Which means, anything “written down” is literature, unless you consider something equivalent, such as scroll, isn’t literature. FYI, scroll can be made by bound bamboo slates.
Fireside camp stories? Write it down. Literature. Movies? Novelization. Literature. Games? Zork CYOA. Literature. RPG? Play session journal. Literature.
Anything that can be written down is literature. ASCII art? Well… you may be pushing it there. 
Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. A pamphlet, a scroll, a flyer, a quarto, a handwritten manuscript, and a broadsheet are not “literature” by the original definition - only something printed in book format.
It’s not how I look at the world, personally, mind you. But we’re talking about an academic POV.
I’m pretty sure I’ve met academics who do not define literature in that dictionary-pointy way.
When Bob Dylan won the Nobel, there was a lot of fuss from stultified minds about how Dylan didn’t write “literature.” Does anyone here think that the great IF isn’t literature? Of course it is. Just like great songwriting is.
I personally have never encountered such a definition of literature in the academy, no.
I don’t see a benefit in qualifying games as literature. Games don’t need to be literature to be art. Game studies is a growing and lively field of inquiry.
So far as IF scholarship goes, I would point to essays like Anastasia Salter’s excellent 2020 article “Plundered Hearts: Infocom, Romance, and the History of Game Design”. Salter doesn’t attempt to characterize IF as literature, presumably because it isn’t productive to do so.
The essay is limited access in the way academic scholarship too often is, so I won’t share it openly. I may link it privately, though–the article celebrates this community’s practice of openly sharing source code and other research materials.
I get where you’re coming from, but I actually don’t see IF as literature. IF is already art. Calling it “literature” doesn’t make it more artistic. Games don’t need to be literature just to justify their artistic validity.
The puzzles in King Lear are pretty bad, anyway.
I have no opinion on Bob Dylan’s prize. However, I would venture that the real issue is that the Nobel committee doesn’t acknowledge songwriting as worthy of its own prize, even though writing songs is a valid and challenging artform. I would say that’s a problem with the process, not the art.
To my mind, it’s pretty hard to use a binary it-is-or-it-isn’t definition of literature - there’s no accepted authority to pronounce ex cathedra whether something qualifies, and at a time of significant change in how writing is created and consumed, it’s possible to have reasonable people with similar definitions come to radically different conclusions if the only options are “literature” and “!literature.” Nor, I think, is it especially productive, because at the end of the wrangling all we’ve produced is two idiosyncratically-sorted heaps.
Instead maybe it’s more useful to think of literariness as a property, with some writing having more of it, and some less? And maybe a helpful way to judge that, at least in a scholarly context, is the extent to which the tools of literary analysis can be fruitfully employed on a particular work - like, you can obviously do literary analysis on a novel and get something out of it (though probably more out of an Ali Smith novel than a Star Trek tie-in book, at least as to most questions). It’s famously possible to analyze Bob Dylan’s lyrics as poems - it’s a classic cool-English-teacher trick - and there’s lots of IF where looking at themes, prose style, analyzing composition, etc. is rewarding, and of course there are also lots of songs and games where that wouldn’t be particularly edifying.
The flip side of this is that to properly understand Dylan or Photopia, of course you need tools beyond those literary analysis provides. And the extent to which that’s a reflection of differences in medium or genre that are there for good reason, vs. an indication that the traditional toolbox should be expanded, is maybe a place where conversations about where to draw the box around what “counts” as literature becomes helpful again?
I agree with you that IF isn’t innately and doesn’t need to be literature, but you seem to assume that it is an innate and good thing for IF to be games. I am skeptical that it is categorically more productive to interpret IF through a games context, with conversations about game design, than it does to interpret IF through a literary context.
Art, like the world, is fractal and fluid. We find categories useful to moor ourselves within the flux, so interpreting IF as an intersection between “games” and “literature” is useful. Each work will interpret that intersection differently dependent upon the idiosyncrasies of its creative impetus, so I would consider it both productive and beneficial to investigate how IF weaves through the polysemous spectra between games and literature.
