So SPAG's been around for ten years now, and what's happened in the IF
world in the ten years of SPAG's existence? Oh, not much. Consider:
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1) THE RISE OF FREEWARE IF. Ten years ago, much of what was produced in
the IF community was some variety of commercial effort -- often
shareware or crippleware. Legend was on its last legs (Gateway 2:
Homeworld was released in 1993), the Adventions games saw their last
commercial installment with 1993's Unnkulia Zero, and amateur efforts
like MacWesleyan (1995), Save Princeton (1994), Perdition's Flames
(1993), and Enhanced (1994), were all shareware. Much of what was made
available for free was the leavings of the annual Softworks AGT
competition, about which, honorable exceptions like Cosmoserve (1992)
and Shades of Gray (1994) aside, the less said the better. The 1993
freeware release of Curses heralded a trend of high-quality freeware
games (The Legend Lives! in 1994, Christminster and Jigsaw in 1995,
etc.) that left shareware largely a memory in a few years.
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You can argue, of course, that the move away from commercial IF has been
less than salutary for authors, who have lost a chance at even the
meager compensation available from shareware registrations -- but the
freeware revolution has likely broadened the IF audience (in that new
players are arguably more willing to try a free game with no pressure to
register) and diversified the IF available (since the decline of
commercial avenues for IF left fewer constraints on authors'
creativity).
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2) BREVITY, THE SOUL OF IF. Relatively short IF games were all but
unknown ten years ago; Unnkulia One-Half was written in 1993 as a teaser
for Unnkulia Zero, and medium-length fare like Busted! was rare (and
only half-serious.) The advent of the annual competition in 1995, with
its "One Rule" that entries must be finishable in under two hours,
heralded a movement toward shorter games, and popular games like John's
Fire Witch (1995) both followed and pushed the trend -- fast enough that
longer IF is now largely unknown, with maybe a release or two each year.
(Three of the past four Best Game winners have been competition
entries.)
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As above, this is both good and bad. New writers can break into the
IF-writing biz more easily if the median length of an IF release is
relatively compact; if all new games were expected to be Curses-length,
there would likely be many fewer IF authors. At the same time, however,
the trend toward shorter games has lessened players' patience for highly
difficult, epic-length IF on the scale of Jigsaw; it's hard to
reaccustom oneself to devoting months to a single game when the more
common IF experience takes only an evening (and when there are hundreds
more worthy efforts in the archive). The diminished appetite for long
games has in turn made authors reluctant to devote the considerable
energies required, and the spiral proceeds from there. How significant a
loss this is for the IF world is a matter of taste and opinion, of
course, but it's certainly a striking trend.
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A somewhat unfortunate example of this was G. Kevin Wilson's Once and
Future, a sprawling Arthurian epic written over the course of five years
and released commercially in 1998. While reviews were generally
positive, interest (at least, as measured by sales) was tepid -- in
part, it seemed, because epic-length IF had fallen out of style to some
extent over the course of the game's creation, and the ample supply of
short, high-quality freeware games narrowed the game's appeal somewhat. 
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3) THE NARRATIVE CATCHES UP WITH THE CROSSWORD. Through most of its
history, IF has consisted largely of puzzles wrapped in an ostensible
plot premise -- sometimes with obvious set-piece puzzles (see Zork
Zero), and usually with the seams only slightly better hidden.
Aberrations like Trinity and A Mind Forever Voyaging aside, most IF had
so little plot that it was all but inevitable that puzzles would
predominate and largely displace what passed for a story. Many of the
games produced in the freeware IF revolution featured stronger stories,
however (perhaps because, in shorter IF, it's easier to sustain a
narrative arc), spawning a trend toward smoother integration of plot and
puzzle (in other words, fewer locked doors that have to be unlocked
because no IF player can leave a door unlocked in good conscience, etc.,
and more puzzles that the PC might actually want to solve). Notable
harbingers of this trend were Christminster (1995), The One That Got
Away (1995), Delusions (1996), and Kissing the Buddha's Feet (1996); by
the 1997 competition, the plots of the top-ranked games (The Edifice,
Babel, and Glowgrass) had become highly focused, and the puzzles to be
solved would have made little to no sense in any other context.
