The factors that make a superb interactive fiction are the exact same factors that breath life into role playing games. Dialogue and story and believability must be crisp for both. The Modding communities for games Like Oblivion and Fallout 3 often crave the skills that the text adventure community excels at.
One of the greatest selling points of I.F. has always been imagination; the imagination of the player. We decide what the world looks like just as readers of novels create the world as the author guides them forward. Now we have massive memory and HD screens and real to life graphics spoon feeding us these worlds. BUT! we also have editors and modders and the ability to play God in our own PC environments. So I say good. I say let there be light. And I say give me the switch.
I have never completed a text based adventure. I did love the early Atlantis games
Atlantis III: The New World (aka Beyond Atlantis 2)
Atlantis II (aka "Beyond Atlantis")
the music and stories still bring back fond memories of puzzling and hours of adventure. There was plenty to read and notes to be taken and thinking to be done. And real learning took place despite me.
What am I getting at? I think the two separate things in the title are not at all separate things. When the historians, if we have a future, look back to this time from 100 years hence; perhaps the whole of early game development will be seen as a golden thread leading to either disaster or salvation for humanity. Virtual reality is very powerful and seductive, whether it be as pure text or augmented by artworks of sound and graphics. The medium is a solid potential in our lives that is a continuation of the earliest songs and stories shared as fundamental forms of communication throughout Human history. It is how we choose to use this potential that will determine how it shapes our lives and our children's lives.
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