69. Notable internet moments.

The internet is pretty cool, but it allows you to do some even cooler things. One of my favorite internet moments is watching a live puppet show with full video and speech. The puppet was made from a toilet roll wrapped in paper, was called Mister Tie, was a megalomaniacal dictator loosely modelled on Saddam Hussein, and responded in real-time to the stimuli provided by the audience. One viewer started drawing Mister Tie on the software’s whiteboard, to which Mister Tie responded, “Oh, I see my portrait is being done. Having my image emblazoned all over the landscape is the first step to being a true leader.” When some rebels in the audience began throwing tomatoes at Mister Tie, he had them dragged to some out-of-the-way place by loyalists.

A very influential internet activity for me was the Game Neverending, which was sadly dropped in favour of producing Flickr, now the most popular and lucrative photo-sharing application in the world. The Game Neverending was social software, and the game provided the limits required for social interaction to take place. It could barely even be called a game, but the people who played it stayed for the community. Everyone got along great, we had a good gift economy going and it was like Woodstock in the 1970s, except it happened every wonderful day. The Game Neverending was so good that in the long holidays before a new year of High School started, I would spend up to 13 hours every day just making Purple Paper and talking to my new friends about every conceivable topic. And everyone online would join in the conversation.

And just tonight I played a text adventure with my lady friend Melita; she was the player, and I was the parser. It took some prodding to get her to understand that she wasn’t limited to just moving between rooms, but she quite liked the experience. And that’s what counts.

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