Hi, I am writing a dissertation on Interactive Fiction as part of my university degree and as part of my research I am trying to collate some data from relevant users.

I am looking at past and present IF games and trying to determine the key factors which make the genre popular, with the ultimate aim of making a new IF game.

I would be extremely grateful if you could take a couple of minutes to complete the questionnaire found in the link below:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ZKhWpQ ... k/viewform

Thank you very much for your time; any feedback also gratefully received!

John

Survey completed

I'd be interested to see what you come up with in the end. Be sure to post back once you're done.

You can see the results at the end of the survey, it's one of those two links.

I meant the actual game that he makes.

Oh quite right, me too!

I was surprised at only a few things in your results so far, the biggest on being the number of people who said that puzzles aren't necessary in IF. That's one of my favourite things about it. Not much else surprised me except that I was intrigued by the gender gap, I didn't realize it would be there at all, let alone quite so pronounced. Maybe once a larger sample size comes in it will change.

I think a lot of people from the Int.fiction forum answered the survey and a good deal of them don't believe puzzles are really necessary.

xavea wrote:I was surprised at only a few things in your results so far, the biggest on being the number of people who said that puzzles aren't necessary in IF. That's one of my favourite things about it.

From what I can gather this is a paradigm shift that's slowly happened over the last decade or so, where there are now 2 kinds of IF: The "game" kind (the original and the best), and the kind that focuses on the "fiction" element, (glorified choose-your-own-adventure books). People generally prefer one over the other which is why you'll get some people saying puzzles are not important - they don't see it as a computer game.