Re: Can I make money by writing IF?


28 Nov 1995 02:20:30 GMT

I hope there will always be a niche market for IF. Language is infinitely
plastic, compared with even the best pictorial image games. I hope too I
am not mired in an archaic way of structuring reality, text-based to the
core, but I believe the great IF application will still be written (not
that there haven't been some good ones). In July's Wired I had a short
piece called "in search of the grail," how my sense of possibilities was
changed forever during an epiphany while playing Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy. My insight was that how we frame reality, how we frame
ourselves, how we hold ourselves as a possibility for action in the
world, is structured by the multiple horizons disclosed by interactive
text. The WWW is a graphical representation of that reality.

It's impossible to make money writing poetry too (in the main) but some
great poetry is still being written. I think IF is still evolving and the
best is yet to come.