a question for Certain Old-timer GEnie-ites...

[lagilman]

If The Game were to be restarted for the holidays, would you be interested in playing?


EtA: Oh dear lord. I've been reading the archives of the first Game, and I think we invented cracktastic.


And because everyone else is jumping off the bridge...

Which creature of the night are you? Your Result: Sorceror   Control is the name of your game. You are a studied tactician and scientist and you seek a kingdom where things make sense, damn the morals, even if you have to create it. You are cold, calm and calculating.
Vampire
Werewolf
Incubus/Succubus
Cthulu Spawn
Ghost
Demon
Which creature of the night are you? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Hrmmm.... Change two answers I was meh on, and the top two results are reversed.

Which creature of the night are you? Your Result: Vampire   You are a social pragmatist, as likely to kiss as to bite. Your sensuality and social pragmatism is the counter-balance to your existential angst and your tendency toward depression.
Sorceror
Demon
Werewolf
Cthulu Spawn
Incubus/Succubus
Ghost
Which creature of the night are you? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Innneresting.

Comments

[ramblin-phyl.livejournal.com]

I remember GEnie. I don't remember the Game.

[badgermirlacca.livejournal.com]

Yes. We also need Jenn and the Usual Suspects.

[djonn]

It's been a very long time, but I still have the coordinates for the virtual pocket dimension wherein the Senior Field Agent for Corporate has his office. And if this references what I think it references, the Senior Field Agent will certainly want to have a hand in the proceedings. And a certain Tisania di Medici might also be persuaded out of the woodwork, depending on the particular circumstances of the revival....

[msdori.livejournal.com]

Oh, HELL YEAH.

Details?

[badgermirlacca.livejournal.com]

msdori saved the original Game (in all its incoherence), and I'm volunteering to edit it for those who may want their memories refreshed. We're trying to get the files transferred now.

[scottedelman.livejournal.com]

I, too, was on GEnie, but I also have no memory of The Game.

I guess this announcement really is only for "certain" GEnie-ites. And they know who they are. At least, I hope so, because I don't!

[msdori.livejournal.com]

And holy shit, Julian's got his work cut out for him.

I was just thinking yesterday how much I missed those guys. *G*

[djonn]

This is a Very Good Thing, because I lost most of that material a couple of computers back. (It may still be on a floppy disk somewhere, but I need to get a USB floppy drive for the current computer so I can read the five hundred floppy disks stacked hither and thither on the bookshelves behind me....)

So I'll want a copy when it's available. [If anyone also has an archive of the Great Chocolate Chip Cookie Chase from my own author topic, I need that, too, but that's probably a pipe dream....]

[lagilman]

Details still to be worked out, but I see The Badger is already on the scent...

[lagilman]

The Game was... oh lord. How to describe The Game. It was Second Life, done entirely in text. Real-time quests and parties, dropped and picked up as people had time and inclination, and always with a surge around the holidays.

It got... pretty whacked-out.

[lagilman]

and some new Players, probably.

[djonn]

This is a shorthand reference to a large -- not to say "sprawling", not to say "madcap" -- interactive caper/adventure story that wandered through a number of author topics at one point quite late in the GEnie life cycle.

The specific epic under discussion included some characters and elements spun off from the "Clan Borgia" continuity, but was largely independent of the Borgia material, and where the Borgia collective mostly involved original characters, this particular epic incorporated a sizeable (and equally sprawling) fanfictional component.

Corporate and the Senior Field Agent tended to get pulled into almost all of the interactive storylines that sprang up on GEnie in those days -- besides the Borgia adventures and the present Game, Jeffry cooked up a "Foxhole" premise at one point, and there were various topic-invasions involving radioactive Gila monsters and small children playing dinosaurs. But "the Game" probably counts as the most complicated of all, save perhaps for the "Bugs Bunny vs. the Borg" multi-author Star Trek fanfic created in SFRT2 by a completely different authorial team.

[camille-is-here.livejournal.com]

Squeee!

[house-draven.livejournal.com]

Damn straight, I'm in. But I'll be playing, I think, with a character who isn't named yet, dammnit. Crap.

[lagilman]

Oh hell. I don't even know who I'd invite, at this point. I'm so PO'd at the lot of them....

[badgermirlacca.livejournal.com]

Just for the record:

The Game began December 31, 1996, in GEnie's Category 44, Topic 3. Administrative posts were supposed to run (and mostly did) in my Topic, the Cat/Num of which I no longer recall. It ran until April 26, 1997, when Djonn's final post wrapped things up... and then, because some of us just can't let these things go, a coda story for Dori, Ashley, and Katie in Cairo also ran.

Right now the Game files are as follows:
1: 221 pages
2: 198 pages
3: 201 pages
4: 350 pages

Participants in the original Game included the following posters:

LAG
qIra (Jules)
Jenn (who was the original creator and driving force behind it all)
Kath Lawrence
Vampry (Sue Phillips)
Dori
Kate Daniel
Sue Wolven
Keith DeCandido
Vicki
Sherri Fillingham
Doris Egan
Handlebar (D. Kingsley)

... and that was just the first file.

It was the most ridiculously glorious mashup of crossovers and Mary Sues you would ever want to see. But by damn, we saved us some Multiverse!

[badgermirlacca.livejournal.com]

Don't bet on it. When the Game started, just about anybody who wanted to could drop in a post or two.

[badgermirlacca.livejournal.com]

Send your email to mirlacca at prodigy dot net.

