Text adventure

Text adventures are interactive fiction based in a text-only interface (though they may sometimes also include a graphical map alongside the game), or games which the player commands and controls characters, environments and mechanics exclusively through text.

This is generally done through the use of a "text parser" in which the player types in specific verbs and nouns - to which the game responds with text based descriptions of the results of their actions - and types in compass points or locations to move.

The text adventure is one of the oldest and most longstanding genres in gaming, spawning from the 1975 game Adventure (a.k.a. Colossal Cave Adventure or simply Adventure) and peaking in popularity in the early 1980s through the company Infocom and games such as Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and A Mind Forever Voyaging. The genre's popularity died down in the late 1980s due to success of graphic adventure games. However, an amateur online community formed in the late 1990s through developers such as Andrew Plotkin, Adam Cadre and Emily Short and the success of their games such as Spider and Web, Photopia and Galatea helped see the genre remain active at a more niche, amateur level which continued into the 21st century.

Text adventures without text parsers which include interaction through clicking or selecting between specific paths or options are referred to as choose your own adventure games.