Honestly, when I thought of this in 1995, it might actually have been possible for me to learn most or all of the stuff I would've needed to learn to pull it off. Though I must say it wasn't inter-dash-active, the way I imagined it at the outset. Originally it was more of a 3-d environment where I would kind of riff masterfully (huh?) on the varied expressions of genes, all laid out visually in the form of a double helix you could cruise up and down on each chromosome to see the masterful things I had decreed . The verse (oh yes, it was to be verse) would have somehow corresponded metrically and rhyme-ically to the base pairs making up the genes, and somehow I would have been able to cover a meaningful number of genes. Hah. Somehow.
Somehow. Thank god for steep learning curves, my near-total technical ineptitude and the realization, not long after the advent of the browser, that I was more suited to writing about the guys who actually came up with things like the browser.
Of course, in the time it would have taken me to learn all that graphics programming stuff, the game would have gotten away from me anyway. Plus, I would have never thought to call it GenomeStoryWiki ("wiki" sounded so so weak the first time I heard it (I've gotten used to it just fine)).
Anyway, the thing itself: a massively editable (to flog a weak-ass buzz phrase that 8 years ago would have really gotten some airplay) representation of the human genome. Not a hardcore, scientifically useful thing like The Synaptic Leap or the Genome Browser. More of a literary entity. Meaning, you can kind of zoom in on any part of a chromosome (yes, still somehow represented graphically) and write your own little take on, say, the gene for blue eyes or clairvoyance or what have you.
