Sure, but action-advenure is also almost meaningless when trying to describe a type of game, because it covers such a ridiculously huge variety of games.
I read that Braid also was partly inspired by Trinity (I believe it is mentioned in the credits). And the gameplay and symbolism obviously draws on SMB. 
All these categories and genres are fuzzy.
I see nothing wrong with that. Games represent an infinite spectrum of possibility.
Is Zork Zero a text adventure even though it has graphics, and a choice based card game? I think so. Others may disagree.
That’s why we clarify our terms in a discussion, but trying to put rigid definitions to these things is rather pointless and ultimately doomed to failure.
It is tricky, which is why this is a common discussion. “Fiction” is higher on the genre tree. Most movies and books read for entertainment are also fictional but not interactive.
I’d say Detroit and Life is Strange are closer to IF than Mass Effect is. Both of those could probably be converted to text narratives. I’d probably consider those “graphic adventures” or even perhaps Visual Novels with very specific and customized interaction.
Thus the need for genre-specification (and possibly more specifically interaction-style specification). If I say I want to play IF and you give me Mario Galaxy I’m probably not going to ask you for other recommendations since you clearly didn’t understand what I was looking for. Terming everything as IF is just as unhelpful as “action adventure” - although you then understand the interaction style that will be involved.
(This occurs to me - IF has the player interacting with the fiction via words and text instead of interacting via action or fighting/shooting components, often with WASD or a controller, so that might be a key component as well.)
I often wonder if these discussions originate because someone wants to discuss or promote any random type of computer or console game to the IF audience just because “there’s a fictional story you can interact with!”
It would be totally fine to discuss those types of games here - we have Off-Topic discussion categories. But I think the actual IF audience is savvy enough to recognize what IF is (or their preferred flavor of it) even when the genre lines are blurred for marketing purposes or due to genuine cluelessness.
We often delete drive-by promotions of (usually mobile) games specifically for this reason. If you are part of this community and wish to discuss anything reasonbly off-topic that’s fine, but that privilege is reserved for the community and not for blanket-spam “Hey, buy our mobile LORDS OF WAR game because it has interactive fiction elements!” messages.
Noted, but I don’t think anyone’s doing that here, are they?
This one wasn’t started out of the blue. It split off from this conversation to not clog up the review thread.
Oh I see! I’d assumed this was just the latest in those annual group therapy sessions that the community has been running for the past quarter of a century (as helpfully documented above, by Brian).
Still don’t think there’s an ulterior motive though (at, least not with the OP in this thread).
An idle suggestion:
Given that these threads on the boundaries of interactive fiction vs. text adventures, games vs. stories, etc., pop up so regularly, sometimes getting closed by the mods but always coming back, what if we had one megathread on the subject where anyone who wants to debate this could be directed? Other forums have isolated threads for religion or politics or the text editor wars, and this topic is probably our closest equivalent of such.
Well, vim is clearly text adventure, while emacs is action-adventure.
This is emac’s learning curve:
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This is vim’s:
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Now that we’ve settled this question, who wants to discuss whether video games are art? 
Isn’t art graphics or can it be text?
Discussing this today has made me realize that when people go about attempting to grandly define the genre of “interactive fiction” we tend to focus on what the game displays to the player. What I’ve realized is the solution is the other way around:
(This is all my potentially malleable opinion, not a decree, YMMV of course)
For a work to qualify for the genre of IF, the player should be controlling the game primarily via text:
Inclusively, the game-world should also be described in a major capacity via text.
And that…kind of takes care of it from what I can consider.
Additionally:
Can the game be read to someone in most of its entirety and played over the phone or with a non-sighted individual without sacrificing any of the plot or primary gameplay? (Any visual or audio elements are not necessary to understand or play the game, and not just described by the reader - the game needs to furnish text narration) If yes, it is IF.
I will maintain that Visual Novels are a very specialized form of IF, often with very customized controls.
