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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: What makes IF so popular...?
Message-ID: <GF46qv.Jur@world.std.com>
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 07:13:43 GMT
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Adam Cadre <grignr@cascadia.drizzle.com> wrote:
>Ulrich Schreitmueller wrote:
>> It always reminded me of the way comic books are always referred to as
>> "graphic novels" to get their literary merit across
>
>False, or at least misleading.  No one refers to a stapled, standard comic
>book as a graphic novel.  A graphic novel is a squarebound book, many
>times longer than a standard 22-page comic book, which makes use of the
>medium of sequential art.  What's more, to qualify as a true graphic
>novel, the contents should be an all-new, self-contained story and not a
>collection of previously published material.

Ok, my previous comment about "IF" versus "text adventure" may
have been wandering away from the point of the debate, but the
above analysis while quite possibly true for some definition of
"graphic novel" (I'm not quite sure whose definition you're using)
seems to ignore the history. Well, I'm not a particularly close
to the medium of comics, so I don't know it particularly well,
but the way Scott McCloud tells it in the chapter about comics
"as art" in Reinventing Comics:

   In 1978 Will Eisner -- sill known primarily for the
   comics pages he penned 30 years earlier [The Spirit]--
   created a 178-page comic called "A Contract With God"
   and quietly inaugurated a revolution in the way comics
   were viewed.

   Though technically a collection of four short stories,
   Eisner termed his creation a "graphic novel".

   Ironically, after 40 years of _magazines_ called "comic
   books"...

   ... the field finally had a comic that actually _was_
   a book and its author _couldn't use the term_ without
   fear of _degrading the work_.

Now, how much of this is factual, or attributable to Will Eisner's
beliefs, versus how much is McCloud with his own axe to grind, I
don't know. But it's right at the heart of the issue, and I think
there is a truth: if you feel like you're creating art, and your
medium is generally disparaged as "childlike" or whatever, you
might well want to switch to a term that implies different connotations
about your medium. (Although you might do this more for commercial
reasons than artistic reasons.)

Personally, I have no problem with people wanting to call IF "IF",
and with people seeking to do more than just viscerally entertain
with their "games", and with them choosing to call them something
other than "games" for that reason or any other.

The real problem with this thread is that you can't go about
changing language by posting to a newsgroup saying "let's all
stop calling them 'IF' and start calling them 'text adventures'
instead"--and I'm not sure that was the thread-starter's point,
although it seems to be where the thread has evolved to. My
recollection was that the point of the thread was that, given
pre-existence of *both* terms, it may well create a bias towards
the more "literary" expectations connoted by "IF" than the
visceral fun connoted by "text adventure" when we use IF for
the newsgroup and the competitions and etc. (Do you *really*
believe "IF" doesn't have more connotation that way?)

Of the three general sorts of responses to the thread: "IF
doesn't mean that", "'text adventures' is a bad term in its own
way", and "actually, there are plenty of not-narrative-focussed
*and* highly-rated comp games, so I disbelieve the thesis", I
think the last one is the winner.

SeanB
