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About This Site
© Mark Silcox
Aug 27, 1999
Having condemned Herr Gutenberg's invention to the trash heap of history, I'll try in this article to provide a more formal description of what interactive fiction actually is, as well as what you might be able to find out about it from this site in the coming months.
The web abounds with sites devoted to the interests of 'insiders' to the IF community - players, testers, programmers and other sorts of enthusiasts who've been initiated into the joys of the Infocom library and know their way around the IF archive. The purpose of this site is not to cater to these folk but rather to draw mere novices into the fold - to reach out into the wider literary community and grab hold of people who read a lot and have sophisticated tastes but have occasionally sensed that there is something missing in the conventional narratives that they've been reading - something that the new media introduced into wide public use since the dawn of the computer age might be uniquely well-suited to provide.
Perhaps you've been engrossed in some 18th century picaresque, a Tom Jones, say, or a Don Quixote, and wished that you could just for once decide which fork in the road the hero chose next. Or perhaps you've been re-reading an favourite work of fiction for the umpteenth time, and found yourself wishing that just once, Elizabeth Bennett could reject Mr. Darcy, or the Mule could destroy the Foundation, or the Sultan could get bored with Sheherazad, or King Herod could decide not to slaughter the innocents. Do any of these sentiments sound familiar to you, qua reader of conventional literary fiction? If so, please read on... I suppose I'd better begin by giving at least some indication of what sorts of literary works this site will focus upon. The two features that seem to me to make a work of literature 'count' as a piece of interactive fiction are as follows:
1: A story with a beginning, a middle and an ending, the content of which are determined at least partly by decisions made by the reader while in a state of partial information about the total structure of the narrative.
2: Consistent use of the second-person singular. If you don't like this characterisation of IF then by all means send me a rude e-mail and we can duke it out, although my own suspicion is that it's actually rather foolish to argue too much about definitions in this sort of way - witness the seemingly endless debates carried on by 'literary theory' wonks about whether The Novel is 'alive' or 'dead'. Certainly, while much of the sort of stuff that is traditionally classified as IF falls comfortably within the range of both of these conditions - e.g. most role playing games, virtually all of the stuff on the IF archive, and the famous Choose Your Own Adventure books we all remember from the early '80s. They do also exclude some interesting stuff - improvisational theatre can, it seems to me, be sensibly described as both 'interactive' and 'fictional,' and most hypertext fiction is written in the first or the third person. Since these literary genres clearly would be interesting to the sort of person I'm aiming this site at, there'll be plenty of room for discussion of both of them here during the coming months. No point in being too dogmatic.
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The copyright of the article About This Site in Interactive Fiction is owned by Mark Silcox. Permission to republish About This Site in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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