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Why isn’t there innovation in IF anymore?
I’ve thought several times over how to write this post without inciting anyone’s wrath unnecessarily. Probably the best way to begin, then, is to somewhat sensationally paraphrase Dan Shiovitz’s review of Blue Lacuna in the post title. Here are his actual words:
What happened? Why haven’t we continued to push at the boundaries? When I ask this, I don’t mean “Why aren’t we writing IF that’s good?” because there is plenty of good IF being written today. I mean, “Why aren’t we writing IF that does things that earlier games didn’t do?” Why aren’t authors taking more risks?
It’s a really interesting question that he doesn’t provide an answer for in his review. So here’s mine, which I write mainly because I’m really curious what other people’s are (assuming, even, they agree with the premise):
I agree that there was a sense of discovery in the IF community during the 90’s resurgence; the invention of Inform, I think has to be counted as its fountainhead, where people who were longtime fans of the genre suddenly discovered that they could actually make more of something they had merely loved from afar for about a decade. (I know, TADS came before it.) There was a sense of: let’s make this do everything we stored up dreams about. And then… at some point, the dreams exhausted themselves, is what I think happened for most of those original people, and there haven’t been as many new dreamers to replace them.
Maybe it was something about the age (if you are allowed to called the 80’s an age) when IF was first created that gave it a special patina to us then; maybe video games have become so sophisticated to make the marriage of game and plain text seem obsolete to kids these days. Either way, the community seems to me (admittedly, an outside observer) smaller and smaller, with an accordingly smaller pool of inspiration to draw from.
I agree with Dan that people still make good IF these days, and there certainly continues to be a lot of technical innovation. But this technical innovation seems inextricably unlinked to artistic innovation; when Inform 7 was released, for example, it didn’t change the kind of stories people made, nor did it seem to have much effect on the number of authors out there, nor their productivity.
The corollary, however, to all this: it only takes one smart person with a well-placed, well-executed idea to shake everything up.
7 comments
Emily, good points all. Some brief responses:
1) I didn’t mean to link Liza’s post as proof of an exact number, just for the general sense of the size of the community. I’m going to assume Dan said two hundred totally off the cuff.
2) I struggled with whether to write “most”, “many,” or “some” in my sentence about exhausting dreams. I certainly don’t want to imply everyone has run out of ideas when that is manifestly untrue.
3) is a very thought-provoking point. My experience with my own grubby system has been that the most interesting work I’ve heard people do with it hasn’t been placed on the Web. It’s really hard to judge uptake because of it, which is frustrating.
[...] a few weeks ago, but then didn’t really like the way the post came out, so killed it. But Chris’ post over here made me realize I’m still curious, if anyone feels like [...]
I’ve been worried about a lack of innovation in some aspects of IF for a while now. There have been some wonderful stories written, and some amazing technical achievements, but there doesn’t seem to have been any huge advance in terms of the experiences that are available to the player.
I believe there’s so much more that could be done with parsers, text generation, NPC AI and so on. It bothers me that there are IF systems from two decades ago that can do some things we still can’t do with the major systems available today. Of course, I’m aware that all of this is hot air unless backed up with action. I always feel slightly uncomfortable bringing it up, as I’d hate for anyone to think I was criticising the amazing work that has been done.
BTW, it seems to me that I7 has produced quite a large influx of new authors into the IF community. Whether this results in more works being released is harder to judge, and I’d certainly agree with your assessment that it doesn’t seem to have greatly changed the nature of those works that have been released.
If good games are still being written, why does it matter that they are not innovative? Or are the games not really that good, since they come across as mere imitations of older games?
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I have some obvious biases in this discussion, but my sense is
1) There are a lot more than 200 people out there who play IF at least occasionally. I’m not sure where Dan got his number in that conversation, but it might have been based on something like how many people vote in the annual comp. But there’s evidence for much broader readership, in that the most popular games on the ifarchive get downloaded hundreds or thousands of times a year; jayisgames columns about IF attract many dozens of comments; heck, my blog averages around 500 hits a day. I am sure some of that is accidental traffic or whatever, but it does suggest a wider audience.
On the other hand, RAIF has changed a lot, not entirely for the better. I think the community is less visible because a lot of it has left the newsgroup and now participates via forums or blogs in a more diffuse way.
2) Not all of the early IF-creatin’ crowd has run out of ideas. What it *has* done is grow up and get a job. People who were in college or graduate school in the 90s are in many cases still around but now too busy with employment, marriage, or kids to spend as much time creating as they did before.
3) re. Inform 7 specifically, I get a fair amount of anecdotal feedback to the effect that it is of interest to new groups of users, especially students in classroom contexts. That doesn’t mean that the output of these groups is visible to (or even of interest to) the main community, but it does mean that IF is being used in places where it was not accessible before.
4) Expectations have risen. I can’t speak for everyone else, but personally I find it takes way, way longer than it used to to write a new game. That’s partly because of my own employment and social life, but it’s also a reflection of my changed expectations about what a new game must be and do: polish and testing requirements are higher and a lot of the easy-to-try experiments have been done. And some of the work left to do is development of those early ideas into a more mature form of art. (Case in point: people still talk about Galatea as being a breakthrough in conversation design. There’s been a lot of subsequent work — by me, by other people — that is more sophisticated and took a lot more effort to put together, not to mention that Galatea is hampered by juvenile patches in the writing and some frankly bad game design choices. But improvements on the original idea sometimes look incremental even if in fact they are doing fairly daring new things under the hood.)