When I discovered CoG thirteen years ago, they’d released only four games. They were just starting to learn what made interactive fiction work, narratively and mechanically. These days, they have it down to a science, and their more recent releases tend to feel far more like novels than games in the way they speak to my mind and emotions.
Obviously there’s a lot more variety than there used to be, which is a wonderful thing. I’m glad that there’s been enough collective experience for some IF-specific norms and expectations to emerge, and I’m glad that people are still experimenting outside of that.
I’m glad that, in so many of the ongoing disputes on the “best” way to do things, we haven’t reached a consensus. We have plot-driven stories and character-driven stories, “game-y” IF and literary IF, fixed PCs and endlessly customizable ones, escapist settings and grittily realistic ones, ROs with carefully constructed identities and playersexual ROs of variable gender - and everything in between. Whatever your tastes may be, there’s almost certainly something that suits them. And personally, I’ve found my own preferences challenged and sometimes expanded by trying different things.
Also on a personal level, I’m thrilled that so many games now offer the option to play as asexual, and that more and more authors understand the nuances of asexual identity, so that playing an asexual character doesn’t have to mean cutting myself off from romance, or even necessarily from sex. I’m thrilled to see asexual NPCs appear in more and more stories, in a variety of roles, sometimes as ROs.
I’m disappointed, although I’m not surprised, to see how much of the conversations on this forum and elsewhere revolve around sex and romance. There hasn’t always been an expectation of romance in every game - most early ChoiceScript games, if they touch upon romance at all, treat it as a brief subplot. Heck, even Choice of Romance didn’t offer the kind of vicarious experience readers have come to expect these days. I love a good romance. I enjoy a good sex scene. But I want authors to write those things because they want to, not because it’s expected of them. It breaks my heart that a lot of excellent stories, with elegant prose, complex characters, vivid settings, get shrugged aside because they don’t have much in the way of romance. It bemuses me to see discussions of multifaceted, complex stories like Fallen Hero or the “Claw, Shadow, and Sage” series focused so disproportionately on the romantic elements, and don’t get me started on the way people talk about A Kiss from Death.
I think it’s also unfortunate that shorter stories are so often devalued. I love The Book of Hungry Names and Lords of Infinity and all those other games with a word count that would intimidate Proust, but they’re not the only kind of story worth reading. Some of the greatest authors the world has ever known were masters of the short story, and I’d hate to see IF authors of similar talents go forever under the radar because they’re not producing doorstoppers.
