I’m sorry that stung you. The touch of something in that case was our penchant for tidiness, trying to keep duplicate topics from taking off; it happens a couple of times a week, entirely independently of CoG’s ideological commitments. Your original post was titled “Gender Choice vs Good Fiction.” We already have a good dozen threads on the topic of gender choice–on pretty much all of which people have made the exact same points about the literary virtues of “experiencing a life other than your own” rather than shaping a character to one’s own gender etc.
When you then lamented that you’d actually just wanted to use gender choice as an entrypoint into the broader issue of Good Fiction, we encouraged you to make this thread.
That’s a fair perspective. The forum culture prioritizes encouraging people to write, and keeping them from giving up. It’s a comfortable place to try things and put your best efforts out there without fearing that they’ll be torn to pieces. Authors who want brutal honesty and strongly prescriptive feedback from their reviewers can find it here, but they’ll probably need to hunt for it, e.g. chasing the folks on their WiP thread who’ve given the most helpful criticisms and asking for more. What you’re more likely to find here is a friendly editor who will help you shape your work into something rather better, and lots of constructive suggestions.
The market for IF, like the market for non-interactive novels, rewards “good enough” (Dan Brown potboilers, 50 Shades) more than it rewards greatness. Authors have to decide for themselves how ambitious they want to be–what level of greatness they think they’ve got in them, and whether they’ve got the drive and time to make their work as good as they possibly can. Personally, I’m satisfied with where I stopped with Choice of Rebels, even though another year’s polishing could plainly have improved it. In my own mental ranking of serious fantasy novels, it’s a long ways from the top, but it’s farther from the bottom. As a creative side project, that’s good enough for me.
But to answer the thread’s title question, I’m sure there’s nothing in the medium keeping IF authors from writing the kind of good solid middlebrow stuff you point to, with a strong sense of literary style: Cormac McCarthy instead of Louis L’Amour, or (switching genres) Kazuo Ishiguro rather than Terry Brooks, David Mitchell rather than Isaac Asimov.
That’s easy for me to say, of course…because I don’t share your distaste for second-person narration, stats, a customizable protagonist, or the idea of readers as co-creators (something I think is present in any fiction, btw, although it can be resisted to a degree by authors keen to remove ambiguity and assert their exclusive control of the text). I’m sympathetic with the conventions of the medium, and don’t consider them unliterary.
But I also think good IF can be written that ticks the boxes of first-person, stats-free, fixed-protagonist, etc. So all the best to you if you do decide to write it somewhere else.