We use a bloody quill and a roll of parchment to draw our own.
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Do you mean bloody as in dipped in blood? Or are you talking like an Australian?
âWe use a bloody quill and we like it!â
-Wade
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It sort of works either way, doesnât it?
As for the remark that potential authors might want to look elsewhere if seeking commercial success⌠maybe? It really depends. We have plenty of brilliant programmers, writers, and artists here who could have moved smoothly into the contemporary âfree-to-playâ gaming app market and have likely found commercial success there, or at least more plausibly than here. But they havenât. A poll run recently found that two thirds of the authors here wouldnât do this for a living even if it were commercially viable. As for the remaining third⌠If I may go out on a limb here, I suspect what keeps many folks here is an enduring love for the medium. For those trying to make money with IF, I suspect they donât only want to be commercially viable; they want to be commercially viable doing what they love. Otherwise, it isnât a dream job, itâs just a job.
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Some members of our community founded successful indie studios and earned fame if not fortune. But I had the opportunity to get into the actual game industry, making big-name games for big money. If someone makes you that sort of offer, my advice is to run away screaming. Better to make text adventures for fun in oneâs spare time.
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To each its own. I certainly am in this for love of the media, not for money.
Kind regards,
[INCANUS]
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Iâve played a few games that are so cool, and you just canât find anywhere else. Thereâs definitely an attraction. For me, itâs a bit of the thrill of âthe huntâ for unique gaming experiences. It also helps that my computer is a dinosaur⌠so Iâm ripe for playing IF!
I play my IF games at a silky smooth 60fps while rendering hundreds of words at a time, bitches! 
I donât think IF will ever be commercially viable as a genre. Itâs obscure and antiquated by todayâs standards. Still, there might be a diamond in the rough out there for an original IF game that takes the world by storm. I present my magnum opusâŚ
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I use Trizbort, but even that is something that most players wonât do.
I love parser-based games, but I canât turn a blind eye to the fact that when it comes to an acceptable and modern-looking user interface, thereâs little or no progress.
For example, last yearâs IFComp winning game (Dr. Ludwig and the Devil) still technically looks like it escaped from the eighties.
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Somebody really wants to bring back that old IF Arcade eventâŚ
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I found the scan! Sorry, lowres, but Iâll put a link to the website where I found it.
Looks like the raunchy Leather Goddesses of Phobos is rather popular! Border Zone, not so much.
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Interesting. MFV sales werenât that bad, actuallyâŚ
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I agree, but âelsewhereâ doesnât have to mean outside of gaming.
[caution, Hanon-meandering tangent ahead]
GPS technology for civilians was released in the early 1980s and soon you could buy all number of advanced and somewhat pricey GPS specific devices for your car which could track your position on a map and even navigate you to a destination. Some even could speak to you so you could keep your eyes on the road! These often needed to be manually updated for map changes, often plugged into a computer for downloaded files. Sometimes you would pay for your specific state or region if you didnât need all the maps if you didnât drive cross-country or into Canada.
Whereâd all these devices go? Nowadays GPS mapping and navigation is seamlessly built into phones where it works better than a separate one-use device as navigation can be a component of many tasks such as shopping, weather, emergency alerts, etc and thereâs no real market for separate personal consumer GPS devices. The technology works for free in the device you already have, so why would you buy one unless you need a backup for your yacht when sailing outside of cell-tower coverage?
In my usual roundabout way, Iâm not saying IF is obsolete, itâs just been adapted into bigger sorts of games that can now have conversation trees and descriptions of objects you examine and unique interfaces other than typing. Inkle Studios is probably the best example of bridging the gap between pure text IF and a boardgame/phone game that appeals to players whoâve never heard of Zork.
As novice hobbyists, we can still revel in classic IF games and the creation of new ones, but our tools we can use most easily as singular and small groups of authors and creators are essentially components of larger games that people are used to paying for and wonât backslide technology-wise. In order for pure IF to be âsuccessfulâ commercially nowadays creators need to evolve and take advantage of new paradigms.
Parser and choice IF was always sort of a transitional phase of gaming - using words to describe bigger experiences without creating the experience outright due to technology limitations. Now that those limitations are not an issue it would be backsliding for the general public to massively embrace text adventures on their own. Nobody is going to a restaurant and paying for a recipe and a menu description of food; they will pay to have the food presented to them as a full experience. That doesnât mean recipe-writing isnât important, itâs more of a fundamental part of the process.
I can hear people yelling âBut people need to be more literate and readâŚâ most people do, but reading is a completely different mode of interaction and skillset from gaming. I kind of think interactive fiction teabags the split between the complex stats/dice/lore/research/interaction of an RPG or CRPG that there is a hard-core audience and fanbase for, and the semi-passive experience of prose reading that most people enjoy in a neutral-zone that most mainstream game-players just donât gravitate to.
This is cool though: Inkle Studios showed us that a choice-narrative can become Game of the Year if presented correctly. Weâre not going to ever be able to profit off of bare .gblorb files that someone can slap into any random interpreter. CoG comes the closest to doing this by leaning more toward the publishing/bookselling paradigm, and by creating their own sub-genre of games with interaction and agency parameters that their core audience expects similar to series-fiction like the branded Choose Your Own Adventure books did in print.
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I first met Jon Ingold at the very first IF Meetup I attended, which was down in Greenwich or somewhere around fifteen years ago, when Inkle was still in its infancy. I remember him telling me that the future of IF was choice-based, and I was sceptical, but look at them now!
Commercial parser IF does still exist and Strand Games, represented by our very own Hugh Steers @jkj_yuio seem to be doing well. Strand have already implemented many of the ease-of-use innovations being discussed in the sister-thread to this one.
âCreating those experiences outrightâ - Iâm sorry, but I just donât buy this. No game creates an experience outright. Some games use pictures, some use words. Some experiences work better in pictures and some work better in words. Itâs all representation. Movies have been around for a hundred years - and I love movies, Iâm a film-maker among other things - but I also love books. Parser and choice IF arenât a transitional phase of anything, theyâre a complete and valid artform in their own right. Theyâre just not as popular as other types of videogame because they require a different kind of attention and engagement.
IF is a subset of gaming, but itâs also a subset of literature. Weâre all writers here. Why are we second-guessing ourselves? Why have we lost confidence in the power of words? Did Hemingway or Faulkner or Emily Dickenson or Ursula K. Le Guin ever stop and say, maybe if I added pictures and sound my work would be more valid? Then why are we?
Name one game you can eat.
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I hope if someone is trying to play a parser-based IF, they would be more interested in reading things than not 
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SUPERBRIEF
This game is now in its âsuperbriefâ mode, which always gives short descriptions of locations (even if you havenât been there before).INSTRUCTIONS
Type words. Play game.OK
I didnât understand that sentence.GOT IT
I didnât understand that sentence.HELP
Type words. Play game.ARGH
I didnât understand that sentence.
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You beat me to it.
Although, I canât help noting that you can eat most things at least once. 
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We havenât, Iâm also saying that people shouldnât get wrapped up worrying that text adventures wonât become a popular commercial genre again.
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I actually think you and Hanon are both right. Thereâs no denying that we wouldnât be where we are without those first steps of text adventures pushing the boundaries of how we interact with computers. That is a valid way to view IF.
Thereâs also no dispute that you both value IF as a valid art form. I mean, weâre all here because we appreciate the merit interactive fiction has.
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You can eat the destroying angel once. Just once though.
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