"The thrill for me is making something that comes alive," he says. In his view text games indeed can be a growth area for a game industry looking for new ways to leverage a tablet-generation audience interested in experiences that offer deep experiences with simple inputs. "That was when we started thinking, 'okay, this isn't about the content - it's about the interface,'" he says. A year and a half ago, he showed one of his games to a colleague he describes as "really keen" to explore the genre, and the colleague couldn't get into it. Ingold believes it's the steep barrier to entry posed by the parser interface that has kept text games confined to their niche status. It's a challenge for designers, too, who might find themselves limited by the steep challenge of creating affordances for every option a player might want to execute. But the more complex games in the genre get, the more likely it is that players, especially those unaccustomed to text adventures, might be frustrated in their attempts to get the game to understand what they're trying to do. Interactive text games have long depended on the parser interface, which relies on players typing simple commands that the game can understand. "You know, less puzzle-y and more story-y, and then trying to do things to make the parser clever."
"I spent a long time in the full on parser-based hobbyist niche, and a lot of that was spent doing experiments trying to make things more 'accessible,'" Ingold tells Gamasutra. That's why he and his colleagues at Cambridge, UK's Inkle Studios - a software company founded by game devs - have created Inklewriter, a new tool for making interactive stories: It's free, and designed for anyone to use. The age of accessible platforms coupled with a hunger for deeper stories have set the stage for interactive fiction games to flourish, but longtime IF writer and game industry veteran Jon Ingold believes the tools to create storytelling games have to be accessible, too.