Increasingly, a plot that both makes sense and drives the bulk of a
game's action has become an expected IF feature, and well-regarded games
integrate their plot and puzzles seamlessly. (Try to imagine the puzzles
in the last three competition winners -- Slouching Toward Bedlam;
Another Earth, Another Sky; and All Roads -- transposed into any other
game.)
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This is a welcome development in a lot of respects, but in one in
particular: it suggests that the IF medium can be valuable for
expressing ideas and telling a story in new ways, not simply for the
crafting of puzzles (which was, largely, its original purpose). Some
have argued that the ability to not only put the player in the shoes of
the protagonist (as static fiction does with first-person narration) but
actually direct the protagonist's actions heightens a sense of
complicity in the plot as it unfolds and offer an opportunity to make a
statement that simply could not be made as effectively in static
fiction. Similarly, the experience of interacting with characters and
experiencing a setting gives IF a potential emotional impact not
available in static fiction -- and the best writers have found ways to
make such an impact, notably Adam Cadre in Photopia (1998) and Andrew
Plotkin in Shade (2000).
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Much ink has been spilled on the subject of the decline of puzzlefests,
of course, a large portion of it by yours truly, but the nature of the
shift has sometimes been oversimplified. Even now, relatively few IF
games eschew puzzles altogether (and even those that do must contend
with players' puzzle-solving expectations; thus, the branching plots of
Galatea (2000) were taken by many as an invitation to find each and
every narrative possibility), and even now there are well-regarded games
that could reasonably be viewed as puzzles with some ostensible story
(Lock and Key). The few genuinely puzzleless games that have been
produced (many in the annual Art Show, a few -- Exhibition (1999), Best
of Three (2001) -- in the competition) have garnered respect but have
hardly set off a stampede. More common are games that use a few puzzles
for pacing (Photopia, All Roads, My Angel), but focus their efforts on
plot and character development rather than complex puzzles.
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It's hard to argue, moreover, that puzzle development is a lost art, as
the last few years of IF development have seen some of the best puzzles
ever devised. The language puzzle in The Edifice (1997), the entirety of
Rematch (2000), and a certain puzzle in Spider and Web (1998) all
require persistence, ingenuity, and a bit of lateral thinking. Nor are
full-blown puzzlefests entirely things of the past: recent years have
given us the gargantuan Mulldoon Legacy (1999), Not Just an Ordinary
Ballerina (1999), and First Things First (2002), each crammed with
creative puzzles. The demise of the puzzle, in short, has been greatly
exaggerated.
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4) NPC INTERACTION: MORE, BETTER. Part of the rise in the storytelling
element of IF has been increased attention to NPC development: while
many NPCs in the early days of IF simply served as puzzle props
(recognize what the NPC wants, give it to him/her, obtain
knowledge/object to solve another puzzle -- or disable/distract NPC
guarding exit/treasure), the latter-day IF revolution has increasingly
offered more complex characters with whom the PC can interact more
extensively. Some of this arises simply from authors giving NPCs more
personality -- both Small World and Kissing the Buddha's Feet in the
1996 competition gave key NPCs a wide variety of one-liners and amusing
reactions to the game's events, making them feel like well-developed
characters even though the PC didn't need to interact much with them.
But the complexity of NPC interactions, in the form of more elaborate
conversation systems, has also played a key role.
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At the forefront of this particular development is Emily Short, whose
Galatea (2000) consisted almost entirely of interactions with a single
exhaustively realized NPC, interactions that, both through an ASK/TELL
conversation system and a variety of other means, helped develop a
highly complex NPC personality; different questions or approaches would
elicit different reactions depending on the conversational context and
send the relationship between the PC and NPC down a variety of different
paths. Subsequent Short efforts, including 2001's Pytho's Mask and Best
of Three and 2003's City of Secrets, featured a novel conversation
system that blend the freedom of an ASK/TELL interface with the specific
phrasings (and associated tone choices) of menu-based systems, allowing
for considerably more complex interactions -- and more complex
characters, like Grant from Best of Three and Evaine from City of
Secrets, have emerged as a result. Other notable NPC-centric games were
Adam Cadre's Varicella (1999), many of whose NPCs were vividly rendered
loathsome characters, and Stephen Granade's Common Ground (1999), a
shifting-perspective look at complex family relationships. Both the
tools and the precedents are there for multilayered NPCs, in short,
characters that drive the story rather than merely being cogs in the
wheel.
