SPAG 'zine, and immersion

The latest issue of the SPAG (The Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games) newsletter is out. My experience with SPAG only covers early issues where content consisted entirely of game reviews - this one on the other hand has interviews with the top three IFComp 2008 finishers, several articles about a new game, and a handful of other reviews. What caught my fleeting eye (and it was fleeting, because the bibliography for the Thesis is due tomorrow) was the Editorial section, which briefly covers a few interesting points about the current state of IF. I certainly agree that IF is in its infancy - there's a lot that can be developed and explored in terms of new IF stories/games, although that's not to say the current library of IF work is inadequate in any particular sense. I suppose what I'm doing with the Thesis is pretty much what SPAG stands for - the promotion of text-based adventure games as more than merely an outdated mode of geeky entertainment. As ambitious as it all sounds, I'm certainly am hoping to see text games viewed as serious literature, and if there are arguably no Nabokovs or Prousts or Woolfs of the IF world, existing works show the _potential_ of what IF can do and can become... and also its limits. Which is all really good for the Thesis: limits can be almost as interesting to consider as anything else.

The idea of IF being "immersive" is also something I'd like to explore, when I get the time to sit down and have a think about it. The immersive aspect may very well extend beyond the single-player text experience - perhaps it's directly related to the reading experience, much like how easy it can be to find oneself utterly absorbed in a book and be reading until well past midnight. It would certainly explain my experience with certain MUDs (multi-user dungeons, or text-based MMOs).

Something involving the "limits of the text" or the "borders of the word", to be pretentiously fancy about it, is coming to mind. Does IF, with its empty spaces and command-line/caret feature, remove the frame that holds the reader in the narrative world when he or she reads a book? Or is the frame still there, just made invisible? How much is the interactivity in IF a mirage?