So who is in the Bar this evening? A young man named Mouse is here, chatting with Ace about Shelly. She disappeared a little over a week ago. Sara and Cole are in the corner, slowly and spookily getting acquainted. Sara is a criminologist. Cole might be a criminal ... or partially evil. Over there is Bart and Iris. They're related, but not directly to one another and not necessarily in the same dimension. From the kitchen walks a reverie-prone boy named Gil, carrying a bowl of snacks to an empty table. A purplish fellow named Suti distracts him from his task with welcome conversation. An unshaven man named Tony is attempting to write in his journal, until Elaine distracts him with a definitely royal demeanor. But where is the barman? Because too much imaginative interaction can make one very thirsty in a virtual bar at the end of the universe called Milliways.
Founded just under a year ago, Milliways Bar is an ever-expanding community of users on the wildly popular online diary service called LiveJournal. Like every community on LiveJournal, each Milliways user has a diary of their own, as well as the right to post public entries to the shared journal. Using this basic architecture, the creators and players at Milliways have taken a basic thread-based discussion board and turned it into something all-together more interesting.
They've turned it into a bar.
The Bar works using the mechanics provided by LiveJournal itself, through posting and replying. Nothing more. By making initial "entrance" posts and allowing any and all other characters to respond as the inclination strikes them, Milliways Bar is enabling a kind of collaborative storytelling. Additionally, characters can use their individual journals to create out-of-Milliways events that take place before or after their actual Milliways visit, thus giving context to their characters actions or voice to their concerns or contemplations.
At last count, there are over 950 registered users in the Milliways community, and not a single one of them is real. That's the whole point. Because Milliways Bar is not a place for anyone to just be they. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Remember Cheers, the bar where everybody knew your name? Well, this is the bar where everybody read the book you were in. Or saw the movie. Or watched the television show. Or heard the song.
If the name sounds remotely familiar, then you already know just why a bar called Milliways attracts such extraordinary clientele. The name was borrowed from The Restaurant At The End of The Universe, the second book in Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Series. If you've read the book, then you'll surely recall one of the impossible realities of dining at Milliways.
At the Restaurant you can meet and dine with a fascinating cross-section of the entire population of space and time.
The LiveJournal version of Milliways is much like that, only with much more implied/actual drinking, very heavy plotting and more innuendo than you can possibly imagine. This is an adult community, after all.
Like all good ideas, Milliways was simply a notion at the beginning. "Nny came up with the idea one evening whilest drunk," says Mod Sophie, "and persuaded me via drunken instant messages to throw in my lot with hers." "I begged desperately not to do it on my own," explains Mod Nny. And so it began.
An LJ community for the bar at the end of the universe was created on a drunken whim. The original occupants were Snow White (from Bill Willingham's Fables, not Disney), Sirius Black (from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series), Kassandra (from Homer's The Iliad) and the two lead character's from a book by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett entitled Good Omens, the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley. The population just kept building from there with new characters appearing weekly. It is building still.
Managing Madness
These days, you're just as likely to run into your favorite television character as you are to meet a denizen from the farthest reaches of the most obscure novel you've ever read. Because Milliways Bar is a role-playing game, and the roles to be played come from almost every source imaginable. There are no dice, there is no graph paper and miniatures are entirely optional. They don't have dungeon masters, but they do have moderators. There are four of them, two on each side of the Atlantic. Nny, Sophie, Meg and Josie -- who you will all meet and get to know in part two of this feature -- have the onerous task of maintaining order at the risk of their own sanity.
Luckily, there are rules.
Your character must be pre-existing, already established in a book, a story, a novella, a movie, a television show or something. This gives your character a little something called canon. Academically speaking, canon is the collected works of a writer that have been accepted as authentic. So by extension, canon for a Milliways character is their basis for behavior, appearance and motivation, not to mention a good bit of back-story. For example, Spider-Man's canon would be the entire MarvelUniverse while Bo or Luke Duke's canon would be all six seasons of The Dukes of Hazzard. Keeping character's canon-bound prevents a player from bringing in someone a little too powerful or a little too godly. Mod Josie puts it this way: "The worry is that someone will bring in a bunch of characters like Princess Sparklypoo who Rules the World." Other potential characters are just flat out prohibited, such as King Arthur, the Norse God Odin and the Lord Almighty.