Without checking a dictionary, I guess I’d define “literature” for myself as an elevated example of any genre involving the written word, although I certainly don’t think I can force that definition on others. And of course what one person considers “elevated” is up for debate. I personally think that James Joyce and Ezra Pound were jokes perpetrated by malicious academics on generations of trusting students. Yet of course many people vehemently disagree.
As for what counts, I don’t think anyone gets cranky when a poet wins the Nobel for Literature. Or do they?
Definitely no fun. But the puzzles in Twelfth Night are a delight.
I think this strikes directly at the heart of the matter. The toolbox for understanding literature does change, as does our understanding of what literature is. It is and should be an evolving reflection of the world around us. And resistance to change is useful and provides opportunities for making good arguments. But I think there’s a lot of reflexive, canon-driven resistance that sidelines a lot of great written art. It actually annoys me that IF is so overlooked as literature.
I understand.
To this I would say–not from a conversational viewpoint, not necessarily specific to here–journals will decide what they publish, conferences will decide whom to platform, and universities will decide where expertise ought to lie. Where their budgets ought to lie. There are practical implications to these questions. Who will decide funding for games research? A media studies specialist? A Faulkner scholar? As dry as these questions are, I don’t see how they can be avoided.
To me–this is only my opinion–game research will always be the lost middle child in English departments. The skill to, say, read source code will be uncommon–if present at all. And yet source code is part of the text. People expect me to look at source code–I try to muddle through–at Gold Machine, so I do. The types of analysis that are particular to game studies may be underdeveloped or absent altogether. There is real, practical benefit to treating it as its own form. Benefit to the field, benefit to the scholars, benefit to the students.
Media Studies is another common name, which may be more palatable than games (and provide a sense that the scholarship extends beyond technical matters). I am old, and come from a circle that debated it in terms of “games vs. art.” That is my old habit.
I am certain that I cannot. My concern is that while my definition does not matter in any real-world sense, the definitions of scholars and universities do. They decide which scholars get funding, which instructors get tenure, etc. Politically, what kind of people run English departments vs. a games (media) studies department? Where will the funding go? What classes will get listed? What materials will be offered in the library?
What skills and works will be privileged?
We have here a Master’s thesis questionnaire. There has been a lot of community pushback over definitions. From an academic standpoint, whose definitions are they? What kinds of conversations do they encourage?
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Since Gold Machine began, I have written over 50,000 words about Infocom games. I have spent little time on puzzles, and even less time on history and authorial backgrounds. Nearly all of it is discussion of the text. I have behaved as if these were works of art, and I have never needed to call them literature. Textual analysis is not limited to literature.
I would finally say that I often detect–not here, mind you, but out and about–that games/media can only derive legitimacy from an already established field (in this case, literature). I reject this, wholeheartedly. We are already there.
Especially if you skip the Malvolio sidequest.
It’s kind of a “wait another fifty years and see how people look back on it” question, I suppose.
I can see there’s a tension here. Coming in from the games studies side, games are art but they’re not particularly literary. That is, “the arts” include literature, music, painting (doesn’t require paint!), sculpture (may be CAD and a 3D printer!), and performance (now on screen!). Movies include words but we don’t have to categorize them as literature in this breakdown. Because they fit nicely in the tradition of theater. Games, well, the Greeks didn’t assign a muse, but we can see how to slot them in as a new strand in this skein.
But, of course, here we are in our particularly textual corner of the games world. So there’s a real desire to compare IF to literature. IF’s use of literary technique (prose style, dialogue, the fire of language) is what distinguishes IF from gaming in general.
On the gripping hand, what we talk about here influences games studies in general.
More news as it happens, as they say.
I guess this thread has already questioned why IF should be considered part of “the games world” at all! Okay, that’s fair.
