CIRCA:Text Adventure (Computer Game Genre)

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Definition and Summary

Text adventures are a type of computer game that makes use of descriptive commands (verbs such as 'look,' 'go north,' 'open door') which ,when entered on a computer command line by typing, produce algorithmic responses that affect changes in the progress of a virtual fictional narrative. Typical features of the genre include:

  • second person perspective
  • alternate narrative branches


commands consisting of

later include pictures


The history of the genre is parallel to the advent of personal computing, with the first text adventure



    • Second-person perspective.



The genre has also been termed interactive fiction, underscoring its relation to literary fiction as exemplified by the novelform. However, not all fictions with which one can interact are computer games, least text adventures. Similarly, not all computer programs in which descriptive commands that affect changes to a virtual scenario are text adventures. Text adventures combine have the following typical features:


Interactive fictions


improvisation, alternate choices and outcomes)


prompt the computer to update the user with a textual or graphical description of the actions those verbs stand for being performed in the context of an ongoing story .



the results of those actions in an imaginative scenario or story that progresses according to. 

Context Points arguements





Will Crowther's

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