One thing that’d be cool is an article comparing interactive fiction to other types of hobbyist fiction released online for free, and the communities around them. Fanfiction’s a big one. There’s some overlap of fanfiction and interactive fiction, and a fair number of interactive fanfics listed on AO3 (fun fact, Abigail Corfman’s Spring Thing Astarion fanfic has its own AO3 page). Also interactive webcomics, Homestuck being the most famous example. Quests, which I made a post about a while ago. Web serials, which I mentally catalogue with those giant Choice of Games IFs since both tend to get worked on for years and achieve enormous word counts and maybe loyal fanbases if you’re lucky. Plus all the other random self-published stories that are just floating out there, on the internet. (9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9, anyone?) TV Tropes is the best catalogue of them in my opinion, and maybe the only one. It’s also got a page for interactive fiction and some IF games have their own pages (which I’ve been meaning to crosslink on IFDB for a while. Made another post about it too). Maybe tie it into how self-publishing and amateur writing work in general, or something.
They’re all interesting spaces since they’re a way to get people to read your stuff without having to go through the standard affair of finding a literary agent and publisher and whatever other hoops you have to jump through to get into an industry that seems to me oddly divorced from mainstream culture nowadays. It seems like the book industry has settled into its own niches of doing things and only accepts very specific types of writing that fits into those niches. To get published you have to know people who know people or have an MFA from Iowa. This very depressing blog post about the state of the book industry is where I got that from. Yeah it’s entirely anecdotal and doesn’t cite anything, but the author seems like he knows what he’s talking about.
It reminds me of the whole AAA versus indie games thing. One is a lumbering behemoth only willing to work on stuff that might be financially profitable and the other is full of more experimental unusual stuff that nobody would ever want to officially release under the umbrella of a large corporate type organization. And a lot of awful stuff too, because that’s the nature of self-published anything, but there are gems out there that get ignored because of the dominant culture and the sense that only stuff published by real companies/publishing houses are real and worth paying attention to.
So something about that, maybe. I guess I wrote more than I meant to, and don’t know how much is actually true or just based on gut feelings. Maybe I went off topic. Whoops.