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.

Text parsers are played by typing commands into a command prompt, as below.

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>listen
You search the silence for a hint of your prey, but there is nothing. Only the rustling of bats, off to the side.

Something shifts in the darkness ahead, a great silent bulk. Your prey.

>go north
Those directions have meaning under the stars and the sun. These caves... contain only themselves.

>look

Branching Cave
You glance around again. The cave narrows ahead, a tight crawl winding around folds of limestone. A low passage descends to your right, and there is a side chamber on the left.

A faint rustling echoes deep in the side chamber, and the laughing chitter of bats.

>

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(From Hunter, in Darkness by Andrew Plotkin)

The commands in green are entered via the command prompt at the bottom (>). After each command, the game responds—sometimes with a clever error message, like the one that came up when I tried to “go north.” Even though the commands must be entered using certain syntax, these games can understand hundreds or even thousands of commands, even if they don’t all yield super relevant responses. Plotkin, one of the foremost IF writers, provides this guide for players learning to effectively use typed commands.

Since they have to handle far fewer inputs, these games can be created much more quickly than text parsers. They often rely more heavily on well-crafted prose than on complex interactive components, though this has been changing with new game writing platforms like Twine 2. Twine, a program that is extremely easy to learn and not too hard to master, effortlessly allows for game elements like health, variable conversations, randomness, and complex puzzles. Companies like Choice Of Games LLC have also been bringing dynamic choose-your-own adventures to the Apple and Android app store, creating a much wider audience for these games.

Much like a good book, a good IF game uses your imagination to build half the story. With a simple line like “You are likely to be eaten by a grue,” a game can suggest a creature and let your brain do the rest of the work. This creates highly personalized worlds in which everything is completely based on your own perception and imagination. As an active participant in the story, you really get to be the character instead of just reading about him or her in a linear fiction piece.

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Here are some of my favorite IF games:

Birdland—Brendan Patrick Hennessy—2015

A teenage girl is plagued by strange dreams during a summer at sleepaway camp.

Cat Petting Simulator—neongrey—2014

Pet that cat.

Zork—Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling—1980

This is one of the earliest and most iconic games of the genre. Written in the late ’70s, this classic adventure is full of trolls, treasure, and a weirdly normal house. You won’t win, but you’ll have a ton of fun trying.

Hunter, In Darkness—Andrew Plotkin (Zarf)—1999

A relatively short, non-traditional game. Claustrophobes be warned: You start off in a terrifying cave. First time players should type “about.”