ForumWarz

I've been enjoying ForumWarz lately. It's a browser-based, multiplayer rpg that parodies internet forums and internet culture in general. The brand of humor is not for everyone and may be considered offensive but I think it's really well-written and funny.

The game is very polished and the tutorial is quite smooth. Your main mission is to pwn various forums. This happens as a kind of turn-based battle in which you use various skills or items.

The "world" of ForumWarz feels pretty deep for a free, browser-based game. You can talk to various NPC's via an IM client, send and receive e-mails that advance the story, visit various websites for goods or services and even mess with a google type search engine. The NPC's are very distinctive and the dialogue is really well written.

There are character classes to choose from and you can select various upgrades to your character as you level up. Not surprisingly, I play as a Troll. You get a certain number of forum visits each day which prevents you from rushing through all the content too quickly. It's a great way to kill some time.

For a multiplayer game - you don't really interact with other people during the main gameplay. However, there are community features which lend a social nature to the game. There are leaderboards, achievements to be gained and a weekly challenge called Domination. But the most fun way to interact is with forumbuildr - a collaborative way to create new forums. Users can come up with ideas for new forums and write dialogue for the posts and thread titles. It's fun and, once complete, anyone can play through the user created forum.

They recently added another multiplayer feature called INCIT (still in test mode) in which users caption photos. And of course, there are actual forums (on which some people even roleplay as their ForumWarz characters).

The community/multiplayer aspect of ForumWarz does seem a bit divorced from the main game. But the community is a good one and the game itself is perfect for a fun play at work.

There's a good interview with one of the developer's here but it's probably best to play the game before reading it.