[STING OF THE WASP] Let's Play Interactive Fiction Together!

Hey, nerds! Now, we like us our forum adventures, but how many of us have gone back to scope out the antecedent text adventures parser-based interactive fiction? (Did you know they didn't stop making these things in the 80s? I know, right?) Me, I've always been fascinated by the potential and ideal of interactive fiction, but I have a problem: I'm just plain bad at video games! Any game that's not a hand-holding, highly-linear affair, or worse yet, has an actual puzzle? I'll never see the end of that story, maybe not even the 1/4th mark, without a walkthrough — which really takes the "interactive" bit out of "interactive fiction."

Which brings us to this thread. If we go through these parser-based interactive fiction games together, surely our combined brainmight can find the solutions that get us to the conclusions, and then we can all see the ending, where previously none of us would have! And it'll be a lot of fun. And we might even learn something! We might even learn a little something about... ourselves.

But before we can do all that, it might be necessary to give a primer on how parser-based interactive fiction works. Unlike the forum adventures here, we can't just type in any old garbage, up to and including full paragraphs, and have confidence the author will be able to interpret it. You can not change the grand flow of the story with a single command, you must work more granularly, dictating exactly what your character does moment-to-moment. (Thankfully, not to the level of >INHALE, >EXHALE.) These games have a parser, which means your commands have to fit into a grammar and vocabulary that even your dumb, dumb computer can understand. Luckily, it's pretty easy for us humans to pick up too. Here's a quick guide that'll tell you pretty much everything you need to know, with only one dumb joke:

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You can find a more in-depth guide here. If you get something wrong and it's purely that you couldn't jigger it in a way the parser couldn't understand it, I'll try to modify it so it does work. Unless it's one of those situations where, even though the action is sensible, the computer can't understand it.

Our first game is Sting Of The Wasp, a 2004 game by Jason Devlin. It's about a bunch of terrible socialites, first and foremost yourself, at a country club. It's short, humorous, and so easy even I was able to complete it all by myself.