Twisty Little Passages

1) "Works of interactive fiction also present simulated worlds: These are not merely the setting of the literature that is realized; they also, among other things, serve to constrain and define the operation of the narrative-generating program. IF worlds are reflected in, but not equivalent to, maps, object trees, and descriptive texts. The IF world is no less than the content plane of interactive fiction, just as the story is the content plane of a narrative."

2) "The riddle is not only the most important early ancestor of interactive fiction but also an extremely valuable figure for understanding it, perhaps the most directly useful figure in considering the aesthetics and poetics of the form today."

3) "The writing of an IF work is not some surface feature to be applied at the last moment any more than the choice of words in a riddle can be done 'last.' Although structure as well as writing is important, the writing is intimately related to the workings of an IF world. The arrangement of challenges and the way in which the IF world can be experienced can be discussed with reference to the riddle. (An art such as architecture, which considers that people may take different courses through a space, also has advantages in considering this aspect.) To understand how language functions in interactive fiction and what the literary aspects of interactive fiction are, the best comparison seems to be not to the novel but to the form of poetry considered here, the riddle. The riddle, like an IF work, must express itself clearly enough to be solved, obliquely enough to be challenging, and beautifully enough to be compelling. These are all different aspects of the same goal; they are not in competition. An excellent interactive fiction work is no more 'a crossword at war with a narrative' [...] than a poem is sound at war with sense."

4) "'I'd set my theme, I'd set my locations, and I'd start putting items in and putting in puzzles. I'd get the game about two thirds done and then I would stop. The next one third of the game literally came from the people I gave to play the game. I'd watch how they played the game, I'd watch what they tried to do with the items that I never thought they might try to do.'" (Scott Adams, on process)

5) "Developing twenty implementations of the Z-machine and twenty IF works would result in four hundred saleable products. Mike Dornbrook, Infocom's director of marketing, said this cross-platform availability was important to the company's bottom line: no single computer platform ever accounted for more than 25 percent of Infocom's revenue in any quarter."

6) "As is the case for other forms of computer literature, while creative progress in interactive fiction is essential to the future of the form, such progress will be almost impossible, and will be for all practical purposes irrelevant, if the number of people with a deep interest in interactive fiction, worldwide, is only in the hundreds. The true popularity of computer literature---not its mass marketability or brazen promotion, but rather making works in the form available to those outside a narrow academic or newsgroup-based community---is an essential, not incidental, concern for all writers who use the computer as a medium for their work."