted to explain something about the context those games came from, so that more detailed discussion in the future would be informed by that. Otherwise, people who knew only about the four games mentioned previously might continue to think, for instance, that all Infocom games are either fantasy or science fiction of some sort. For similar reasons, I looked at the rather brief history of IF in more detail than the "current era," and I tried to be fairly broad while zooming in on a few particularly interesting works. There are "close readings" of recent IF available elsewhere. Stuart Moulthrop and I wrote a paper about Varicella; you probably recall that I presented some details of how Bad Machine relates to the riddle at UCLA; and there is other work out and forthcoming from scholars, not to mention many papers written by students for classes. I certainly agree with you that there are topics touched on in Twisty Little Passages that deserve further discussion: IF as software, the role of NPCs, the riddle as a way of deeply understanding specific recent interactive fiction works, and others. If the first academic book on interactive fiction didn't cover these adequately, it may be the author's fault, or it may be that IF is a complex topic that requires more discussion than can fit into a single, introductory book, written for readers who may not have played IF before. This seemed to me like the best book to write, though. My hope was that it would contextualize and justify approaches from textual and software studies, considerations of specific recent games, and more detailed applications of the riddle figure, helping to begin an academic discussion of IF. Brandon, thanks for your thoughtful review. I’m glad you liked the beginning of the book, and wish the rest of it had been of as much interest.
Although it’s too late to offer you any solace, I’ll at least explain one of my decisions: The coverage of chapter 5, about Infocom, is as broad as it is because I felt Infocom was very important as an institution. Such a wide range of interesting IF was developed at Infocom, by people talking to each other about ideas, sharing code, and all working with the same editor and testers. I could have picked out the usual suspects for literary discussion (Trinity, AMFV) or only talked about a few popular favorites (Planetfall, Hitchhiker’s Guide), but I wanted to explain something about the context those games came from, so that more detailed discussion in the future would be informed by that. Otherwise, people who knew only about the four games mentioned previously might continue to think, for instance, that all Infocom games are either fantasy or science fiction of some sort.
For similar reasons, I looked at the rather brief history of IF in more detail than the “current era,” and I tried to be fairly broad while zooming in on a few particularly interesting works. There are “close readings” of recent IF available elsewhere. Stuart Moulthrop and I wrote a paper about Varicella; you probably recall that I presented some details of how Bad Machine relates to the riddle at UCLA; and there is other work out and forthcoming from scholars, not to mention many papers written by students for classes.
I certainly agree with you that there are topics touched on in Twisty Little Passages that deserve further discussion: IF as software, the role of NPCs, the riddle as a way of deeply understanding specific recent interactive fiction works, and others. If the first academic book on interactive fiction didn’t cover these adequately, it may be the author’s fault, or it may be that IF is a complex topic that requires more discussion than can fit into a single, introductory book, written for readers who may not have played IF before. This seemed to me like the best book to write, though. My hope was that it would contextualize and justify approaches from textual and software studies, considerations of specific recent games, and more detailed applications of the riddle figure, helping to begin an academic discussion of IF.

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