Twine games like Depression Quest are meeting with great success right now, and I wish I knew enough or had played enough to write more about them. In this way, what I will call “classic” text adventures (adventures that require text input from the player), also differ slightly from hypertext adventures, like those written in Twine (which I’ll admit I don’t know much about), because they do not require such overt choice the player has a slightly different kind of control over the way in which narrative and other story and puzzle elements unfold, and their pacing. In text games, progress and narrative are integrated in a way rarely seen in graphic adventures, with a heavy emphasis on exploration, and, often, minimal exposition or presentation of the rules. In the same way, you can experience as much or as little of narrative, setting, characters, and dialogue as you like the closest graphic approximation might be something like Nintendo’s Metroid: Prime (2002), which is highly interactive and unusual in its approach to narrative (but still requires better reflexes than mine). It’s more open-ended than CYOA because it requires the user to generate the text, meaning that reading, problem-solving, exploration, dialogue, and pure aesthetic enjoyment can be combined and manipulated by the reader-player in any way they choose, and that narrative often won’t take precedence. It’s also not the same as Choose-Your-Own-Adventure fiction (although there are plenty of fine examples of that all over the internet) it may have many endings but a single path, many paths but a single ending, or it may be a non-narrative exercise in exploration. Interactive Fiction (also know as IF) is more than the sum of its parts it’s not a story interrupted by a few puzzles, or a few puzzles with a story grafted on.
For years, some of the most experimental and independent work in gaming and storytelling has been carried out in the text-adventure (or Interactive Fiction) community. But imagining that video games progress in a straight line toward graphic excellence is like thinking that Marvelman needs to be recolored because we have better technology now. It’s easy to think that text adventures (and their close cousins, MUDs), existed only as a stopgap until something better came along, and that text game designers were simply making the best of a bad situation. The fact that game design has changed drastically, though, doesn’t mean that text adventures have been left behind. I think most of us have a sense that gaming has moved on from the punishing arbitrariness of early games Spelunky is punishing enough, but the rules are consistent, established, and learnable, not you-forgot-to-pick-up-this-item-20-turns-ago-and-now-you’ve-been-eaten (although the exploration of those unwritten rules can be as fun as it is frustrating, as I’ll try to explain). Many early text adventures are as hardcore, unfair, and labyrinthine as games can be while I respect them deeply, and can’t deny that they gave out a lot of gaming value for the money (these games were meant to torture you for months), I don’t really want to play them. While many gamers have tried (and failed) to work that stupid vending machine in the first few minutes of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, their engagement with text adventures rarely goes any deeper than that, probably because that game is so damn frustrating.
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