I'm also an IF fan (and by which I include even those tacky Choose Your Own Adventure books, as being about the simplest possible engine on which you can build IF), but get confused by the academic variety of 'interactive hypertexts'.
After puzzling over why I like one experience and not the other, this is what I've come up with.
I think, for me, the difference between IF and merely 'interactive literature' is that Interactive Fiction works to create an immersive environment. That is, there is always a single moment, a single narrative stream, in which the reader takes the place of a character in this ongoing drama, and can influence events as they occur.
This sense of being part of an ongoing experience, a plotline, is to me incredibly emotionally involving, and fun. It is the essence of storytelling, of being human.
In other forms of 'interactive literature', the ones that don't interest me, the common thread seems to be that the interactivity of the medium is deliberately working *against* this sense of personal immersion. The hypertext links deconstruct the narrative flow of the text; they shred it, they tear it to pieces, and above all they smash any sense of being a single person involved in an ongoing experience. They replace it with a sense of being a watcher, or perhaps a hive mind creature, aloof from the timestream; godlike, detached, disinterested, empowered only to cut and paste others' experiences but not to have any *impact* or involvement on them as a human within the narrative frame. The reader becomes a critic, not a participant.
That, to me, is the essential difference - IF is perhaps a specialised type of interactive literature in which the illusion of reality is maintained; a simulation of an ongoing coherent lifestory, in which the reader takes the role of a person within the frame of the text, not existing in some priviledged plane outside it.
And illusion though it may be, I like it.
IMO, one of the interesting technical outcomes of this need for a coherent immersive experience in IF is that any software system which is going to do IF, not just interactive literature, has to maintain a kind of digital avatar of the user, and a simulation of a world; things the user does within the simulated 'world' have to have consequences for both the world and the avatar. And that means the software engine needs to be able to track state data for a user's session. (The concept of 'saving and restoring' kind of breaks this narrative flow; one can think of it as the user trying on multiple avatars, but it's still not perfect ). Most interactive literature that I've personally seen doesn't have a lot of state tracking in it; and those examples that do, such as hypertexts that remember how many times a reader has visited a certain page, almost never use it to maintain a coherent avatar that exists within the frame of the text.
(Apologies if I've used any words out of their academic context; I don't know the formal academic definitions of words like 'interactive literature' or 'narrative'. I'm just using them in the context in which I would normally use them).
Why I Like IF
After puzzling over why I like one experience and not the other, this is what I've come up with.
I think, for me, the difference between IF and merely 'interactive literature' is that Interactive Fiction works to create an immersive environment. That is, there is always a single moment, a single narrative stream, in which the reader takes the place of a character in this ongoing drama, and can influence events as they occur.
This sense of being part of an ongoing experience, a plotline, is to me incredibly emotionally involving, and fun. It is the essence of storytelling, of being human.
In other forms of 'interactive literature', the ones that don't interest me, the common thread seems to be that the interactivity of the medium is deliberately working *against* this sense of personal immersion. The hypertext links deconstruct the narrative flow of the text; they shred it, they tear it to pieces, and above all they smash any sense of being a single person involved in an ongoing experience. They replace it with a sense of being a watcher, or perhaps a hive mind creature, aloof from the timestream; godlike, detached, disinterested, empowered only to cut and paste others' experiences but not to have any *impact* or involvement on them as a human within the narrative frame. The reader becomes a critic, not a participant.
That, to me, is the essential difference - IF is perhaps a specialised type of interactive literature in which the illusion of reality is maintained; a simulation of an ongoing coherent lifestory, in which the reader takes the role of a person within the frame of the text, not existing in some priviledged plane outside it.
And illusion though it may be, I like it.
IMO, one of the interesting technical outcomes of this need for a coherent immersive experience in IF is that any software system which is going to do IF, not just interactive literature, has to maintain a kind of digital avatar of the user, and a simulation of a world; things the user does within the simulated 'world' have to have consequences for both the world and the avatar. And that means the software engine needs to be able to track state data for a user's session. (The concept of 'saving and restoring' kind of breaks this narrative flow; one can think of it as the user trying on multiple avatars, but it's still not perfect ). Most interactive literature that I've personally seen doesn't have a lot of state tracking in it; and those examples that do, such as hypertexts that remember how many times a reader has visited a certain page, almost never use it to maintain a coherent avatar that exists within the frame of the text.
(Apologies if I've used any words out of their academic context; I don't know the formal academic definitions of words like 'interactive literature' or 'narrative'. I'm just using them in the context in which I would normally use them).