Greg Costikyan recently ran a post about GMing as bespoke tailoring — the idea that having your game run by an individual human with an interest in your tastes is the ultimate high-end in gaming experiences, with digital RPGs and MMO games as the equivalent of ready-to-wear stuff.
I don’t GM, but this interested me because I do enjoy what you might call bespoke IF authorship: writing a game (usually tiny, though not necessarily joky) for a specific person or small group of friends. Obviously, there’s usually no expectation that what I create is going to be of value or interest to anyone else; it’s more like writing a letter than like a literary exercise. The reason I find it so satisfying, though, is that it’s much easier to get the balance right if you’re addressing the game to a particular person’s play style.
Does anybody else do this? Or is it my own private form of crazy?
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 