First off, text adventures give the player a lot of freedom. In graphical games, the player character can act in at best a handful of significantly different ways in any given situation1¹ Not counting small variations. Using different types of attack is still attacking, for example. Entering into dialogue is still one action, however deep the dialogue is.. In a text adventure, the player character typically has ten or twenty meaningfully different ways to act in any given situation.

Text adventures also have the benefit of being able to convey things without representing them literally. A graphical game that wishes to represent a large city must model a literal large city, with thousands of buildings. In a text adventure, it is possible to describe a city such that it feels large, while modelling only very few buildings.2² As a consequence of this, text adventures can also represent non-visual effects. With text, we can present an abstract space much easier than with graphics, which tend to the literal.. Not to mention being able to model other senses, like smell and touch!

Related to the above, text adventures can more easily support dynamic environments. In a graphical game, dynamic environments require complicated physics and animations. This – in addition to avoiding the effort of graphical and sound design – helps make text adventures cheaper to make. Many of the greatest text adventures of all time were developed as pet projects by single developers in their spare time.3³ From what I understand, text adventures are even used to prototype narratives and mechanics in some big game studios.

If all of the above is not intriguing enough, let’s also mention that text adventures are a mature technology. They were some of the first computer games ever created. It’s difficult to find a computer that cannot run text adventures.

Great! But what … are they?

I have played a few text adventures the past weeks, and here’s a brief excerpt from one4⁴ The Dreamhold; Andrew Plotkin; self-published; 2004. Playable online.. This transcript begins when we have exited the starting area, and just begun to explore what lies beyond.

CURVING HALL, WEST END

The curving corridor ends here, in a blank plaster wall relieved by a single window. The window looks out on a strange subterranean prospect to the west. You can return east, pass through the archway to the north, or try the closed door to the south.

> look at window

A broad glass pane looks out over a dark cavern. This end of the corridor seems to be deep underground. A natural cave spreads out below; its mammoth columns and cascades of flowstone are only dimly picked out by the candlelight behind you. The farther reaches are hidden in darkness. But the shining waterfall before you is easily visible. A stream pours in from your right, tumbles from a ledge, and plummets into a pit beneath the window. The water seems to sparkle with some natural phosphorescence.

> break window

The glass ignores your assault.

> enter archway

ARBORETUM

The walls here are painted white and are utterly undecorated. An archway leads south. In the center of the room stands an earthenware tub. From it sprouts a tangle of vines, broad fan-like leaves, and an enormous golden flower. The luxuriant growth clashes, you think, with the room’s stark emptiness.

> look at flower

The plant sits alone in its pot, in the center of the empty room. The golden flower is nearly the size of your head. It rises from a tangle of vines and leaves that would better suit an unexplored south-coast swamp than someone’s home.

> take flower

The plant’s stems look too thick to break.

> smell flower

You lean forward and take a deep breath of the flower’s aroma.

Memory nearly bursts through.

This moves us to

DANK JUNGLE (IN THE EARTHENWARE TUB)

You are standing waist-deep in an empty earthenware tub, in the midst of a trackless jungle.

Heavy, entangled trunks and vines loom in every direction, as far as you can see – and you can’t see far. The sky is entirely obscured by layers of vegetation. Only a murky green light filters down to you. But golden flowers dot the trees, like bursts of sun.

An iron key is balanced neatly on the edge of the tub.

> take key

Taken.

> get out of tub

You swing your legs out of the tub, and find the world swinging around you…

This moves us to

ARBORETUM

The walls of the room are painted in green slashes, like the trunks of uncounted trees, and splashed with gold. An archway leads south. A hint of sweet-rank perfume touches you as you breathe.

> inventory

You are carrying an iron key.

We explored a space in a building set into a cave, and smelling the flower got us transported … into a memory? Or literally miniaturised and into the tub? We were able to bring the iron key, after all. Did we even emerge into the same room, given that the description changed? It’s not made clear, and this ambiguity is okay in text – each reader will get to play their own preferred version of the game.

