I think you’re trying to compare apples and oranges. Of course a transcript of a parser game isn’t going to read like a novel. It’s not supposed to. Reading a book and playing an parser game are different experiences. Likewise, part of the experience of a choice-based game is replayability, the ability to explore what might have happened if different choices were taken. So a linear story like King Lear isn’t going to convert into IF and remain unaltered. An interesting work might result, but it would need to be regarded as a work in its own right. Reading a story with several different possible endings, in which the protagonist can take one of several different paths, is a different experience than reading a linear narrative, and perhaps the individual stories are less than the sum of the whole, but perhaps it needs to be played through several times in order to be appreciated fully. Perhaps then, the individual stories, experienced separately but apprehended together, might prove greater than the whole. It’s a new medium, and it can’t be measured using the same yardsticks we used for the old.
Ah, but plenty of IF is purely linear. At least, it is now - because the field has expanded to include all sorts of things which fit the definition of “interactive fiction” but which didn’t actually exist at the time the term was coined. It’s not just parser games. And even parser games can have this quality - example: “Out”. Highly linear, no puzzles or challenges to overcome, it’s all about experiencing the journey and isn’t concerned with the destination. The walkthrough is simply the repeated command “out”.
Graham Nelson rightly condemned “tying the player to a chair and shouting the plot” in his extended essay “The Craft of Adventure” in 1995. Lots of modern IF works don’t do precisely that - it’s more like inviting the player to sit down and read a short story that progresses when prompted - but scope of IF has clearly changed, and what is a fatal sin in one style of IF is the entirety of the work in another!
That’s entirely why I think we need to start making distinctions within the category of IF, because a brilliant example of one type of IF would fail miserably by standards of other types. Nelson’s admonition only applies to a particular style which was nigh-universal at the time but isn’t any longer. Our criteria for judging and creating need to expand, and we need more-specific terminology to accomplish that.
We’ve been doing that for at least 20 years.
Great! So where are the distinctions between IF that purely tells stories and IF that focuses on overcoming challenges and puzzles?
In the “puzzleless IF” tag on IFDb?
It’s imaginable that someone (you?) would write an article (or just a forum post) laying out a vocabulary of distinctions, and that the article would be useful and so the vocabulary would be widely used. Maybe people would cite your article the way they still cite Nelson’s articles from the '90s!
But I claim you won’t get far unless the terms are respectful and constructive. The useful terms we have are ones that the authors would use/accept to describe their own work (parser, hypertext, puzzle, choice-based), terms that can help us to provide better beta feedback or constructive criticism to authors.
For example, we do have a useful vocabulary on how to talk about various virtues of puzzles. Emily Short on Best Individual Puzzle | The XYZZY Awards Emily Short uses terms like extent, explorability, surprise, ingenuity, originality, fairness/accessibility, structural integration, and narrative integration. These terms are useful, respectful, and constructive. (“I wish the frog puzzle were better.” “How?” “I wish it were more explorable.”)
We can even say, “I think this game would be better if it didn’t have puzzles,” or “I wish this game had puzzles” or just “more puzzles.” “Puzzleless” is a useful term.
I see no opportunity to develop a useful, respectful, constructive distinction between what you call “games” and “literature.”
Today, the terms “game” and “literature” are overloaded with people saying “that’s not really literature” and “that’s not really a game” so as to exclude people. Attempting to draw a distinction between games/non-games and literature/non-literature just comes off as rude, unconstructive criticism.
I’d like to answer those questions below. Big spoilers for Zozzled.
The story is primarily about Donny Cantaloupes, who runs the bar, and Mildred Waverly, with whom he’d had an affair years prior, resulting in two kids, including Agent Byrd, who raids the speakeasy at the start of the game.
When you drink all of the spirits in the hotel (the parts of Mildred’s ghost), you learn the secret of how Mildred died. Donny thought he’d poisoned Mildred, but in fact he’d accidentally served her denatured alcohol, which Mildred had allowed to get into the supply because she’d thought that anyone who drank it deserved what they got; she died by her own acts to promote the Prohibition.
In the end, you tell Agent Byrd that Cantaloupes is her father, reuniting them.
Overall, the theme of the story is that an obsession with prohibiting alcohol caused nothing but trouble, that alcohol is just good fun, and that getting drunk will conquer all in the end. The player character, Hazel Greene, is mostly unchanged by the events of the story, starting off as a good-natured drunk, and ending the story the same way, in keeping with the theme that alcohol (“spirit”) is everlasting.
