Pen and Paper RPGs Designed for Internet Play?

The Neitherworld blog wonders what a pen and paper roleplaying game designed specifically for playing over the Internet might look like,

We’re playing games designed for a tabletop in another medium. We’re adapting.

…but what if there were RPGs designed specifically for such a medium? RPGs designed to be played by people online who aren’t all in the same location? I’m not talking about MMORPGs. I’m talking about something analogous to a tabletop RPG. Something flexible. What would such an RPG look like?

There are some interesting answers and ideas in the comments section.

Botanicula

Not sure how much fun it would be to play Botanicula, but it sure looks pretty

The History of Giving Someone the Finger

The BBC looks at the history of everyone’s favorite hand gesture which, it notes, “seems to have overtaken cultural, linguistic and national boundaries and can now be seen at protests, on football pitches, and at rock concerts across the world.”

As Louis Armstrong might put it, what a wonderful world.

A convicted murder in Florida is getting a new trial because the only copy of the trial transcript was destroyed by a computer virus,

[Court reporter Terlesa] Cowart, a courts spokeswoman told the Miami Herald, put the trial transcript on an internal disc instead, and then erased the data from the stenography machine’s memory disc.

She did back the disk up on her computer, but a virus on the computer later erased all of her notes. All that remained was a transcript of one pretrial hearing and the trial’s closing arguments.

It is bizarre that Florida courts don’t create at least a digital audio recording of all trial proceedings and have a backup system in place. It is crazy to think the pictures of my action figure collection have more backup redundancy than the official proceedings of the trial of someone accused of murder.