I enjoyed Dead Like Ants a lot more than For A Change.  It seemed simpler and more engaging, and the language appealed to me more.  For A Change had a language style that would be interesting in a book but was, in my opinion, somewhat cumbersome.

What I thought was most interesting about Dead Like Ants was the fact that dying in the game was not necessarily bad. In fact, you want to die. I didn’t quite figure this out until I had died once, returned to the spot where I died (in a spiderweb) and everything was the same except now there was a silk bundle in the web, and no spider. But the least interesting was trying to navigate around. I constantly had to type in “exits” to figure out where I could possibly go, and it was difficult for me to try and piece together the settings as they related to each other.

There is a huge difference between a sentence and a drawing. The drawing is definite, and tells you visually exactly what is going on (much of the time.)  The sentence is more ambiguous.  Your own imagination creates an image, which is probably different from other people’s images. In conventional video games, you are given all the visual information.  This might make things easier but less unique to the player.  In interactive fiction, the scene itself must be visualized by the player. I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing.  It would be really interesting to play through an interactive fiction and then play a fleshed out video game version of it. Kind of like when you read a book and then see the movie.