The central ethos behind TextBased is an appreciation for language, understanding it as the most efficient interface available to us. Words, in just a few symbols, carry waves of ideas that would take far longer to represent in any other medium. Text-based games have long realized the unique rendering possibilities of words to create worlds far larger than computer GPUs can handle, but most other games stick with graphical representations of their concepts. Textbased exists on the boundary of these two, providing physical, graphical representations of entities that rely on a textual nudge that overlays the imaginative possibilities of words upon relatively crude depictions of them.

TextBased’s engagement with words extends beyond its rendering, however. The narrative and mechanics interrogate the base structures of the English language, peeling back the very interface TextBased relies on, and peering into its own mechanisms. The player is invited and forced to, at times, follow grammatical structure precisely, in the construction of commands, but also to repudiate those structures entirely. Throughout this precise, the player is building things at English’s base level: letters. This new set of “unit operations” is centered around bricolage, a defining concept of TextBased and language at large. These base units of bricolage are the basis of play in TextBased, which position the game as an anti-proceduralist language of sorts, propagating an original agency.

The result, the impact, of these base units of bricolage is an experimental game that allows the player to imagine what a world free of traditional grammar structure looks like. The post-grammar, post-science world of TextBased relies on the imaginative power of games to occupy that unique space of experimentation by immersing the player in a language that evolves into something brand-new.