>What IF is *not* is highbrow art. I do not expect to gain any insights
>into the human condition through IF. It is therefore inappropriate to
>analyse IF in the same terms that one would use to analyse serious
>fiction, films, etc. This is what annoyed me about Gareth's comments.
>I felt that he was criticizing the games (Zebulon in particular) using
>criteria (i.e. the quality of the prose) which is of minor importance
>to IF.
It seems to me that this is like a movie-goer of the late 19th century
walking out of one of the first films and deciding, on the basis of what
he's seen, that movies aren't higbrow art. He'd probably be right about
the movie he actually saw--early motion pictures were often about such
exciting things as waves lapping against the shore--but he'd have
absolutely no basis on which to draw conclusions about what movies could be.
Somebody (Neil Gaiman? Alan Moore?) responded to the claim that comic
books can't be art by saying, "Comic books are just combinations of words
and pictures. There's no limit to how good those words can be, and no
limit to how good the pictures can be. If words and pictures can be art
seperately, why can't they be art together?" (I'm paraphrasing rather
poorly, by the way.) IF is either just words or a combination of words
and pictures. Is there any particular reason that you feel IF can't be
"highbrow art," or is it just that you've never seen IF that is?
I want to stress that I'm not saying all IF should be highbrow, anymore
than all movies and books ought to be highbrow. There's a place in IF for
the equivalents of Die Hard and Sleepless in Seattle, just as there's a
place for the equivalents of Citizen Kane and Howard's End.
> I don't think one has to be a good
>writer to "write" a good IF game. Indeed, a number of IF authors have
>said that they don't consider themselves good prose writers.
> It doesn't detract one whit from their games.
I agree that one doesn't have to be a good prose writer to write good IF.
But what does that prove? You don't have to be a good prose
writer to write an entertaining book. John Grisham's prose is pretty
mediocre, but his books are hard to put down. That doesn't mean that
books aren't highbrow art--just that some of them aren't.
And I disagree with you when you say that it doesn't detract from their
games. "Theatre" was an entertaining and clever game, but the couple of
spots where the prose was rough prevented me from being fully drawn in.
To continue my early analogy: A Time To Kill is a gripping enough book
that I couldn't stop reading, even when the prose got on my nerves.
But when the writer is as good with prose as he is with plot--as in, say,
Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent--the prose and plot work together,
instead of working against each other. At the very least, when you have a
writer like Dick Clancy whose prose is good but nothing special, the
prose doesn't get in the way of the story.
To b ring my rather wandering discussion back to IF: I don't think the
puzzles or the plot in Curses were particularly better
than those in Theatre, but because the prose was better in the former
than in the latter, I enjoyed it quite a bit more.
It's interesting, by the way, that I have to rely on other kinds of
literature to make my point. That's symptomatic, I think, of the fact
that there just isn't that much IF in the world--which is why I think
it's far too early to decide that IF can't be highbrow art.
-Jacob