I agree with Dan here. The question of “What is a game?” is kind of notorious for never leading anywhere productive, to the extent that on another forum I frequent, well, I guess I’ll link because the answer we came up with is not necessarily safe for work. Ditto for “Are games art?” or “Is this game art?” and especially “This thing with a story can’t be art because the player can affect the story” which goes back to Roger Ebert at least and depends on a blinkered version of art.
Your very first post had the explanation of why these arguments go nowhere! These are all Wittgensteinian concepts; it’s not like we start with a strictly bounded conception of “game” or whatever and expand it, the conception itself is flexible. (Oh, I already said that–I thought I had started typing something about W. and deleted it.)
Sometimes it serves to emphasize an aspect of the concept for a particular purpose, but at this point we’re more likely to get a productive discussion by just talking about the concepts we’re deploying for that purpose, rather than hitching them to the Big Words That Lead To Boring Arguments. Like, we can talk about how puzzles can create dramatic irony, or something like that.
A prototype theory exemplar based definition would certainly be better than any boundary based definition, but yes, these are neither fun nor useful debates to have.
Might I suggest the terms puzzleish and non-puzzleish.
Puzzle isn’t a loaded term the way game and literature are (at least as far as I know 
).
The ugly -ish suffix helps to highlight the fact that we’re placing works on a somewhat fuzzy axis and not making a hard binary choice.
I’d definitely call Delightful Wallpaper literature! This whole discussion about games/literature actually kinda reminds me of the debate as to whether Edward Gorey is more of an illustrator or a writer. Well, he’s both! (Besides which, literature doesn’t even have to tell a story. Some of Gorey’s books are once again perfect examples! What story does The Gashlycrumb Tinies tell? None! (Besides which, Delightful Wallpaper does tell a story! I remember the changeable narrative about everyone in that family murdering each other more than I remember a lot of other IF games.))
This is a great idea–might I suggest “puzzly”? It’s less made-up, and lets us call things more or less puzzly. Like, I saw 9:05 on the list of puzzleless IF, and I wouldn’t call it puzzleless*
*Though this might just be because when I played it I was completely new to IF and couldn’t accomplish basic tasks. On my first playthrough I missed whatever it was that indicates where you get off to go to work, drove out of town on the highway, and was like “I really don’t see what the big deal with this game is.”
Also, classifying IFs as more or less puzzly helps bring out that puzzliness is in some ways independent from narrative. Counterfeit Monkey for one is very puzzly but also has a very strong narrative, and the puzzle nature is integrated with the narrative.
There are also games that have challenges that aren’t puzzles. Kerkerkruip is one–I don’t think there’s much in the way of puzzles, and they’d be kind of pointless because the game is meant to be replayable (there’s a whole other discussion here about the process of discovering systems in roguelikes), but it’s all about overcoming challenges in RPG style.
Another discussion is systematic vs. unsystematic puzzles–in a discussion at that other site I called them “puzzles vs. riddles,” which was a bad choice, but you can think of them like this: If you read the source code, will that give away the solution to the puzzle? This is true for most IF puzzles (I reckon) but not all.
EDIT-ADD: If you really want to read some discussion of puzzle games, I strongly recommend the group of posts that last one comes from, The Ourobouros Sequence by Joel Goodwin at Electron Dance. They’re almost all about what I just called systematic puzzles, and not IF at all, but well worth reading! I should warn you that it’s basically book-length, 21 long posts, and that’s not even getting to the comments (if you think I’m long-winded here…)
I’ve been thinking this over for the last few days, and I think I’ve had a clarifying insight.
Most interactive text fiction works exist on a continuum or spectrum defined by the degree and type of participation of the audience. They’re joint constructions, whether they’re stories that the user explores or complex adventures where the course of events is largely user-determined. We can think of them as conversations between the author of the work and the users.
I think there is a strong parallel between the development of IF and the history of tabletop roleplaying games, which have evolved out of battle simulations and gradually developed into a broad spectrum of methods for producing storytelling experiences. A key principle of tabletop gaming (which I’ve experienced both as a game master and player) is that even when one person has the responsibility of creating and running scenarios (called the game master, storyteller, or a variety of other names) that person must never try to impose a particular narrative onto the game. The participation of the other players is an integral part of the game, and (to paraphrase Graham Nelson) tying up the players and shouting story at them ruins the experience for everyone.
