Well, there's actually an easy answer to this question - you need to go read Graham Nelson's celebrated series of essays "The Craft of Adventure." Nelson is a giant on the IF landscape - he created INFORM, the most powerful and widely used IF coding language, and wrote two monumentally successful (and almost insanely complicated) IF games, "Curses!" and "Jigsaw," both of have been part of the IF 'canon' ever since their release. In addition to being a programming genius and a world-class game designer, he's got a wonderfully funny, professorial-but-offhand writing style that makes TCOA a pleasure to read from start to finish. What he tries to do in these essays is to provide a set of rules, pointers and suggestions for the neophyte IF writer that will help him/her to put together a structured, playable game while avoiding some of the obvious technical and stylistic pitfalls of the genre. I think everyone who's ever read these essays from start to finish would have to agree that he's succeeded wonderfully in achieving this aim - what follows, then, must be considered less a review per se than a 'celebration' of Nelson's accomplishment, supplemented by a few very minor quibbles where his opinions do not square exactly with my own.
My very favorite part of TCOA is the first essay. Here, Nelson provides a kind of potted history of the steps that led up to the writing of "Zork I," the commercial text adventure that first brought IF into the cultural mainstream. Nelson ingeniously decides to go considerable further back in history than the dawn of the PC revolution, all the way to the discovery of the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the setting for Willie Crowther's very early work "Colossal Cave" which was the original precursor to "Zork." The story is a fascinating one, and raises many interesting questions about the possible similarities between IF addiction and other, superficially quite different sorts of avocations, like crawling around underground in the dark sniffing the air and looking for undiscovered passages. It has long been a secret fantasy of mine to see some of the most gifted authors of IF slip into a miner' helmet and some steel-toed boots and head out to Kentucky to get back to their roots - perhaps one day I'll set up a 'field trip' through this site...
