A Theory of Fun for Interactive Fiction Design?
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Feb 022007
There’s a nice (if somewhat belated!) review of A Theory of Fun from an interactive fiction perspective at Emily Short’s Interactive Fiction blog. Kind of interesting, because of course a lot of IF focuses on puzzles, and a lot of IF focuses on narrative, and the book doesn’t have too much to say about either. 🙂
5 Responses to “A Theory of Fun for Interactive Fiction Design?”
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I tend to think of games (as Raph described them) as more of an inductive learning… something that could potentially be done by neural nets. There’s a non-binary feedback cycle.
Puzzles are about deduction. There’s only a binary feedback cycle, and once “success” has been hit, the puzzle is never seen again. The way to solve the puzzle is to fundamentally understand “what’s going on”.
Some random thoughts, and non-related stuff, on: http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/Stickybeaking.htm
It’s a bit of an odd approach for a review, it’s true. 🙂 I skipped over some things about the book that I did like quite a bit, because they didn’t fit the main question I wanted to ask for the site. For that matter, I kept changing my mind about whether I thought IF qualified as a game at all, under the terms you were using, and eventually settled on “sometimes”.
Re. Mike’s comment, I think the puzzle/game learning distinctions may be a little less clear-cut than that. In particular, if the puzzles are all based on a similar set of rules (all related word puzzles, for instance), then it makes more sense to talk about the kind of learning you describe: the more the player solves, the easier the other puzzles become, and some kind of general pattern emerges.
I suppose that’s still more like doing chess exercises than like playing chess, though.
Random comment:
Why wasn’t this blog’s title, “Emily Short’s review of aToF”? Why is someone from the IF development community reviewing aToF so unique that it dersves a blog? … Why are the IF and the MMORPG/MUD (and CRPG and FPS) development communities so segregated?
Well, if you read Chris Crawford’s book on Interactive Fiction, you’ll see that he argues that games are fundamentally incompatible with Interactive Fiction, and, in particular, that the gaming industry is incapable by it’s nature of doing IF. His arguments are similar in some ways to the ones Raph makes about the gaming ‘dinosaurs’ and ‘genre kings’.
My view is more that the interactive space is currently so underpopulated that artificial divisions exist purely because the full spectrum of possibility is as yet unfilled. The gaps will close with time.
Actually ANY review of ATOF at this stage deserves a blog. 🙂 Gotta keep up the publicity!