The author basically dislikes all the trends of 90's gaming, but he had already run through the old stuff at this point. Anyway, he does have a point in that a

The author basically dislikes all the trends of 90's gaming, but he had already run through the old stuff at this point. Anyway, he does have a point in that as a piece of interactive narrative, it's more expensive, and adding a lot of production has its own charm, but it's also a step back from the very best Infocom adventure games when you're looking at the kind of play experience it presents, which is basically a CYOA book - the only experimenting to do is to choose option A over option B. This isn't necessarily wrong, even - visual novels have made a real art of that - but it's about the craft behind that kind of narrative, and not the direct engagement with technology. One respect in which I differ from Maher's view is that I don't really see the direct engagement as important. In most instances games are performing cartooning in their use of technology, and so adding more legible "player verbs" and "simulation elements" isn't necessarily adding that much to the message. Sometimes all you need to do to make a game narrative stick is to hide a major branch within a subtle decision, or force a replay to allow a different option to appear.