You are likely to be eaten by a grue

I also discovered that while text adventure games where born into the family of computer games, they had since "grown up" and began "hanging out" with the literature crowd (though it still regularly writes home) -- which is to say that in much latter-day interactive fiction, particularly things produced since 1996, storytelling had been increasingly emphasized and the puzzles deemphasized. Not that puzzles were gone, but more and more authors of IF were trying to integrate puzzles into a coherent and compelling plot, rather than (as was often the case in earlier years) letting the story serve as an ostensible premise, but populating the thing with puzzles that had nothing to do with the plot. Now, some interactive fiction goes whole hog and abolishes puzzles altogether!

So, why continue to try to tell a story through this medium? Because making the player/reader drive the course of the story allows for some interesting effects; a skillful author can get the player/reader to identify with the protagonist in ways that simply aren't possible in static fiction (because the player/reader has a sense of complicity, to use a favorite word, in the plot that the static fiction reader lacks). Plus there are all sorts of neat things that can be done with narrative when you have a computer on your side.

While there are plenty of puzzle-centric games that also happen to be well-written (Lock and Key comes to mind), it's true that the more literary IF works have attracted more attention from critics and reviewers.