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The “novel where you are the hero”
Some other individuals got together in order to make these visions of possible Utopias more accessible and more popular. Among them manga artists, sci-fi writers, computer-freaks, creators of computer games. They talked about many things in a forum on the Web called “Utopias Unlimited.” To make their scenarios as realistic as possible, they tried acting out the roles of the various antagonists : some had fun playing the part of the capitalists while others played the revolutionaries, then they switched roles. They tried to make the capitalists as clever as possible to put their scenarios to the test. Like players in a role-game.
Several projects emerged.
One was a “novel-where-you-are-the-hero,” a genre of juvenile literature where the reader imagines her/himself a detective, an explorer or a spy and has various adventures. These novels give the reader-hero choices at the end of each little chapter, for example “Enter the Black Cave” or “Climb over the Iron Mountain.”
These little illustrated stories were amusing and instructive. Later they became more widely disseminated via CDRoms, DVD’s and Internet sites, with more choices and richer graphics. They had a certain success, were translated into several languages, and were even sold in pirated editions made in Asia (which their anti-capitalist “owners” found rather amusing).
The efforts of certain governments to censor and seize these subversive “novels-where-you-are-the-hero” created great free publicity, especially among the young. People read them out of curiosity, out of defiance, out of love for science-fiction. They became a kind of cult in high schools and colleges. On every continent, visions of a possible alternative intrigued a whole segment of the younger generation and not a few adult readers. Soon there were imitations with other plots, other solutions, other visions, more or less artistic, more or less successful, more or less commercialized.
