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Forum Games

For one reason or another, I've been thinking about some of the old forums I used to browse, and it made me realize that I have not seen or participated in a forum game in a long time. What are forum games? Basically these games are just text/verbal-oriented games that members would come up with and play in between browsing other threads. Here are a few of the games I remember from back in the day:

Count To N

Perhaps the most mundane of the forum games, Count To N involves posters of the forum counting in sequential order from 1 until the bump limit of the thread is reached. It can be used in a roundabout way to test how cohesive a community. Members in a highly cohesive community may follow through with a lengthy count without any posts interrupting the count, while a less cohesive community may only count a few numbers before derailing the thread.

Count To N Forum Game

Figure 1. Count To N Forum Game

Corrupt A Wish

One of the sillier games, Corrupt A Wish, involves forum members making a wish, and then the next poster granting that wish but corrupting it in a monkey-paw like fashion. For example, someone on a Linux forum may write a wish such as:

I wish for a new, popular, free and open source GUI toolkit other than GTK and Qt.

The next poster would then nefariously grant the wish:

Granted, but it's written in JavaScript, by Microsoft, under an MIT license.

At a more general level, Corrupt A Wish can be thought of as a subset of the The Poster Above You game, in which you reply to the poster above, and write text that the poster below must respond to. Of all these flavors of games, I tend to like Corrupt A Wish since it sparks creative and humorous responses.

Corrupt A Wish Forum Game

Figure 2. Corrupt A Wish Forum Game

Hurt Or Heal

In Hurt Or Heal, the thread creator posts a list of objects (usually people) each starting with a score of 10. Posters are then instructed to either hurt one of the objects by decreasing it's score by -1 or -2, or heal one of the objects by increasing it's score by +1 or +2. Alternatively, a poster could split their hurt and heal scores across 2 objects, or choose to only hurt or heal by a single point. When a score reaches 0, the object is removed from the game. Since many hurt and heal games specify only a single action per each poster per day, the game can continue for many days, encouraging posters to check the thread on a recurring basis to see how their most and least favorite objects are faring. The game essentially ends when it reaches a stalemate (most posters get bored, and the ones that remain either cancel out each others' hurts and heals or the direction of hurts and heals becomes obvious).

Hurt Or Heal Forum Game

Figure 3. Hurt Or Heal Forum Game

Playing Forum Games Through RSS

I wrote a post a year or two ago in which me and the webring neighbors replied to posts on each others' feeds through mutual subscription between feeds. At the time I was subscribing to feeds by hand, but since then various members have built aggregated feeds (either though OPML files or feed aggregation services) and kept them up to date. And so, if anyone wants to corrupt wishes through RSS, download the most recent lainring OPML file from (the beautifully minimal) 0x19 site, add the subscriptions to your feed reader, and reply to each others' posts through your own RSS feed. My wish is:

I wish that the most popular Linux distros didn't default to SystemD for their init system.