The futility of ranting

I’m a little bit closer to understanding why rants don’t work. I’m reading a book about interactive fiction and the author makes the point that it started long before Infocom and goes back to riddles. Interactive fiction, which riddles are one example of, engage an audience like no other work of literature.

By presenting a metaphorical system that the listener or reader must inhabit and figure out in order to fully experience, and in order to answer correctly, the riddle offers its way of thinking and engages its audience as no other work of literature does.

A rant would would be the opposite as it requires no engagement because the writer is in his own world. The ranter lays out all the “facts” and provides no opportunity for the audience to engage the work.