User:Thijshijsijsjss/Gossamery/Interactive Fiction (Critical Inquiry 11, 1984)

• Got to know it as a reference in Twisty Little Passages
• Read 2025-02-12, on sci-hub, doi:10.1086/448277

1984 article / paper about interactive fiction. It discusses Eliza, Collosal Cave Adventure, touches on literary theory and the implied reader of a text. Fun to read about the state of the genre at the time -- what conventions have prevailed and which statements feel antiquated now. Some nice quotes:

Ultimately, the fiction that resulted from the use of microcomputers has become sufficiently different from traditional fiction so that one might well wonder whether it is fiction at all.

One senses one's essential humanity wobbling in the midst of the infinite paradoxes of existence and meaning.

In these real-world fictions, like the read world iteself, the reader must find her own way instead of merely being led along by the author's smoothly flowing text.

Fiction these works may be, but the greatest fiction, in a way, is the genre itself.