[Coda]

Well, that depends on just how "simple" the game is.

Speaking from lots of experience building text-based games as a kid: You need SOME good way of organizing all of your data. You CAN build a game by writing a function for each room; this does work (it's how I wrote my very very first one when I was around ten years old) but it's really awful and you end up regretting it and wondering how to improve on it.

You can store all of the data in the same file as the code, but structure it nice and cleanly so you can treat it all as data instead of as different branches of code. This is great for demos and toys and other small stuff, but as your game grows it starts getting clumsy trying to manage everything in a single file.

The end result of engineering a large text-based game tends to be that you end up with your code split across several files so that you can quickly find what is responsible for what, and your data split across several files so you can add and remove content without having to modify the game code itself or disturb the rest of the data.