Look, a journal!

If you've talked to me much in the past, say, two years, you may already be aware of my love affair with interactive fiction. I certainly talk about it enough. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that it is my fandom right now. And so, like any obsessive fangirl who likes something obscure, I have been wanting for a while to make a post to proselytize to you tell you about the thing I love in the hopes that some of you might be interested too. This is that post.

Part I: What The Hell Is Interactive Fiction, Anyway?

Most of you are, I think, old enough and nerdy enough to know what text adventures are. They're those games from the old pre-graphics days where the game world is described in, well, text, and you play by typing more words at it, and then the game tells you that you can't get ye flask and you scream and smash your head against the keyboard a few times.

Actual commercial text adventures have not really been a thing since the advent of graphical games, but there is a small and devoted community still doing freeware text games. There are lots of reasons for this! Partly it's because they're so easy to make: they don't require any music, art, animation, voice acting, or anything like that. They can be done entirely by one person who can (at least sort of) write and (at least sort of) code. Partly it's because there are things that just work better in text format. Really getting inside a character's head and seeing things the way they see things, for one--getting their thoughts, noticing what they notice, getting sensory information that's not visual. There's a (quite compelling, IMO) game that consists entirely of walking around a gallery and looking at paintings through the eyes of four different characters. I have a hard time imagining that working in any other medium. There's also a whole subgenre of games that center on language and wordplay--like this one, whose central puzzle/gameplay conceit revolves around inferring meaning from syntax, and which uses that conceit to effectively portray an alien world containing a lot of concepts that don't seem to completely map onto anything we're familiar with.

So I really do believe that there's still a niche for text games—and not just as a nostalgia thing for people who come from the 80s.

A point on terminology: "Text adventures" : "interactive fiction" :: "comics" : "graphic novels", which is to say that the former is the original term which non-fans tend to be familiar with but which certain fans will get terribly snotty about if you use it, while the latter is the more recent term that fans like but pretty much no one else uses/understands. I use them pretty interchangeably, but will mostly be referring to "IF" from here on out because it's shorter.

( Part II: Interpreters )
( Part III: How To Play )
( Part IV: Game Recommendations )
( Appendix: Useful Links )

And now I've rambled on quite long enough. If by some strange chance you do go forth and try out any of these games, let me know what you think! I am also happy to answer questions (or hurl more recommendations your way upon request).