Sucking on the teats of the Homestuck cow

Homestuck is a story about four internet friends, who engage in the computer game, Sburb, through which their world is changed. Sburb is not merely a digital game, as they find themselves playing as either server or client players in “real life”. The comic reads as if Homestuck itself is a game, and the reader is the player. The reader does not have any influence on the storyline, however the links that the reader clicks to proceed in the story are made to look like game commands, such as "> Enter name.", taking inspiration from classic adventure games. Homestuck also incorporates several types of media, including text, pictures, animations, sound, and mini-games. Due to its popularity, Andrew Hussie, the creator of Homestuck, is now working on an actual adventure game called Hiveswap, which is set in the Homestuck universe. So Hiveswap is basically a game based on Homestuck, which is a comic that reads as a game about the game Sburb while also incorporating mini-games as a narrative tool.

While this might seem as the beautiful lovechild of hypermedia and crossmedia, it does also seem a bit like milking that one magical cow that apparently possesses an infinity udder that never runs dry, and one can fear that once Hiveswap is released another comic will float to the surface and tell the story about people playing the game – this time with more elaborate in-comic games – followed by another digital game that is set in the universe of the comic, and this pattern will repeat itself until the ultimate culmination with the launch of the digital game Sburb: The Beginning.