In Nick Montfort’s article, Interactive Fiction’s Fourth Era, Montfort goes into great detail about the history of Interactive Fiction as well as some of its unique qualities. The statement that stood out to me the most was, “This version [of Adventure] came out in 1976, complete with puzzles and fantasy elements, and it was an instant hit — work in the computer industry supposedly ground to a halt while practically every person with access to a computer tried to solve Adventure.” My question, after reading that statement, is,

What does this say about our society? 

This game came out in the mid-seventies, and, even then, the computer industry came to a halt as every person that could get their hands on a computer, stopped and played this game. If this happened in the seventies, and technology and the obsession of it has only increased, then if something revolutionary came out in the technology world, what would society do today? Perhaps our society was and is too obsessed and engulfed in technology. Perhaps we rely on it too much. There aren’t very many things in this world that make work stop. A family crisis or  an attack on our nation’s Capital cause work to stop. But a piece of Interactive Fiction? It seems too extreme to be true.

As time has progressed, have we let ourselves become taken over by technology? We do most of our work on computers; I’m even writing this blog post on my MacBook Pro. We have our iPhones and our Droïds hooked to our sides at most times. We can now post our pictures instantly to Instagram. The iPad has made portable computers even more portable. Perhaps we are so constantly using our technological devices that we no longer notice that we’re stopping work to see something new, or, even, something old but so readily available because of our advances in technology. How much less work do we get done because of our phones and our computers? It is so easy, perhaps too easy, to open a browser and look at anything.

As our successes in technology continue, how will it affect our ability to work and get things done? We may just be setting ourselves up for failure.

(Adventure can supposedly be found here, though, I couldn’t find it, as hard as I tried: http://ifarchive.org/)