Review of Graham Nelson's _The Craft of Adventure_
Most of the rest of TCOA consists of an enumeration of certain sorts of "dos" and "don'ts" for the IF writer. These range from the fairly obvious (e.g. "Enough with the mazes!") to the insightful ("No puzzles that you need to die once to solve." - Are you listening, Mr. Plotkin?) to the somewhat dubious. Probably the most memorable formula from TCOA is Nelson' often-quoted remark that an IF narrative is "a crossword at war with a narrative." To the novice author he offers this rather curious piece of advice:
There's a fine line between a challenge and a nuisance: the designer has to think, first and foremost, like a player (not an author, and certainly not a programmer).
I'm less than entirely comfortable with this description of how IF writing works, myself. To suggest that there should be a sort of parity between the telling of stories and the construction of mere puzzles seems to me to underrate the possibilities of IF as an art form. There has really only ever been one reason why puzzles show up so reliably in IF narratives: they're there as part of the genre's commercial heritage. When one is trying to sell a piece of software for $30-$50 it simply cannot be the sort of thing that can be entirely consumed in half a dozen one hour sittings. Anyone involved in commercial PC or console game design who's being honest will tell you that precisely the same rationale lies behind the inevitable presence of "combat" in contemporary games that are themselves truly memorable only because of the stories they tell or the visions they offer, rather than simply because they offer the satisfaction of splattering baddies. But f you can't make a game that takes forty hours to play, the masses will feel gypped if you don't sell it at a reasonable price. And fifty bucks just ain't reasonable.
Of course, this is a crude oversimplification. Part of what makes IF distinctive is that the stories it tells are always 'non-linear,' or else at the very least discontinuous in structure, and the presence of puzzles will always be an important device for bringing this about. Still, Nelson's enthusiasm for old-fashioned, puzzle-heavy IF occasionally leads him into a somewhat excessive Puritanism. He repeatedly expresses a preference for more 'austere' styles of writing of the sort that one finds in the original Crowther/Woods version of "Adventure," or in classic Infocom
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