Of course, this is a game by an author that is known for abstract mechanics. There are also games that are far more traditional in their mechanics. When I come off of a brief session of Plundered Hearts5⁵ Plundered Hearts; Infocom; Infocom; 1987. Playable online. I can almost hear the chirping of the jungle and the lapping of the waves against the island where I’m stalking around a large house trying to figure out how to get into the ongoing ball.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise. Novels – and spoken stories – have transported readers to fantastical locations for ages. But I still didn’t know text adventures could be so immersive.

The bright reader has already figured out how the above interaction works out: the game prints a brief paragraph of text describing the players’ immediate environment or the result of their last action, followed by a prompt sign, after which the player types in what they want to do next.6⁶ There are technical differences here between narrator, player character, and player but we’ll brush past that for the moment.

The instructions the player types into the prompt look like English, but they follow a fairly strict format used in almost all text adventures by convention. These are recognised by a component of the game called the parser. Despite the strict format, some of the joy of playing these text adventures is trying something crazy, like in Plundered Hearts when we stand on the balcony above the ballroom, see the rope on which the chandelier is attached, type SWING ON ROPE … and the player character comes crashing down onto the dancing guests with a big “Aiieeee!” It’s outside the conventional commands, but it makes sense and the author catered for it.

Text adventures typically take a simulationist approach to narration. This means the author has not specified what happens in any given situation. Instead, what happens next is determined mechanistically by the player’s actions given the current world state. Maybe we need to cross a violent river, but it’s up to us if we want to block it, re-route it, magically freeze it, or jetpack over it. The progress is gated on being able to cross, not how that ability is achieved.

The violent river is an example of a puzzle, which are usually strewn throughout text adventures. These puzzles are used to pace the narrative, and avoid dumping everything on the player at once. Obstacles get placed in the way of progress, and the player needs to find ways around them to experience more of the story.

The puzzle-pacing of text adventures means they can often contain a lot more detail and flavour text than a corresponding novel, because the player slowly uncovers the text they are most interested in, and are free to ignore the rest.7⁷ Well, any information needed to solve puzzles cannot be ignored, of course. But while old-school games tended to hide such information in the most innocuous places, requiring careful searching of every nook and cranny to proceed, modern games tend to be more forgiving and hint more actively at which locations are important to search.

At some point I would like to do a formal comparison of text adventure puzzles by way of grounded theory8⁸ That is the only hammer I have for extracting structure and meaning from unstructured accounts.. That is out of scope of this article, so we’ll look at one sloppy categorisation of interest:

• Lock-and-key: we must possess a specific item to get past an obstacle. We find the item by observing the environment carefully.
• Lock-and-password: we must perform a specific action to get past an obstacle. We learn about the action by observing the environment. Tougher puzzles require astuter observation, sometimes even catching on to background patterns.
• Change-the-self: we must alter our appearance to get past an obstacle. This can be considered a combination of key- and password-based puzzles: we must find the item that masks our appearance, and then be perceptive enough to know when to wear it.
• Change-an-item: converting one item to another is fairly common, either by performing the right action on it or by combining it with the right other items.
• Change-the-environment: we must rearrange the environment in a way that makes actions possible that were previously unthinkable, unreasonable, or nonsensical.

There are some puzzle types that might not fit into the above categories.

• Waiting-based puzzles: where just quietly waiting for one or more turns makes something happen.
• Persistance-based puzzles: where doing something once has an effect that is not quite useful, but doing it many times has an effect that is very useful.

Either of these could be considered lock-and-password puzzles, only with the password being to repeat an action.

We could also categorise puzzles into what sort of simulation they are based on, e.g. whether they simulate human senses9⁹ Requiring observing the environment in particular ways, or manipulating the senses of others such as shouting to wake someone up., or physical systems10¹⁰ Getting items to increase leverage, throwing things at other things to dislodge them, getting something large to block a view, etc., or machines11¹¹ Figuring out how to run a bread dispensing machine, or how an orrery evolves to bring an item closer to the ground., or magic systems12¹² These simulations need to be internally consistent, but they may not correspond to any natural laws we know from our world., or the desires of other people13¹³ Giving people things, showing them things, feeding animals, etc..

Text adventures are generally free14¹⁴ In the sense of gratis, but also sometimes libre.. They spawned out of the culture of free sharing at mit and other universities, and they are passion projects to date. Most games are released in competitions, and all big competitions have rules that stipulate playing the game must be free. There are good reasons to try playing them, and few reasons not to.

