Interactive fiction: the fascinating space between literature and games

destructoid.com:

Narrative games may be a small niche within the gaming industry as a whole, but there’s an even smaller subsection of the genre that a lot of gamers don’t know about: interactive fiction also known as IF. With the exception of some UI upgrades or a musical score, the vast majority of IF is just simple text on a screen that the player clicks through. It exists in the space between my two favorite things: literature and video games. Technically interactive fiction got its start in the late 1970s with text adventures like Zork, but now the world of text-based games has taken on a whole new life.

I’ve always dabbled in the world of IF, but when I came across this thread on Twitter, it reminded me that the community surrounding this genre is more active among the writers and narrative designers in games than one might think.

I love interactive fiction for a few reasons, chief among them being that I love reading, but also because IF does something that a vast majority of games do not — it puts story above gameplay. I know this is kind of sacrilegious in the games space, but in the world of IF, interactivity is used more for artistic narrative expression than anything else.

Take the piece titled “growth” by Liz England, for example. I recommend playing it (it’s short, like two minutes tops) before you proceed, because I’m about to spoil it.

It starts with the player finding a growth on their hand, and gives them a few options like “Call a doctor” and “Call a friend.” As they start making these choices, however, they realize that nothing they can do will really help to make the growth go away. The choices soon become more and more unhinged, and eventually end with the player cutting off the growth themselves, which they then