Also, please do not attempt to rebuild the Bar. This is frowned upon. The Bar can offer drinks, food and the occasional stick of dynamite, but converting a couple of empty booths into your own private bowling alley would be just wrong. For that matter, a character can't cause such a big scene that it gets in the way of everyone else's fun. I'm guessing this is a nice way of saying, "No, you can't pretend you're Medusa and turn everyone into stone ... at least not until you get permission." The Bar also encourages the use of something called "common sense" -- a rule that all of us could use in the real world.
But the biggest one of them all might be the rule about "canon puncturing."
Let me explain ... let's say I'm a Flying Monkey from The Wizard of Oz. (Hello, Monkey!) I'm just kicking back in the Bar, having an evil banana daiquiri, when out of nowhere, some joker walks in and starts telling me that I'm not real. Why am I not real? Because this character saw me in a movie down at the cineplex or on his television, that's why. Therefore, he knows that things in movies aren't real, so neither am I. And so, my canon is effectively punctured. In layman's terms, he pulled the rug out from under my suspended hammock of disbelief and now my poor winged monkey has to suffer yet another conversation about how terribly coincidental it is that there just happens to be this movie featuring these other flying primates that look and act and behave just like him, and wasn't that scene in the movie where so-and-so did such-and-such just the best thing ever? You can see how this has to be a rule. Without it, every single thread would be nothing but "You don't say" and "My, how ironic."
In a recent survey, Milliway's players were asked to volunteer some simple facts about themselves and the characters they play. The results were very intriguing. 75% of players surveyed are between the ages of 16 and 25, with the 26-to-35 crowd clocking in around 17%, and 36-to-45 at 4%. Over half of those players are running five or more characters. But the most striking statistic of all might be this one: 83% of the players from the Milliway's community are female while 67% of the characters played are male. But really, is it all that odd that so many women would decide to bring life to male personas? Is it any stranger than your average male MMORPGamer who runs around World of Warcraft as a pretty little night elf? Or a married man who plays a busty fire controller in City of Heroes and calls the fire imps he spawns his "babies"? Weird is relative.
Playing Fair
When we were small, we played with the toys we had in the worlds we knew. We didn't discriminate. Even though the GI Joes were far more physically articulate than their stiff-legged Star Wars counterparts, we'd still let Snake Eyes drive the AT-AT from time to time. Plastic-caped Obi-Wan Kenobi would wield his forearm-hidden lightsabre against the chrome-pated Destro and his cronies while the Micronauts stood by and watched in transparent comfort. Even when toys weren't readily at hand, we'd pick up a carefully chosen stick and call it a sword, then raise it to the playground's heaven and call down the almighty power of Grayskull. When dusk came, we'd hop on our bicycles through imaginary doors welded shut like the General Lee and speed our way home with Cobra Commander, Skeletor and Lord Vader hot on our imaginary trail. That was the way we played.
But we grew out of it. Didn't we?
The occupants of Milliways embrace that childlike spirit that sees no real boundaries between that which can and cannot go together. But can they legally do just what they're doing? After all, in our current climate of litigious urges, isn't it a little risky to play even the simplest of games with copywritten toys? Yes and no.
Yes, because writing fan fiction, whether as a group or in single part, does infringe on copyright protection. However, it is important to keep in mind the primary objective of copyright. Copyright does not so much insure the profit of a given author as much as it secures the process of science and the arts. Don't believe me? Ask Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: "To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work."
