What is “interactive fiction”?
Interactive fiction (IF), or text adventures, are games in which the player and the computer interact through a textual interface: the player enters commands and the computer responds by printing text to the screen, generally what the player can see and what effects the previous command had. The player’s input can be a simple command in the format
The term refers to programs (sometimes called “games” or, less often, “works”) that let you type commands to a character. This character wanders around in a simulated world of some sort, usually one that is described in text. “Text adventure” and “text game” have been used to mean pretty much the same thing. Examples include Adventure, Zork, Deadline, Planetfall, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Hobbit, and Curses. Some people include graphical adventure games such as Myst when they use the term, but those sorts of games aren’t the focus of this FAQ, nor are they the main concern of the IF community. The ifwiki offers a formal definition of interactive fiction; there is a longer discussion of the topic in the rec.arts.int-fiction FAQ; and other definitions can be found in various essays and books.
That is a good question. In days past, both interactive fiction and text adventure had the same meaning. Interactive fiction has a broader interpretation these days. For the sake of this FAQ and the topic it covers, text adventure is more accurate, but still not perfect. Basically, Interactive Fiction is a text-based game where the player has some direct impact on the story. This impact is usually from some action that they perform such as finding an item, solving a puzzle, opening a locked door, finding the treasure, or other similar action. Some games even change when the player doesn’t do something. Another attempt to define IF can be found at the Interactive Fiction Basement.
“Interactive fiction” is a catch-all name for many forms of story-telling. Most forms are text-based (but see below) and feature some degree of reader, or player, participation beyond the act of, say, turning the page of a book to read the next one. In the context of rec.arts.int-fiction the name is most commonly used to refer to just one type: computer-based text adventures. These games involve the player entering textual commands in response to the game’s output. In turn, this output is influenced by the player’s input. An extremely simple example of this interplay between player input and game output (from “Zork”) is: West of House You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. >OPEN THE MAILBOX Opening the small mailbox reveals a leaflet. >TAKE THE LEAFLET Taken. >READ IT “WELCOME TO ZORK! ZORK is a game of adventure, danger, and low cunning. In it you will explore some of the most amazing territory ever seen by mo
