To self-plagiarise what I said about this elsewhere: interesting, but inconsequential. This stuff is just piffling semantics. Call it whatever you like - it won’t invalidate your art.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5580003&forum_id=2...id.#47989216)

Mar 2021

Personally I’ve mostly stopped reading your blog entries or articles or whatever because of your constant harping on what these terms “should” mean. You can’t control how people use language; that never works. There was tons of debate about this stuff back in the day and then most people gave up on trying to enforce it.

You often have a lot of good thoughts, but personally I don’t have the patience to push past the irritating pedantic bits to get to the good parts. My two cents, other people may feel differently, etc.

I do agree that the distinction is useful (though I feel like it’s more of a spectrum than an either/or), but IMO it would be much more productive to try to invent new terminology that describes the distinction directly than to keep fighting a long-lost battle to “rescue” old terms that no longer have the meanings you want.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5580003&forum_id=2...id.#47989203)

Interactive Fiction is often over-simplified as “an interactive story”, but there are many games that have no story at all - they are parser controlled state manipulation puzzle boxes without anything except a goal.

Even the most barren of text adventures surely becomes a narrative through play, consisting merely of the transcript of play. Unless the state being manipulaed is so abstract to have no narrative capability at all. Something I have never seen, though it may be possible.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5580003&forum_id=2...id.#47989222)

This had been discussed to death back in the day. I won’t jump into the rabbit hole and scratch up old wounds here. To me personally “text adventure” is a marketing term that goes well when targeting the retro scene. As the person who created two of the most renowned text based adventure games for 8-bit and 16-bit systems in recent years, I can say: it does work, regardless whether the hype surrounding my games is justified.

Why the whole discussion resurfaced straight from 1988 is because there are two scenes who developed differently. There is the retro scene, which grew very strong in recent years, as the download numbers for Hibernated (+5.300) and Rabenstein (+7.500) prove. And then there is the IF scene, who went threw different states of evolution, which is amazing, since the 90s. The problem with the retro scene is that it’s a lot about reliving childhood memories or to even build upon that memories. So the mindset somewhat was frozen in time which results in these old discussions reappearing out of nowhere.

The good news is there are efforts to build bridges, no matter if that happens intentionally. Just have a look at @fredrik and his projects Ozmoo and PunyInform, which brings back decent libraries and interpreters back to old systems. Or @mulehollandaise, who with Tristam Island now created the first game which appeals to both retro and IF scene. I am working on new stuff as well, as you know.

I think instead of looking back and disscet this topic again and again and again, we should look forward to the bright future ahead.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5580003&forum_id=2...id.#47990854)