You can eat the destroying angel once. Just once though.
I donāt see us losing confidence in the words. I see questions about how to bring more people into the fold, which means compromise to some degree with a few well-thought-out gauntlets thrown down. Not changing the medium, but adding to it.There are so many readers and puzzle-solvers out there! They should be ours! Thereās an unfortunate configuration of circumstance that prevents them from finding us and falling under our spell. How do we bridge that? And if someone made some money (unlikely, but folks can dream and weirder things have happened) along the way, awesome. But the primary goal should be to seduce the people and bring them into the fold.
If more people discovered IF and played our free games on IFDB, weād all be happy even without a dime. But there must be baited fishhooks if this is ever going to happen.
Hey, wait, thatās my job! 
I wonder how we can do thisā¦
I do not know about others, but I very much believe in the power of words.
THIS. (Okay it was not a parser game, but the effect would be similar if not the same if written as parser.) And when I read through the reviews of my One King entry for IFComp, I definitely made an impression 
. I do need to work on my grammar skills and try to write more succinctly.
Iāve been working the street corners during my lunch breaks, but people keep giving me dirty looks. Iām at a loss too. Thereās one creepy fellow that looks interested, but Iām not sure he actually wants to play interactive fiction.
You wonāt know for sure unless you try. Go take one for the team. 
I know some lady who used to paint and place rocks to promote reduce, reuse, recycle. Maybe we 3D print a stencil for a QR code for the IFDB. Then we can covertly graffiti bomb IF messages IRL.
ETA: Before Zarf sits on me, I say this in jest of course.
Iām concerned. But also amused. But concerned.
Now that you mention it, I wonder why all my board game pieces are disappearingā¦
What an alarming image. I wasnāt aware this is how Zarf punishes people.
Seducing people means giving them what they want, priming them to want more, and then showing them the way they can have more. Onboarding.
So we need to give them what they want, which is cheap/free, easily accessible, pretty, user-friendly games that are right in their faces (meaning advertised and pimped by authorities and on platforms that our targeted audience uses). Meet them part way to prime them. Every example thatās been given of modified parsers has been decidedly retro. We donāt want retro. We want sleek, modern stuff. Not that thereās anything wrong with retro. Itās just not the way to get attention.
Amen, sister!
Iāll make the picket signs.
Actually, I donāt want sleek stuff. Itās bound to be more complicated that its worth. Of course, Iām a chess player. Look at board, click here, click there, and done!
Modern chess UI kind of turn me off. Same with IF.
If you want fancy stuff, I donāt object, but give me a simple alternative way to make my moves, or I wonāt be enjoying the game.
Really, thereās nothing wrong with 2-clicks/drag-and-drop UI since thatās universal. IMO.
You are already an IF fan. My point was how to attract the audience that arenāt already IF fans, but should be.
If you want to get them young, you want simple. 5-7 years old arenāt interested in fancy stylings. Once past puberty, itās probably too late. Too much FPS, and unless the interface shows that, they probably arenāt interested.
It took me a very long time to warm up to Visual Novel, just because Iām unfamiliar with them. Even now, Iām incredibly picky about what kind of VN I would be willing to tolerate.
TALP is on that task. I think our task should be to attract the many, many adults who like to read and solve puzzles, and who are big buyers of interactive books, PnC games, and word puzzle games.
Let me illustrate generation gaps.
One of my beta testers lost his game because he assumed that all IF stories will autosave, because all (video) games he played Autosaved. I had to put in an opeing warning that IF stories do not autosave, and explain better how players may SAVE/RESTORE their games.
Since I grew up with text adventures, I didnāt even think about this feature.
My partners were talking about this recently. Something I apparently have missed entirely is that autosave has become near-universal. Maybe I didnāt know this because Iāve stayed buried in the indie scene? Idk, but it was surprising for me to learn as well.