Re: Is IF art? (was Re: Gareth's competition comments)


19 Oct 1995 16:25:31 GMT

I think this point is quite salient, and I very much hope it's correct:

Jacob Solomon Weinstein (jweinste@castor.usc.edu) wrote:
: IF is a medium, and not a genre. There are different genres of
: IF--detective IF, sci-fi IF, etc. So far, we haven't seen much, if any,
: "literary IF." That doesn't mean it can't be created.
...
: In fact, you could even
: make a case that all IF so far falls into one genre--say, the
: "crossword-puzzle genre." That doesn't mean that IF _is_ that one genre,
: only that other genres haven't been created. What I'm arguing is that
: there's nothing in IF to prevent an artist from writing in the genre of
: "literary IF".

Yet allow me to play advocatus diaboli. And allow me to introduce an
illustrative analogy:
Can we consider coin-op arcade games to be a medium? I would think that
since there are many different types - (Galaga-style, Driving and race
games, Adventure, Fighting games) - which one might call genres - that the
category as a whole could be considered as a medium. Coin-ops all have a
case with art, screens that display when the game is idle, something that
ends play, etc. There are unifying qualities of the medium. Within the
genres, there are traditions and techniques and perhaps even mutual
reference. (I smell a master's thesis and a 100-article thread in
rec.games.video.arcade)
Of course, the next question is, can coin-op arcade games be literary?
I think they clearly cannot. They can be lots of fun. Perhaps they have
have literary elements, just as some have now have filmic story frames or
sequences. Perhaps they could even be considered "art". Yet they aren't
literary because their users aren't primarially readers. They are game
players.
On to IF, and my point. In IF, the user of the medium is definitiely
both a reader and a game-player. But, is the user's literary
(reader-like, writer-like) activity primary, even compared to his or her
ludic (game-playing) activity? "Scrabble" is a game in which players read
and construct texts, but Scrabble doesn't seem literary. So the mere
involvement of text isn't, in my opinion, enough to suggest that the
medium has the potential for literariness.

Now, if you think my analogy is poor, that could be because I'm making
my point unclear, or it could be becuase you think I'm wrong (or becasue
I actually am wrong, of course...) But I don't want to spend a lot of
time talking about coin-op games, of course. I'm only brining this up to
demonstrate my line of thinking.
As stated, I happen to think the medium *can* be literary. But I also
think it's worthwhile to figure out the qualities that can make it so.