I wasn’t necessarily suggesting that City of Secrets was a deilberate polemic. I actually said in the talk that I wasn’t ascribing any deliberate personal intentionality to Nick, because I was talking about him as an author-presence, not a person. And the same applies to you of course. My argument, though, is that it’s difficult *not* to attempt to define the value of IF in contrast to graphics, just as ekphrastic poetry has difficulty ignoring the issue of its relationship to painting, photography or film.

With City of Secrets, though, it’s true that I was trying to do something a little bit different: to hint at the protagonist’s perceptual filters by describing styles and trends rather than straightforward physical detail. I doubt whether many players encounter this, but there are even some examinable abstract nouns in CoS: for instance, confronted with a painting, you can EXAMINE STYLE as well as examining the literal objects depicted in the painting (because the painting’s description does mention “style”, and I thought, why not?).

This was partly a thematic decision, to do with the idea that there are many layers of truth and illusion in the City.

I don’t recall it being any kind of deliberate attempt to prove the value of textual IF as a medium as opposed to graphical adventures. (Though Jon Ingold, I believe, wrote “Make It Good” partly to make that argument, so it would be an interesting work to examine in this line.)