It’s also a cultural climate where audiences are increasingly used to thinking of books as media companions — popular film series like Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games, or TV series like Game of Thrones, all feel richer to fans if they read the books as well as enjoy the films.

Designers of text-based games can take advantage of that familiarity to bring audiences into worlds they can read and participate in. Not every fan would want to create fan art or fan fiction or do cosplay (though thousands do!), but it’s clear people very much want to interact with things they read, or to access written content in new ways.

“There’s always been a desire, when you read a book that you really like, to remain in the setting, and to remain engaged with it,” she suggests. “You put the book down, and somehow wish that world could go on… so I do see that as an opportunity. I see that as a place where i want people to re-engage.”

At the same time, Short says she can’t help but look at things from the perspecive of her “previous life” as a classics professor: “I feel a lot of the things people are doing now actually have really profound roots in human nature,” she says.

“The whole idea that a story is a kind of intellectual property and only counts the first time you tell it, and that it’s cheating to repurpose someone else’s story, to retell it, is… not the way people conceived of these things in the ancient world.” —Gamasutra – News – In-depth: Is it time for a text game revival?.