The chapter by Rettberg gives a nice introduction and background into what interactive fiction is and how it has evolved over time, starting with Adventure, evolving with the creation of Infocom, and expanding from an open-source-like medium being shared for some games. Although these text based games aren’t as popular now, they do seem to bring back a sense of nostalgia for me. When I play these games I am especially reminded of PC games I played growing up, like The Oregon Trail, which had similar elements of story telling and decision making to what many of these text-based games have. Although they lack solely being a text-based game, I feel that they are the same at heart. These games all have an “interactor” that is working toward a definable goal that’s to be solved through some sort of reasoning. In a sense, most video games now can be resolved into a ‘flavor’ of an interactive fiction.
I thought the other readings were great examples of interactive fiction, and I had a lot of fun playing them. I think that these games have allowed for a new age of interaction that people didn’t have a lot of before. I almost see it as a Choose Your Own Adventure that’s been ported from a physical version to a digital version. One thing that may be lacking though is that it would be hard to find all possible outcomes, as they may even be infinite. Contrary to the affordance that books are finite, this medium allows for an infinite, or almost infinite, medium as a user could replay the game many times without scratching the surface of all possible outcomes.