#text-adventures

“...is a tool for creating interactive fiction - that is, multiple choice games that focus on text and story.“

I DON’T KNOW WHAT THIS ISbut i’m probably...

A text-adventure is a video game that has no graphics -- it’s only text. Most text-adventures are original content, but there’s some precedent for text-adventures that are based on books, movies, or other media.

I took a Java programming course in Spring quarter and developed what I believe are all the skills necessary to make this work, but it’s a big project: I have to sort out what aspects of the story lend themselves to text-adventure format, write out that story with whatever branchings I need to include, and then program the damn thing. That means it’ll take time, but I love The Magicians and I love IF (interactive fiction -- the other name for text-adventures) as an art form, so I’m gonna get it done.

Since it’s your first exposure to IF, I strongly strongly recommend you head down to the IF archive and play something. Almost all IF is free, as are the programs used to run it, and there are some really great games out there. Some of my favorites are:

Emily Short’s Galatea

Stephen Granade’s Losing Your Grip

Eric Eve’s Blighted Isle

Douglas Adams’ Bureaucracy (the first text adventure I ever played!)

There are plenty of classics that I haven’t included on this list, not because they aren’t good, but because a lot of early text-adventures were created in part because there weren’t alternatives. Zork was written in 1977-1979 and released in 1980 when there weren’t really computer graphics to speak of and later re-releases included graphics. In other words, it was a text-adventure out of necessity, because there was literally no other way of telling that kind of story. In contrast, Galatea was released in 2000, around the same time as the graphically-advanced Half-Life. That makes the medium it was written for a matter of choice, and you can tell -- it’s not just written as a text-adventure, it’s written to be a text-adventure.

People are still writing new text-adventures and some truly talented people are shaping the medium into something new and interesting. Some of the biggest hype is directed at Aaron Reed’s Blue Lacuna. I’ve always been a little afraid to start it because it’s so gigantic, but from what I understand, it’s well and truly about interaction and that’s interesting! And hey, my friend Wes Modes made this cool text-adventure which looks at memory and emotion and the ways they interact, so you might check that out, too.

"... is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories"

>Take hint