# NAIL: A General Interactive Fiction Agent

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.04259 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04259/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Do the Rewards Justify the Means? Measuring Trade-Offs Between Rewards and Ethical Behavior in the MACHIAVELLI Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03279/) (2023)
- [What Would Jiminy Cricket Do? Towards Agents That Behave Morally](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13136/) (2021)
- [Aligning to Social Norms and Values in Interactive Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01975/) (2022)
- [Can Large Language Models Play Text Games Well? Current State-of-the-Art and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02868/) (2023)
- [Multi-Stage Episodic Control for Strategic Exploration in Text Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01251/) (2022)
- [Reading and Acting while Blindfolded: The Need for Semantics in Text Game Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13552/) (2021)
- [A Systematic Survey of Text Worlds as Embodied Natural Language Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04132/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Text Games for Reinforcement Learning informed by Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09478/) (2021)
- [Generalization in Text-based Games via Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09968/) (2021)
- [TALES: Text Adventure Learning Environment Suite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14128/) (2025)
- [Perceiving the World: Question-guided Reinforcement Learning for Text-based Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09597/) (2022)
- [EXPLORER: Exploration-guided Reasoning for Textual Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10692/) (2024)
- [Learning to Play Text-based Adventure Games with Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10720/) (2023)
- [Learn What Is Possible, Then Choose What Is Best: Disentangling One-To-Many Relations in Language Through Text-based Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07258/) (2023)
- [Affordance Extraction with an External Knowledge Database for Text-Based Simulated Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00265/) (2022)
- [Malinowski in the Age of AI: Can large language models create a text game based on an anthropological classic?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20536/) (2024)
- [Persona Dynamics: Unveiling the Impact of Personality Traits on Agents in Text-Based Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06868/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Interactive Fiction (IF) games are complex textual decision making problems. This paper introduces NAIL, an autonomous agent for general parser-based IF games. NAIL won the 2018 Text Adventure AI Competition, where it was evaluated on twenty unseen games. This paper describes the architecture, development, and insights underpinning NAIL's performance.