Web fiction
Interactive fiction
Software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters; the umbrella over text adventures and choice-based narrative.
Interactive fiction (IF) is "software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters," and a work in the form can be read as a literary narrative, an adventure game or a role-playing game at once. Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure (around 1975), expanded by Don Woods in 1977, was "one of the first well-known works of interactive fiction," and Infocom's Zork became "the first text adventure to see widespread commercial release." The umbrella runs wider than the parser game: the article covers the printed gamebook, where "the reader is instead given choices at different points in the text," notes that "the term sometimes also covers visual novels," and records the modern indie revival on free tools such as Twine, which "publishes directly to HTML."
For writers the form matters as the interactive branch of fiction's family tree: the same choice-at-a-fork contract a visual novel runs on, worked out decades early in text.