Herman Melville was born well ahead of his time, wasting his writings on paper when the great Moby-Dick deserved a more impressive platform: Facebook.
History has been bent in a corrective direction by Zynga-weary game designer David Fox.
The brave Fox has finally brought Melville's great novel to Facebook in the form of Melville, a game that lets you spend a replenishing pool of points to turn each page from the tutorial of "Call me Ishmael" to the climactic boss battle between Ahab and the whale (at least I think it gets there...I haven't earned enough star points to read that far ahead).
It's like all FarmVille but with all of the complexities of FarmVille gameplay replaced with simple page-turning mouse-clicks.
Play it here and then share your progress with all of your Facebook friends.
To be clear, this is the novel—the written word, not some silly action-game representation. And if you don't want to wait to earn more points that'll let you turn the page, you can always pay real money for them.
As of today, MelVille is the best-written game on Facebook. When will that change?
MelVille [The Shakespearean Cybermonkey]
You can contact Stephen Totilo, the author of this post, at stephentotilo@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.