I was playing a text-based game on itch.io today, but was surprised because in Zork (which was pretty much my only other exposure to IF up to this point), players are given a handful of commands that they can use at any time to pretty much do whatever they want. This game, on the other hand, gave players a handful of choices of actions to take. What are these two types of IF called? Which one is more common? What other types of IF are out there?
Thanks!
Oh by the way, hereâs the link to the game. LUNIUM by radiosity
Parser-based (e.g. Zork) and choice-based (e.g. LUNIUM). That game was made in Twine. We in this forum use a pretty wide definition of interactive fiction, generally accepting that if itâs text-focused and interactive, it counts.
Actually, hereâs a question I donât know the answer to: do people consider VNs under choice-based games, or their own thing?
Never heard of a âVNâ. What is it exactly?
edit⌠nevermind. I think it is Visual Novel. (What I would call a form of comic.
People have different answers to that one, but personally I donât think it makes sense to cordon them off from choice-based games when the difference is generally one of aesthetic and not interaction style.
Two main categories of IF are parser IF (the kind where players type commands) and choice IF (the kind where players typically choose options or hyperlinked words to navigate through a story).
Some games donât entirely fall at either the parser or choice ends of the continuum, but are somewhere in between. You can read about those here: Parser-choice hybrid - IFWiki
Iâd say a Visual Novel is a type of choice-narrative since choices are selected and there is no parser interpreting player input, but much of the story is told with sprite graphics and text or audio dialogue instead of just description. Modern VNs even employ 3D navigation and motion-animation.
In a VN you donât need to describe routine actions. Essentially you donât write âBob enters the room. He says âHello there.ââ You see a cutout sprite of Bobâs character enter the screen in front of a room background and get his dialogue âHello thereâ - or even audio voice acting. Itâs a little like directing a play or a puppet show or planning animation moreso than writing a novel of descriptive text since there are graphics. Thatâs not to say thereâs no text description in VNs, but itâs used in particular and unique ways. In fact, many times you get dialogue that describes what theyâre doing because the art doesnât explicitly show it. âNatsuki sat down at the desk with her head in her handsâ but thereâs no art or sprite in that configuration, so thatâs described, but the cutout portraits still talk standing up as they usually do.
In general - but not always - Visual Novels are low agency - the choices tend to be fewer and affect less of the plot and players may watch scenes and dialogue that are minutes long before making a choice. In Doki Doki Literature Club Iâd bet there are fewer than ten choices in a five-hour playthrough that actually cause anything like a plot branch or detour. There are exceptions and some very complicated VNs, but the general plot contour is narrow branch-and-bottleneck. There are also VN hybrids that employ mini games like Danganronpa and RPG/fighting like Persona since the VN style lends itself very well to plot-based cutscenes and dialogue options blended with another type of game.
Iâd say parser games and standard non-graphical choice narratives are both âtext adventuresâ but a visual novel is by definition not a text adventure.
Generally for our purposes VNs are their own thing because theyâre very specific with their own different set of tropes and conventions and expectations. VNs have been entered into IFComp and discussion is welcome here, but thereâs a whole Visual Novel community with more activity in their corners of the internet if thatâs your specific interest.
For an example of a modern and super-complicated VN, check out Date Everything.
I like Hidnookâs and bgâs answers. And I would argue that there is at least one type of IF that cannot be confined to either of the better known categories of parser fiction or choice fictionâIF in which the player chooses words without knowing the context in which they will be used. The well-known commercial works of this variety are collectively known as Mad Libs, but even before Mad Libs the same principle was employed in the parlor game Consequences.
There are two types of IF game: âwetâ and âdryâ.
Wet: Counterfeit Monkey, Howling Dogs, Eat Me, Coloratura.
Dry: Spider and Web, Bureau of Strange Happenings, The Wizard Sniffer, Birdland.
Now Iâm curious about Counterfeit Monkey. Wet? It feels like a fairly dry game to me.
EDIT: Not dry as in boring! But it doesnât strike me as similar to the rest of the games in that list.
I donât make the rules.
Birdland is emotional and takes place on a lake, so I donât see how this can be.
I would have said âtext adventureâ referred only to a subset of those games, even to the extent that it could connote being âstuck in the 80sâ. âAdventureâ makes me think of a fairly lengthy puzzlefest. Likely it has a sprawling map and requires good note-taking, although I can think of some graphical adventures which are linear (Space Quest for instance). Maybe itâs more that adventures are games you âbeatâ, not âfinishâ.
Not woody and tinny?
The term âtext adventureâ is all over the place these days and even less useful than âinteractive fictionâ.
âIFâ at least has consistent community usage behind it since the Usenet days. What the community means by it has shifted, but you can look at the history on that.
I think âText adventureâ gets used when someone is explicitly not saying âinteractive fictionâ â but the reason theyâre not using it is not consistent. It has a retro tone to it (as paul-donnelly was saying), or it gets used in a broad literal sense of âgames made mostly of textâ (as HanonO was saying).
I donât understand the wet/dry distinction.
And yeah, Iâd argue text is a type of presentation, parser is a type of interface, and adventure is a genre. A parser interface might imply a textual presentation, but you can have a parser interface in a graphical or audio game. Text Adventure might imply a parser interface, but you could implement a text adventure under a choice interface or with gamepad-style controls. And thereâs no reason you couldnât use the text parser presentation-interface style to implement non-adventure games⌠Like say a Chess game where you feed the parser commands like âPawn to E3â or âKingâs side Castleâ or âWhite queen captures Black Knightâ⌠And if youâre familiar with the puzzle game 2048, where you slide numbered tiles on a 4*4 board where if tiles with the same value collide, they fuse into a tile with their combined value and ever move spawns a 2 tile in a random empty space, you probably know it from a smartphone app that implements it as a graphical game with swipe touch controls, but I play it frequently via a version for the Linux console that implements it as text with arrow key controls.
Admittedly, there are some game genres so strongly associated with a graphical presentation and gamepad-style interfaces that its hard to imagine them implemented with text parsers⌠and the line between adventure game and RPG is a bit fuzzy(If I had to draw the line, Iâd say Adventure games tend to have few PC statsthat are either immutable or upgraded in very distinct units with player progression mainly happening through collecting new equipment to unlock abilities while RPGs tend to be more number crunchy with more incremental improvement to player stats largely gained through some kind of experience system, but again, fuzzy)âŚ
I thought it was âgunâ and âfrockâ.
A big difference between adventures and pretty much all other games is that in an adventure you will do a given thing once, twice, but not âmanyâ times. The wider world of games is the exact opposite: you perform the same action hundreds or thousands of times, as a basic feature of the game design. Doing a fun thing repeatedly is the whole draw of playing a game, generally.
The main repetitive activity in an adventure is mapping, and I suppose restarting and replaying the game to optimize your solution.
Itâs not totally exclusive to adventure: lots of IF which might not be an adventure is non-repetitive, and presumably there are non-repetitive games which arenât IF or an adventure in any sense (although I canât think of an example). But other than that, itâs hard to overstate this design divide.
According to this claim, the more stat changes you get, and the more largely similar battles you fight, in between solving each puzzle, the more you move from adventure territory to RPG territory.
I guess youâve never tried the Babel Fish puzzle? 
Also grinding in QBNs like Fallen London is a thing, akin to leveling up stats in an RPG.