Interactive Fiction has "Potential Narrative"

A work of IF is not itself a narrative; it is an interactive computer program. A narrative is “the representation of real or fictive events and situations in a time sequence” (Prince 1980, 180); this can result from an interactive session but does not describe any IF work itself. Similarly, interactive fiction is not a story in the sense of the things that happen in a narrative, or more precisely, “the content plane of narrative as opposed to its expression or discourse; the ‘what’ of a narrative as opposed to its ‘how’” (Prince 1987, 91). In everyday speech, of course, “story” also refers to a particular genre, the type of thing people expect to hear when they say in conversation “‘so, tell me the story” or that which a child expects to hear after asking to be read a story. Interactive fiction is not precisely this sort of story, either, although there may be a “frame story” provided in the documentation or there may be a certain type of story that is always generated in successfully traversing the work. An IF work is always related to story and narrative since these terms are used together in narratology, even if a particular work does not have a “‘story” in this ordinary sense.

A distinction between story and narrative has been noted in various ways since Aristotle, who distinguished the argument, or logos, and how it was arranged into plot, or mythos; the Russian formalists also distinguished the material of the story or fabula from how it was told in the sjuzet (Chatman 1975, 295). Interactive fiction has the potential to produce narratives, usually as a result of the interactor typing things to effect action in the IF world. In fact IF works are potential literature in the sense of the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature, abbreviated Oulipo) (Mathews and Brotchie 1998; Motte 1986), and specifically they are potential narratives.

Works of interactive fiction also present simulated worlds: These are not merely the setting of the literature that is realized; they also, among other things, serve to constrain and define the operation of the narrative generating program. IF worlds are reflected in, but not equivalent to, maps, object trees, and descriptive texts. The IF world is no less than the content plane of interactive fiction, just as story is the content plane of a narrative.