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.

Because we've been mainly focusing on blogs as electronic literature, I've forgotten about the other forms of e-writing out there. And then Marmalade's post made me remember one of my favorite online writing forms out there: fanfic!

My cousin has been maintaining a fanfiction site for about 4 years. She's an avid fan of Harry Potter and creates her own Harry Potter tales based on the characters in the Harry Potter series. For those who aren't acquainted with the "fanfic" world, it's basically an "alternate universe" of sorts, with the stories based on popular media (books, movies, TV shows). Usually, the younger writers will write really sappy stories involving the love lives of main characters from a TV series or book, but among the millions of fanfic writers, you'll occasionally find an amazing writer, one whose works are even better than the original. Apparently, there are some Harry Potter fanfic-ers whose works and plotlines are considered to be even more original than J.K.Rowling's. J.K. Rowling herself even admits to reading fanfiction in her spare time. As to whether the fanfiction influences her own writing, I am not sure, but that is an interesting question to ask, and brings up the issue of writer-audience interaction. The internet has allowed the writer to connect with her audience in a way that would never have been imaginable before. Does this mean that we, as readers, may even have input into and influence on our favorite authors' works? How much do present-day authors cater to the wishes of the fans in the fanfic world, and should they? It almost seems like writing a novel, which before seemed to be a closed affair for the author, has become an event for the public. The Harry Potter phenomenon is especially interesting because the series hasn't even ended, yet there are thousands of fanfic-ers that have already written their own versions of "Book 7." Quite unheard of before the internet age.