The bright reader has already figured out how interaction works in text adventures: the game prints a brief paragraph of text describing the players’ immediate environment or the result of their last action, followed by a prompt sign, after which the player types in what they want to do next.6 There are technical differences here between narrator, player character, and player but we’ll brush past that for the moment. The instructions the player types into the prompt look like English, but they follow a fairly strict format used in almost all text adventures by convention. These are recognised by a component of the game called the parser. Despite the strict format, some of the joy of playing these text adventures is trying something crazy, like in Plundered Hearts when we stand on the balcony above the ballroom, see the rope on which the chandelier is attached, type SWING ON ROPE … and the player character comes crashing down onto the dancing guests with a big “Aiieeee!” It’s outside the conventional commands, but it makes sense and the author catered for it. Text adventures typically take a simulationist approach to narration. This means the author has not specified what happens in any given situation. Instead, what happens next is determined mechanistically by the player’s actions given the current world state. Maybe we need to cross a violent river, but it’s up to us if we want to block it, re-route it, magically freeze it, or jetpack over it. The progress is gated on being able to cross, not how that ability is achieved. The violent river is an example of a puzzle, which are usually strewn throughout text adventures. These puzzles are used to pace the narrative, and avoid dumping everything on the player at once. Obstacles get placed in the way of progress, and the player needs to find ways around them to experience more of the story. The puzzle-pacing of text adventures means they can often contain a lot more detail and flavour text than a corresponding novel, because the player slowly uncovers the text they are most interested in, and are free to ignore the rest.7 Well, any information needed to solve puzzles cannot be ignored, of course. Old school games tended to hide such information in the most innocuous places, requiring careful searching of every nook and cranny to proceed. Modern games, by contrast, tend to be more forgiving and hint more actively at which locations are important to search.