Neat Resource!

I was brows­ing through a mag­a­zine about writ­ing today and came across an arti­cle about online writ­ing labs (OWLs), sug­gest­ing that writ­ers make use of them as ref­er­ence tools.

I was dis­tract­ed, though, by this: Ink, “A Free, Mul­ti­play­er, Online Game for Writ­ing & Community.”

Imag­ine that you’re surf­ing the Web and you dis­cov­er a site called Ink…You click Enter, and your brows­er loads a chat win­dow and the image of a cityscape. A cap­tion informs you that you are in the City Cen­ter. Almost imme­di­ate­ly, some­one notices that you’ve arrived and begins talk­ing with you in the chat win­dow. “Wel­come to Ink,” the stranger says. “This is a great place. But we have a prob­lem right now, and I’m hop­ing you can help. Our neigh­bor­hood isn’t doing well. We need to get a group of peo­ple togeth­er to address this prob­lem. Can you help us? We need to design a fli­er that will moti­vate peo­ple to come to a meet­ing where we can talk about this prob­lem. We need to draft a res­o­lu­tion that we can cir­cu­late to those who show up. We also need a brochure that explains why oth­er cit­i­zens should vote for our pro­pos­al. And we’re going to need a white paper to explain to City Coun­cil the prin­ci­ples that inform our pro­pos­al. We’ve got a lot of work to do. Can you help us?”