Caltrops - A Mind Forever Voyaging





	[quote name="Fullofkittens"]The Kindle (and the iFag, my guess) achieve by accident what Roberta Williams tried in vain to do for a decade: they cleanly divide the "reader" subset out of the computing market. Computers (and phones) have audiences so generalized that any computer game tends to appeal to the widest possible audience (Top 40 music sucks, etc). On the other hand, Kindle owners have all demonstrated one preference that they do not share with most gamers: they like to read a big block of text, push a button, and then read another big block of text. If there are pictures, they do not mind if the pictures look bad. This represents a great opportunity for IF "authors" (or whatever it is that the makers of text games call themselves). The Kindle owners I know are all kind of saying the same thing: they'd rather read a paperback if they've got one, but they like it because it can download anything. They're into the idea of casually perusing the vast libraries of books that theoretically exist or will exist in THE CLOUD. I think the experience of reading a really big book on one would be shitty; it's better suited for light reading in places where you don't have access to hard copies. It's also well-suited to reading text that's never had a hard copy. As ICJ said, the Kindle has a sort of retrofuturistic feel to it... it kind of feels like an alternate universe where instead of getting good graphics and evolving into modern PCs, green-screen terminals made the jump to mobile devices. To me, it would feel more natural to read IF on a Kindle than a regular book: IF is better suited to the time-frame that people want to spend, and the interactivity will be more appealing to people because the thing has buttons and not just pages. The other piece of the business opportunity is that it's now stupid easy to sell shit online. If you owned a Kindle, would you buy <i>Planetfall</i> for 50 cents? Hell yes you would, you could play that shit on an airplane, people would think you were reading <i>The Road</i> while you're talking to Floyd. I think that the modern reading community is ready for more sophisticated Choose Your Own Adventure books, played on frivolously expensive gadgets.[/quote]