What is a text adventure?
A game made of prose and typed commands. No graphics, no reflexes, no timer counting down in the corner — just a description, a prompt, and whatever you decide to do about it.
What you actually see
Easier shown than described. This is one, four turns in:
> look THE GAUGE CHAMBER Granite, and under it, from a long way down, four notes standing perfectly still. A copper column runs floor to ceiling in the corner. The shaft is down. > examine the column Fed from the water table, which follows the whole catchment and follows it late. It is not recording the flood. It is forecasting it, four years out. > listen Four seconds. Then four. Then four. Then three and nine-tenths. > d
That is the whole medium. You read, you decide, you type, and the world answers in a paragraph. The pictures are the ones you make, which is why a good one stays with you longer than most games with an art department.
Where they came from
In 1976 a programmer and caver called Will Crowther wrote a program that described the Bedquilt section of Kentucky's Mammoth Cave and let you walk around it by typing directions. He wrote it partly for his daughters. Don Woods found it, asked to extend it, and added the treasure, the dwarves and the magic word, and Colossal Cave Adventure went out over the ARPANET and quietly ate the productivity of every computing department in America.
Infocom followed at the end of the decade with Zork, then thirty-odd more, and for about eight years text adventures were simply what computer games were. They sold in their millions, in boxes with maps and props in them, on machines that could not have drawn a convincing tree if you had asked.
Why they went away, and why they did not
Graphics happened. By 1989 the commercial genre was dead, and Infocom with it. But the form turned out to be almost impossible to kill: the tools got given away, the community kept writing, and every year since 1995 the Interactive Fiction Competition has produced a crop of new work, some of it far better than the commercial stuff ever was.
What has changed is where you play. A text adventure in 1983 meant a floppy disk. Today it is a web page that loads in a second, remembers where you were, and works the same on a phone at a bus stop as on a desktop.
Text adventure, interactive fiction, or something else?
The words get used loosely and it is worth knowing what they point at, because "interactive fiction" covers two quite different experiences.
- Parser games — what this site makes, and what people usually mean by text adventure. You type what you want to do and the game works out whether it can be done. The world is a place with objects in it, and the pleasure is in understanding a situation well enough to act on it.
- Choice-based — Twine and its relatives. You click one of two or three links. Much easier to pick up, and much better suited to stories about deciding things than to stories about doing them. There are no wrong verbs because there are no verbs.
- MUDs — the same typed commands, but multiplayer and continuous. A different hobby that shares a keyboard.
- Gamebooks — Fighting Fantasy and the like. Choice-based on paper, usually with dice.
If somebody says they bounced off text adventures, they almost always mean a parser game that made them guess a verb. That is a solvable problem, and it is what the rule below is about.
The vocabulary is much smaller than it looks
The commonest thing that puts people off is imagining they need to guess from an English
dictionary. They do not. About twenty verbs cover very nearly everything you will ever want:
look, examine, search, read, take,
drop, open, close, push, pull,
turn, use, tie, cut, light,
talk to, ask, give, show, wait, and
the compass directions.
Everything else is nouns, and the game gives you those in the room description. A parser game is less like a vocabulary test and more like a conversation with somebody who has a small vocabulary and excellent hearing.
What makes a good one
The same thing that made Zork good and makes a bad one insufferable: fairness. A good text adventure never asks you to guess a verb, never hides a solution in a room you have already been locked out of, and never kills you for something it did not warn you about. The difficulty should come from understanding the situation, not from wrestling with the parser.
The second thing is that the writing has to carry the whole world. There is no art department. If the room is not frightening on the page it is not frightening at all — which is also why the good ones stay with you longer than most games with budgets.
Are they hard?
The good ones are hard in the way a crossword is hard: the difficulty is the point, and it is always the kind you can get at by thinking. What they should never be is obscure — a puzzle you failed because you did not try the word "prise", or because the answer was in a room that closed behind you an hour ago.
The games here run about two to three hours each and are built to one stated rule: every trap tells you about itself twice before it kills you, and the death screen names the warning you walked past. There is no state you can reach where the game is quietly unwinnable and does not say so.
What you actually do
You read, you type examine a great deal, you draw a map on the back of an envelope
because it genuinely helps, and you die a few times and learn something each time. A good one takes
three or four hours and about eleven of those minutes are spent typing.
Where to start
If you have never played one, start with something with a small map and a clear problem rather than something atmospheric and vague — you want the first hour to teach you the medium, not to be admired.
Then read how to play, which is four minutes and covers everything practical, and pick anything from the list. They are free, there is nothing to install, and the first act of each is designed to be survivable while you are still learning which end of a parser to hold.