Have you ever wanted to enjoy a butter beer in the Leaky Cauldron, go shopping in Diagon Alley, travel through a fireplace with floo powder, or play Quidditch and snatch the golden snitch?

Kids and adults of all ages, all over the world, are burying their noses in the wildly popular Harry Potter novels. As I read each of the four books in the series, I found the characters so likeable and the places they visited so interesting that I dreamed of jumping right into the book with them. Many other readers who have been similarly enchanted can probably identify with this feeling. While popping into a work of fiction is clearly impossible, there is one other solution that comes almost as close: a Harry Potter online role-playing game. When you visit this "virtual Hogwarts," you can visit the same places described in the Harry Potter books, perform the same magical feats, and even meet the same characters, played by other people from around the world.

This is possible with a rather old but very reliable server technology called a MUSH. MUSH stands for Multiple User Shared Hallucination, but that hardly explains what it is. A MUSH is a server on the Internet you can connect to from almost any computer -- even a fifteen-year old Mac Plus -- and enter a virtual environment. You connect to a MUSH using a "terminal" program, and everything is text-based; you won't find any JPEG images of your favorite characters. However, this would only make the online game more like the original books -- after all, the Harry Potter books, aside from a few illustrations, are entirely text-based as well.

When makes a MUSH unique is that the magical places Harry Potter and his friends visited in the books can be accurately replicated in the virtual MUSH world. For example, a "virtual Peeves" the Poltergeist can fly from room to room and torment you at random. You can use a flute to lull Fluffy the Cerberus to sleep so you can sneak by. You could speak a password to a painting and see it reveal a doorway behind. Nearly every creature, place, and magical object in the Harry Potter books can be found in a Harry Potter MUSH. This MUSH will also be entirely free of charge, unlike fancier online role-playing games such as Everquest and Ultima Online.

While all this may sound good, this virtual Harry Potter world has just gotten started, and it's being built by only two people. We're looking for other 'wizards' out there to help us make this online role-playing game a reality. If you'd like to help, or if you'd like to know more about this project, send us an e-mail