A different kind of RPG

So a lot of people/readings have been talking about text-based games, and how they are kind of lame. (I'm looking at you, Adventure!)

What I would like to talk about is a different kind of (entirely textual) game, and in order to talk about it, I have to make a confession:

I am addicted to reading other people's role-playing games. Particularly this one. Because homework requires a large majority of my free time, I've never played, but I've been following some of the characters for a couple of years.

This particular RPG is called Milliways Bar (anybody else a Douglas Adams fan?), and it's a LiveJournal-based role-playing game, in which people play characters from literally hundreds of different fictional universes, all of whom have mysteriously ended up in this bar/restaurant/motel at the end of the universe. Some characters come and go between the bar and their home universes, while others are permanently stuck in Milliways. You get characters from different points in the timeline (i.e. a Han Solo from the movies, and a Luke Skywalker from fifty years earlier) interacting. And for me, as a media nerd, the most fun part is watching characters from different universes interact--everybody from Buffy to Judas Iscariot (nope, not kidding) to Salad Fingers. Plus there's plot within the bar, so characters are reacting to all kinds of stuff all over the place and it is a whole lot of really dorky fun.

I don't know what (if anything) something like this has in common with more mainstream role-playing games (Warcraft and its ilk), because I know very little about those kinds of games. What's cool about Milliways, and a lot of the livejournal-based RPGs, is the focus on characters--there's plot, both within the bar and outside of it when characters react to events in their own universes (or take "field trips" to their universes), but that plot is mostly a device to explore already-developed characters. As opposed to MMORPGS, where (from what I gather from the readings) personalities develop through action. This sort of RPG also demonstrates that text-based games don't have to suck, if they focus more on characters than on the game world (which, let's face it, is a lot more fulfilling when it's graphical)--and that you can have interesting, ongoing multiplayer games that involve conversation instead of shooting.

And of course Milliways and games like it use characters that already exist, which makes it kind of like real-time fanfiction. But it has a lot in common with other multiplayer games, in that there is a shared landscape that can be altered (so, for example, if someone cut down a tree in the Milliways "yard," that tree wouldn't be there for other characters to use anymore--but there would still be a stump) and goals/plots that must be accomplished as a group.

Anyway, since RPGs like this one (and there are a lot of them) have a lot in common both with forms of electronic writing and with multiplayer computer games, I thought they were worth mentioning.