Here's a simple question: why do we care about text games at all? What's interesting or different enough about them to bother?
That's a big topic, but I'll hit some high points.
This is the simplest reason: some people just love text. I love reading and I always have. Learning from a video tires me out. Skimming a text webpage isn't bad. And feasting on a real book with that ink-and-dust smell is a treat.
There aren't many "real" commercial text games. There never have been. They were more common long ago, and you'll see the occasional modern recreation or Indie game.
It's a little like rhythm games. Some people love them, some hate them. But if you love them, there's nothing else that scratches that itch.
Go play Castle Marrach or Allegory of Empires for a little while. It doesn't feel exactly like a book. But you can smell and taste the influence of book lovers through the entire experience.
I like that. Maybe you do too.
You don't have a full-time art team standing by, waiting for you to give them commissions. You're probably not a Blender expert. And if you're an accomplished painter then you know how long it takes you to make time for one picture, let alone a whole game's worth.
You know what you can do?
You can write.
If you have an image in mind that wants to get out, nothing is faster than writing it out in words. On a page with a pen or on your laptop or whatever — writing is fast, and lots of people are good at it. And if you're not good at it, it's very learnable. Humans have been writing for over 6,000 years and we've learned a few things in that time. 3D modelling is still a bit trickier. We'll get there. But I wouldn't wait up. Widespread literacy took us roughly 5,900 of those 6,000 years.
And that means if you have a story that wants to get out, text is an amazing way to do it.
It's not the only choice. You could learn to draw and make a webcomic. I'm cool with that. Or you could learn to play guitar and write songs. That's good too.
But you know what's easier and faster than either of those? Writing stories in text.
Since writing is easy, fast and cheap, you don't need to raise a bunch of money or find a bunch of volunteers to get your game started. You can just throw one together. By yourself, if you want.
The Interactive Fiction Community has been doing this for a long time. Random writers making little games for each other. Their big competition has been going for about 26 years as I write this — they started it about five years before SkotOS started. And it's still running.
A SkotOS game is one more way to take a story inside you and put it in the world. The web lets you publish your short stories easily. SkotOS can let you publish your game.
It's not as easy as a short story. But it's a thing one person can do.
Here's one reason you like a lot of books better than their movie adaptations: a book can tell you a lot about a character's thoughts and inner process. A movie just puts their massively-magnified face on a giant screen, and you have to hope that Christian Slater gets the point across by frowning and brooding.
There are some things text is just better at.
Stories with a lot of important background characters? They have to cut those out for video media like movies and video games. Stories with a lot of character development, so the thoughts and feelings are the story? Nope, not on video. Giant, epic stories? The extended Lord of the Rings was what, twelve hours of movies? And it still cut out a huge amount because it had to. $281 million only goes so far, you know?
Some entire genres like, say, cosmic horror are incredibly hard to adapt because showing a big brightly-lit picture isn't an effective way to communicate them. If you take a romance novel and cut out all the thinky bits and background and character development... mostly you get a rom-com with some pretty costumes (or just skimpy clothes.) There's a reason romantic movies are often so dumb compared to the books they come from.
Text is great at depth. Depth of character, depth of feeling, depth of thought.
It's not impossible to do the same with video. It's just crushingly expensive.
I feel like there have been some fantastic text games over the years. I've played a fair number, including some weird obscure ones. I've seen games that do a good job where video games usually fall flat, in genres like creeping horror and fun trashy romance. Notice how visual romance novels tend to be text-heavy?
And it's hard to tell where to draw the line. There are some incredible text games that we don't think of that way because there are also some graphics — I'm looking at you, Fallen London and Sunless Skies. But in many games, the text clearly carries the weight of putting you into a beautiful world and a beautiful story.
Adapting that to multiplayer is different, and hard. Adapting it to constant interactivity is hard. And I'm not going to tell you that you should go invent a new genre. That'd be silly.
So go play a few games that already exist, like Fallen London or the current SkotOS games (Castle Marrach, The Eternal City, https://allegoryofempires.com/, Multiverse; Revelations). Text really does have that depth and richness, at a cost that means you could be making these, not just consuming them.
If you find that convincing, maybe building a SkotOS-based game is for you. That used to mean an application process and setting up a financial agreement with a company.
Now you can just go do it, at least if you're a software developer. Or if you have a friendly software developer who'd like to do it with you. Or if you're willing to learn, though that'd be an undertaking.
Text is gorgeous. People want to write, actually write their own games. Now we just have to make it easy. We're working on it. Perhaps you could help too?
You could also jump into an existing SkotOS-based game. They're always looking for help. And for that, you don't need to be able to write code.