Weblogs: October 2007 Archive Page

Several bloggers noticed yesterday that the US National Library of Medicine (NLM, which is part of the NIH: National Institutes of Health) has a style guide for citing blogs... The NLM's definition of a blog isn't bad... But the guide itself is several years late and still flawed.

But for many of us, that's not it at all; there's a lot more to IF than fond memories of classic games on antique computers. Many of us see text-based interactive fiction as a uniquely expressive story-telling medium. To us, text is not the same as really lame graphics - it's an altogether different medium with altogether different capabilities, and it didn't become obsolete when graphical games came along any more than books became obsolete when television was invented.

What is it about interactive fiction that keeps us enthusiasts interested after all these years?

For starters, IF is probably the only computer game medium in which an individual author can hope to create an entire work on his or her own. Part of the reason today's cutting-edge computer games are so technically accomplished is that they're created by huge teams of specialists. Without millions of dollars of financial backing, someone with an idea for a game has little hope of realizing it as a full graphical production. In contrast, a lone writer can readily create an entire text game single-handedly.

Probably the most interesting thing about IF, though, is its inherent emphasis on story.

Reporting -- especially investigative reporting, the lifeblood of a truly adversarial press -- is labor-intensive, money-sucking stuff, yet even The New York Times can't figure out how to charge for its content in the Age of Rip, Burn, and Remix. To be sure, newspapers are hemorrhaging readers to the Web, and fewer and fewer Americans care about current events and the world outside their own skulls. But the other part of the problem is that Generation Download thinks information wants to be free, everywhere and always, even if some ink-stained wretch wept tears of blood to create it.

Lawrence Lessig talks a good game, but I still don't understand how people who live and die by their intellectual property survive the obsolescence of copyright and the transition to the gift economy of our dreams.