I first logged onto Online Caroline for about 30 seconds, looked around, thought she was a real person, and then logged out. I thought she was just another blogger. I was tired that night and decided to put off "playing" with her until the next day.

The next day, I read Jill Walker's essay on Online Caroline. It was during the reading that I realized Caroline was fake. I "spoiled" the story for myself before I could even start my "friendship" with Caroline. I walked into this "relationship" already skeptical because of Walker's analysis, and after about 10 minutes of being Caroline's "friend," I was convinced this was not for me. I echo a lot of skepticism that others, including crashingintowalls and tophat1,talk about in their posts. I mentioned in some comments in other people's posts that the over-friendly tone, though aimed at making the situation believable, actually has the opposite effect. Caroline's attempts at moving this friendship forward had a negative effect on me. The web designer's "tools" of friendship, including personalized emails and a conversational, direct tone makes the "player" realize that this situation is forged, fake. Like other people have mentioned, the personalized email does not feel personalized--rather, it seems contrived to me. It seems to me like the web-designers are forcing the friendship onto the participant, wanting desperately for us to buy into their scheme. But, as many of these posts seem to suggest, it hasn't been working for the most part.

I've been thinking some about Jesper Juul's ideas about game-time. It's occurred to me that narrative may in fact create an incongruity in game-time, as the narrative suggests one kind of temporal flow, and gameplay suggests another. I'm sure that at least a couple of you have played one of the Final Fantasy games. One thing that I've found incongruous about that sort of game is that the plot creates "urgent" situations where you are told that the villain has been spotted in some town and you have to go stop him. The implication in the story is that you have to go now. However, you can often wander about doing random things to your heart's content, while the urgency created by the plot just sort of festers in the background.

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.