Plant the Pot Plant in the Plant Pot

Moby Games has a nice clear overview of the seemingly unkillable game format known as "Interactive Fiction".

Interactive fiction is not a gaming genre, it is a format. Although “text adventure” is commonly used to describe this type of game, interactive fiction has grown from its Adventure roots to incorporate a variety of game types, and some interactive fiction cannot possibly be described as a game at all. What all interactive fiction shares in common is the use of text to describe characters and objects within a setting, and the use of a parser to interpret text typed by the player, allowing the player to interact with the characters and objects within the setting.