There’s a war going on on Twitter and it has a hue.
We used to play color wars at summer camp. Near the end of the year the entire camp would split up into colors, red, green, black, blue, etc… and compete in a series of events: tug of war, egg toss, basketball…
I LOVE the idea of playing games on twitter.
So I started a thread using the concept of chain stories which I think would work really well within the 140-character medium.
Here’s how it went (read bottom to top):
Some immediate issues surfaced:
- There has to be mutual follow-ship between the participants (the penultimate post on the above screenshot was tweeted by someone I wasn’t following and I didn’t see it at the time it was posted)
- Simultaneous posting from more than one participant (is likely and it…) breaks the thread (if facilitated by @replies)
- Likewise, delayed posting also breaks the thread
- It’s just generally difficult to follow the thread of the story
Possible solutions:
- Limit the game to two participants
- Set up a group and have people tweet to that somehow (this wouldn’t totally solve the simultaneous posting problem)
- Let the game descend into anarchy from time to time – use hashtags to follow the story rather than @replies
I’m inclined to take the latter approach. As long as an individual is monitoring the thread they could draw everything back together if tweets got out of control. Alternatively, the story could be allowed to branch off by changing the hashtag (#story, #story1, #story2 etc).
Ultimately for a game like this to work, it has to be spontaneous and simple. I’ll give it another try at some point and document it here.
Some other game ideas:
- Word of the day: challenge people to include a specified (really obscure) word in their tweets
- Web treasure hunt: clues build up a picture and participants have to identify a digital artifact and link to it
- Degrees of separation: get from one person/thing/place etc to another in as few ‘degrees’ as possible
- I’m NOT going to suggest Mornington Crescent as that would be far to geeky
sorry to be the cause of confusion 9and the end of the story?) but I do think you’re on to something interesting!
taking a tangent – have you seen @english140?
ps I love mornington crescent!
I think the story burnt out quickly because it was being thought about too much. I ended up in a conversation with another person about how it might or might not work and I think that kinda killed it on this occasion.
That conversation was a useful one to have though. Sometimes spontaneity takes a lot of planning.
An observation from today’s obscure word of the day game:
You have to be following @hashtags for your tweets to show up on hashtags.org and it turns out nobody is! Why can’t these things be simple?!
I’ll try and keep track of the tweets manually so points can be allocated anyway.
@waugaman’s already mentioned my own experiment at http://www.english140.com. I’m stuck in some geeky problems about how to pull any 140s that people might right into a single Twitter feed, a bit like @overheard does. hashtags seems a bit of clumsy way of doing it and doesn’t make the best of the Twitter everywhere/anywhere read/write element that I’m trying to use ie. I write something as part of the game and everyone gets it etc.
Tweetscan is doing a nice job of keeping track of the obscure word game for me:
http://tweetscan.com/index.php?s=myomancy
In fact people don’t even need to include the # this way as it’s unlikely the words will appear in tweets naturally.
Can see the potential of hashtags in following people into same as you. Will give Tweetscan a look tonight when away from real job (where does real and unreal crossover though!).
BTW – the follow hashtags caught me out too.
Blogged English 140 on my blog today.
http://watfordgap.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/what-are-you-doing/