A community site for text/choice-based/whatever-you-call-it?

Every so often I look around for a forum/site for choice-based/IF games (like anything created with Inform, TADS, Twee, ChoiceScript, Undum, etc.), but I’ve never really found anything. In other words, a community independent of platform that deals mostly with text-based games (if there’s a term for this more concise than a couple of rambling sentences, please let me know!).

I wonder if this is just unlikely to come together due to some community-forming rules, like it’s both too specific (text-based kind-of narrative works) and too general (not about one platform or one genre/medium)?

Sometimes there are threads here and at other IF sites about choice-based games of course, but IF is strong enough in terms of tradition, history, and community for those discussions to feel more like branches from an IF tree, rather than all of these tools branching off the central trunk of ‘mostly single-player text games’, if that makes sense.

Just like game developers in general are free to choose any one of a number of programming languages, game creation toolkits, engines, and so on (for example, consider TIGSource), and in theory benefit from exposure to a wide variety of tools, people writing for this IF/choice-based/text medium could do the same.

Does this sound like something people here would be interested in?

/Weekend-rambling.

The only choice-based games/stories (not sure which they go by) that I’m really familiar with are those that were released to the IF community, assuming a “choice-based game” is something along the lines of a CYOA. I wouldn’t mind discussing IF and CYOAs together at all, even though I’m not so familiar with the latter.

I also think IF should be freely discussed alongside the MUD family, in the same community. People interested in developing both kinds of things would learn from the strengths of the other kind. The same goes for IF/choice-based (or IF/choice-based/MUDs, of course ).

I’m with you on that Bainespal (being active in muds myself), though I have a feeling from my IF experience that many IF players aren’t as interested in the kind of play found on muds. I’m not sure if it’s a majority though or exactly how the demographics fall out. It does seem like there’s very little cross-over currently, at least in public discussion. Many mud developers aren’t knowledgeable at all about IF and vice-versa.