Interactive fiction (lack of) mainstream popularity

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(I’m new so please let me know if this belongs in a different category. Is this long enough to be considered an “essay”?)

On some older threads, I’ve seen people wondering why interactive fiction isn’t more popular, even though adjacent media - books and video games - are. Here are my speculations.

For context: I’m an 80ies/90ies kid, and I started gaming in the Monkey Island era. I never got into pure text adventures but I did play and enjoy the (parser-based but illustrated) Frederik Pohl’s Gateway games. I only recently discovered this community and haven’t played much yet, and I’m mostly interested in it from a game dev perspective.

I think interactive fiction struggles to be popular because it’s more effortful to consume than books or video games, without offering enough benefits (for most people) to counter-balance it. Let’s consider its competitors:

Books:

Compared to film or TV, literature is more effortful: you have to engage your imagination, and you typically need a bigger time investment per story as well. But it has some clear upsides:

  • Ability to engage the reader’s imagination
  • Freedom to explore ideas in as much depth as the author wishes, including internal thoughts, abstract concepts, etc. that are difficult to express visually

Interactive fiction offers these benefits too, but they must be balanced against whatever gameplay needs the piece has. It’s often necessary, for instance, to keep descriptions brief so the player knows what they need to remember.

Games:

Games are also more effortful than TV or film: you have to do things to progress. In the case of adventure games, you have to pay attention to and remember things in order to solve puzzles. But they have upsides as well:

  • The joy of discovery, eureka moments, achievement
  • Influencing the narrative, feeling like you are the main character

Interactive fiction offers these too, and there’s a lot of potential especially for influencing the narrative. But most players are probably satisfied with the level of narrative influence they get from graphical games. Perhaps this is for lack of knowing anything better, though.

To summarize:

I think the medium struggles because it combines the effortfulness of literature and games, and it’s hard to gain both kinds of benefits without them conflicting with each other.

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Interesting topic! A while back, I taught some classes to get writers and other people interested in interactive fiction. The former to see about creating it and the latter, of course, to consume it. This is because one of my contentions is that “text adventures” were actually surprising in how long they lasted (commercially). Had the graphics and audio been better at the time, one of my theses (which I never fully worked out) is that we likely would not have seen text adventures or they would have had a very brief, flash-in-the-pan existence.

What I learned from all that is that I think there’s a cleaner way to put this. Games (the graphical kind) get their emotional hooks in two ways: through the character, and through the senses: spectacle, sound, and the physical feedback of doing something skillfully. When the character is thin (and player-avatars often are, deliberately), the sensory channel picks up the slack. That’s why a silent protagonist in a AAA game doesn’t feel emotionally empty. The music, the combat, and the visuals are doing the work instead.

Books only have one channel, but it’s a deep one: with a good writer, you get to actually know someone else’s mind from the inside: their contradictions, their blind spots, the gap between what they say and what they want. That’s real emotional labor, even though you’re not “doing” anything. It’s engagement with a fully realized other person, not with your own agency.

Interactive fiction’s “you” tries to borrow the game’s mirror structure (an avatar built for agency, not depth), but it often lacks the sensory canvas to make that emptiness work the way a AAA (or even AA) game does. No spectacle to fall back on. And it can’t easily go the book’s route either, because a protagonist with real independent will starts to fight the player’s choices, which undercuts the whole point of “interactive.” So it ends up in a middle zone: not quite a window into another mind, not quite a satisfying mirror.

One of the things I found during the above research was that if IF abandoned the second person and/or gave its protagonist real pushback against the player, it would read more like a novel. That was for better and worse, mind you, and then it really came down to the skill of the writer.

Which, if you’re coming at this from a design angle rather than a player one, is really the practical takeaway: choosing second-person, high-agency IF isn’t a neutral default, it’s a bet. You’re choosing the thin-mirror strategy, and thin mirrors need something to fill the gap that spectacle fills in a graphical game. In text, that’s probably prose rhythm, sound (if you’re doing audio at all), pacing, the texture of the parser’s responses themselves: the equivalent of combat-feel, just written instead of rendered. If you’re not going to give the player that, you’re implicitly choosing the other path: a protagonist with real will, less agency, something closer to a novel. Neither is wrong, but I think a lot of IF ends up in the unsatisfying middle by accident rather than by design. Nobody chose thin-mirror-without-compensation; it just happened because the second person was the default, and everyone inherited that from parser conventions and history.

