If you enjoy this type of game, you might enjoy attending an interactive fiction meetup. At meetups, we play IF games, talk about them, and meet with other IF authors. Andrew Plotkin (author of Hadean Lands) regularly appears at the Boston meetup.
Any in Chicago? These games got me into programming when i was pretty young (scott adams style games that is - maybe I have IF entangled with text adventure?). Would love to meet up with some people who are into this stuff still - i've been playing around with some concepts recently for my own text adventure games.
* http://pr-if.org/ Boston
* http://www.meetup.com/sf-bay-area-interactive-fiction/ Bay Area
* http://www.meetup.com/Oxford-and-London-Interactive-Fiction-... Oxford and London