One thing I feel keenly when looking back at that old usenet stuff is a regret that I could not be a part of those conversations. The question of whether IF is a genre or a medium, for instance. That would have been a fun one. I was stuck doing decidedly less interesting things back then, unfortunately.
I appreciate the links, though it’s noteworthy that there isn’t a lot of IF theory named on the wiki page that’s from the last ten years. There’s Aaron’s project, and a bibliography by Emily Short (more on that in a second), as well as a link to Mathbrush’s author page. Jimmy Maher’s Infocom replay concluded in 2016. Each of those projects/resources (and my own less discussed one, too!) are concerned to some extent with history, with the past.
I think a question arises: where did all the lively theoretical and craft conversations and publications of the sort featured on the IFWiki go? Do they still happen with the same frequency, but are no longer indexed at the IFWiki? Has everyone moved on to greener commercial or academic pastures? Has the subject been exhausted? Or did howling dogs short circuit then-current assumptions in IF theory, thereby mandating its replacement with something else, someplace else?
Emily Short’s “Brief Bibliography about IF History” refers to the then-present (2016) epoch as a “Diaspora”:
Diaspora (now). IF is now being written by many types of people, for many reasons, as freeware or for sale, and distributed in a wide range of places. It is harder than ever to follow what is going on, and also there is a greater than ever variety to the works and players.
There are lots of implications to that: diversification and fragmentation of genre; removal of gatekeeping because there is no longer just one arena in which IF can succeed; the corresponding loss of a lot of community received wisdom, or a lot of people who simply haven’t picked up on it.
On the one hand I am really excited by the diversity of what is being created, and by the fact that I can barely keep up with releases in this field because they’re happening so fast; on the other hand, I find that there are fewer venues for the kinds of advanced craft discussions we used to have around IF in the New School period, because there just isn’t the common ground about what we’re even talking about to support that kind of conversation. (This again isn’t universal; it’s just a trend.)
I do think universities have become—just in the past 20 years—an increasingly excellent place to get into good conversations about games. I presume that there are a growing number of publications interested in featuring content about games. That’s probably a good thing in the long run, since preservation and institutional knowledge are complementary. Maybe IF has been or can be subsumed in the larger conversation about games and new media.
Anyway, sorry for a bit of a ramble. I say all this to say: it is hard to find IF theory from the past ten years. It may be a matter of finding it, or it may be that it’s changed into something else.