Basics of Interactive Fiction

How to play Interactive Fiction ?

In Interactive Fiction, the player interacts with and influences the outcome of a story by entering commands in a text interface, the "parser".

Example conversation:

You stand in front of a house. You can see the front door which is closed.
> open door
It appears to be closed.
> look under the door mat
You didn't think it would be that easy, did you ?

Most works of Interactive Fiction share a common dictionary, which is usually generated by the authoring system whey were created with, but a lot of them also define a set of story-specific words that invite the player to experiment. Common commands are e.g.

Of course there are many more words/phrases modern works of IF can recognize. One of the most interesting aspects of the text parser interface is that it invites the player to experiment, instead of offering a fixed set of options.