A Canon of IF?

["Chris Thi Nguyen" <thi@jahoopa.com>]

So I was wondering if there's ever been anything like an IF Canon
discussion.

I mean a list of important/influential/really-damn-good/innovative IF.  This
is different from swapping lists of "my favorite IF."  There's plenty of
truly enjoyable IF that improves upon previous IF.  Like, Beyond Zork, which
is a great overall implementation of stuff that got created everywhere else.
I'm talking about revolutionary IF.

My list, unfortunately, is sorely lacking in the second, noncommercial half
of IF history.  But it goes something like:

Adventure/Colossal Caves
    The beginning - not really an astonishing example of the genre.  But it
set a lot of IF standards, some of which quickly became cliches.  A lot
like, say, Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, the now semi-crappy book that
kicked off the mystery novel genre.  (Sorry to any Moonstone fans.)

Zork
    You know, like Chaucer.  The first great.

Planetfall
    First loveable NPC.  First incidence of people reporting that they
cried.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    First truly great IF satire.  Not just funny - actually made fun of
other IF, though never openly.  With a parody peak - I'm talking about my
favorite moment in all conventional puzzle-IF, the babel fish puzzle, whose
out-of-control, tongue-in-cheek, near inane complexity felt like a perfectly
tuned parody of IF puzzles.

Suspended
    A forgotten classic, I feel like, which came when Infocom was really
expanding the power of IF, swept into the dustbin by the rise of Sierra
On-line and the Graphics Horde.  If you haven't played this one, you're a
brain in a vat and you have control of all these damn robots.  One of them
has only thermographic vision, another is blind can only feel textures,
another can only see shape but not color, etc.
    I almost see a parallel between this and some of the modernists.  I
mean, maybe I'm totally off on my history, but didn't Faulkner and Joyce
turn out their stream-of-consciousness narratives at the rise of cinema?  I
know that a lot of art history people see impressionism and cubism and all
that in painting as a response to photography being able to out-do all of
old-school painting's attempts at realism.  The response in both cases is to
start doing what the other, newer medium couldn't possibly do.  Movies can
show places better than books, but they sure as hell can't do
stream-of-consciousness.
    When the graphics games start up, Suspended moves to do what graphics
games could never do - describe stories from the point of view of things
that see differently.

I'm sorry, I love Suspended, and no one else has ever heard of it.  But it
was a tremendous innovation, and I thought it was really cool.

You know, I'm surprised that there was never an IF from the point of view of
a blind person.  Or maybe there was.

And then, and then... at this point my knowledge peters out.  The two from
the current phase from IF that I can point to are Photopia, for a variety of
reasons (although some people might argue that Photopia, more than other IF,
borrows from innovations from the standard literary world - Vonnegut's play
with time).  And Spider and Web, for actually incorporating the weird
epistemological status of the game player - able to play a puzzle, fail, and
then try again - into the storyline and into the game character's viewpoint.

But what the hell else?  I know there's got to be more out there.  Someone
already mentioned Plotkin's one about the colors, I can't remember the name

Sorry for the length.  I've been lurkin' for a while, and been thinking a
few things about IF.

-thi