At first I was an unbiased observer.. fly on the wall... now I could not help but solve the riddle. Save the human race. With imagination, I saw what the future might hold.

I actually felt worried for Dana. She wasn't a blip of text on the radar screen, she was a real person. The Widow was out to get her, an enemy chasing her snowy footprints. Dana ran off to China and Japan for solace. She said so in her blog. And you could actually listen to her sad goodbye cries to mom in the answering machine of her San Francisco phone number (415-248-2617).

As a non-native living in Tokyo on a CAPitALLism assignment, I too felt removed from everything I'd known, inserted into a city whose kana and kanji signs and signals were for me disconnected, pointing to a void of meaning.

But the anticipatory rush... flying like... how exciting. Waiting for the next ilovebees update, life was precious, each moment preciously important. It made my day feel as if the whole world realized we had only one week to go until apocalypse, as if terrorists were striking and the threat was fresh, as if Y2K was counting down all over again. With new influences, my mind processed life's extra significance with crazed thirst.

The citizens of teleological worlds entertain such frenzied scripts.

CAPitALLism.org soon became the longest site whose "in-game" status gamers could not verify with certainty. They wondered if Dana's world and mine were one. Here are a few of the many comments:

From NetNinja:


From Penny Arcade:


From NetNinja:


From Unfiction:

Now that I was searching to help Dana, and with the Window Washers hacking my site, I too could feel ilovebees's scope entering new corridors, how CAPitALLism was read differently through this filter, how the game was enhanced in some way... to CAP it ALL made life more interesting, less fixed.

MicroMachines -->