Is it right to judge hypertext games...?

[Emerald (Emily Boegheim)]

@Peter Piers

I can’t tell whether you’re responding to my post. If you are, I did say “Now it means parser and choice-based games.” If not, apologies.

If you’re saying that “IF meaning parser and choice is not all that recent and has been around for much longer”, then you can’t really use that as evidence, because all that proves is that there have been CYOA games for a long time. And even if they were considered IF at the time (which I don’t know but rather doubt, partly because the genres were not as well-defined as they are today, and were still happy to be games/interactive stories (a term which is not necessarily what we understand as IF today, as Fallout is also an interactive story)) that won’t necessarily mean that they were the kind of IF that was understood as “Interactive Fiction” when Inform came out and R*IF was a thing and “Interactive Fiction” really meant something in the post-Infocom years.

For what it’s worth, rec.arts.int-fiction was originally started for discussion of academic/literary hypertext and then taken over by parser IF folks.

[Peter_Piers]

Heh. This world is ever changing, innit. Ah well, some of us have to be the grumpy old men in the corner, huh?

This undermines my credibility but not my point about labels, anyway.

Except in the sense that the very label I’m discussing was appropriated. But again, that’s not because it described something literally (though Infocom would disagree!), but because it was a label that really stuck. It was overpowering, and overrode what came before.

…so I guess that CYOA coming back to claim what used to be theirs, even if in academia mostly, is only fair.

Hmmm. I do get your point. I do see that CYOA has as much, if not better, claims to the IF moniker.

By which token, of course it would be right to judge hypertext games in the IFComp.

My head is spinning. [emote]:P[/emote]

EDIT - But I stick to my guns in that taking the term “Interactive Fiction” literally to justify an entry in the Comp is silly. Even if the label does expand, you wouldn’t call Hadean Lands an RPG on the grounds that you are role-playing a character in a game. Nor would you classify Doom as an adventure game on the grounds that you’re going on a (bloody) adventure.