ItвЂ™s more open-ended than CYOA because it requires the user to generate the text, meaning that reading, problem-solving, exploration, dialogue, and pure aesthetic enjoyment can be combined and manipulated by the reader-player in any way they choose, and that narrative often wonвЂ™t take precedence. ItвЂ™s also not the same as Choose-Your-Own-Adventure fiction (although there are plenty of fine examples of that all over the internet) it may have many endings but a single path, many paths but a single ending, or it may be a non-narrative exercise in exploration. Interactive Fiction (also know as IF) is more than the sum of its parts itвЂ™s not a story interrupted by a few puzzles, or a few puzzles with a story grafted on. For years, some of the most experimental and independent work in gaming and storytelling has been carried out in the text-adventure (or Interactive Fiction) community. But imagining that video games progress in a straight line toward graphic excellence is like thinking that Marvelman needs to be recolored because we have better technology now.

ItвЂ™s easy to think that text adventures (and their close cousins, MUDs), existed only as a stopgap until something better came along, and that text game designers were simply making the best of a bad situation. The fact that game design has changed drastically, though, doesnвЂ™t mean that text adventures have been left behind. I think most of us have a sense that gaming has moved on from the punishing arbitrariness of early games Spelunky is punishing enough, but the rules are consistent, established, and learnable, not you-forgot-to-pick-up-this-item-20-turns-ago-and-now-youвЂ™ve-been-eaten (although the exploration of those unwritten rules can be as fun as it is frustrating, as IвЂ™ll try to explain). Many early text adventures are as hardcore, unfair, and labyrinthine as games can be while I respect them deeply, and canвЂ™t deny that they gave out a lot of gaming value for the money (these games were meant to torture you for months), I donвЂ™t really want to play them. While many gamers have tried (and failed) to work that stupid vending machine in the first few minutes of The HitchhikerвЂ™s Guide to the Galaxy, their engagement with text adventures rarely goes any deeper than that, probably because that game is so damn frustrating.

Favorite text based games