I was considering writing here about text games, which I’ve been thinking about recently, and in particular about the past 15 years of non-commercial games with quasi-literary aspirations. But if I write at any length about these games and their authors, it becomes very likely that the authors will, sooner or later, find my site and read what I have written. Because I have a sense of these people, of what type of people they are, and it seems very likely that they are googlers.

Their showing up here and reading my words is an odd prospect, because for at least 10 years I’ve been aware of these “prominent” interactive-fiction authors, have known their names and had opinions about them, much in the same way that I’m aware of, say, Ted Danson, or giraffes, or the sun. But posting my opinions about those things will not summon them to me. I am still only among friends when I talk about giraffes. Writing about these interactive fiction authors would be like shouting out their names in a crowded room – crowded, but not that crowded. Eventually they will hear. That is a strange kind of power to be burdened with.

Particularly strange because of the fact that I know them as little as I know Ted Danson and yet I’ve done something much more intimate with them – I’ve watched these people’s conversations in newsgroups. Or rather, I’ve read their conversations after they’ve had them. Sometimes long after, sometimes soon after, but always after.

Reading through bulletin boards or newsgroups after the fact is like walking through a cocktail party in the classic frozen-time fantasy. All these people are caught in lifelike postures, talking to one another. Yet all are silent and totally immobile; I can get as close as I want, but it has all already happened, and none of them can possibly be aware of me as I slink among them, observing as though at a museum. Another metaphor would be that it’s like walking among preserved figures at Pompeii. Something happened here that turned this place into ruins. Once humans lived here, but now they’ve moved on. Or have they? If you provoke any of the figures, it may notice your presence. Then again the spirit may be too far away to ever realize you are prodding its former self, futilely asking it newbie questions.

So there is something distinctly more awkward about my non-relationship to these people than my non-relationship to actual celebrities like Mr. Danson, because to them I am voyeur rather than audience. Even outside the pseudo-private world of the newsgroups. I know these people only from the droppings they leave on the internet; by the time I get there to pick up their work or read their words, they themselves have already fled. In this respect, the internet is itself a lot like a text game, or like “Myst” – most of your knowledge of other people comes from reading the journals they leave behind in abandoned rooms, nosing around their eerie, silent islands.

It doesn’t matter how intentional or willing we are about being so relentlessly public online; it still feels like The Fermata to a visitor. Which, no, I haven’t actually read. Yes, I know, it’s all about how he wanders around and masturbates on the frozen people. Well, there’s a fair amount of that on the internet too. Rather prescient of Nicholson Baker, actually.

So, anyway, summoning these authors here by talking about them – and thus hosting my own personal petrified party – would be worse than just catching Ted Danson’s ear; it would be like Raymond Burr suddenly staring straight into my binoculars.

I said that this posting was a “thought” about the internet but I imagine you’d be hard pressed to say what the thought was. Nonetheless, there’s no question who thought it.

ME.