Games that imitate an actual computer environment

General
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Here are a few, whether you consider all of them IF is a matter of judgment…

  • Stories Untold - The first part is actually IF, but the other parts use computers or systems too, I think
  • Her Story - You get a imitated PC desktop with a few apps, plus a keyword system though it’s overshadowed by the FMV clips
  • Deus Ex Ceviche - by Tom Lento and Chandler Groover, some sort of fish and floppy disk thing, pretty complicated I think
  • Arc Symphony - by Matilde Park and Penelope Evans, presents itself as a Usenet newsgroup
  • Okinawa Online - My own game, made in Sugarcube…it has keyword-based navigation, similar to Her Story
  • Quadrilateral Cowboy - A first-person game, definitely not interactive fiction—but you get a terminal with a full command line to work with and you can hack doors, gun turrets, cameras, etc.

Depending on how much similarity to a real GUI you want, Sugarcube for Twine is useful. As others have noted you can use text boxes to make a keyword system. I posted some simple code that does that here earlier this year.

You can also use Sugarcube’s dialog system to imitate pop ups or windows—albeit without drag and drop features like in a true desktop.

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22

Thank you all, I’m definitely got more ideas than I bargained for!

There is a third part to this, but I believe it’s a different issue so I’ve created a separate thread for it.

23

In the 8-bit days, there were quite a lot of games that emulated a dial-up BBS system. That sort of “hacker” game wasn’t really considered a text adventure at the time; although at least a couple of them were written with text adventure creation systems.

It wasn’t unusual for a “hacker” game to form a separate part of a larger software experience, with links to either a more traditional text adventure or an arcade action game.

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