Interactive Fiction, Like Riddles, Lack Replay Value

Infocom's interactive fiction, like most interactive fiction, is generally held by players to not have replay value in the usual sense, much as one cannot simply "replay" a riddle to which one knows the answer (although one can pose it to another, think about it again once the answer has been forgotten, or appreciate it in new ways with knowledge of the solution). Critics have noted that "once this kind of finite interactive fiction has been mastered, it generally ceases to hold the reader's interest, save for demonstrating prowess or ingenuity to the uninitiated. A finite interactive text is like pop fiction, read once and no more" (Niesz and Holland 1984, 122).

Once one learns to play a board game, on the other hand, the knowledge gained from one game hardly ruins the experience of the next one. Adjusting the difficulty of a riddle by describing things more clearly or pro viding more hints, unlike changing the rules of a game, is very directly related to making an IF work, or individual challenges within it, more or less difficult. The situation of the written literary riddle and the riddlee or riddlees attempting to solve it-so different than four people sitting around a Risk board forming and breaking alliances in the course of play-is very similar to that of one or more interactors attempting to solve a work of interactive fiction. The riddle can also help one understand how a work may not need to be made infinite in order to deal with the problem of" replay value." One does not need a book that is too large to read in a lifetime to hold one's interest, after all. An IF work can be solvable and finite on one level (in terms of how long it takes to move from initial state to final state through its world) and endlessly profound on other levels.