Sender: Adam Myrow <myrow@homerun.us>
From: Adam Myrow <myrow@eskimo.com>
Subject: Re: What is IF really?
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Ok, now that I've had a chance to catch up on the thread, here is perhaps
the earliest use of the term IF.  It is in a New York Times article
published in May of 1983.  I dug this out of the If-archive some time ago
and can't remember exactly where.  Anyway, it has the title "Participatory
Novels."  It is a review of Infocom's Deadline.  It says in part
"Deadline, in fact, is more like a genre of fiction than a game. It is
published" by Infocom, a company founded by eight young M. I. T. computer
scientists in 1979. Infocom has been a major pioneer in such games, which
have been called 'participatory novels,' 'interactive fiction' and
'participa-stories.'"  Deadline calls itself "an Interlogic Mystery," so I
think Infocom hadn't quite decided on Interactive Fiction at that time.
Somebody, however, had used it.

Anyway, my point is that it is certainly true that IF in its earliest
sense was text-based and the idea was that it was an interactive novel.

So, for me, I tend to stay with the most traditional definition of IF
which requires text-based games.  Note that I do not rule out games with
graphics, but I personally rule out games that are 100% graphical.  Would
you consider a book that had no text, but only pictures a novel?  Probably
not.  However, if those pictures told a story, and it was a story that had
been imagined by the author, it would still be fiction.  So, a completely
graphical game that tells a story that was imagined could be called
computer-based fiction.  In short, the terms "Interactive Fiction" and
"Participatory Novel" mean the same thing to me.  Nobody uses the latter
term, however.  Now, there are plenty of files on the IF-archive that are
not IF to me even though they are text-based.  Pick Up The Phone Booth And
Die, as well as its parodies are not IF to me.  They make no attempt to
tell a story.  There are other files who are borderline.  Photopia is IF,
but barely.  It certainly tells a story, but it is impossible to alter the
story by your actions except for perhaps one or two paragraphs.  I believe
that computer-based CYOA is IF and, as pointed out by a previous poster,
it often has more branches than traditional IF.  However, it usually has
no puzzles which are fairly important to IF, but not completely necessary.
I personally prefer that a work of IF have puzzles, or it is no longer a
game.  So, for example, Photopia is IF, but not a game.  Jigsaw, Curses,
First Things First, and Beyond Zork are games and IF.  Beyond Zork could
also be loosely called RPG, but IF ends up winning the day.

I guess I really opened a can of worms when I started this thread, but I
figured that since we talk about IF every day on this newsgroup, that
there would be some unity as to what it means.  I know that by reading
these posts, I've made up my mind and will probably stick with my
definition unless the term gets in the dictionary with another one.
Actually, that would be cool to have IF in the dictionary.  I heard that
such terms as "Treky" are in already, so who knows?

Adam

