jennybee.net

Perhaps I was a story teller in a past life because despite not being involved in the story telling community, one of the things I immediately noticed* about Plurk was its suitability for just that.

*Actually I believe @philcampbell mentioned it first and I agreed.

I tried it out once on Twitter but it didn’t really work. Plurk’s self-contained conversations are much more suited to it though.

Knowing that there was a small team of folk online and ready to go I began with:

Once upon a time on a dark night, something stirred in a Birmingham side street… what happens next plurkers?

It was greeted enthusiastically and a handful of people began contributing to the narrative.

You can read the story here.

The story was location-based so I thought it could be fun to plot the locations on a Google map. Someone on Twitter suggested the Birmingham side street could be ‘Needless Alley’ which is a real place in Brum. Perfect!

In creating the map I was inspired to add satellite co-ordinates into the narrative as a plot device so these were discovered engraved on the back of the protagonists watch in chapter one.

Quite how the map element evolves, and whether other web elements are invoked remains to be seen but I like the notion of layering the narrative in this way.

Because he’s a master of such things, @philcampbell suggested creating a podcast out of the story but I’m not best qualified to take this on.

What I do think could be fun though would be doing a live reading, with two or three voices and possibly someone ‘operating’ the google map etc. But we need to see how the story evolves first. What particularly excites me about this is that the story might be being ‘performed’ as it is being written by the audience.

We’ll have to see about that. For now though, come to Plurk and help write Jonny Snake’s destiny.

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…

zeFrank

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:

1. 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)
2. Simultaneous posting from more than one participant (is likely and it…) breaks the thread (if facilitated by @replies)
3. Likewise, delayed posting also breaks the thread
4. It’s just generally difficult to follow the thread of the story

Possible solutions:

1. Limit the game to two participants
2. Set up a group and have people tweet to that somehow (this wouldn’t totally solve the simultaneous posting problem)
3. 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