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Been looking at this for my whole life and I still think it reduces to one thing.

Some people like puzzles they can solve in throwaway time (bus ride, lunch break, waiting room).

A small number of people like hard puzzles or puzzles that require their undivided attention.

IF only satisfies the latter and loses everyone from the former.

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This is fair and often brought up, but I think it reduces the wrong pair of variables to a single axis. (I say that as a friendly challenge to the idea without in any way suggesting I’m correct!) “Hard puzzle” and “requires undivided attention” aren’t the same thing. A cryptic crossword clue or a Raymond Smullyan teaser can be genuinely difficult and still get solved in a two-minute wait for a bus, because it’s a closed unit. You can drop it mid-thought and lose nothing when you pick it back up.

What actually kills throwaway-time compatibility isn’t difficulty, at least so I would argue; it’s resumption cost. Crosswords, logic-puzzle books, even a novel chapter: none of them ask you to hold live state in your head between sessions. Alastair Reynolds provides a good example in that his Revelation Space is basically one giant puzzle in terms of plot reconstruction, but the unit you’re actually engaging with, moment to moment, is a self-contained scene. Put the book down for a week; the puzzle doesn’t decay because the text is holding it, not your memory.

IF often works the opposite way: an unsolved clue, a half-mapped geography, an inventory you’re tracking: that’s live state sitting in your head, and if you walk away for two days, you pay real tax getting back into it. That’s a resumption-cost problem, and it’s orthogonal to how hard the puzzles actually are. You could make IF puzzles trivially easy, and it still wouldn’t fix this because the friction isn’t the puzzle; it’s the cost of reloading the mental model every time you come back to it.

It’s probably also worth noting that plenty of mobile games have no puzzles at all and still thrive as throwaway time, which the “it’s all about puzzles” framing can’t explain either. So I don’t think puzzle-vs-no-puzzle is even the right lens: resumability is.

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Graphically intensive 1st person POV games can generally be reduced to very simple model. It collapses to a few very simple ideas. 1) Pick a direction and go. 2) Point gun at thing. 3) Shoot gun. 4) Reload gun. 5) Take health pack. That’s it. The Marvel superhero model. This mechanic could be expressed in IF in moments. It wouldn’t be well received either. Enter the MUD and MMUD. In AAA titles they become Raid and weekly timed events with the promise of a prize that is uncommon and brings temporary status. I sank a couple years into Destiny 1 and it had extremely frustrating moments and many times it just felt like actual work. I put it down after it ended and never went on in that franchise. Then there are games like Uncharted and the Last of US. Their success is precisely because they expressed the kind of complex puzzle solving mechanics and story that are the bread and butter of IF. The Last of Us and The Last of Us II (It’s not 2 like is commonly written in which II is another nod to film and fiction) had such an immersive story that they were able to crossover and become adaptable to Film. I have platinum’s in TLOU and TLOU II which means I did everything possible. Many times that took the form of interaction with the side character in spaces and places in the game to have dialog moments or to add to a collection of comic books because they were important to another character. To reveal the backstory, which becomes more important. Most popular video games that have tried to crossover to Film have been terribly realized. Doom comes to mind yet the TLOU and Uncharted kind of worked. I personally was upset at the TLOU because I didn’t like how they adapted one of the characters but it was well received by people who hadn’t poured what felt like their entire self into it the way I did.

My point is that games like The Last of US could be expressed as interactive fiction and be just as immersive and successful. You have to go find that dumpster and move it to another part of the map to climb it to be able to go into a new area and explore it. You have to make your way across the country solving puzzles while struggling with and getting attached to your cargo while coming to grips with your own backstory. These are tropes that map well IRL and are a draw.

So when people say the IF is too much effort I think of this. They are noticing that IF preserves a type and kind of depth that very few, really the very prestigious AAA titles have expressed. Most popular AAA titles reduce to 5 simple verbs and a tiny loop. The ones that succeed and crossover and become cultural touchstones embrace rich IF mechanics.

