So is it 'text adventure' or 'interactive fiction'?
What is the more appropriate term...'text adventure' or 'interactive fiction'?
For years now, people have referred to text adventures as interactive fiction. But prior to 1992, that wasn't the case, and the phrase 'text adventure' became consistent with the famous genre.
But over the past decade or so, the medium of the text adventure has expanded into more of a prose-based art form with interactive elements, hence the term 'interactive fiction'. While I don't agree with the term 'interactive fiction' (In fact, I cringe whenever I hear it...ugh...what an ugly phrase!), I do believe that names do change with the times and that 'interactive fiction' broadly accounts for the evolving medium of the text adventure.
What do you think? Please post comments below.
1 Comments:
Either term is useful, except "interactive fiction" sounds kinda vague and cheap and pretentious now -- perhaps it didn't, back then, when Infocom thought it up (and that wasn't in 1992) -- but what better term is there?
Some "text adventures" are clearly less gamelike than others: On the one hand you have A Mind Forever Voyaging, Worlds Apart, Shrapnel, My Angel, Rameses, Pytho's Mask,... and on the other Lock & Key, The Guild of Thieves, Zork, Scott Adams' stuff, your stuff,...
The line is blurry, of course, and something like Winter Wonderland or Trinity is both adventurous and "a good read" -- and *every* TA is IF in that it is interactive and fiction -- but some obviously focus on the storytelling and others on puzzles, treasures, or even combat, whereas My Angel, for example, really attempts to produce a coherent narrative (esp. in "novel mode").
So I don't see why one term should be done away with when they empathise different aspects of the medium.
Post a Comment
<< Home