josemanuel & nick – while the form v. genre is a nice and useful binary, it strikes me as unsatisfactory. In poetry, the delineation of form outside of genre certainly may often be a bit easier (the sestina, the sonnet, the villanelle), although not always: what of the dramatic monologue (which may come in a variety of lyric forms)? But lyric poetry is surely a genre, just as surely as prose fiction is a genre.

And it is with prose that genre distinctions become even blurrier. Is the epistolary novel a form, a genre, or both? And let’s ignore the equally complicating case of so-called “genre fiction,” designating those so-often maligned realms of “sub-par, non-literary” fiction (judgments in quotes for hopefully obvious reasons). But of course, just as we may have genres of medium, so too we might have genres between media (mystery, comedy, and so on), and the overlap causes additional confusion.

In any case, comparing IF to other prose fiction traditions seems more genuine than aligning it with poetic formal traditions. And it is this alignment with fiction, and its distinguishing itself as ‘interactive’ (as opposed to merely ‘prose fiction’) that suggests to me a genre built from many potential forms, and distinguishable from other computer programs (just as epic is distinguished from lyric, and lyric from dramatic, though all can be poetic).

Sorry for rambling; I find it a compelling question, and one too-often overlooked in new media and computer game studies…

If fiction is an “untruth that is not a lie,” what is it in a work of fiction that one might claim is not a lie? And, what is the relation between ‘it’ and drama??

Jim, I’ve been asked recently through other channels if Facade was interactive fiction. It’s a complex question. I’d say that it has most or all of the formal elements, as SHRDLU and the blocks world does, but, similarly, it is not participating mainly in the IF tradition. The emphasis is on interpersonal relationships rather than figuring out a systematic world or riddle, so “interactive drama” (as Michael and Andrew explain) makes for a more meaningful framework. Nevertheless, people interested in IF would be well advised to learn about Facade, which is extremely relevant to what goes on in IF. That’s why I reviewed it as IF for the SPAG Newsletter.

Given this, though, there’s no good shorthand term for text-based interactive fiction, a cumbersome set of words…

btw, to be clear, the term “interactive drama” was used in the context of digital interactive entertainment at least as early as 1986 in Brenda Laurel’s thesis, and later her 1991 book Computers as Theater, and by Joe Bates and the original Oz project folk in the early 1990′s; we created Facade within that vision of the term.

I believe Nick does consider Facade to be an interactive fiction, but I’m not sure if the rest of the IF community would. For instance, I doubt we’d be allowed in the IF competitions, or hosted in the IF archive.

Noah has argued for “hypertext” (as originally conceived by Nelson) to mean something much broader than the term hypertext has come to mean as defined by a community of practice. In Noah’s broader definition, a hypertext can include significant computation, including a simulated world, so IF might be subsumed by hypertext. But I think Noah is fighting an uphill battle here; the communities of practice have already spoken.

Terminology keeps coming back to haunt us.

In the past I’ve preferred the general definition of “fiction”, as an “imagined story”, not tied to form. In this sense, interactive fiction is pretty much equivalent to the general term “interactive story”. Using this definition for fiction then, interactive drama, e.g. Facade, is a form of interactive fiction; Photopia would be text-based interactive fiction.

But most consider fiction to specifically be a text-based form, the way the term is used in a bookstore, e.g. novels and short stories in the “fiction” section.

At the same time, somewhat inconsistently I suppose, I considered the term “drama” to in fact be tied to form: an enacted story with actors, e.g. theater or movies. (But, I suppose you could make the argument that “drama” shouldn’t be tied to form; while not quite a genre, it’s a story with certain properties, such as building tension, about serious subjects with heavy emotion, etc. It’s not a genre itself because you can have sci-fi dramas, western dramas, etc.)

If you use the form-specific definition of fiction (text) and the form-specific definition of drama (enacted), interactive drama is complementary to IF: Facade is not interactive fiction, but interactive drama; Photopia would be just interactive fiction. In this case, what is the umbrella term for both — interactive story? Interactive narrative? Sigh.

Michael views Facade as an interactive drama. Are interactive fictions and interactive dramas the same thing? The play experience is certainly different in many respects.