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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: The Gostak
Message-ID: <Gn1EML.Axw@world.std.com>
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 07:39:57 GMT
References: <MPG.1662731b5270fd039896f0@News.CIS.DFN.DE>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Xref: news.duke.edu rec.games.int-fiction:66685

Carl Muckenhoupt  <carl@wurb.com> wrote:
>One reaction that puzzled me at first was the complaint that it isn't
>really IF.  After all, no one denies that Jabberwocky is a poem.  Paul
>O'Brian's review explains this complaint in more detail, and it's a valid
>complaint.

I actually can identify with the complaint that it's not really
IF, and the way I perceive this does not seem to match exactly
with what Paul wrote, so I will offer it.

Certainly Gostak falls into the set of "interactive experiences
delivered entirely through text"--and if that's what you mean by
IF, or 'the medium of IF', well ok. But other things fit that
description and aren't normally considered IF--computer-assisted
crosswords, or computer ASCII chess. IF as the genre we're
generally talking about is this particular combination of
interactivity/player-agency/storytelling, and a very strange
thing happens in gostak: the player ends up working on solving
puzzles that aren't even visible to the player-character.

Is that a *contradiction* of what it means to be IF? Not by
any *definition* I've heard of the term, but definitions aren't
really how we tend to understand things; we understand words
by extrapolation from the sets of things they refer to--see
Wittgenstein's 'family resemblences'.

This doesn't mean that the term 'IF' can't comfortably grow
to include this; and there are no doubt other games that do
this; but at a certain point, with the puzzle-solving
decoupled so heavily from the story (and, to a certain extent,
the interactivity), you might find yourself crossing over closer
to other sorts of games that we don't consider IF.

No doubt different people perceive this differently, though.

SeanB