I am interested in the games-studies approach. I think that you can’t talk about (much less write) IF without taking that viewpoint into account. That is – to take a concrete example from Golmac – you can’t talk about Floyd as a character without thinking about Floyd’s game behavior. Whether he is “reactive” or “interactive”, e.g. You can read transcripts describing Floyd, but even then, you’re considering the gameplay experience of being that player in the transcript. It is not a purely prose object.
So that’s why.
I begin to perceive your point better-- a pushback against shoehorning IF into the categories defined by an older medium that carries a lot of baggage and snobbery. And it’s true that the often blinkered opinions of gatekeepers have real-world consequences for those studying and practicing marginalized art forms.
So a good question is: is IF a new species? Or can it still mate and produce viable offspring with its ancestral group?
This is a nice illustration of a successful evolution from literature. There’s no doubt that film is a descendant of literature, and there is no doubt that it is its own species now with a cultural legitimacy I wish IF had. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything from the mainstream art/lit world on IF: not a review, not an article, nothing. I do occasionally see publications like the NYT cover games, but not in proportion to their significance. Games are HUGE business, and can be amazing art. But the mainstream art world seems to treat the whole field like a redheaded stepchild.
I just doubted it in that very post! :) I think of it as a descendant of theater.
Well, I don’t think “the art world” is a unified thing. The fact that universities have moved game studies into the curriculum is a huge change. Porpentine got Twine games into the Whitney Biennial. Major SF awards like the Hugos and Nebulas are adding games to their purview.
(I mean, “the art world” treats SF like a red-headed whatsit also, but that’s sort of my point.)
It’s a young field, so things like theory, available journals, academic standing are in flux (but growing).
I feel it’s vulgar to keep talking about my blog, but one of the things I wanted to do was contribute to an underrepresented field of inquiry. I thought, “what kinds of discourse surround art?” I looked at what was out there, and there is a ton of craft writing (Craft is the most theorized aspect of IF. E: in my opinion, of course). There’s excellent historical analysis. I thought cultural analysis is a discussion that I could contribute to. Focusing on the perspective of players/readers. I actually find historical analysis fascinating, but I just didn’t think IF needed that from me.
I am not the mainstream art world, of course.
I mentioned Salter’s article earlier; I think it’s a good example of academic writing about IF/games/media that a traditional lit scholar could not produce.
I have seen at least one IF literary magazine. That’s another kind of healthy discourse surrounding an art form.
Like Zarf said, things are moving forward in promising ways.
As far as I can tell, the OP with his/her pseudo-Finnish 
username dropped this bombshell, let it explode, and then walked off into the sunset after doing something similar elsewhere across the Internet, leaving all of us to chew over what is or isn’t literature, a game, art, etc.
A snippet from that thread:
And my reason for focusing on tech is simply the fact the tech has been a major aspect in the evolution of literature, from stone tablets to ink and paper to printing…
So, there you go - the OP believes there was somehow “literature” even before stone tablets, although I’m sure they meant to say clay tablets LMFAO. I’m gonna take a wild guess and say that the OP isn’t exactly up to speed on the works of Enheduanna
Feels like all of us here have been, albeit bloodlessly and without malice, taken for a ride by this person doing “research” for a “master’s thesis.”
This seemed like an actual productive discussion that didn’t get out of hand as usual ‘What is IF?’ conversations sometimes do. The user did introduce themselves in the Introduction thread also, and has been online as recently as a day ago, so they are likely reading replies and I don’t believe this is an outright troll. Not everyone has time to participate extensively in forums as some of us do, especially if they are going to school.
We don’t have any kind of “minimum participation” rules, except what Discourse requires for trust level advancement.
I’ve found the chewing useful and productive, and it’s gotten me to question my thinking on the subject, which is always a good thing. I don’t know if the discussion will be of any use to the OP, who wanted answers to specific questions, but I like this thread.
