We didn't lose anything -- interactive fiction games are still being produced, and you can play them on your android or iphone these days, too. http://ifarchive.org/ and http://xyzzyawards.org/ are good places to start.
If someone wanted to write an interactive text game like these and put it on the web, are there any frameworks available? If not, a lot of the work would be on figuring out how to parse the player's input, how to map out the possible paths through the game, etc, instead of writing the story.
I actually started working on a Ruby IF framework, with the intent that it could also be used to create MUDs and IF-ish games that had combat, so they can be played like an RPG.
I haven't gotten far yet, sadly. You are correct about the player's input being an issue, and the mapping has some issues to resolve, but the biggest problem is actually the interactions between objects or the player and objects.
For instance, the 'push' command is going to mean something different to every entity. Some won't respond (default response) but others might move or react.
I actually implemented that once in C# in such a way that it confused most of the other developers and they quit. I offered to scrap my code, but that was kind of the end of the project. -sigh-
Have the ruby thing on github by any chance? Id love to check it out. I've been toying with the idea of writing a mud in ruby, and giving it a graphical web frontend to make it more accessible to new players.
Cool, I have one from a while ago that I got about that far as well. I was thinking about working through the Mud Game Programming book to get a working foundation going, but send me an email (in profile) once you start working on it again.
