Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as video games. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only". Graphical text adventure games, where the text is accompanied by graphics still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is text. Some users of the term distinguish between "interactive fiction" that focuses on narrative and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles. Meanwhile, more expansive definitions of "interactive fiction" may include all adventure games, including wholly graphical adventures such as Myst. As a commercial product, interactive fiction reached its peak in popularity from 1979–1986, as a dominant software product marketed for home computers. Due to their text-only nature it sidestepped the problem of writing for the widely divergent graphics architectures, this meant interactive fiction games were easily ported across all the popular platforms, even those such as CP/M not known for gaming or strong graphics capabilities. Today, a steady stream of new works is produced by an online interactive fiction community, using freely available development systems. Wikipedia [ - ]

Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players... [ + ]