That’s rapidly changing in the game industry and has been for years. Working in it, usually as quality assurance, I can tell you that storyboarding, character arcs, placement of inciting incidents, and so on, is a major area of focus for some game companies. Certainly not across the board, of course. But there is a major shift in the ability to tell effective stories. A lot of the game examples I provided – whether in graphical adventure or first-person shooter format – was an attempt to indicate at least some of this trend. Whether it’s taken “seriously enough” as a form of storytelling, that’s hard to say. I’m less concerned about the critics (like Ebert) and more concerned with what audiences respond to. That will be the barometer of what of storytelling is effective in a game format. We’re starting to see that more and more with people’s buying decisions.
On the first point, I think textual IF has been aimed at just plain game players. The “readers” part has been incidental, at best.
On the first and second points, I’ve been conducting classes on textual IF since 2005 and I can say that the one thing people have never said is that any textual IF is too literary. So if I gave that impression of my thoughts, I was incorrect in doing so.
The problem has been that textual IF is too much game and, to many people, barely even that. (Appealing to avid game players with textual IF is certainly possible, but it’s also just one part of a potentially vast audience.)
When I have presented textual IF – and I’ve done it with works from the Infocom days, from the resurgence period of Legend Entertainment, and then from a wide swath of the textual IF community (including various IF Comp games) – the issue has largely been that the stories are not engaging enough. People have reported that the characters are barely existent as far as they’re concerned. The plots are often not all that interesting. The dialogue (when there is any) is borderline at best. Here I’m reporting on the feedback I’ve been given, as opposed to just presenting my own conclusions. (I do realize that this is anecdotal to everyone reading this, however.) The point is that the reaction I’ve gotten is that people just don’t care about what they just played/read. It was a little bit of a diversion, but not much beyond that. I’ve had people tell me it was basically just like playing a more elaborate form of crossword puzzle: slotting words and phrases in the right place to “win.”
What people responded to initially was “a book I can play.” They liked the idea of taking something they already enjoy – reading good stories – and having some ability to interact with the story. Authors, in turn, were intrigued by the possibilities of making an already established audience less passive, in that they now had direct agency within the story. (I even had screenwriters who were interested in the idea of textual IF systems becoming some sort of “living storyboard”; a quasi prototype, if you will, for how a series of scenes can play out.)
My contention has long been that textual IF was not primarily aimed at readers insofar as it did not encourage readers to engage with textual IF as they do with their novels or even with their film experiences. This is largely because writing techniques were not utilized by the vast majority of people creating textual IF. Why is that? Because the people authoring textual IF were (often) not writers. They may have been people who wanted to tell a story, but the focus was more on creating a fun game than a fun game and an emotional experience.
Having audiences search through IFDB, for example, is a very enlightening experience for those who want to see how people approach textual IF, what catches their eye, what they tend to be intrigued with, etc. Then you have to do follow-up: after they try it, what was their experience like? Did they feel let-down? Did they feel surprised at how good it was? And so on.
With all this rambling of mine aside, I will say that I am aware that I’ve often approached textual IF in a counter-current fashion. As such I realize that a certain extent, there is an inherent selection effect in how I’ve presented classes and how I’ve engaged outside audiences (adults and children; teachers and students; authors and screenwriters; readers and players) with textual IF. I’ve tried to guard against that when possible but it’s often not – hence me presenting ideas like this here for consideration. So much thanks for your responses. You (and others here) have given me some really good things to think about and take into consideration when presenting textual IF to audiences.