When Professor Sample first mentioned “textual adventure games” I immediately thought of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series that I loved back in middle school. In the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books you are given the perspective of the main character and every page presents you with a decision; based on your choice you flip to another page in the book and follow this progression until your character either dies or completes the story-line. Within each thin novel there are countless ways to arrive at a variety of conclusions.

After playing a couple of computer-based interactive fiction games (“Aisle” and “Lost Pig”), it seems like these are Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books taken to the next level. Instead of being restricted to a couple of options per page, the player is free to look around, ask questions, or interact with objects within the game world. This brings a whole new dimension of interactivity with the narrative of the game.

Both book-based and computer-based textual adventure games force the player to use their imagination to form the game world. From black text on a white background, the player can (with some help from the game designer) explore a cave, stand in a grocery store aisle, or help a troll find a lost pig. It seems plausible that modern graphic-game designers rely too heavily on flashy graphics with weak story-lines and thus remove the player’s ability to form a mental game-world of his or her own creation. I find this very sad as the creation of a mental game-world was always one of my favorite parts of reading the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series.