Friday, February 08, 2008

The "Interactive Fiction" of Year Zero

Edit: I have edited this post, because apparently I jump to conclusions too quickly. It's all good, we're still in business.

2 comments:

Dennis G. Jerz said...

The term "interactive fiction" has been used to refer specifically to text-parser games (like Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork) for about 25 years now.

It seems to me that "alternate reality" does a better job of describing the kind of game that has both fictional and real-world elements.

http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/bibliography/

Lapsura said...

I must admit, my first encounter with the term "interactive fiction" was on this website (I was a Medievalist until very recently). Thank you kindly for the clarification!

It seems to me that "interactive fiction" as applied here refers to the experience of the "reader" (if we can call the "player" a reader of this game as a text). Perhaps not historically or conventionally accurate, but it is a new way of understanding a new kind of text. I'm not saying I fully agree with it, but I also don't fully agree with "alternate reality," and certainly not with "game."