Text adventures and other subgenres of interactive fiction do share a lot of common subproblems - creating basic immersion (by storytelling and/or imagery), interaction with the non-living environment, interaction with non-player characters. Different subgenres find their own solutions to each subprobem, often trivializing some parts to improve the treatment of others, but a novel approach to any of these problems can potentially be interesting for multiple or all sub-genres.
http://www.ifarchive.org/
http://ifdb.tads.org/