Does anyone here want to participate in a story game?

[feihong]

I was thinking about running a simple story game as an exercise in writing Chinese. If you're interested, please reply to this topic. Details are below:

1. As the host, I write a short story (in Chinese), and post it in parts (I think 10 is a good number).

2. After each part, the participants write what they think will happen next in my story (a single sentence is fine).

3. The person who comes closest to guessing what happens next gets a point. The person who makes the most interesting guess also gets a point.

4. We keep repeating steps 2 and 3 until my story ends. The person with the most points wins!

This is definitely an experiment, since I'm not sure how well this will work in practice. One of the biggest problems being, does anyone even want to try doing this? Also, I should mention that there is no prize for winning the game, other than the honor and respect of your fellow forum-goers.

[Meng Lelan]

There's something like this in English on some city specific online forums in the US and some of the results are funny to no end whatsover.

I can try but I don't know, is the story going to be all made up or what?

[jkhsu]

What? No money for winning? Sure, count me in.

[feihong]

@Meng Lelan

The story is completely fictional. I actually already wrote it. It's not a very good story, but I tried to fill it with weird twists so that it's at least hard to guess what happens next.

[skylee]

I think it would be more fun if people can actually contribute to the story instead of just guess what is in the host's mind.

I have tried something like this on this website years ago but it did not get very far. And I can't find that thread now.

[Meng Lelan]

I like skylee's idea of us contributing to the story.

[roddy]

I can see this working, would make a perfectly good classroom activity.

[querido]

I agree with points for original ideas.

Thanks. I'll play.

[Edit: No I'd better not. Too busy.]

[feihong]

If others contribute to the story, how will we decide which branch to go with? Do we vote, or does the host decide? I actually like the idea of it becoming a "choose your own adventure" story. We could retroactively edit replies to link to individual replies that follow that branch. Would that get too complicated, though?

I still maintain that we limit the game to a finite number of rounds, though.

[jkhsu]

I see two totally different ideas being discussed here:

One is feihong's original story idea which I think is a fair game for anyone to play. I'd be interested in seeing how that one goes.

The other is this idea of everyone contributing to a story. This is a great idea but it shouldn't be a game where there is a winner or have the need to choose a branch to go with. The reason is because we have people with various levels of Chinese writing ability here. A few paragraphs of text may take Meng Lelan or Skylee a few minutes to write but take me hours (maybe days) and I'd still have grammar / vocab mistakes. Additionally, if we choose a particular branch, those who aren't great writers or don't get their branches chosen will stop participating.

Here are my suggestions on how this idea might work:

1. I like feihong's idea of having an end to this story. Rather than rounds, why don't we just specify a time limit for the story. For example, the story starts tomorrow and ends in two weeks at a certain time.

2. Your post must follow the storyline of the most recent post. In other words, every new post is a branch. No branches are chosen.

A version control issue can surface if two or more people happen to be writing at the same time based on the same previous post but post their own replies at different times. I guess this is a problem we will have to deal with? Maybe a general rule is to write in short spurts instead of spending hours writing an essay only to realize the story has changed already.

Additional thoughts?

[大肚男]

For what it's worth, I think the original idea is great, I like the idea of feihong being a sort of a dungeon master.

Plus, it will give the story a needed consistency.

This would also give feihong the opportunity to change hits story based on suggestions as he sees fit

I'm in either way, even though my Chinese is nor very good.

Looking forward to the Story.

[Hofmann]

Sounds fun. Tempting to troll though.

[jkhsu]

@feihong: Are you planning to run this game? I'm up for giving your original idea a try.

[David Wong]

我也感兴趣。