> interactive fiction (IF) == text adventure games in the style of 1980s Infocom.

Not necessarily, infocom style games are just a subgenre of modern interactive fiction nowadays. Infocom style games are enormous and full of obscure puzzles, mazes, etc. that require hours and hours of gameplay. IF has branched out a lot and most stories are written to be completed in less than an hour and typically have less infuriating puzzles or mazes, along with complete help and hint systems.

There are tons of award winning IF stories that involve no real combat, puzzles, etc. and are just exploration of interesting environments or talking to characters. Check out some of the winners from the annual IF competition for a great sampling of modern IF: https://ifcomp.org/comp/2021

Emily Short in particular is someone who really pushes the boundaries of IF, her story Galatea from the early 2000s is a great example of how far beyond Infocom style games IF has gone: https://www.ifwiki.org/Emily_Short and https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=urxrv27t7qtu52lb

Emily Short, Zarf, Adam Cadre. All masters breaking the boundaries of the IF genre.

Adam Cadre's Photopia [1] made me choke some tears. His 9:05 [2] is darkly comical, and is fun to explore again once you know what it is about.

Zarf's Spider and Web [3] is both a thrilling spy tale and a subversion of text adventure mechanics. For those who are never going to play this game, a minor spoiler. The setting is a fictional Cold War-style spy setting, your "adventure" is you being interviewed by your captor, recounting your story so far; for much of the game, whenever you make a false move -- the kind which would result in your death in a traditional adventure -- your captor will just simply tell you "...except that's not what actually happened, is it?" and rewind the story to the last checkpoint, where something has changed.

Then there's Rematch [4]. It's essentially a one-move game. One move -- that is, one complex multi-clause sentence -- and you die, except if you figure it out. And the kinds of things you can do in that one move are very complex!

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[1] Photopia: http://adamcadre.ac/if/photopia.html

[2] 9:05: http://adamcadre.ac/if/905.html

[3] Spider and Web: https://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/tangle/

[4] Rematch: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=22oqimzgf8snv002

Spider and Web is such an awesome game. I remember playing it years and years ago, possibly circa 2005, on the bus on my way to my first job, on my old and battered Nokia phone, for which I found a IF interpreter somehow.

I remember at one point I managed to overcome a tricky part of the game, then lifted my head and smiled to myself, satisfied. Then I saw that the game printed at me "You smile in the darkness" and I went "wtf". People stared at me. At that time not too many people were busy with their phone during bus rides.

Varicella is amazing, too. (the game, not the infectious disease)

Yes! I forgot. To be honest, there are too many cool and genre-breaking IF games to list.

There are two games I have really enjoyed but that I'm unable to find again

- A single room game where you have to get rid of your inventory (it's a lot more compelling than it sounds)

- Having to figure out a constructed language in a tribal setting to get medicine for your son

I think the second one is The Gostak, by Carl Muckenhoupt:

https://www.ifwiki.org/The_Gostak

I definitely want to play the game you just linked and thanks for alerting me to it. However, in the game I was thinking of, the parser and descriptive text are in English, but characters speak in the constructed language and only respond to it

Both sound interesting. I've played enough IF to know just "getting rid of your inventory" is a promising starting point!

There is a distinction between Twine games, or choice-based games, and parser games, which are typically called Interactive Fiction games. One provides a pre-set list of choices at branches of narrative, while the other provides a world that the user can explore and manipulate via a palette of text commands.

Wait, Twine is _not_ for making "text adventure" style games with a palette of text commands? Somehow I was getting the idea that it was, but when used for shorter stories authors just didn't want to call it "text adventure". but we're actually talking about a different feature set of the game software entirely?

Twine does not lend itself to making Infocom style games easilly. It is more like Choose Your Own Adventure books in that at its simplest it is "do you want to go left or right?" style choices. However, you can use javascript to program more complicated styles of game play.

Yes - Twine is for what's called "CYOA" (after the old Choose Your Own Adventure book series) or "choice based" interactive fiction. That type of IF has its origin in gamebooks, and generally consists of sections of text that you move between by picking from a list of choices ("to open the door turn to section 223, to run away turn to section 543", that sort of thing). Digital tools can add more dynamic elements, but generally it's rooted in the experience of reading/playing a Fighting Fantasy or Choose Your Own Adventure type gamebook.

The other main type of IF is the "parser" kind - that's the Infocom style where the UI is a bit like a command line, you type arbitrary commands, and get dynamic feedback. The main tool used nowadays for making that type of IF is Inform 7, though there are others.

The IF community has included choice-based games in "interactive fiction" for a long time now. They're eligible for IFComp and everything.

I've made several Twine stories, participated in IF jams, and see folks using IF/stories/&c fairly interchangeably. It could certainly be that Twine keeps a naming convention in order to be neutral, but as an IF writer and therefore more or less a community member, it's not something that I see people fighting over as opposed, say for instance, to the roguelike community.

There was one pretty bizarre Twine story about genetically engineered ponies. It was subtle, you didn't realize how gross it was at first reading. It was brilliant. Do you remember the name?

