Interactive fiction (IF) is one of the most venerable super genres of digital creativity, an art form that has existed for almost as long as computers have been able to send and receive text. With its deepest roots in mainframe-and-teletype entertainments from the 1960s and 1970s such as Hunt the Wumpus and ELIZA, IF today encompasses hypertext games, visual novels, and a swirling variety of commercial and experimental work that focuses on text as its core interactive element.

Ages of Interactive Text

For much of the 1980s, IF often defined the cutting edge of computer games. A typical IF game of that era often adapted the most prominent UI of that era, one that's quite familiar to readers of this magazine: the command-line prompt. Titles such as Zork and Wishbringer published by Infocom, or The Hobbit by Melbourne House, let players explore entirely text-based worlds on their home computers, typing in verb-first text commands such as GO NORTH, GET LAMP, or ASK MATILDA ABOUT GENETIC RECOMBINATION for the game to parse and respond to. After the commercial viability of these "parser games" dried up in the 1990s, a hobbyist community formed on the young Internet to keep this archaic art form alive, developing tools and sharing resources that allowed contemporary audiences to continue playing these games – and making new ones.

In the decades since, the vibrant IF community has invented many playful technologies inspired by the parser games of yore, including the accessible hypertext kit Twine [1] and the narrative scripting language Ink [2]. These tools allow rapid development using modern design principles and game-engine integration, and some have gone on to commercial success. And yet the venerable parser game remains dear to the IF community, which often celebrates new games made in the old style, even if their audience is relatively limited. I like to think of a new parser IF game as a fresh jazz composition, or a new poem: Not everyone might appreciate it, but it has an unmatched power to uplift and inspire those who do.

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