IF fiction isn’t struggling anymore than crossword puzzles struggle. They are part and parcel and aren’t going anywhere. IF struggles the same way crossword puzzles struggle and that is because the mainstream has been trained to expect simplicity and then being richly rewarded for it as if it were something much more difficult. The very things that make IF effortful are the same things that make the best games unforgettable.

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Agreed on the underlying claim: any game with a narrative is reducible to a set of actions you could type out as text commands. That’s true almost by definition. But I might push back on where you land with it. I don’t think IF preserves depth. I think it compresses it, and that compression is exactly why my writers and their readers didn’t really engage.

Take your Last of Us example. What makes that story work isn’t just that the underlying beats could be expressed as text commands (find the dumpster, move it, climb it). It’s (arguably) that the game surrounds those few thin actions with a massive amount of non-textual depth, doing the actual emotional labor: voice performance, facial animation, music, pacing you don’t control, environments you’re not asked to describe because you’re just looking at them. Strip that away and reduce it to prose, and you haven’t preserved the depth; you’ve relocated the entire burden of producing it onto the text. And text is a much narrower channel than a rendered, scored, voice-acted scene. That’s the compression I mean. The bones survive; most of what made you platinum both games don’t.

This is what I actually heard, repeatedly, from both sides of the room when I taught this. From the writers, almost verbatim: “I feel like I can’t make the character interesting. I have to allow for a story that is partly told by the reader/player.” From their readers: “I feel like there’s nothing of consequence here. There’s nothing to latch onto.” Digging into both complaints, they converge on the same structural problem, just seen from opposite sides: the skeleton of a story is provided, and the bones of a narrative are there, but as a writer, you’re having to avoid filling in too much, and as a reader, you’re having to fill in too much. Same skeleton, opposite complaint, because the medium is asking the writer to withhold what they would normally supply and asking the reader to supply what they would normally receive.

So, all that said, I entirely agree with you that IF isn’t “struggling” in the sense of dying out: crosswords aren’t dying either. But I don’t think it’s because IF holds onto depth that mainstream games shed. I think it’s a smaller, more durable niche precisely because the compression is real: it rewards people who are willing to do the reconstruction work themselves, and that’s always going to be fewer people than the audience for a medium that does the reconstruction for you, at least to some extent.

Great discussion!

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Following up on my own point above, I think I raised an objection that I didn’t answer: if text is a much narrower channel than a rendered, scored, voice-acted scene, why don’t books suffer the same fate? Novels are pure text, too, and nobody accuses them of compressing depth in the same way that I’m accusing IF of doing.

I think the answer is that I stated the problem one level too shallow. It’s not that the text itself is too narrow a channel to carry depth. It obviously isn’t, or the entire novel form wouldn’t exist. It’s that IF’s text is doing two jobs at once, and a novel’s text only ever does one.

A novel’s prose has exactly one job: to produce depth. Interiority, voice, the reader’s model of a person’s contradictions. Nothing else is competing for the sentence. IF’s prose has that job (or at least it can in the hands of a skilled writer) and a second one bolted on: it has to function as a game interface. It has to tell you what’s in the room clearly enough that you can act on it, keep the puzzle fair, and make sure the one object you need isn’t buried in the atmosphere. A novelist can write an impressionistic, ambiguous room because nobody has to “solve” it. An IF author can’t, because the room description doubles as a parser’s inventory, whether the prose likes it or not. And when those two jobs conflict, which they constantly do, function wins, because if it doesn’t, the puzzle breaks.

So, as I think on it, a narrower channel wasn’t quite the right description. Same channel, same bandwidth, in both cases, it’s plain text. What’s different is how much of that bandwidth is actually free for depth once the functional overhead gets paid. Novels spend the whole channel on depth. IF spends a chunk of it just keeping the game legible, and depth gets whatever’s left over. That’s (perhaps?) a better version of the compression claim than the one I just made: it’s not that text can’t carry depth, it’s that IF’s text is carrying two jobs at once, and depth is the one that loses when they fight.

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Thanks everyone for your detailed responses!

On Last of Us: If that was turned into IF, it would become more effortful, which is all I was saying. You’d have to mentally construct the world and keep it in memory, instead of having it served in form of graphics, voice acting, etc. So you can focus your mental energy on winning the fights and solving the puzzles.