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5) EXPERIMENTATION. As noted, commercial IF is largely gone and is
unlikely to make a comeback any time soon -- but with the decline of
commercial IF has come a great deal of narrative experimentation with
the IF medium, some of which, of course, has worked better than others,
but most of it has offered something worthwhile.
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Those experiments have taken a variety of forms, many of which cannot be
revealed here without spoilers -- authors began testing the waters with
puzzleless and puzzle-light IF in 1996 and 1997 (In the End, Tapestry,
Space Under the Window), and have moved on to more radical experiments.
Some of the experiments have included novel PC points of view, from dogs
(Ralph, 1996) to cats (Day for Soft Food, 1999) to teddy bears (Bear's
Night Out, 1997) to robots (Bad Machine, 1998) to genies (Djinni
Chronicles, 2000), and others have taken the form of PCs that prove
unreliable in a variety of ways. An even more striking experiment was
The Gostak (2001), written in a language whose syntax was akin to
English but whose vocabulary was entirely unfamiliar, and the challenge
was to decipher it sufficiently and interact sensibly enough to solve
some simple puzzles. Other notable experiments have included Aisle
(1999) and Rematch, both of which offer just one turn (repeated over and
over) but manage to provide surprisingly varied and deep exploration of
the game's world, and Heroes (2001), where the player has a task to
achieve and can assume any of five separate roles to achieve it. There
have also been attempts at literary adaptation (The Tempest, 1997, and
Nevermore, 2000); surreal/symbolic settings (So Far, 1996, and For a
Change, 1999), IF games in reverse (Zero Sum Game, 1997, and Janitor,
2002), and games where most or all of the challenge is to figure out
what is going on (Shade, 2000, and All Roads, 2001). These and other
successful experiments have helped pushed the boundaries of what IF
authors can do with the craft.
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The common thread here is that many, if not all, of these experiments
would have been hard to market (at least, the history of commercial IF
includes little boundary-pushing as ambitious as the above efforts,
which says something); it's reasonable to conclude that the freeware
revolution gave rise to an environment that made innovation of this sort
possible. It's undeniable, however, that things have been done with IF
tools in the past ten years that have expanded the frontiers of the
possible -- at least, in this setting. (No, not Z-abuses.)
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6) MULTIMEDIA FOR THE COMMON MAN. While most IF is still text-only,
development tools facilitating the use of multimedia have, if not
flourished, at least achieved a modicum of popularity in recent years,
notably HTML-TADS, Glulx, and Hugo, such that basic graphics and sound
files are now relatively commonplace. Particularly notable in this
regard were Carma (2002), which had fairly polished animations and
well-produced music, and Kaged (2000), which had photographs and a
nicely mood-enhancing soundtrack.
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It's not clear whether this represents a significant advance in relative
terms -- the progress of multimedia IF has been slow enough, and the
enhancement of multimedia in commercial games fast enough, that
potential players accustomed to highly vivid graphics and professionally
produced sound are likely in for a rude shock. Still, there are viable
multimedia tools available, which is certainly an improvement on 1994.
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7) PARODY/COMMENTARY. I'm not sure how much it says, in these
self-conscious times, that IF has developed the ability to comment on
itself and on its own limitations, but that it has is undeniable.
Arguably the first example was Undo (1995), a peculiar little effort
with no puzzles in the traditional sense, one problem that is solved
with linguistic trickery, a possible score of 86 points but no actual
opportunity to score said points, and a variety of bizarre red herrings.
Zero Sum Game, where the goal was to undo the entirety of a
hack-and-slash fantasy quest and thereby bring the score down to 0 (and
the protagonist caused considerably more mayhem in trying to set things
right than he/she had caused during the "original" game, was another
game that explicitly poked fun at IF conventions, and the list has grown
from there: 9:05 (1999), Shrapnel (1999), Being Andrew Plotkin (2000),
LASH (2000), Guess the Verb! (2000), Voices (2001), and Janitor have all
employed self-reference in one way or another to amuse or inform. All
this suggests that, if nothing else, the medium is stable and defined
enough that critique and mockery makes some level of sense, which is
progress of a sort.
