"After smacking her lips together for a moment, Diot glances back and forth to the men at the table with her. Leaning forward with a conspiratorial expression, Diot whispers, "His name is Simon. It just came back to me. And even if he does belong here, you have to admit he is rather poorly dressed."

This is a compelling excerpt from an online role-playing game (RPG). Just scintillating, isn't it? The point is, sci-fi and fantasy role-play scenarios are proving to be ferociously popular breeding grounds for experimentation with Google Wave, the new communications tool that Google hopes will revolutionise how human beings interact and share media online.

The world of online role-play is well established and is, as you might expect, full of incredibly nerdy people. But they're an innovative lot, and looking at how they're adapting gameplay to the Wave platform is an interesting (and entertaining) way of understanding what that platform is capable of.

Some of the more obvious attractions of face-to-face roleplay are absent.

I've been hunting for 'public' role-playing waves to get a feel for the scene. Public waves are open to anyone and you can browse them anonymously or join in the conversation just like a traditional forum on a website. Many of the RPGs are explicitly experimental and have been started by games-masters who want to openly play around with Wave. They posit a storyline or premise and invite others to join and start building up a narrative. Characters, scenes and plot twists soon come rushing in and, for the users who contribute, it certainly seems to be a very immersive experience. Other-worldly aliases are a must, by the way. "My name is Filp," says one role-player, introducing himself, "I pilot the ship, and when I'm not piloting the ship I can help fix the ship, or shoot people... if we need to shoot people. I kind of hope we won't." But that's how any RPG works. What's different about the games on Wave? Brent Newhall, an RPG games-master I speak to, offers some insight:

"I love being able to see others' responses as they type them. I've monitored several players' reactions simultaneously in various parts of a Wave, and it's incredibly powerful to see how several people are reacting at once; I've only ever seen that before during face-to-face role-playing."

Gamers seem to be very adept at using the highlighting, editing and annotative functions of Wave to re-shape games as they unfold and criticise each other's roles and contributions. This tends to occur in the margins of the 'main' gameplay thread. And with Wave's 'coolest' feature, the playback function, it's possible to remind yourself of every response and edit that's gone into a thread from day one and relive the narrative in sequence at the click of a button. Altogether, it appears to be refreshingly discursive, with the emphasis being very much on dialogue and verbal interaction rather than tactical scenarios which I'm told are much more central to face-to-face role-play. Also, there's no dressing up in elaborate costumes.

But Wave's flexibility has allowed for other gaming elements to be introduced. A game developer recently came up with the idea of importing 'battlemaps' into waves around which the narrative action can flow. The application is called 'Flighty' and allows gamers to revel in a stronger sense of spatial awareness instead of relying purely on the powers of prose and imagination. One wave-gaming enthusiast, Quinn Murphy, explained why he thinks RPGs have allowed for the most inventive uses of Wave to date: "A gamer is really passionate about what he's doing and is often a geek, so he is going to push the technology right to the limits of what it will do. I myself have done so much weird stuff with Wave just to see what will happen. Business users, if they're watching, can discover a lot of techniques and tools that are applicable to their needs as well as people using it strictly for personal reasons"

Another games-master, Brian Ballsun-Stanton, adds that he believes Wave is a genuine improvement on forum-based RPGs where, he says, "The amount of effort needed to arrange a game on a forum tends to be prohibitive due to the sheer number of threads." Wave's capacity for replying to individual segments of a post rather than a whole set of paragraphs in one go has meant that this new kind of text-based RPG 'landscape' is much more fluid and interactive. Third-person narrative framing helps give a sense of the 'action' though: "As he didn't show any ID badges or tell them his name, Dexter had to look the man up in his data sheet. Finally coming up with the proper name, he noticed the warning label: Handle with caution. So. Dangerous, insubordinate, pompous and frivolous. Dexter liked him already."

Overgeeked, a gamer who's new to the Wave RPG scene, says that the community is already very diverse, with many different types of game 'system' being played out in waves: "Gamers tend to be a really smart and articulate bunch," he claims, "There's a lot of overlapping interests too; fantasy, science fiction, books, movies, TV, etc. so even if a Wave isn't about RPGs there's likely to be a few gamers there."

All of the gamers I speak to say that their application of RPGs to Wave is still evolving. Many of them express an eagerness to know what final tweaks and changes Google will make to the platform before the official release of Wave, but it looks like they're busying themselves quite contentedly with Wave as it exists today. Estimates as to how many role-players are using Wave vary wildly. Some of the gamers I speak to suggest it's as little as 300 while others believe it could be in the high thousands. Regardless of the actual figure, do any Wave search for "with:public" and you'll see that the RPG scene is pretty dominant.

But that's what geeks are for, right? Testing all our new toys so we can use them for the benefit of work and society more seemlessly. There's no need to don your virtual cape and assume the guise of a magician, Jedi or any other fantastical identity, but three or four years from now when Google Wave is as natural a part of your online routine as common email is today, you might want to spare a thought for the make-believing geeks who made it all possible.

"If anyone needs me, I'll be meditating in my quarters."