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Playing devil’s advocate, I feel like there are several assumptions being made in this thread.

1: That interactive fiction is entirely different from “video games”. I would categorize IF as a kind of video game, a vague genre of video games that sometimes overlaps with other genres. There’s been a lot of debate about whether visual novels count as IF, for example. In terms of avenues for publication and release, IF is much closer to video games than literature/books. You can release a IF game on Steam and Itch.io without modifying it to adapt the “video game” medium, because it’s already a video game, but it’s impossible to publish your average IF game as a book without literally adapting it to another medium.

2: That interactive fiction must have “puzzles”. A lot of the more interesting, genre-bending IF these days (at least in my opinion) doesn’t.

3: That interactive fiction doesn’t have mainstream popularity. Depends on how you define it. I’d say Type Help went pretty mainstream. Choice of Games and Fallen London are also well-known. If you expand into visual novels, or other more expansive definitions of IF, then the success rankings go off the charts. See Disco Elysium, for example. You can argue that none of it is popular enough to qualify as mainstream, but by that definition a lot of other prominent genres also don’t have mainstream popularity. I can’t name any ASCII roguelike with mainstream popularity, and I can’t even think of a traditional roguelike with blockbuster mainstream popularity.

If you consider IF as a subset of video game, then asking “why does IF not have mainstream popularity?” is like asking “why do roguelikes not have mainstream popularity?” They’re a specific genre/type of game with specific conventions, and will always appeal only to a subset of people because of that. There are some popular classic, ASCII-style roguelikes, and some games that stretch the definition of roguelike or arguably aren’t roguelikes at all (“roguelites”) and have become very famous in the process. See Hades, Binding of Isaac etc. But these popular games are mostly regarded on their own terms, not as examples of their genre, and mainstream popularity for those games doesn’t necessarily translate into success for roguelikes as a whole.

The average roguelike made by a random person will never see any mainstream success, just as the average video game in any genre made by a random person will never see mainstream success. See this post I keep referencing. Your (commercial or not) game doesn’t need a reason to make zero dollars, it needs a reason to NOT make zero dollars because the average game will make zero dollars. It’s easier for you and your game to get money and popularity if you already have it, and extremely hard to get it if you don’t.

Also, I feel like there’s not much point to comparing any genre of video game to blockbuster AAA games, and blockbuster multiplayer FPS and what have you, which are basically their own genre at this point. Inherently they have a lot of funding, recognition and many, many people working on them, which means they are almost guaranteed to be more successful than your average indie game, even your average successful indie game. But this huge funding means a certain calcification; generally the AAAs don’t want to try anything risky, they’ll stick to the formula. These AAA games are just a totally different sphere, they settled on genre conventions (realistic graphics, 3D worlds etc) that provide a workable “money + staff + time = more money” pipeline and won’t switch to genres like “ASCII roguelike” or “parser IF” that don’t guarantee that pipeline will work.

4: One last point, mostly an aside. I don’t believe reading is more effortful than TV or film. It really depends on what you’re reading, but in my opinion it’s less effortful and more accessible because you don’t need to turn on sound and use a large screen for the optimal experience. I can read a book almost anywhere but I can only concentrate on film or TV when I’m in a quiet, dark space and consequently don’t watch much of it. But I recall the average person in the US reads less books these days so it may not apply to everyone. I don’t know if they’re necessarily watching more film or TV to make up for it, though.

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I’d like to challenge the idea of “effort” or “challenge” as a flatly mechanical thing. Media can be hard to consume for a number of reasons, whether because of difficult subject matter, construction, or ambiguity. We don’t debate the meanings of works here very often, which is no strike against us or against IF in general, but I find other communities discuss meaning in media fairly often. In this way, a more kinetic work with very few choices might offer a great deal of challenge for players willing to meet it where it is.

Regarding The Last of Us, it’s possible to get a debate going about its ending right now, in any number of places, thirteen years after its release. Setting aside the question of whether that debate would be interesting or productive, it has to be said again that engaging with a text and interpreting it is effortful.

