Interactive fiction

Interactive fiction is storytelling in which a participant’s choices or commands shape the narrative, exploreable world, or both. It includes text-based works and digital forms.

Parser-based interactive fiction: Interactive fiction in which players type natural-language commands that a parser interprets. Typed commands let participants act directly on objects and characters in the story world.
Choose Your Own Adventure: A series of branching children's books that let readers choose among different paths and endings. The books brought explicit narrative choices to a mass audience before digital fiction took hold.
Will Crowther: An American programmer and caver who created the original Adventure computer game. Crowther combined cave exploration with text commands in an early influential interactive narrative.
Text adventure: A game in which players explore a world and solve problems primarily through text. Text adventures are a major game-oriented form of interactive fiction.
Linear narrative: A story whose events are presented in a fixed sequence without participant-directed changes. Interactive fiction lets actions alter access, order, or outcomes where linear narratives do not.
Choice-based interactive fiction: Interactive fiction that presents explicit options for selecting actions or narrative branches. Visible choices provide a different route through branching narrative than typed commands.
Adventure (1976 video game): A pioneering computer adventure game by Will Crowther, later expanded by Don Woods. Its text commands and explorable setting helped establish computer-based interactive storytelling.
Don Woods: An American computer scientist who expanded Adventure into Colossal Cave Adventure. Woods enlarged Crowther’s game and helped shape the text adventure tradition.
Interactive novel: A digital novel in which choices or tracked variables influence the unfolding story. Interactive novels foreground literary prose while letting decisions alter events or endings.
Role-playing game: A game in which players portray characters and make decisions within a rule-governed world. Role-playing games often prioritize character systems and rules beyond the narrative choices central here.

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