I’m introducing text adventure games to the students in my online “Video Game Culture and Theory” course. A few years ago, when my son was 11, I made a screencast of him encountering a text adventure game for the first time. My students generally like watching this video, since it gives them an idea of how to play a text-only game.

The Onion recently posted a great spoof of a “Second-Person Shooter.”

“You’re walking down a long corridor. Suddenly, a Nazi leaps out from around a doorway and unleashes a hail of machine gun fire in your direction. You duck behind  a marble pillar and select your pistol. You press X to shoot the Nazi with your pistol, and he falls down dead.”

I love the passive mode: “Bullets are fired. A grenade is thrown.”