What is good in IF?

Can a work be good but unpopular?

Most of us think so.  Victor G. has recently raised the shades of Homer and James Joyce to defend this notion.  But it raises questions about how we can measure a work’s goodness.

The IF Comp is great, because it allows us to rate works against one another.  We know then how good a certain work is, in the Comp-playing public eye.  But if we conceed to Victor that a work can be good, but unpopular, then all bets are off:  especially if we also accept that a work can be popular, but bad.

Now, I’ll make an ugly little confession:  I really don’t care for _Ulysses._  Not much for the _Illiad_, either, although bits of it I quite enjoy.  Maybe I’ll change my opinion when I’m an old man; presuming I should be so lucky.

But nevertheless, I like the idea that unpopular works can be good.  When I moved to Cambodia, I brought a boxed set of Shakespeare, because I guessed (rightly) that there’d be no books here. 

A couple years ago, going through airport security, some steroid-heavy guard saw I had several copies of _Hamlet_.  He said he couldn’t get into Shakespeare, because of the language.  Steering a course between apologizing for Shakespeare’s language and telling him, “That’s because you’re a moron,” which wouldn’t have been nice and might have caused me some trouble, I told him the language is difficult.  But, Shakespeare didn’t write novels; he didn’t write to be read; he wrote to be performed.  So I suggested he watch enactments.

I also like the idea that unpopular works can be good because my very own _LAIR of the CyberCow_ scored abysmally last year.  So I would be delighted to be able to argue that, like the _Illiad_ or _Ulysses_, it was simply under-appreciated.

If we unlink saying a work is good from saying that it is popular — that it has a good Comp score — what is this “good” we’re talking about?

If we know a game’s Comp score, we can predict pretty well how much a group of players will like it.  If the game’s rated at a 4.6, then people will say, “Eh.  It wasn’t terrible, but I have complaints.”  If it’s rated at an 8, they’ll say, “That was pretty good.”

A large group of players is likely to rate it, on average, at its Comp score.  A small group is less likely to.  One person is pretty unlikely to.  The smaller the target sample is, the more unlikely an accurate prediction is.

Numerically, a case like _Ulysses_ is like this:  most people would rate it low, but a few people would rate it high.  So the book would have a low score overall; but if you only looked at its score among lit geeks, it would be much higher.

As a practical question, how do you filter in those people who give scores that are highly predictive of _Ulysses’_ true quality, and filter out ignorant slobs like me who think it’s an incoherent mess?  — Well, you need a “lit geek” filter, and that amounts to the education-and-evaluation system that we have in the humanities.

Keep in mind, both of those are going on:  You are both indoctrinating people into the literary culture and rejecting people who don’t conform to that indoctrination properly.

Now, once you’ve done that, and you have a bunch of Ph.D.s in English lit, you can poll them and they’ll give _Ulysses_ a score that reflects its true quality.  And you know it reflects its true quality, because the people you’ve indoctrinated on the basis of liking apparently-incoherent works like _Ulysses_ tell you it is.

— I’m not being sarcastic there:  you get the same problem setting standards with any unit of measure.  In the case of literature, it’s more complicated:  but since lit Ph.D.s generally tell us one work is better than another, and another is still better, and we can agree with them on these and they can point out things we missed, then when they go on to say a fourth book we dislike is best of all, we can take it on their authority that we’re missing something.

Now, to apply this to IF — there are a certain number of people who are broadly acknowledged to be expert IF authors.  If these people were all to tell us that, even though _LAIR of the CyberCow_ got a terrible score in last year’s Comp, that was only because most judges didn’t understand its extreme cleverness and pathos, and it *is* nevertheless an excellent game — I think most of us understand that we would be *obligated* to take that on their authority.

Sadly, none of them *have* said that.  Not only have none of them said that about _LAIR_, but they haven’t, to the best of my limited knowledge, said it about _any_ work of IF.  From this I gather that IF is still a young enough art form that it hasn’t hit the snob barrier yet.

If you don’t know what the snob barrier is, that’s the point at which the rules around an art form become sufficiently complicated that you have to have years of training and a certain inborn talent to appreciate the art.  Nobody without an extensive education (even if self-educated) and a good knack for literary criticism is going to pick up _Ulysses_ and declare it a great book.  And the book is intentionally designed to rebuff any such attempts, in contrast to _Dubliners_, which is far more, to use Victor’s word, accessible. 

Ironically, I’m told that JJ has picked this elitist form to write a work that elevates one day in the life of an average man to mythic status.  Apparently lit Ph.D.s like to be made to feel in sympathy with the average man from time to time.  I don’t care much for post-snob barrier art; I don’t think that’s the way to do it.

I much prefer the Poes and Shakespeares:  these artists wrote popular works in their own day, which average people can still read and enjoy immensely.  Even the airport guard could enjoy Shakespeare if he gave a good production a chance.  Average people will not be able to unravel *why* they like these stories — understanding how the stories are constructed to generate such appeal *does* take a great deal of study.  And Homer, remember, was the Shakespeare of his day:  a bard come through to strum on his lyre and chant by the fireside about Achilles was a trip to the cinema.  Ancient Greeks would rate him highly, for better reasons than lit geeks.

Another Mr. Lizard didn’t fathom Eric Eve’s _Snow Quest_, and speculated that it was a series of inside jokes.  He thought that Eric was making fun of other games, but his hypothesis basically was that Eric had created a snob barrier — that you couldn’t understand his game unless you had an exhaustive background knowledge of IF.  To my knowledge, that’s not true — or if it is, nobody else has detected the references either.

I don’t know of a snob barrier in video games, either.  Possibly its development has been retarded by the fact that video games require the coordination of a large number of people; but then, so do movies, and we have plenty of snob cinema.  (Some of it quite good.)  Over the past 10 or 15 years, we’ve seen Ph.D.s in gaming, so we can predict that video games will develop a snob barrier sooner or later.

In fact, we can consider it an attempt to create a snob barrier every time someone tries to do something that only the cleverest players will catch — like _The Ascot_, or some time ago _There’s a Snake In The Bathtub._  But these haven’t caught, partly because the snobbery required is good game-play, while those who advocate for games — people like Victor or myself; snobs, in other words — often miss the snob-payoff, and then when we get it don’t value it enough to adopt the game as a cause.

Perhaps the closest thing we have in IF to a snob barrier is the Xyzzy Awards.  These are more prestigious than the IF Comp.  But, they don’t seem to have broken away from popular taste.

Therefore, because there is no well-defined snob subgenre of IF, I am taking the IF Comp scores to be definitive of good, well-crafted IF.  As IF continues to develop, we may see the development of well-defined genres, each with its own audience and conventions.  That will probably happen when the playing population grows large enough to sustain splinter-groups, such that all the puzzle-players form a camp quite separate from the others.

But, until the creation of sub-genres and the formation of a snob barrier, the only criteria we have to robustly measure “good” in IF is popular response; and therefore I believe I am justified in generalizing from the IF Comp reviews and scores.