Interactive Fiction and the Great Machine

And here’s a Spanish-language review of The Great Machine. As you may or may not know, I cannot speak Spanish. Speaking Greek and German and English (and some French), however, I can kind of decypher some. I did end up having to use Babelfish a lot, with hilarious results, but I kind of got the gist of it. And considering the kind of reactions the game usually gets, it’s rather positive. (That’s not saying much, I guess. But hey.)

What is partly discussed in the comments – if I understand them correctly, and there’s no guarantee of that; I don’t have the time today to look at them closely until the language makes sense – is this issue of why play interactive fiction, and that a mixture of literature and video game might not be a good thing.

I was going to write a short post about that, and then spent three hours writing an essay on games as art – probably the clearest and best one I’ve written on that subject. I’ve decided to cut it from this post for now, and see if I can find some place where I can publish it where people will actually read it. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

And now I have to catch up with a mountain of work…