AAA games can be easy targets when it comes to discussing things like challenge or, more pointedly, cerebrality, but earning all achievements in games like Prey (2017) or Resident Evil 2 (2019) will require a great deal of planning, optimization, and problem solving. The AA or “mid-tier” anime-coded Atelier games have very deep crafting systems, and, while they don’t do Call of Duty numbers, they are commercially viable products that have been on shelves for 19 years.

Ultimately, though, I don’t really think interactive fiction struggles. Few pieces of media in any field achieve widespread recognition. People still make a living selling point-and-click games today, CoG is a going concern, and a lot of Infocom DNA is found in commercial games of all stripes.

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This is a really interesting line of thought. I don’t have much to add to it, but yeah. I think I would call weaving two information streams into one channel a kind of signal compression. As you pointed out, you might almost call the functional overhead the UI, as it suggests available actions and provides wayfaring cues.

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I think the thing to note is that “video games” is a big industry with a lot of kinds of games in it. It’s very common for people to play a lot of “video games” but only like one or two kinds of video games, e.g. you find people who play platformers but never RPGs, driving games but never shooters, match-3 games but never sports games, puzzlers but never dating sims.

Even within IF, there are people who only play puzzley IF and never play choice-based games, or vice versa.

It feels misleading to say that “video games” are mainstream. While almost everyone has finished a movie or a book, surprisingly few people have ever finished a Mario platformer. (Mario games are designed to be enjoyed without finishing the game.) Being a fan of lots of kinds of video games is, itself, quite rare.

For choice-based IF, I do think the market is limited to folks who enjoy reading and folks who enjoy choice-based games. Plenty of readers don’t play any electronic games at all. Plenty of video gamers don’t enjoy any books.

For puzzley IF, the market is limited to folks who enjoy reading and folks who enjoy puzzle games. Plenty of video gamers enjoy video-game puzzles, even puzzles that require sustained attention, but don’t enjoy any books.

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Like most things, it’s likely many factors contributing.

That said, I’d argue even books are a more niche medium. At least, I get the impression most people who have seen the Lord of the Rings Movies, Harry Potter Movies, Game of Thrones TV show, Marvel Cinematic Universe, and any big name anime adapted from manga have never read the source material, and for just about any famous fictional character originating from literature or comics, the version that lives in the minds of the masses is the version from the most popular adaptation, not the original, and if we step away from the huge franchises Big Media can’t help milking to death, there are lots of classic movies adapted from novels where most people aren’t even aware there is a novel.

I suspect most IF players are already part of the minority who treat reading as a serious hobby.

As for the resumption issue mentioned, I think it’s worth noting that’s also an issue with many video games, especially ones that are non-linear or which are linear, but have optional objectives for completionists, and not all games do a great job of reminding the player of what they have/haven’t done or what to do next… Though, it does bring up the question of how difficult various IF systems make it to print a “The story thus far” summary that is dependant on game state when you load a save or implement a progress command that tells the player what important objectives they’ve accomplished(e.g. a remaster of Zork I might list the treasures you’ve found marking those you’ve put in the trophy case with a asterisk with question marks for treasure not yet found, possibly with the list in an intended collection order to give subtle hints on where missing treasures can be found… Sorry if that’s not a great example, it’s just the game I know the most about the overall goal of the game).

Also, probably worth considering the supply side. A novel or short story only requires a writer to make, so even though the potential audience is smaller than for visual media, lots of people write because you don’t need multiple skill sets to make it one your own and you don’t need collaborators if you only have the one skill set… and with posting stuff online, reaching everyone with a computer or smartphone is technically trivial. Meanwhile, IF requires at least writing and coding to some extent, and if you already need two skill sets in a solo creator or a team of two, throwing on another skill set/collaborator or two for an indie video game is arguably a smaller step than the novelist>IF dev step. There are probably some doing IF because they have no graphic design skills and can’t find a collaborater who does, but I suspect a lot of IF devs specifically want to emphaisze the text over other aspects of presentation,… and of course, not every video game is narrative driven, so someone with coding and graphic design skills making a storyless puzzler probably wouldn’t even consider IF.

