Forum-Based Role Playing Games as Digital Storytelling

When people hear the term role-playing games, they tend to think of two things: A group of friends sitting around a table playing Dungeons & Dragons, or video games with exciting graphics. Between those two, however, exists a third style of gaming. Hundreds of online forums offer gathering places for thousands of playerspeople who come together to role-play in writing. They create stories by taking turns, describing events through their characters eyes. Whether it is the arena of the Hunger Games, the epic battles of the Marvel Universe, or love stories in a fantasy version of New York, people build their own spaces of words, and inhabit them day after day. But what makes thousands of players, many teenagers among them, voluntarily type up novel-length stories? How do they use the resources of the Internet, gathering images, sounds, and video clips to weave them into one coherent narrative? How do they create together through improvisation and negotiation, in ways that connect them to older forms of storytelling? Through observing more than a hundred websites, and participating in five of them for a year, Csenge Virg Zalka creates a pilot study that delves into a subculture of unbound creativity.