Gargoyle allows you to participate in interactive fiction. The main website is http://ccxvii.net/gargoyle/. It isn't so easy to install in Ubuntu or pretty much any Linux distro because it's not in the official repositories.
As a result, you would need to download it from: http://code.google.com/p/garglk/

There is a good tutorial about installing Gargoyle:
http://daniel-bartholomew.com/wordpress/2009/06/gargoyle-on-ubuntu/