At this point, you know more about text adventures than I did when I started out. Here are some games I have played and which I think aren’t terrible for a beginner:

• Glowgrass (1997): You crash land in an overgrown Ancient settlement, and the eerie starts to take on a familiar face as you end up learning more about what has happened.
• Violet (2008): If you can successfully type the command WRITE you win the game. But boy are there many distractions when a distractable person just needs to write.
• The Dreamhold (2004): You wake up in a wizard’s Dreamhold with no memory. As you explore, some things come back to you. Eventually you gather all masks and you figure out what you need to do to finish what you started.
• Plundered Hearts (1987): You are a woman stuck between men who have violent business to finish with each other. Somehow you end up rescuing your pirate hero multiple times.
• Lost Pig (2007): You are an orc and you lost your pig. Now you must find it. You’ll make a friend along the way. This game has fairly difficult puzzles, but it is incredibly responsive; even silly actions (BURN TAPESTRY) have effects programmed.

These are all games that are either merciful or polite on the Zarfian cruelty scale, meaning you might be able to die, but the game will not let you continue to play after failure has become certain.15¹⁵ In contrast, games that are cruel will happily let you put the game into an unwinnable state with no way to tell that that has even happened. Create a savegame after every time you’ve made progress (with the SAVE command) and you’ll never lose much progress.

Zarf’s if cheat sheet contains some useful commands that tend to work in many games. It’s fine to not be able to solve a puzzle. Sometimes they are hard. Make sure you have examined everything carefully for hints. If you still cannot progress, see if you can play with a friend. If you have no friends, look up hints or a walkthrough.16¹⁶ My personal rule is that if I have come up with a solution that ought to have worked, but wasn’t programmed with the appropriate response, I allow myself to cheat and look at the solution in a walkthrough. Often the solution is the same as I had thought of, only it expected a variation on the wording I used. E.g. WAVE MIRROR IN MOONLIGHT might not work, but PUT MIRROR IN MOONBEAM does.

Give it a fair shot. It takes a few games until one is familiar enough with the conventions to navigate the game smoothly, but it’s worth it, I think. Opens up a whole world.

A brief note on terminology is in place. I call these games text adventures, but a lot of people these days prefer the term interactive fiction. Here’s how that happened.

In the mid-1970s, a couple of avid cavers programmed a text-based virtual cave exploration simulator on a large mainframe computer. They named the simulator Colossal Cave Adventure, and it got colloquially known as Adventure. This was the first game of its kind, and it spawned an entirely new genre. Much like the game Rogue spawned the genre of roguelikes, the game Adventure spawned the genre of text adventures.

Sometimes these game-defined genres change names. First person shooters used to be known as Doom clones, but as they branched away from the formula of the original Doom, they needed a more generic name. This has happened also with text adventures. These types of games soon branched out to include less adventurous mechanics, and a new name was needed. One big developer in particular, Infocom, went with interactive fiction, in part to try to sell the games to a broader market of readers. That name stuck around as the more inclusive term.17¹⁷ Some interactive fiction games aren’t even parser-based, but choice-based: instead of asking the player to type in what they want to do, they stop at story beats and give the player a list of alternatives for how to proceed.

There are three reasons I still speak of text adventures:

1. I have not yet branched out to these other games. The games I’ve played (and started to make) are still fairly firmly planted in the simulationist, puzzle-paced Adventure tradition. If I specifically played the games that came out just after Doom and mimicked it closely, I would similarly say I play Doom clones, not first person shooters.
2. I dislike the term interactive fiction because it’s provably too long. Just as with “first person shooter”, which is universally abbreviated fps, nobody bothers saying or writing “interactive fiction”. They abbreviate it to if instead. And that is such an overloaded combination of characters that it becomes impossible to perform a web search for. I don’t like that.
3. A minor reason is that if I wanted a good work of fiction, I’d pick up a book. I play text adventures for the interactivity in a simulated world, and there I want good game mechanics before a good narrative. Calling it interactive fiction puts the emphasis on the narrative over the game, which is not what I’m looking for.