Blue Facebook header with left sidebar of statistics and main content of text and image
Screenshot of the original
Facebook app from 2010. Wow!

1337: A Game Novel is an interactive fiction I developed as a Facebook app in 2010, way back when social media still had this naïve force-for-good thing going, shouting its holy marquee of decentralized::::::democratized::::::digitized::::::town square!

Welp, so much for that. I deleted my Facebook account in 2017. But something about this fiction project nagged. For all its shortcomings -- many! -- it really did seem to do something, well, novel with the novel form: you the reader and your honest-to-goodness real-life friends were spliced in as main characters, the setting was the city you live in, the choices you made colored the tone and narrative trajectory as it squiggled the line between fiction and reality, amplifying the whole whatever-you-will. So now, after a 2026 remastering of sorts, just as the internet is once again metamorphosing in a way that will make its past self seem quaint, unrecognizable -- this time at least, we're maybe not so naïve? -- you can read 1337 (pronounced "leet"), right here, right now.

As a Facebook app the text applied the reader's Facebook profile as the name of the main character. Supporting characters were the reader's Facebook friends. For this the website version, enter the names of the characters, below.

I highly recommend entering your own first name for the main character. Rest assured: no personal data is harvested by this application.

Game settings

Gender pronouns for main character

Supporting characters

Recommendation: use names of people you know who create interesting pairings with the descriptions below.

[Character] was attending community college, majoring in Public Policy or Social Sustainability or Somethingorother-ology. He'd probably started gaming younger than any of us and when he wasn't gaming he was adding entries for the Battlestar Galactica Wiki or reading Phillip K. Dick. That or quoting obscure lines from obsessions he considered superbly genius and we considered superbly annoying.
The day [Character] walked in and sat down at Station 44 and ::::spotlight smile:::: asked what server we were on and what our clan callsign was and then promptly went about logging in...Well! All of us were momentarily stunned. And while the utter, well, utter-ness of this breach of gaming etiquette cannot be overstated, we probably would've done a double-take anyway, since she was firstly a girl, secondly dressed in a very ungamerly business suit complete with matching pumps, pressed blouse, and Bank of [City] namebadge, and thirdly because she didn't speak gamer, not even remotely. No BOOM! Headshot!, no Leeeeroy Jenkins! Just nothing.
From his perch at Station 43 [Character] was this bumbling father-type you just couldn't get mad at. He maintained a spreadsheet of game tasks and calculated who was supposed to be doing what and when. He brought spare Cheetos for everyone (Folks, you know we game poorly when our blood sugar's low). He devised the whole interview thing. He even created a Headbook page for us.
[Character] had claimed Station 49, last seat in the row, ever since we'd claimed the whole back row in the cybercafe. He made clear from the beginning that he was a "lone wolf," which even we recognized as an ubernerd thing to label yourself. He would "help us on missions," he explained, and we would "return teh favor," but that would be "teh extent of our relationship." Not that this made much sense seeing as [Character] then volunteered to be our clan's tank, which if you know anything about it put him right at the heart of everything, the key to any clan winning, well, anything.
[Character] was the only high schooler on The Row. She'd shown up for some internship thing with her school's T.E.C.H. program but she'd long foregone any pretense of schoolwork and already logged well above her required 150 internship hours "researching." Not that she acted or looked like your typical gamer. She knew the precise tilt of head required to play up her bishojo pixie cutesy in internet gamer forum pics.