By Visa @ MetaGame
Twitter is an MMO-RPG
Twitter is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, primarily text-based with limited multimedia support. It combines elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat.
Players can read, view and contribute descriptions of objects, other players, non-player characters, and actions performed in the virtual world, as well as the “real” world. Players typically interact with each other by utilizing strings that resemble a natural language.
While traditional MUDs typically implement RPGs set in distinct fantasy worlds populated by fictional races and monsters, with players choosing classes in order to gain specific skills or powers, Twitter allows every player to project their own fantasy and define their own game.
The flexible nature of Twitter makes it difficult for any singular definition of “the game” to become canonical. Conflict between players with different interpretations of Twitter is a key feature of Twitter itself. Indeed, one of the most popular games is “hey, fuck that guy”.
Unsurprisingly, few players put much thought into precisely defining the game that they are playing. Most players “pick it up” organically as they go along, inheriting the unwritten rules and norms of their peers via imitation and (limited) experimentation.
The key feature of (public) Twitter is that any player can interact with any other player. Any player can reply to any other player’s tweets, or retweet it, or quote-tweet it. This bypasses traditional limitations of both “real life” as well as older web mediums like “blogs”.
Twitter is also searchable, and allows tweets to be “threaded” in chains.
This allows skilled players to build incredibly complex tapestries of hypertext, consisting of thousands of tweets.
Why would such prolific players choose Twitter as a medium, rather than “websites” or “books”, which appear to be better suited to large volumes of content?
Because Twitter allows any player to interact with any other player’s tweets.
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