And no, because much hinges on a little something called "fair use" -- as in the fair use of a copywritten work as dictated by law. In this case, the applicable law is found under Title 17,Chapter 1, § 107 of the US Code and goes a little something like this:
[T]he fair use of a copyrighted work ... for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
§ 107 goes on to address the purpose, nature and amount of the work used, as well as the effect that said use might have on the work's fair market value. While Title 17 is no different than any other portion of the US Code and therefore open to massive amounts of lawyerly interpretation, it certainly seems to permit the existence of collaborative creative outlets like Milliways or the thousands of other media-based pan-fandom RPGs, both on LiveJournal and beyond into the still-persisting realms of MUDs, MUSHs and MOOs. Since most of these interactions operate without the exchange of funds and nobody is getting paid to play any of these parts, it would stand to reason that this use is as fair as it could be. Taken seriously, Milliways could be construed as a lengthy forum of criticism and research into these characters. If approached from another direction, the whole Bar might be deemed a parody of massive proportions. And one thing is certain: if you meet someone in Milliways and you're not familiar with their character, it is entirely likely that you will seek out the original source and learns all you can about them, which is certainly a kind of teaching.
For example, the barman at Milliways is Bernard Mickey Wrangle. If you never read Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins, you would have no idea who Bernard is. Several in the Bar were in just that situation, so about twenty of them chose to pick up the novel and learn. These days, Bernard from Woodpecker is spending quality time with Nymphadora Tonks -- from Book Five of the Harry Potter series, of course.
Please understand that none of this interpretation is stone gospel and it should be taken with the appreciation that all law deserves. Fortunately, there have been a surprising number of legal briefs written about copyright concerns for fanfiction, fan-sites and so on. You just need to know where to start looking.
Persistent Characters
While such all-inclusive behavior might make a chorus of continuity editors scream in dread horror, the fact remains that the Milliways folk are carrying on a rather grand literary tradition that stretches back as far as Shakespeare and Chaucer. Some of the greatest authors in Western Literature based their works on stories told long before. So while some modern authors may take offense to these invented affairs and fabricated encounters, others agree that fanfiction is relatively harmless and possibly even positive. In an online journal entry in 2002, author Neil Gaiman -- whose characters frequent Milliways from time to time -- said, "As long as people aren't commercially exploiting characters I've created, and are doing it for each other, I don't see that there's any harm in it, and given how much people enjoy it, it's obviously doing some good." Mod Sophie explains the appeal of Milliways thusly, "People have characters that they love and want to explore further ... We give them the opportunity."
In 1925, an Italian novelist named Luigi Pirandello wrote a play entitled Six Characters in Search of An Author that dealt with the possibility of characters having a life outside the confines of their original work or source. In the introduction, Pirandello remarks about the insistent nature of strong characters and their need to be more than they are.
[T]hey, as if completely detached from every narrative support, characters from a novel miraculously emerging from the pages of the book that contained them, went on living on their own, choosing certain moments of the day to reappear before me in the solitude of my study and coming -- now one, now the other, now two together -- to tempt me, to propose that I present or describe this scene or that, to explain the effects that could be secured with them, the new interest which a certain unusual situation could provide, and so forth.
Characters from his own imagination were, he realized, "born alive, [and] wished to live." And who are we to say the same dignity doesn't apply to characters from the Knight Rider television series as much as those from the works of Gaiman or Rowling.
Yes. K.I.T.T. is in the Bar. Why do you ask?
Everyone Wants To Be Someone (Else)
Though it might be one of the most popular, Milliways is far from being the only online journal-based role-playing community. There are many more and they cater to interests stretching from the ridiculous to the mundane. Several are on LiveJournal, but some have moved to GreatestJournal -- most who move cite the obscene amount of player icons available there. Skimming the list, there is a Justice League community, one for The Tribe, many Buffy/Vampire Slayer communities and even more communities dealing with various permutations of the Harry Potter universe.
(An extensive list is forthcoming, but suffice it to say that if you turned LiveJournal upside down and shook it, it would rain Harry Potter RPGs.)
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go and do a little research on angels and demons. See, there's another LJ RPG community opening up that deals with the ongoing battle between good and evil, and I'm thinking that membership in the heavenly host might be just my speed ...
Or maybe I'll just hang out in the Bar.
(Original art by Emily Clare Friedman. Research assistance provided by Jennifer Doherty, Lora Friedenthal, Alyssa Jackson and the Moderators of Milliways Bar. Invaluable editorial input by A. Nikki Thomas. Thank you.)
This is part one of two. The next installment will introduce you to the brave foursome who manage to keep this madness in check ... mostly. In the meantime, visit Milliways Bar for yourself. You might see someone you know ...