And of course, it doesn’t help that the genre had its commercial heyday at a time when computer graphics were supremely rudimentary and that graphics have been how most computer games make their first impression since the digitization of Arcades all the way up to modern cinematic Triple-A titles. Unless you grew up with one of those first gen personal computers, you kind of have to ignore all the pretty pixels even the shovelest of indie shovelware considers baseline and look hard to even find the most celebrated IF titles this side of the 16-bit revolution.

But honestly, I’m probably rambling in an effort to distract myself from my AC going from noisy but still putting out cold air to just being broken.

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I don’t think it’s a bad thing for IF not to be mainstream popular. IF and adventure games had their glorious days. But they are by no means gone. For one thing, some of the best things about them (narrative, puzzles, dialogs) have found their way into other genres. “Escape the Room” games are basically IF/Adventure games in a condensed form. The genre lives on, it’s simply in a different way from what it used to be like.

Anyway, I’m not totally convinced that the people who played text adventures back them would love them that much if they had serious alternatives to play. Part of it was the joy of the new, and IF in particular delivered that in spades with its illusion of limitless interactivity via the parser. Part of it was that this was what the people were doing. And until computer graphics caught up, the brain was simply the best graphic illustrator. And in those days, and this is true of many genres, people put up with a lot of questionable design because that’s the design that existed. It was all in flux, people were not thinking about good design so much as what was fun for them and their friend to play. Incidently, when you think about the Topologika games in that light, and remember it was mathematicians at university that made those games (corrections are welcome), it makes it a little less surprising how punishing those games can be to the modern player.

At any rate, that was then. This is now, and IF has exploded into very many engines and styles. Parser IF in particular remains a bit of a niche, partly because of its reputation; when it works it’s glorious, but when it doesn’t, oy… but this is not a bad thing. Unless you’re trying to make a living out of them.

IF in a world of portable devices must not be disregarded, however. It is true, in this modern world, with so many things vying for our attention, we are more geared towards the casual; that is partly because the casual is on our phones, and the non-casual has to wait for us at home. And the part I always liked the least about adventure games and IF was having to stop playing and do other stuff, when I could instead be fiddling about some more.

IF for Android could stand some improvement, but as it exists, Fabularium is perfectly serviceable. On a phone, the keyboard works well (I played iFrotz for, I think, a few years, on the iPod. I played many games to completion there for the first time, including Hollywood Hijinx and The Mulldoon Legacy. Curses defeated me on that one yet again, though. I’ll come back to it soon enough. Unlike Jigsaw, its design hasn’t irritated me; and so it continues on my radar), on a tablet the keyboard is clunkier but, amazingly, Gboard’s (the Android’s default virtual keyboard) handwriting recognition is really good. My new tablet came with a pen, and I can easily play Fabularium IF on the go, writing my commands with a pen.

It’s not casual, because it involved getting each individual game and putting them in Fabularium (that alone can be a barrier to some), and using the pen like this can be fiddly until you get the hang of it (because Fabularium’s support for the Android’s keyboard has pretty significant problems). But once you get past that hurdle? Dude, enter the subway; sit down; open your backpack, grab your tablet; turn it on; grab the pen from its support; load Fabularium and a game; type “restore”; and you’re playing before you got to the next station!

IF and adventure games do demand a space in your head, and for a long time they were limited to your physical desktop. But with the possibilities of nowadays? If Escape the Room games are any indication, adventure games for portable devices are a thing. Choice-based IF? I honestly don’t know because I don’t like it much so I don’t follow it, but I’ve seen it crop up here and there, and Inkle famously made a splash with Eighty Days and Sorcery. Parser IF? Harder sell, and I think it’ll always be a harder sell. That is not a problem, I think. But better interpreter support would certainly make it overall easier.

********

Now for the punchline: I’ve come to realise that I don’t really like IF nearly as much as point-and-click graphical adventures. To me, IF was always the portable, less-computiationally-demanding cousin of graphic adventures. When, as we all know, reality is pretty much the other way around. I am much more likely to enjoy a bad AGS game than a mediocre IF game.

But man, when I love it, I love it. Just yesterday I replayed Babel and it was just as good as I remembered. I have changed, so I felt less into it than I used to be, but level of involvement did not. The “aha” moments did not. The facepalm when I looked up a hint for a puzzle I totally could have solved by myself did not.

