Oh man oh man, did this take me back. I spent large chunks of my middle school experience playing fantasy MOOs and MUXs, etc., mostly based on Anne McCaffrey's Pern series - one in particular that was called "VirtuaPern." I remember rooms being color-coded based on component, and I remember using a client called straight-up "Telnet" to connect. You couldn't hit backspace, so if you mistyped you would have to delete the entire line and start over. I spent a lot of time in middle school and elementary school trying to find ways to interact even more directly with books, which led me to Choose-Your-Own-Adventures and text-based RPGs on journals and in chatrooms. It's sort of a hack-and-slash way to enter a story - I feel that in a way alternative text stuff like this will always be weighed down by the medium. Rather than simply deepening the experience of reading a continuous block of text like a novel, interactive games of the sort we have been playing offer a similar but definitely separate kind of involvement with a story.

I especially felt this difference when playing Pern games, which attempt to simulate the world found in the novels. The novels I read and the games I played felt like cousins to each other, rather than two forms of the same thing. Which of course should not necessarily be required of a text adventure; it's a different medium in which to communicate a fictional world than a novel, so it should not be judged on the same criteria. The only failing I think I would note would be that of text adventures like VirtuaPern to give back to the original source. As an example of fan-created media, VirtuaPern does not suggest as many alternative or complementary readings as would, say, a fanfiction about the same source. Anne McCaffrey's books contribute setting, tone, and conventions to the Pern games, but I never once felt that playing one of them deepened my reading of her books. I personally feel that alternative forms of fiction like RPGs succeed most when they initiate a conversation with traditional forms of fiction. Only then do I truly feel like something is being built. As a kind of interaction and as an alternative way to tell a story, a text adventure like VirtuaPern is fascinating. But as a transformative work and more generally as a form of literature, I think there is a little to be desired.