IF is dead

[Laroquod]

@emshort

There is a huge, depressing story here (you can google GamerGate and spend all day reading if you really don’t need your faith in humanity any more), but at least some portion of that situation has been about organized, overtly anti-feminist and anti-queer attacks. At the center of that campaign is Zoe Quinn, author of the Twine interactive fiction Depression Quest, and there has been a flood of discussion about interactive fiction – by which in this context they mean Twine, since our corner of the internet mostly isn’t visible enough to appear on the radar – being not real games, as being part of what is “ruining” games.

I don’t want to start or continue a debate about GamerGate on intfiction.org (and toward that end I am laying aside any objections to the alleged relevance of Zoe Quinn), but I just have to address the misapprehensions about GamerGate’s attitude to interactive fiction. I have supported GamerGate and its stated goals since September 1st. I have been involved in the hashtag everyday, made a lot of new friends and met a lot of interesting people. Some of you here may find those people “disgusting” for whatever reason, but that’s neither here nor there and I don’t want to argue about it here.

All I want to say is, these people don’t hate interactive fiction. I have been clear about my love of text adventures from the moment I joined, and never received a drop of pushback or disdain. On the contrary, I have received many inquiries about it from people who loved the old text adventures and are fascinated with the things I tell them about the state of the art. Far from being against IF, GamerGate is actually a fantastic recruiting opportunity for IF, if you can stop focusing on whatever part of its history you find so personally horrifying.

Some GamerGaters do ridicule Twine, but most don’t. (Just like here! Imagine that.) There are even plenty of Twine developers among us. When somebody in GamerGate ridicules the tool itself instead of whatever art they found boring or disagreeable that was created with that tool, I politely explain to them that the tool should be distinguished from the art itself, and point out that interesting things have been done with Twine. This too has yet to cause any pushback or argument.

If you don’t like GamerGate on some feminist grounds or whatever, that is fine, I am not really going to argue against you about that here. But I think it is doing IF itself a disservice not to point out that there is a huge pool of gamers out there all congregating in one place who are actually very open to IF and text adventures, many of whom skew older and have nostalgic memories of parser games, and right now they are looking for any sympathetic devs to support. They are thirsty for sympathetic devs. They are really not picky about who you are or what type of game you make.

Happy comping! 8)

Paul.