Heck, there are several games that incorporate parser elements into a graphical environment! I’m thinking of Stories Untold and…that other game where you walked around a spaceship and communicated with the AI via terminals with a parser. (Not Starship Titanic, though that is another example … Myst-like…with a parser?)
Frog Fractions even dropped into a parser game for one segment, but that was likely novelty instead of classification.
You’re thinking of Event[0].
Has anyone created a text adventure game that has a list of options printed at the bottom of each screen (like a gamebook), or do all non-parser versions use the inline hypertext style of input?
Yes. There is not one standard format for choice narratives.
It’s fair to say that those two modes – inline hyperlinks and separate option lists – are the two common ways to present choice-based interactivity. Certainly not the only two ways, but they’re the two big centers of gravity.
Thanks. I’m probably going to have to ignore that distinction when creating the categories or there will be too many of them. I’d like to keep the number to six or less if possible.
So far, I think the categories will be:-
I could potentially add a “hybrid” or “misc” category for anything that doesn’t easily fit anywhere else.
For another complication, there are the stories made with Texture, where you generally make choices by dragging words onto the main text output. (There isn’t always more than one choice.)
The thing is, your 3rd and 4th categories can fall into either of the first two.
Gamebooks and interactive novels are not text adventures though, unless you have a very loose definition for “text adventure”.
Using tundish’s terminology, the internal model for a text adventure is dungeon-based, whereas in gamebooks and interactive novels it is dialogue-based.
To put it another way, text adventure programs track the state of objects separately from locations, whereas in a gamebook the former would be tracked by the player using dice, cards, pen and paper etc. and in an interactive novel both would be tied to specific passages of text.
Imagine how difficult it would be to implement Colossal Cave Adventure or Zork as a paperback book.
That’s not very accurate. Interactive novels can have dialogue choices, but many focus on actions over dialogue. Gamebooks tend focus even more on action. They’re a lot closer to text adventures than interactive novels. A good example is one of the most famous gamebooks, Deathtrap Dungeon. Just from the name alone you can probably guess it’s not about building relationships with pretty women.
There are also other gamebooks like the Fabled Lands games which are open world. There isn’t a linear narrative and you move between sections like would a text adventure. The pages play more like navigating a map and you can return to previous sections to talk to characters after completing a quest, or buy a house after you gained enough money, etc.
A gamebook I’ve been reading/playing lately is The Mystery of Dracula, a gamebook version of the Bram Stoker story. It has puzzles and backtracking. If you can believe it, I’m actually currently stuck in the book because I can’t solve a puzzle.
Anyway, my point is that there is probably more to gamebooks than you might think.
This is why establishing detailed categories is like herding cats. We can make a list of “text adventures” that do not involve “dungeons”. And while I realize you probably meant “dungeon” metaphorically, this is where the problem lies. One person’s “text adventure” is another person’s “parser narrative”.
Someone is always going to go “my gamebook has text and you go on an adventure…why isn’t that a text adventure?”
Believe me and all the other lifers here when we say we’ve had this flamewar! 
…was the original context, right? Obviously you can organize your web site in however many categories you want.
Just be aware that you’re never going to nail down the definitions of these terms. Not even a commonly-agreed-on definition.
I’ve hung around the RPG Codex forums long enough to realise that agreeing on genre definitions is almost impossible, but I was hoping to gain some insight into what would make sense to the most people.
Ultimately the final decision will be mine, but if my definitions are too far from those most commonly used, people will have problems finding what they’re looking for.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that your definitions are too different from other definitions people in the community use, but that seeing them as mutually exclusive might be. If authors love nothing else if not to make experimental works that cross and fuse categories together. This is why the suggestion to use tags instead of categories is one you should strongly consider.
I first encountered text adventures over 30 years ago and have played them on and off ever since (along with gamebooks and CYOA style books). Which type I play depends upon my mood, but in all that time I have never once thought “I really wish there was a game/book that was an exact 50% hybrid of two types”.
In other words, I’m unlikely to write about anything that fits exactly in the grey area between categories.
As for tags, I mentioned before that I feel they would be put to better use by using them to sort content in other ways, such as by platform (Windows/Linux/Mac/Android/book/ebook etc.), intended audience (quite a few interactive novels are aimed at children) or anything else not directly related to the type of IF covered.
I’m also highly likely to be building the initial site by hand, so adding tags would be a lot of extra effort and I’d end up with more index pages than actual content.
You’re writing out all of the HTML pages by hand? That sounds like a lot of work. Myself, I’d use something PHP (or whatever server language the cool kids are using these days) along with a database like SQL. It’s a lot less work and the tags would be really easy to implement since you could easily get a list of games for one or more tags with a simple SQL select statement.
If you were to do the tag thing, I would do what Steam does and lump the broad category tags in with more specific tags. As an example, Tomb Raider would have something like “adventure”, “action”, “puzzles”, "third-person shooter ", and “female protagonist” as its tags. That way it’d be listed under the general listing of both the “action” and “adventure” categories, but then it’d have the more specific tags for other searches. Personally, I really don’t care what format a horror game is in (or any genre IF game, to be honest), but having to hunt multiple formats to find one to play would be a deal breaker for me.
Tags are actually a good idea since they can be inclusive of all the variations of IF. I apologize if I missed that part previously.
I’m using an HTML editor rather than a plain text editor, so I can add opening and closing tags with one or two clicks of the mouse. That way I can create the prototype before paying out for domain registration and hosting.
I do have a content management framework in mind to use once I’m happy with the initial content, layout and organisation.
Steam tags aren’t really the same as tags in most blog software. They’re more like search filters, as they can apply to a single category rather than the whole site.
I could possibly add something similar later, but there would need to be a lot of articles for that to be worthwhile.
Yeah. I meant like Steam tags, not social media hashtags. That’s why kept referencing Steam. Although, I guess I didn’t the first time I brought it up. I’m sorry if I failed to get my message across.
I’m using an HTML editor rather than a plain text editor, so I can add opening and closing tags with one or two clicks of the mouse.
I was referring to the scripting language, not the editor (I haven’t used a normal text editor like notepad for like 25 years 
).
Nearly all databases like what you’re trying to set up use some method of server side scripting, using PHP, ASP, Perl, Python, etc. If you’re not familiar with the concept, the easiest way to explain it is that it’s like Twine. You know how Twine has functions that you can use to list items in your inventory or in a shop? Writing a page by hand for every store is silly when you can just use a function to print an array of items to the page. Doing it this way, you can have a “store” page and then use that page for every store by having it use a different array of items depending on whether you’re viewing weapons store, armor store, etc.
Anyway, server side scripting is the same, except it’s done on the server side. The server creates a unique page at the time of request and sends that page to your browser (which is why you’ll never see PHP or the like in the source of an HTML file, because all of the processing is done before it gets to you). Server side scripts usually interact directly with databases like SQL, but smaller ones are known for retrieving their data from XML files or even just parsing text files. A real database is the way to go if you plan on having a lot of data because it’s a lot faster and comes with functions for selecting specific entries in the database easily and with very little coding.
That was a lot of text. Sorry about that. But hopefully it cleared things up.
The content management framework I’m hoping to use is written in PHP and uses a MySQL or MariaDB database.
I will need to refresh my PHP skills to get the best from it though, so I’ll stick to plain HTML to start with. I haven’t built a website since around 15 years ago, so much of what I previously learnt is now out of date.