@jayeless It was great reading your thoughts on this. You might enjoy checking out the archive of the 50 Years of Text Games newsletter. It'll introduce you to a wide variety of interactive fiction. If you follow the links in each post to the research sources, you'll find even more good stuff.

@jayeless this is something there were more of. Only thing I know about is that there are some adventure type game for Chinese language learning: Escape: A text adventure game for Chinese learners - Hacking Chinese

@KimberlyHirsh Thanks for the suggestion! I think I might've read 1–2 of the instalments of that newsletter, but you're right that the full archives'll have lots of other interesting things, too.

@tkoola Ooh, that looks really cool, and exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of! It'd be great to see more games like that for different languages.

@alexink Yep, I'm in the same boat as you – I probably will give it a go and start making some games (probably simple ones at least to start, though), but I also have existing fiction projects that it'll be a distraction from 😂 That said, I'm always finding ways to distract myself from working on them, and at least this'd be a creative distraction.