But doesn't interactive fiction make the protagonist the player himself? Doesn't this prevent the author from delving into the character's mind, thoughts, and feelings?

The interactive fiction I've played/read doesn't really let you see into the minds of the other characters since that would take the interest out of interacting with them.

Just as a novel written in the first person doesn't have to lack interiority, so too I don't think this is necessarily a problem with IF - though it may need some interesting gameplay developments to flesh out this feature of the genre (multiple protagonists for instance? Odd that this hasn't been done much).

There is a lot that could be learned by videogames from IF, I reckon - and it certainly has a lot more immediate power emotionally than conventional videogames, unconcerned as it is with graphics and NPC animations and the uncanny valley.

That said, although I often wish more people would be aware of, let alone read, IF - unfortunate as it is, there are many reasons for why it resides in the condition it is in at the moment and why it's unlikely to ever make a commercial return, alienating readers of novels for being too gamey and alienating gamers for making them read.

As such, I have to admit I'm not entirely sure what point this article is trying to make or purpose to pursue?

Hi Ron! The audiences are so different though, and the experiences, between reading a novel and playing a game (even a bad game) are so different interactively. I feel as though the interactive novel is more targeted at the wrong group than is badly done (witness James Patterson's "Womens Murder Club" titles, while not million-sellers, they hold a respectable, even cult following).

Random thought: perhaps the Kindle could be a viable platform for re-starting commercially successful IF sometime in the near future?

Ian: A term that been used a lot in the past year or so in I-F circles is "conflation": how much the player "is" the character. Traditionally, yes, the player is conflated with the protagonist -- hence the second-person ("you") narration. This is becoming less true in modern I-F: sometimes the player "is" the in-game character, sometimes the player is only a part of the character's mind (i.e., as the id or superego or consciousness, so you may have to argue with the rest of the character), sometimes the player is a character not explicitly presented in the work (i.e., the player always communicates to the in-game character(s) via cell phone or telepathy, much like that microphone-driven PS2 game), sometimes the player is rather a kind of puppetmaster: a director of the story, or a meddling reader. There's degrees to the player / avatar relationship, and some I-F specifically fool around with it. Notably, _The Baron_ and _Shade_.

Since it's difficult to get the fiction part right if the protagonist is a blank slate, games have started characterizing the avatar at least a little bit via parser errors or boundaries-of-the-world cases: rather than the parser bluntly stating "you can't do that to the seaside", it'll cloak the reason in the avatar's personality: "Ever since that childhood accident, you've avoided large bodies of water." It isn't delving very deep, but even in cases of heavy conflation this technique is used.

As to your third question, I'm not convinced that interiority would reduce interest in interaction with the characters -- my guess would be quite the opposite -- but it is true that interiority isn't used much in I-F, and when it is, it's frequently as a cutscene.

Which brings me to Valentine's post: I have no idea what interactive interiority would look like, how it would operate, what gameplay tropes would be useful for it let alone be specific to it, or even what the pitfalls and benefits of it could be. These unknowns are specifically why I think it's worth bringing up. The few examples of interactive interiority I've heard of in I-F simply reify the character's mind as rooms, props, and puzzles, turning the interior back into a plain-jane exterior again, turning it visual/physical again. Though that's a valid tack, IMHO this defeats the purpose. "Psychonauts" had to reify because it's in a visual medium; I believe I-F should be able to deal with the mind as directly as other prose media do.

Hey Kim -- I think the internet has done wonders for getting gamers to read, and as they age I wouldn't be surprised if they warm up to it a bit. Though I don't have a clue about how to find or build markets, I feel that there are so many readers in the world, and so many gamers in the world, that some sort of market is inevitable. As Valentine said and I implied in the above post, there are reasons I-F is where it is, just as there's reasons that videogames aren't in the Louvre.