Baf's Guide to the IF Archive

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Game Listing by Genre

  • Abuses - There are systems that were designed for the sole purpose of creating Interactive Fiction. There are people perverse enough to make these systems do other things, things to which they are not ideally suited. These are those things.
  • Adaptation - Games based on existing works in other media, or on characters or things from such works.
  • Children's - Games aimed at the very young.
  • Collegiate - The large number of text adventures set on college campuses can only be attributed to the fact that such a large proportion of amateur game writers are college students. It's such a common theme that by now it must be counted as its own genre.
  • Educational - Games designed with teaching in mind.
  • Espionage - Games about spies and international intrigue.
  • Fantasy - Games concerning the magical and fabulous.
  • Historical - Games with an emphasis on recreating a historical perod or periods in detail. (NB: In some cases, this emphasis only exists in parts of the game.)
  • Horror - Tales of fear, monsters, and/or the dark and supernatural.
  • Humor - Games that spend a good chunk of their time trying to be funny. They can occupy other genres as well, but if humor is one of the main goals of the game, it belongs in this category.
  • Mystery - Tales of crime and detection.
  • Pornographic - Games based largely on sexual content.
  • Religious - Games based primarily on spiritual content.
  • Romance - Love stories. Boy meets girl, that sort of thing.
  • RPG - Role-playing games. Most IF involves playing a role, but in the world of computer games, an RPG basically means something that, in some way, imitates the mechanics of playing Dungeons & Dragons.
  • Science Fiction - Basically the same as Fantasy, except that everything is accomplished using advanced technology instead of incantations.
  • Seasonal - Games tied to a particular holiday or time of year.
  • Slice of life - Plausible representations of everyday occurences in real life in modern times.
  • Superhero - The genre inspired by Superman, featuring people with greater-than-human abilities, secret identities, etc.
  • Surreal - Bizarre worlds, unreliable perceptions, and distorted realities. (No, it's not a definition of Surrealism that Andre Breton would approve of, but it's a distinct attitude found in games that use text to escape the plausible or imaginable.)
  • Travel - Games with an emphasis on real-world geography, either concerning a voyage or presenting a particular real locale in detail.
  • Western - Tales of the American frontier, or at least tales resembling tales of the American frontier.
  • Unassigned - Games that have not been assigned any genres


Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive
Copyright © 2011 Carl Muckenhoupt
All reviews included in this site are copyright © the credited author of the review.