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Interactive fiction, MUDs and choose-your-path stories. Some are forty years old and still better written than most things released this year.
17 sites
Starts as one button beside a dying fire and quietly becomes something much larger. Best played without reading anything about it first.
Enormous free MUD with hundreds of areas and a browser client, so you can be killed by a wandering mob without installing anything.
Text MUD running continuously since 1997, with a player-run economy, real politics and a genuinely intimidating combat system.
Free MUD with multiclassing, a web client and a player base that has been levelling the same characters since the nineties.
Long branching novels where your stats matter and the prose does not embarrass itself; a good number play free in the browser.
Community-written choose-your-path stories with ratings, which is the only thing keeping the good ones above the fan fiction.
Ankh-Morpork rendered as a text world, with guilds, working shops and an obsessive attention to what Pratchett actually wrote.
London has been dragged underground by bats, and the writing is far better than that sentence suggests. Free, endless, faintly sinister.
Catalogue, reviews and play links for four decades of interactive fiction, maintained by people who take the form extremely seriously.
The annual competition that decides what interactive fiction is this year, with every entry free to play in the browser.
Where interactive fiction authors argue about parser design, post works in progress and review each other with alarming thoroughness.
Point it at any classic story file and it runs in the tab, which makes the whole Infocom era playable without installing an interpreter.
You are a colony ship AI choosing which disasters to absorb, and every run ends with a summary of how badly humanity settled.
Thousands of browser-playable parser and choice games, plus Quest, the authoring tool most of them were written in.
Every interactive fiction file anyone thought worth keeping since 1992, in a directory listing that has never once been redesigned.
The listing that has catalogued live text MUDs since 1994, and still tells you which of them have people logged in tonight.
The tool behind half the interactive fiction of the past decade, running in the browser and learnable in about twenty minutes.
One button, one detour. Press it as often as you like.