In a recent post, I talked about the term Interactive Fiction (or IF) and how its meaning and use changed over the years. With the genre expanding and maturing, however, the ways of looking at it also changed.
For one thing, while I remarked that fans of “parser-based” or “choice-based” IF usually don’t fight each other, of course there are exceptions. Some reviews are obviously negative because of the presentation of the work rather than its concent. But those cases are rare.
A much more prevalent factor is age: when the IF enthusiast scene first gained momentum in the mid-90s – it had been there for a decade, but the arrival of new tools meant that more people started to write their own works instead of discussing those of others – the first text adventures had been released merely 20 years before. The protagonists of that scene are now 30 years older, and there is a good chance that current enthusiasts weren’t even born at that point.
Currently, IF criticism mostly takes place on the intfiction.org forum and in the Interactive Fiction Database. Those two websites have taken the place of the newsgroups that started the community in the 80s, and the various review sites and publications that have existed over the years. Of course, there are other websites as well, but they are either small and disparate, or dedicated to several kinds of gaming – while they should not be discounted, they make up only a vanishingly small part of IF criticism compared to the mentioned two sites.
While the new generation of interactive fiction consumers is therefore still a part of the original enthusiast scene, it is not familiar with the beginnings of the genre, and probably not with the beginnings of that scene either. The situation is comparable with film criticism: there are far too many works to know all of them, and even thorough researchers might not catch all inspirations of a work.
Looking at current reviews of important “classical” works shows some problems that can arise from such a knowledge gap. While commercial games are usually viewed in relation to their time and the restrictions of the computer systems they ran on, the same is less true of non-commercial offerings: especially some of the experiments that were the direct result of discussions or theoretical musings have largely lost that context over the years, and are now often taken at face value.
I don’t want to point at examples because I don’t want to cast a light on specific reviewers, but a look at some classical “controversial” works should quickly show some reviews that criticise a work solely on its own merit and not as a reflection of its time or what it wanted to achieve. There is certainly a place for this kind of criticism, if framed accordingly, and some reviewers expressly try to look at works from a distance to find out how the genre has evolved or if certain ideas would have different implications today.
In other cases, however, the unfamiliarity with the circumstances of a work’s creation leads to misunderstandings about its scope or intended goal. Some works that were solely meant to illustrate the validity or invalidity of an argument don’t make a lot of sense when taken out of that context, and looking at them without that context they might seem disappointing or even stupid.
Criticism based on a misunderstanding is not altogether worthless, at the very least to point at the existence of such a misunderstanding – but some works are now being unfairly depreciated based on this lack of knowledge, and that might lead to the next generation of consumers and potential critics being less and less able to find them, and to enjoy them for what they were meant to be.
Similarly to my last conclusion, it will be interesting to see how this development continues, and what happens when the last contemporary witnesses die out. Maybe it is a natural process to forget experiments that were only needed to point out certain ideas or aspects, and the lessons learned should be judged in the works that incorporated them.
The featured image is a detail from the logo of XYZZYnews, one of the first serious magazines for interactive fiction critcism.