I realize those games include a 3D-navigable space in the first, and moving an avatar in the second. However both of these modes of navigation boil down to very elaborate menus, and navigation is skippable via map screens for fast travel which is also a choice menu. A clickable map doesn’t necessarily disqualify something from being IF, and Visual Novels include an enormous amount of text, almost to the point that the graphics may be completely superfluous, and most action is narrated instead of implicitly shown in the visuals. Good god, the game never just shows a door opening; there’s always eight screens of “I reached for the handle and turned it…the door clicked…then it creaked open…I looked through the door to see what was behind it, full of expectation…and I slowly walked through the door…” 
(This series also contains graphical mini games but the primary mode of interaction is selecting words on the screen, even in the non-stop debate segments. Even though the text is moving and potentially evading the player selecting it on a moderate timer, the primary interaction is still selecting choices made from text.
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VNs are tough because not all of them involve choices of any kind. There are some that fall under the “kinetic novel” form of VNs which means it’s like 30 hours of reading without any user input.
It’s like saying CYOAs are interactive fiction… but what happens if you remove the choices? It’s just straight fiction, right? That’s why I have a difficult time choosing the correct verb for VNs. Am I reading it or playing it? I tend to flip flop back and forth between the two for no real reason.
Removing the choices gives you a non-interactive story, especially if you’re just clicking “continue” or “next page.”
Including choices within the text that aren’t labeled as such, but boil down to “next page” or just display additional non-critical text may put a work into the “dynamic fiction” category, which is a specialized type of IF which removes most player-agency for narrative pacing but is still interactive (if only slightly) in some capacity. I can understand the argument that removing interactivity from interactive fiction seems counterproductive, but what other genre can they be put into? Especially when they frequently rely on text-styling or other tricks that don’t appear in static fiction like cycling choices the player can click on but don’t significantly alter the plot.
Take a look at Babyface from last year’s IFComp, which is completely linear, but the player may select choices that advance the plot in slightly different order, and also involves interacting with photographs.
I’d agree that VNs fall into “kinetic novel” and “interactive fiction” flavors. Some VNs involve maintaining a complicated schedule and relationships that are the bulk of the plot branching.
Easy.
Video games are art as much as anything else is art.
Sculpture, painting, music, dancing, screeching at random passerbys on a street corner…you know, the classics.
Today I learned: I become an artist when I’m drunk.
This had been discussed to death back in the day. I won’t jump into the rabbit hole and scratch up old wounds here. To me personally “text adventure” is a marketing term that goes well when targeting the retro scene. As the person who created two of the most renowned text based adventure games for 8-bit and 16-bit systems in recent years, I can say: it does work, regardless whether the hype surrounding my games is justified.
Why the whole discussion resurfaced straight from 1988 is because there are two scenes who developed differently. There is the retro scene, which grew very strong in recent years, as the download numbers for Hibernated (+5.300) and Rabenstein (+7.500) prove. And then there is the IF scene, who went threw different states of evolution, which is amazing, since the 90s. The problem with the retro scene is that it’s a lot about reliving childhood memories or to even build upon that memories. So the mindset somewhat was frozen in time which results in these old discussions reappearing out of nowhere.
The good news is there are efforts to build bridges, no matter if that happens intentionally. Just have a look at @fredrik and his projects Ozmoo and PunyInform, which brings back decent libraries and interpreters back to old systems. Or @mulehollandaise, who with Tristam Island now created the first game which appeals to both retro and IF scene. I am working on new stuff as well, as you know.
I think instead of looking back and disscet this topic again and again and again, we should look forward to the bright future ahead.
Right on!
Meaning comes not only from definition but through usage, certainly with the passage of time. Most of us know pretty much what is being discussed when talking about IF, text-adventures, CYOA,… If there’s a misunderstanding, it’s easily clarified in a few extra descriptive words.
Me personally, I intuitively use “IF” as the overarching game-type and “text-adventure” as the more puzzly/exploratory subset of those games. Come to think of it, I also use “IF” as a term for the more narrative literary games. And for choice-games. And “text-adventure” might be a paper-and-ink CYOA-book. And so on and so forth…
It seems it is now time for some light reading to shed some light on matters. Philosophische Untersuchungen by Wittgenstein looks like a good place to start.
The difference between a text adventure player and an interactive fiction player is that a text adventure player will ruin a piece of interactive fiction by looking under the bed. 