Little Tall Tales
About Text Adventures
You might have seen a few installments of Gregor, my interactive fiction game, on the Crimson over the past few weeks. Here are parts one and two. This week, instead of releasing the next installment, I want to provide a bit more background on interactive fiction and suggest a few of my favorite games. If you don’t really care about the details of the medium but still want to play, skip to my suggestions at the bottom. I won’t mind.
“Interactive Fiction” sounds like it’s for nerds. It is… but it’s also for everyone else. Interactive Fiction—also known as IF, text adventure, and choose-your-own adventure—describes any text-based narrative in which the player/reader uses text commands to navigate or control elements of the game. This may involve controlling characters to solve puzzles or simply choosing what happens next at certain points in the narrative. There are two main types of IF: text parsers and clickthrough adventures.