IFDB is a community-built database for interactive fiction and text adventures, where game pages, reviews, ratings, and recommendation lists make a sprawling story-game scene easier to browse.
What is IFDB (Interactive Fic)?
Interactive fiction has a talent for hiding in small corners of the web: a parser game here, a Twine story there, a competition entry with a title that tells you almost nothing. IFDB is the shelf label for that maze. Its pages collect game information alongside member reviews, ratings, tags, recommendations, and links that can sometimes lead straight to browser play. The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation says the site began in 2007 under Michael J. Roberts and now operates as a community-sourced record of the form. That collaborative shape is both its strength and its necessary asterisk. An outside writer who used its tags for historical research also noted that community data can be uneven. Read a few reviews, check the metadata, and follow the links with the same good sense you would bring to any living archive. The reward is a way into a genre whose best work is often passed hand to hand.
What you can do there
- Browse interactive fiction games
- Read reviews and recommendations
Why we picked it
IFDB makes a generous, unruly game tradition feel navigable without sanding off its weirdness. It is as useful for finding one good evening’s story as it is for falling through ten tabs of stranger possibilities.
How to get the most from it
Search for a title, author, or theme, then use reviews and related recommendations to move outward. Open a game’s links to see how it can be played, and compare a few reader perspectives before committing to a longer adventure.
Good to know
Listings, tags, reviews, and availability links are community maintained, so they can be incomplete or change over time. This profile did not verify a current accessibility review or independent assessment of the recommendation system, and no screenshot was captured.
Who made it, and when?
Michael J. Roberts is the credited creator or organization.
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