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Recently in Salon Technology

Who controls free software?
Does Red Hat's aquisition of Cygnus give the company the final say on free software's future?
By Andrew Leonard
[11/18/99]

Playing God
Scary eugenics documents from the turn of the century shine a disturbing light on ethical dilemmas raised by genetic testing.
By Kristi Coale
[11/17/99]

How the Web was almost won
Just how close did we come to a Net ruled by Microsoft? The "server wars" show a grim counterpart to the browser wars.
By Tim O'Reilly
[11/16/99]

Technology: View from the top
The accidental entertainer
Rob Burgess wasn't chasing cartoons -- but with Macromedia's Flash and Shockwave enabling a faux broadband experience, he's suddenly tight with Stan Lee.
By John Geirland
[11/15/99]

Direct mail double cross?
A fight over opt-in marketing has anti-spam activists crying foul.
By Deborah Scoblionkov
[11/12/99]

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Fannon has spent over a decade writing and producing gaming titles like The Mutant File and Champions Universe, but his audience is small compared to the millions who shoot their way through the animated worlds of games like Quake, Doom and Tomb Raider. The 3D graphics, video effects and multi-player environments flaunted by these games are just about the closest anyone's come to that most coveted grail of the personal computer game industry, virtual reality.

Still, Fannon's fans and other devotees of text-based gaming -- a small but stubborn community of role players -- find that V.R. is less important that good old-fashioned storytelling. At Web sites like WebRPG and The Play-by-Email News, gamers busily conduct text-based Dungeons and Dragons campaigns with players from around the world. WebRPG claims 2 million page views per month and runs thousands of games through its message boards, while the Play-by-Email News carries announcements for hundreds of e-mail adventures of every conceivable variety.

"You can get more depth out of a text-based game than a graphic game," says Rick Loomis, president of the Game Manufacturers Association and owner of the Flying Buffalo game company. "This is less true than it has been in the past, but the more graphics and music and everything else you add to it, the less depth there is to the game."

Fans of multi-player titans like Ultima Online and EverQuest might disagree. And there's certainly no reason to believe that some gamers wouldn't be happy hopping between an imagined world that they shape as they write and the rich, graphic experience of multi-player adventure games. But it's clear that there is a hardcore group of gamers who eschew the Ultima Onlines and EverQuests -- with their seven-figure development costs -- in favor of the orcs and saving throws of that tabletop classic, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D).

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