My point is…

…I dunno. Adventure games rule hard, IF games rule soft, and I want to always have them in my tablet so I can play them wherever and whenever?

…yeah, that seems about right.

EDIT - Playing IF and adventure games like this, on the go, has been literally a dream of mine since I was a kid. I would take game manuals to school and read them during recess, to keep experiencing the game world as much as I could while away from it. I’m literally living a childhood dream come true.

Mainstream popularity? Some of us simply aren’t mainstream by nature. And we find our way to this thing, and others.

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Some thoughts:

Interactive Fiction requires a buy-in from the reader/audience/player. A lot of it is second-person “you touch the wobbly-wobbly bits of the machine”.

I think this might be an analogue of “why isn’t theater more popular?” (It is, but most people watch TV and Movies; not everyone likes theater.) Most theater is comfortable, you sit in an audience but it has a buy-in of performative participation - the audience reacts, applauds, might get spoken to directly by the characters - and some people don’t understand that. I was a performer for decades and I frequently hate audience participation except under specific circumstances.

I think interactive fiction involves a bit of perceived risk some might not be comfortable with since the story does not play out with the reader as a passive audience. In a “regular game” you pilot an avatar, you might get shot at and die but the risk is known. In a book the story parameters are not spelled out, but you know it’s going to progress; with interactive fiction, you might be responsible for jamming up the plot and never finishing the story.

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Yeah, I had years to think about the puzzles in Zork and Hitch-Hiker’s, haha. I was 12 so I couldn’t really go out and buy more games to the extent that I do now, so it was okay that these puzzles “lasted” forever.

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There are many factors as to why there’s a lack of mainstream popularity with interactive fiction. A few of my observations include:

In the early days of computers, everybody read to get information through newspapers, magazines, books, etc. Reading was a stronger skill than it is today. Now we have video clips, podcasts, and bit-sized text messages.

Increased screen time has translated to shorter attention spans. The effortness described in previous comments is in direct conflict with attention spans. Reading is a very constructive way to combat boredom.

Pessimistic (and possibly unsubstantiated) Opinion: In general, reading is less enjoyable these days due to screens so the interest in reading is less, in my opinion. For anyone who prefers to read physical print, think about the look and feel of the paper grain, the slightly faded ink, the sound of the page turning, the progression through the stack of pages, noticing the occasional curled corner, placing your bookmark between the pages when you need to take a break. All these things stimulate our brains in a good way, but all these things are in stark contrast to a screen that you swipe or tap on, where every sentence read feels sterile and is presented in exactly the same manner as the previous. (Your brain is not nearly as engaged with a screen.)

Luckily, there is a push to bring back text books and pencils, and remove the reliance on screens from the classrooms and homework. With this, we might see reading for enjoyment gain traction once again.

I get that IF typically embraces an archaic form of videogaming (and this makes it objectively niche), but it sure doesn’t help that our society has moved away from the skills and habits that make typical IF enjoyable in the first place. You know, that equally archaic skill known as reading.

I remember not liking graphic adventure games as much when they moved on from the parser input. (Like the first Quest for Glory in EGA, not the newer VGA version.) There was something so satisfying about choosing how to interactive with an object (from my own deductive reasoning) than with a hand icon activated with a click and a prescribed action taking place.

@Giger_Kitty
Are there many newer AGS games that use the parser mechanic throughout the game?

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Not many. Off the top of my head I really only remember Trilby’s Notes. Not to say there aren’t more; I played probably every AGS game around before leaving AGS in general, which was around 2008 or so… and in the meantime AGS never stopped (thankfully!), so there’s a lot of stuff I’m currently catching up on. But I don’t expect to find a parser game.

Trilby’s Notes is nice. It’s part of a longer series, which started by 5 Days a Stranger. A Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw game.

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Crimson Diamond came out recently, and used the parser throughout - it’s a Laura Bow homage:

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Saw that Crimson Diamond was on Itch as well, and someone made a collection on Itch of parser graphic adventure games. Cool!

→ https://itch.io/c/2774575/parser-graphic-adventures

Looks awesome! I ended up downloading ScummVM in order to launch it full screen with better pixel sharpness. It was blurry on Windows natively. Thanks for the recommendation!

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