As a parser-game newbie, I frequently find myself frustrated with them. The interface throws me out of the story every time I try to take a logical action and it doesn’t understand my command. Worse, if the person who designed the game was not being particularly thoughtful about wrong commands, it can lead to endless moments of confusion where you “look at the thing” and it tells you “that doesn’t seem important” whereas if you had typed “EXAMINE THE THING” it would have solved the stupid puzzle.
Argh.
But, ok, I recognize that my failings are not the genre’s.
I think by and large, parser games are best at exploring external/physical spaces. You’re in a room, you can wander around that room and pick up objects, look at them, hold onto them for later, roam around.
Choice games are often at their best when exploring internal/emotional spaces. You can examine memories or thoughts and clicking links feels, at its best, like stumbling upon a secret.
Another thing that Choice does really well is manage a story’s pacing. Even taking a piece of static fiction and breaking it into smaller chunks and progressing by clicking links can transform the story and, for the right story, make it more effective – more like oral storytelling than the written word.
I think by and large parser feels more like a game – it feels like the text equivalent of, idk, Amnesia, or basically any point-and-click adventure. Which to me (a person who did not grow up with parser and has no nostalgia for the medium) makes it a little less appealing as a medium. I have yet to figure out what you get from the parser experience that you don’t get from playing a regular videogame (though if I find the right parser game that shows me what I’m missing, I’ll change my mind.)
Choice, meanwhile, feels like a different thing. It doesn’t feel like a game so much as an enhanced storytelling format, a way to deliver stories differently than they could otherwise be consumed. And I think that’s why I like them, as a reader and as a writer.