I want to play

When I was in San Francisco, I visited a young friend who had moved there from New York. And she introduced me to a wonderful writing game called collaborative fiction. It's a great sprawling gazillion-dimensional world, where a mediator designs a basic plot, and then a dozen players put it into action, creating characters, writing scripts and action sequences, making it all happen. It can take days—or years. It's like the Sims, only with words—lots and lots of them, and well written—in addition to avatars.

For the first few days after she showed me how it worked, I was hungry to play it too—either join her game (she could use me for verisimilitude, since her current game is populated exclusively by 20-somethings!) or enlist writer friends and set up my own game. I've finally resigned myself to the fact that this is yet one more thing that's for the kids, not for me.

Kids have all the fun, it sometimes seems: texting, Twittering, iPhoning, iChatting—and now this. I mean, I could do all these things too, but who would I do them with? When I told my friend B that I secretly craved an iPhone, she looked at me as if I had lost my mind. "What would you do with it?" she asked. Everything! I thought.