You're probably thinking of Horse Master: The Game of Horse Mastery.

Yes! That one. Thanks!

The IF community will absolutely go to the mat insisting that Twine, etc. is IF in the same sense as parser games. They are judged side by side in the biggest annual competition.

I get that they are trying to be maximally inclusive, but frankly I have no idea what they are talking about. These things are plainly apples and oranges. And there is great value to be found in both.

But saying these are directly comparable is roughly analogous to saying a point and click adventure game is comparable to a "quick time event" game. I think the IF community cedes too much ground with respect to parser games in the name of having a bigger tent.

This wasn't always the case -- there was a considerable amount of resistance to the idea that choice-based games were equivalent to parser IF in the community as recently as 10 years ago.

There were a few related factors that led to the current state, where if anything parser IF is more on the margins than choice-based IF.

The first is that choice-based IF is far, far easier to write, debug, and release than parser-based IF. The barrier to entry is _much_ lower.

Because of this, the diversity of authors participating in the IF scene expanded quite a bit. Parser-based IF skewed really heavily toward the programmer demographic. Twine and other choice-based options brought in a lot of LGBTQ and minority authors who wanted to tell their stories but didn't have the programming background to do so with a parser-based engine.

Twine and other choice-based engines were designed web-first. They incorporated graphics and other visual features enabled by the browser environment while parser-based engines were still effectively stuck in VT-100 emulation mode.

Finally, choice-based IF is also often better at simulating interpersonal interaction and conversation than parser-based IF.

Parser-based IF stagnated for quite a while. Graham Nelson's Inform 7 programming language was a work of staggering genius, but it was a closed-source one man show for a very long time and didn't update to keep pace with what the choice-based engines were doing.

Inform 7 has just recently been open-sourced, with a rearchitected pipeline that should allow for some interesting integrations and enhancements. It will be interesting to see whether there's still sufficient interest around the tool such that the community brings it into the modern era. I certainly hope there is!

Fascinating survey of how we got here.

I would also note that, whatever the API, parser games still leave something to be desired in the year 2022 compared to what is now possible with other gaming frameworks. I'm thinking of indie games like Papers Please and Beholder. But also Twine, et al.

The parser interface accomplished beautiful things in its heyday, but now feels to me to be needlessly constrained and difficult. I think there is a future for text-based IF. I think there are entire genres of games that are only (theoretically) possible with that interface. But the usual <verb> <object> + inventory puzzles formula is just too narrow, too time-consuming to play anymore. And I say this from a place of love.

In my parser game _Aotearoa_ (https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=lrbpmlpsknsgvgem) I worked really hard to provide player affordances such as an in-game interactive tutorial, exhaustive noun and verb synonyms, plus keyword highlighting so players literally _couldn't_ miss a primary interactable item.

Even with all of this, people still got stuck, and properly pacing a story that uses an unconstrained parser world model is an exercise in frustration. But I disagree that the games are too narrow. If anything, the frustration comes in because they are too broad. No other game genre has the sheer hubris to present the player a story, tell them they are the main character, and then challenge them to literally do anything they can think of to overcome the puzzles they are presented with. "I got this," they say, presenting that blinking cursor on a blank line. "Anything you can imagine, I can handle."

Of course every parser title fails spectacularly at this. But the best ones fail in impressive and fascinating ways. S. John Ross's _Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom_ explicitly limits the number of verbs down to six, but succeeds in creating a game environment that is enjoyable on both the direct and meta levels. My own _Aotearoa_ does a lot to remove the normal barriers to entry to interactive fiction, at the cost of some immersion should you choose to use the cues and tutorials. Andrew Plotkin's _Hadean Lands_ and _Spider and Web_ both have high-stakes, complex stories with detailed world models. This is usually the recipe for frustration and failure in parser IF, but both titles implement wonderful unique, _diegetic_ mechanisms to motivate failure and experimentation.

I would hate to see parser IF go away. I think its innovations have been more valuable and influential than many people realize, and I think there's still a lot more that blank line and that blinking cursor have to offer.

There was a google talk several years ago that highlighted the trend to allow and encourage diverse people, programmers and non-programmers, to write their own interactive fiction, "Everyone Can Make Games Now - Carolyn VanEseltine" [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4Kl8RaLuMk

I think you're right to a certain extent -- CYOA and parser-based IF are not the same thing and appeal to different (albeit overlapping) audiences and creators -- but also that the IF community is correct that CYOA is a perfectly legitimate form of "interactive fiction", as are a lot of hypertext works. Just like the roguelike community has found, it's healthier to expand the territory than to fortify the walls. Parser-based IF is better off than it's been in years and the increased energy brought to the community by Twine and other CYOA systems is a big part of that.

My GR writes IF stories and I think even though there’s ressemblance with the text adventure games it seems that they manage to differentiate themselves by being closer to books and mainstream fiction. It seems like the average IF is read more like a book and less like a game.

Sorry to be off topic, but what’s a GR? Just a typo of GF? I searched but the only thing I found was Golden Retriever and I don’t think they are very good at writing fiction in general.

Whoops yeah, it was indeed GF*