Interactive fiction, which once went by the name “text adventure,” is having a moment.

Zork, one of the earliest and best-known text adventures — released for personal computers in 1980 — was given a retrospective at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. A Dark Room, with sparse prose inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” hit the top of the iPhone game charts in April. Device 6, a thrilling blend of short story and puzzle that features music, sound effects and text that can be followed only by rotating your phone or tablet, received an Apple Design Award last month. Even Twitter, in some ways the defining interactive-text game of our age (what are follower counts if not a scoreboard?), has joined the fun with the account @YouAreCarrying, which generates a Zork-like list of items to any user who types the word “Inventory” at it.

The resurgence of the text game is not sudden. In 2012, Christine Love’s Analogue: A Hate Story smartly turned the epistolary novel into an interstellar interactive mystery to tell an allegory about Korean history. And online hypertext stories written with a tool called Twine have become increasingly popular. At the Independent Games Festival last year, the designer Richard Hofmeier, after winning the festival’s grand prize for his game Cart Life, removed it from his booth and replaced it with the Twine story Howling Dogs, by the artist Porpentine.

A good Twine story like Howling Dogs can’t be translated properly into print. A Twine story might include branching narrative paths like a 1980s Choose Your Own Adventure book, yes, but it also might be merely nonlinear, with the order of the text determined by the highlighted words the reader clicks. Cara Ellison’s Sacrilege, for one, is a raw exploration of female sexuality that also includes some astute observations about male desire.