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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: Games versus non-games in modern IF
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Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2002 09:43:32 GMT
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Michael Iachini <FezzikIF@hotmail.com> wrote:
>Do people in today's IF community want "games"?
>Much of what I've been reading seems very serious and literary in
>nature, and seems to imply that many recent works of IF are similarly,
>well, "heavy", for lack of a better term.

What do the people want or what do a few vocal authors think?

If we turn to top 8 games from the last IFComp in an attempt to find
the intersection between what authors do and what players want, I
think it's fairly clear:

All Roads
  puzzles, a complex narrative
Moments Out of Time
  sort-of-puzzles, a detailed story background that is effectively
                 a complex narrative wrapped inside a simpler game
Heroes
  puzzles, a complex narrative
No Time To Squeal
  a couple of puzzles (mostly obvious triggers,) a complex narrative
The Beetmonger's Journal
  puzzles, a straightforward narrative plus framing story
Vicious Cycles
  puzzles, a straightforward narrative told in fragments
Best of Three
  no puzzles but sophisticated interaction (puzzles if you set
           yourself a particular goal and try to achieve it)
Earth and Sky
  puzzle, a straightforward narrative

The complex narratives offer multiple points of views
or hard-to-parse shifts of perspective.  It would appear
that the audience likes game-plus-sophisticated-story,
according to this oversimple analysis.

SeanB