[lagilman]

It was the most ridiculously glorious mashup of crossovers and Mary Sues you would ever want to see

All done with Gleeful Malice Aforethought. *grin*

[djonn]

"Wrapped things up" is probably generous; I'm fairly sure even without the transcripts that there were at least a couple of loose threads left when things finally wound up. For one thing, I don't think I ever did fully resolve matters between Jarod (aka The Pretender) and Tisania di Medici....

That said, the frenetic stage-managing, listmaking, and dispatching of quests that I got roped into organizing volunteered to coordinate in the home stretch were some of the most sheer fun a writer/editor geek should be allowed to have.

[ramblin-phyl.livejournal.com]

I never participated. So I'll bail on any resurection

[scottedelman.livejournal.com]

Based on the 1996 start date, I guess I was present on the magical continent of GEnie, but it was happening off in a corner I never visited. And based on what it sounds like The Game was, some sort of round-robin meta-story, I wouldn't have had time to play anyway, since writing my own fiction ate all my available time!

[lagilman]

Bah. Many of the players were holding down full time jobs and writing, or writing full time during the Game. It was our way of blowing off steam.

(you grabbed the time you could, then threw the storyline to the next person, and came back when time allowed. You have to be willing to a) be there All The Time or b) give up control, true. But it's good training for playing well with others/collaborating.)

[scottedelman.livejournal.com]

it's good training for playing well with others/collaborating.

Then it's a good thing I never showed up, because I don't play well with others, have never collaborated and never plan to.

And since the way I blow off steam is by writing, I don't need to use other writing to blow any steam off. So if I'd had an extra few minutes in the day back then, I would have devoted it to my own story, not your story, or yours, mine, and ours, or however a group story is defined.

What can I say? Call me Mr. Boring! I'm just no fun!

[lagilman]

So long as you aren't Mr. Rudely Dismissive, you can be anything else you want.... *smiles, showing teeth*

[scottedelman.livejournal.com]

Nope, and I hope I didn't come off that way!

Where are the smiley faces, unicorns, and rainbows when I need them?

It's just something that I am about as temperamentally unsuited for as a person can be.

[autojim.livejournal.com]

Alas, I am quite literally mid-move (Detroit to Houston) and will have limited time and access the next several days. If one get started, I may jump in at some point.

I am surrounded by boxes and pretty much all my worldly posessions. Movers come tomorrow.

[(Anonymous)]

Indeed, the "itch" that drives people into shared/collaborative storytelling seems to be distinct from the one that drives people into creating original stories all on their own. The above-referenced Game -- and the numerous other interactive story arcs that sprang up on GEnie in its heyday -- are one manifestation of the shared/collaborative itch; commercially published tie-in fiction is another, and Dungeons & Dragons and its sister role-playing games are a third.

Some folk have both itches, some have just one, and some neither; they're simply different in kind, just as bananas are different from apricots.

[djonn]

Whoops; the anonymous comment is mine -- I've been playing musical browsers this week, and had forgotten that I had logged myself out of one of them....

[lagilman]

Tsk, you almost got yourself deleted....

[djonn]

Received and partially skimmed. Yup, I think we probably did invent "cracktastic".

And I think I'd forgotten just how many characters I ended up running or partially running by the end of the adventure.

[handlebar605.livejournal.com]

My creative juices being almost non-existant, I just played once or twice, because I was in such awe of the work by others (I think that most of the time, I just walked on & ended up as a guard (thankfully never red-shirted) of the multiverse complex being protected)

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

I think it's a matter of temperament, as djonn says - possibly along the same arc as folk who can't understand how someone would spend 'all that time' writing blog posts. It doesn't, as we know, necessarily take up much time and it's entertaining. I'm not personally one for the Second Life kind of stuff, and I think you are right - I never saw the point of D&D either and I don't go for the 'role playing' aspect of LJ, like Zombie Day.. But that's a purely personal thing and no one is forcing anyone to participate.

[lagilman]

I never said this sort of creative play was for everyone. I know it's not. I was objecting to what felt to me like a dismissive "I wouldn't do that with my

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I never said this sort of creative play was for everyone. I know it's not. I was objecting to what felt to me like a dismissive "<b>I</b> wouldn't do that with <b>my<M/b> time" reaction in the original response.

[lagilman]

Luck with the move, let us know when you land safely!

[scottedelman.livejournal.com]

Again, sorry if I came off dismissive. I was really only trying to say that my lack of desire to get involved indicated something about me rather than something about you. I'm sure if we'd been talking about this face to face rather than online my tone would have tipped you off.

[lagilman]

well, your icon should have tipped me off, actually. But I was being a reactive meerkat at the time...

[vincam.livejournal.com]

I miss The Game terribly. I loved the fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants writing. Give-and-take. It was...exhilarating.

[badgermirlacca.livejournal.com]

But that was part of the fun. Anybody could do a walk-on, and could participate exactly to the degree comfortable.

And hey, glad to see you again! Didn't know you were on LJ!

[joyslin.livejournal.com]

I wasn't a participant, but I was an avid reader. I'm at the point, however, if I can come up with a character, I'd play.

[msdori.livejournal.com]

Those files will edit down a huge amount, I think--I just saved the posts with all the headers and stuff. I do have a clean version of the Cairo bit at the end, that Katie and Ashley and I did.

That was so much fun. *G*

[badgermirlacca.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm leaving the headers in--it's interesting to see who's doing the posting, and how much time lag (if any) there is between posts.

I'm taking out the forced line breaks, and so far have only run across a couple of posts which are clearly not related at all.

I can remember some of the background discussion that led to some of those posts. It was interesting.