This new form of interactive fiction is more storylike than games like “The Baron” or “Shade”, although they remain just as sinister and outlandish. Between what we have read about and experienced ourselves, there don’t seem to be a lot of overtly positive interactive fiction games, and I wonder why that is. I believe that overall, stories that end well aren’t as captivating as games that give people the creeps to some degree, and people are more likely to want to solve a twisted game that they don’t have a clue where it is going.
We spoke in class on Friday about the affordances and downfalls of the games we had been discussing. I think that games like “My Father’s Long, Long Legs” and “Power to the People” and even “Queers in Love at the End of the World” are much less stressful to play because they are more narrative; the player doesn’t have to do the hard thinking, they can just choose what comes next in the story and let the computer do the playing. This does, I think, take away a certain degree of control that a player has in previous games we discussed, but I think that players (or maybe just most people in our class) prefer to have their decisions made for them instead of aimlessly searching for what the computer wants them to do next. The narrative structure of the game also gives it a more gauntlet or maybe loop-and-grow feel (to use Ashwell’s terminology) than “Shade”, “The Baron” or many of our CYOA books.