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8) GENRE WITH THE WIND. Finally, one of the more encouraging aspects of
latter-day IF development is that most of the better games have
transcended genre limitations in ways that very little old-school
commercial IF managed to do. Whereas much of the most successful IF in
the '80s fell firmly into well-trodden genre categories, much of the
most acclaimed IF of the last ten years has avoided such categories.
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Consider the competition winners: over the nine years of the
competition, the first-place games have included an elliptical little
nightmare about being stuck in the rain, an allegory of sorts for
evolution and civilization, a fragmented tale of untimely death that
defies categorization, an medieval-Venice metaphysical-fantasy story
involving political scheming and a narrator who moves into and out of
various bodies, and a steampunk story set in an insane asylum with a
dash of unreliable narrator. Other notables of the past few years
include: an 18th-century France drama with incursions of fantasy-style
magic; a palace-intrigue game in an anachronism-heavy alternate-history
19th century Italy where none of the contenders for the throne,
including the PC, are even vaguely sympathetic; a
delve-into-your-own-head saga arising from the PC's attempts to quit
smoking; a parody of an offbeat indie movie, shot through with IF
reference; and a neo-Platonist story freighted with symbolism and object
transformation. By this point, well-regarded IF games that fall within
genre boundaries at all are more the exception than the rule: Anchorhead
(1998), Spider and Web (1998), and Worlds Apart (1999) could fairly be
called Lovecraftian horror, espionage, and sci-fi games without
stretching the definitions too much, but not many other top-flight IF
games of the last several years could be so classified.
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That latter-day IF increasingly ignores genre boundaries is noteworthy
in a few respects. First, it tends to elevate the significance of story
over puzzles, a dynamic discussed above; if the setting and plot are
generic fantasy or sci-fi, the game often becomes an excuse for
set-piece puzzles (since the appeal of the game tends to lie more in the
puzzles grafted into the setting than in a tired plot). If the concepts
and settings are fresh, however, the author is less tempted to play them
down, or ignore them for long stretches, in favor of puzzles. To be
sure, genre does not necessarily mean trite -- but without striking
innovations that stamp a game as somehow transcending a category
(notable examples are Enlightenment (1998), which both inhabits and
satirizes fantasy, and LASH, science fiction that encourages the player
to apply the story's themes on multiple levels), it can be difficult to
make genre fiction feel fresh. (The increasing complaints over the years
about genre IF, particularly fantasy -- without regard for the
cleverness of the puzzles in the genre setting in question -- underscore
the IF audience's increasing dissatisfaction with puzzles as a game's
raison d' tre.)
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Second, the decline of genre IF -- in particular, the decline of fantasy
and sci-fi -- suggests a growing acknowledgment that realistic and
complex characters and compelling human conflicts matter, as those
genres traditionally have been better on outlandish visions of
alternative worlds, or on bizarre occurrences in traditional settings,
than on bringing characters to life. (At the very least, the rise in
"realistic" high-quality IF that eschews both fantastic settings and
strange/mystical events -- Varicella, Common Ground, Exhibition (1999),
Gourmet (2002) -- indicates more interest in bringing to life the
interactions within those settings than in portraying the fantastic and
otherworldly.) There's nothing about those hallmarks of fantasy and
science fiction that precludes character development, of course, but it
says something that authors, more and more, no longer need to rely on
the outlandish and unusual as a hook. Finally, whatever you might think
of IF's aspirations toward serious literature, going beyond genre --
either by subverting it or disregarding it outright -- certainly
reflects those aspirations.
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In short, the past ten years have been quite a time for the development
of IF -- and while the long-sought foothold in the commercial gaming
world, a few heroic attempts to the contrary notwithstanding, has not
yet materialized, that day may yet come. If it does, thanks to the
freeware revolution, the medium will certainly be a good deal more
mature than it was when the market petered out in the early '90s.
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