I enjoyed it, too. Heck, I’m going to write about it (the subject, not members of the board)
These are the kinds of conversations I crave. I can’t really contribute to technical conversations because that isn’t my field. I love this stuff, though. I think about it all the time.
Okay, firstly, I guess, sorry for not having been replying over the weekend, have had a bunch of stuff to take care for other courses as well as the thesis.
And to be clear, I am indeed Finnish, even though I don’t know what that really has to do with the discussion.
And yes, I am not particularly “caught up” with Enheduanna’s works, I’ve read a translation of Epic of Gilgamesh, mostly based on the version by Sîn-lēqi-unninni, but not really any other works of Sumerian literature. And even despite my slip up, mixing stone and clay, you still seemed to understand the point I tried to make.
Now that that’s been cleared up, there has certainly been a lot of discussion, even if somewhat differing from what I originally asked, I still nonetheless appreciate it. The replies thus far have given some quite insightful thoughts on the definition of literature (both in interactive context and otherwise) and one of the points of my thesis. Which has gotten me thinking as well. Also thanks for providing further reading material.
And to give my two cents on the matter, I do not consider video games, in general, as a form of literature, at least not yet. But I do consider works generally thought of as IF as forms of interactive literature. (I personally have a disdain for the term IF, as I think the terms “interactive” and “fiction” are quite broad in the modern world and should include interactive theater, gamebooks, videogames, and really everything else that is both interactive and fictitious).
My definition of literature is really anything that mostly reliant on text to deliver it’s message. Comic books would not be included, as they rely just as much, if not more, on the graphical panels to deliver the story as they do on the speech bubbles and boxes (it is quite possible to follow the story and skim through a comic book by just going through the panels). Visual novels on the other hand, rely more on text then the graphics (the story will most likely be completely missed if all the text is skipped).
Songs, poems, why not even the tweets on Twitter, are by my definition literature. In my opinion, literature is also not inherently art either, much like games or paintings, they can be, but it is not “it is literature, therefore it is art” in my opinion.
But that is not to say that the definition could not change, for example the definition of literacy is something that, in the modern world is not just “the ability to read, write, speak and listen” (as defined by literacytrust) but it also exists in the form of digital literacy, which goes further than just reading and writing text, defined by wikipedia, as “the ability find, evaluate and communicate information on digital platform”. Said definition does confine itself to the ability to read text, even if it is a definition of “literacy”.
The change or further addition to the concept of literacy is something that has evolved with the world around us. And as a form in which we deliver information and messages, literature, could also be subject to change as more and more sources of information and storytelling are born in other forms, such as video documentaries and, for example, youtube videos, which give out the exact same information and message that you could at one time only find in books. So who’s not to say that there’ll be a time, when literature will include these other formats as well, both in terms of art and in terms of information delivery so as to not confine itself only to the text format.
But I do think, or at least wish, that there would remain a term exclusively for works of written text. But as this discussion has shown, that which is commonly considered IF stands at the midground between what is and isn’t literature.
By my definition they would, forms of interactive literature, but not all agree or want it to be that way, which can eventually lead to either a stricter definition of literature, (as has been mentioned in this discussion) or a looser one that could include many other things as well. And if and when that definition is loosened, why couldn’t it be loosened again to include even more.
And I wholeheartedly agree that academic circles for the large part tend to be quite… confused with this field. Is it games? Is it language? Is it media? In my university, it is a part of IT studies, with further specialization going to Interaction Design, yet everyone graduates as a Master or Doctor of Philosophy the same as, chemists, biologists, mathematicians, etc. natural sciences. We are a subgroup within a subgroup. Not helped by the fact that, even further, interaction design is not just games or other IF, but also various other things from UI design to digital education platforms and methods. So we are a ragtag group within a subgroup.
I know the situation isn’t the same for all universities world wide (I know there are universities with majors that are specific to game development, for example), but further specification of these areas and terms is definitely something that would be welcomed by all seeking to study and research these fields, I’m sure.