Great stuff, as always. Thanks for the shout. :)

The last article on IF is interesting, but characteristically prescriptive without research (that sounds a little harsh, hmm). I would qualify it to say that the RIGHT authors need to be involved making games, and they need to be involved in the RIGHT ways. There are reasons why many, many novel-to-game adaptations have failed spectacularly, and reasons why the ones that have succeeded (Tom Clancy's _Splinter Cell_, for instance) have done so. It has to do with how you approach the medium. Narrative and the expression of meaning in an interactive format is drastically different than the expression of meaning in fiction. Almost all of the tools are different. It has to be expressed through action, whereas in books meaning is expressed through communication -- fundamentally different. And there are way too many traditional writers who think that because a game has writing (and because the writing is often bad) think that they could do better. In 99% of cases, they can't, because they don't understand how the medium works. This kind of discussion seems to come up over and over again, and it's clear we need continued development and a solution, but the solution is not what it appears to be from the outside. Though of course I would love to see IF itself (real IF -- the author of the article blends terms) on the iPhone, DS, etc. I've soft-pitched several such ideas and the basic thought, which is probably correct, is that the market isn't large enough to support the development. I would be happy to see that proved wrong. And all this is not to say that novelists can't be helpfully involved in the game world -- but they'll have to do what Clancy did, and get game design experts working with them to dig into their own material and deeply understand what its symbolism and meaning are about, and then express/harness them through game action. This usually requires a lot more humility and willingness to learn than a lot of established-IP authors have. Or maybe it's just that they aren't empowered to go about the process this way, to connect with a motivated developer who will try to deeply understand the material in the way it needs to be understood, rather than attempting to create a linear playthrough of events with a foregone conclusion, which in game terms is utterly stupid.

Cool on the review of sound in Peggle, too. Speaking of film and narrative, I heard George Lucas once said that 40% (maybe it was even 70%) of a film's emotional connection is soundtrack. (And someone else responded: "Yeah -- he heard Spielberg say that.") Same is true in games.