Some people call me John. I played my first text adventure on a friend’s Atari 400, having loaded it from a cassette drive. Remember those? Not tape drives – I mean cassettes. I do. I drive a ’94 Toyota Tercel with a factory cassette deck. I also have a flip-phone. But enough about me.

“Interactive fiction” or “IF” is what they call text adventures now. I prefer the ones with a parser. The parser is the thing that pretends to understand you when you say, “Go north,” or “I’m trying everything I can, dammit!” It’s like having a girlfriend. Yes, I remember what that was like.

The other (main) type of IF (I’m speaking generally here – the stuff that gets entered into competitions labeled “for interactive fiction”) is what they call “choice-based.” These are like those old choose-your-own-adventure books. I’m sure you remember those. (You remember cassettes and the Toyota Tercel, after all.) I prefer the parser ones, which I already wrote and doesn’t bear repeating. We’ll get into the reasons for that later but for the record, I’ve played / read great and terrible examples of both types, so I don’t go in with preconceived notions, which of course is what every biased person always says.

Enjoy my blog. Or don’t.