…Or, why the death of the text-adventure has been greatly exaggerated.
What is a text adventure?
There are those that would dismiss text-adventures as gaming-dinosaurs that rightfully died out decades ago.
And to be fair I suppose it is now possible that a generation has grown up without ever seeing, let alone playing, the genre.
Or perhaps you only know them as their latter-life nom-de-plume of ‘Interactive Fiction:’ a name that a lot of purists loathe with a passion, and although I wouldn't place myself firmly in that camp, I must admit that I do prefer the name ‘Text-Adventure.’
So what is it? Well, it’s essentially a story-based text only puzzle
game, where you communicate with the computer by typing in common-language
phrases and the computer responds. This response may be based on any number of
conditions, not least of which may be your location, items you are carrying,
objects or characters that share your location, things you may or may not have
already done, or how you have actually phrased your commands. And if
all that sounds confusing and dull, you may be half-right. Confusing –
undoubtedly, but dull? Like anything else that entirely depends on the player.
There are people, like me, who began playing text-adventures in the early to
mid-eighties, and still occasionally find something interesting in them now.
But there is also a dedicated core of people still playing old and new
text-adventures, and there is no shortage of new interactive fiction being
written. So the text-adventure is still very much alive and not an
extinct dinosaur medium at all. Hopefully this blog will go some ways to
showing you the how, why, and where’s of this…