But, relatively recently, there has been a significant increase in the number of pieces of interactive fiction where the audiences does NOT participate in the creation of events; instead, the author uses requirements for audience prompting for artistic effect, changing the (likely) pacing and focus of the experience of the story, but otherwise retaining completely control over the narrative. This is where any comparison between tabletop gaming and this form of IF breaks down - there is a gulf here, and it is narrow but very deep.
This non-participatory IF still falls within the defining parameters of “interactive text fiction”. But it’s different from the rest of the field - and it’s a difference of kind, not of degree.
I understand that people have used arguments over whether given works are games as a way of asserting social dominance and ‘doorkeeping’. I think that’s deplorable. But, abusus non tollit usum. It’s still possible, and I’d argue necessary, to talk about what a game is and is not.
These non-conversational works of fiction, where the author has complete control of the content and the user only influences the presentation, can be (and frequently are) art. They’re often wonderful and worthy experiences, and they’re undeniable part of the world interactive text fiction. But they’re not games. That seems to me to be an essential distinction that places them outside the spectrum that the vast majority of IF falls on.
There has indeed been a shift towards games with large-scale choices, rather than small-scale object manipulation. Every now and then, a linear story gets dressed up as an interactive story, with “click to continue” as the only form of interaction (often a few highlighted words of the story text that nevertheless have that effect). But those are exceptions. Usually, choice-driven interactive fiction allows the player to affect the twists and turns of a story, and offers multiple endings.
In contrast, games where the player is primarily performing operations on medium-sized dry goods traditionally offer a single good ending, possibly a few suboptimal endings, and a bunch of game-over situations that the player will quickly undo from. Some content may be optional, but the large-scale narrative arc is often predetermined (in my experience). So while puzzles may be solved in any order, and parts of the world discovered in any order, the overarching story that the game has told you once the last puzzle is solved tends to be fixed. Trinity, Anchorhead, The Warbler’s Nest, Ascent of the Gothic Tower, 9:05, Varicella, Violet, Make It Good, just to name a few: Each of them resolves into a single, canonical story once you’ve completed the game. Even when there is a small selection of endings, surely the author is “imposing a particular narrative onto the game”.
So in my experience, choice-based works allow the story to go in multiple ways, while works of parser IF usually have a single, canonical ending. I personally prefer a canonical story (that I get to discover through exploration), but many players prefer stories where they can change the ultimate outcome. Stories that are commonly found in the choice-based body of works.
I’ll grant you that a game like Anchorhead contains no endings that the author didn’t craft. But which ending - what path the story takes, and how it gets there - is up to the player.
Polish the Glass, in contrast, offers the user no choices as far as the story is concerned. It’s a dramatic presentation that incorporates interactive elements. And it’s a good one. But I think we need language to efficiently distinguish between its type of IF and others. Unfortunately, many of the terms that suggest themselves to my mind have a lot of emotional baggage attached - for example, ‘dictatorial’ is hardly a neutral descriptor - and I’ve yet to come across one that really captures the essence of the distinction.
Any suggestions?
I haven’t played “Polish the Glass,” but I notice some of the reviews on IFDB describe it as “dynamic fiction.” A possibly relevant blog post: https://emshort.blog/2015/11/17/a-couple-examples-of-dynamic-fiction-and-why-they-work/
“Murder at the Manor” would seem to fit the description of ‘dynamic fiction’ as much as “Polish the Glass”. (To use another recent IFcomp example.) Even better, since the user can choose what text becomes part of the experience and the final ending - thus, dynamic. PtG’s story is unalterable and static - I don’t think ‘dynamic’ describes its essential characteristic.
Suppose you take one of these works of dynamic fiction, and then you replace each instance of “clicking a link” with “solving a puzzle”. This would transform the passage graph into a puzzle dependency graph, but I would say that the plot structure is identical.
Of course, in order to add puzzles, you might have to add other elements to the game, such as a simulated world where the player can walk around and manipulate objects. The game would become something else, and this would make a huge difference in how the player experiences the story. But it would be the same story.
Some ideas: Streamlined, distilled, ciceroned, curated, planned, guided, linear, strictly ordered.
I don’t see why you feel “tied up and shouted at” in Polish the Glass but not in Anchorhead. The puzzles in Anchorhead actually make it more confining. The typical feeling of playing Anchorhead is the feeling of being stuck, unable to progress, unable to access the rest of the story, unable to access the only ending.
Nothing about Anchorhead is up to me, except to overcome the challenge of figuring out what the author requires me to do and then doing it. I can’t even travel freely; the challenge of most of the game is to find and open locked doors.