Well, as stated, I think this is true as far as IF is concerned. I think
it does have literary potential. But I think it's useful to figure out
where this potential lies, and what enhances it, and what works against
its development. That's why I contrasted game-playing with reading
activity. Does game-playing in IF enhance the reading of text in some way
traditional writing can't, or does this make reading like a word search or
scavenger hunt instead of like literature?
: Does the form of the piece make it
: interesting for some reason --- for example, did conceiving such a form
: alone require great thought? Does studying the work over a long perios of
: time still yield new insights into its form?
These are questions which, when asked about much IF, will almost
ceratinly be answered 'no,' unless you consider 'studying the work over a
long period of time' the process of puzzle-solving, which I don't think
is study. Look at any Infocom game -- my favories AMFV and Trinity
included -- and there's not much to entice one to return after the game
is solved. As you point out, this is hard to achieve, and it's absence in
Infocom games doesn't prove that IF is a barren medium. It's a useful
metric, though.
: There are so many ways to communicate --- particularly as of this century.
: I think this realization is in part what has motivated many of the 20th
: century's misunderstood artists (the dadaists being the obvious eample).
This brings up an interesting way that game-playing and literature have
interacted: in Dadaist word games, which juxtaposed the randomly dreamed
words and sentences of players in a way that Racter never managed to
emulate. Here are games that could very easily be argued to be literary or
to have literary results. Yet 'The Exquisite Corpse', 'Automatic Writing'
and other Dadaist games were never 'solved' like IF can be. At the end,
the spontaneous text demanded attention and re-reading, if only beacuse of
its absurdity. Very different than such texts as "*** You have died ***",
I think you'll agree.
So, in IF, how can game-play enhance literariness, and how can it
undercut it?