These days, when it comes to social media, I am most active on BlueSky. Two types of posts captured my attention, and got that idea hamster wheel in my mind a-churnin’. The first were posts triggered by a recent feature added to BlueSky—DMs. People complaining about dealing with lewdness in their DM inbox. The other type of post requesting creative interaction. These start with a prompt, followed by the poster’s reply. I like these and usually respond with my own humorous repost reply. For example, the prompt “change a movie title to make it milder” and the response “Natural Born Knitters”. These got me thinking…How could short posts be repurposed for other forms of amusement? Hey Dougie, why not post some game related ideas?

Quirkery

Many years ago, around the time Urban Legions (a browser-based RPG) briefly existed, I had an idea for a photo safari. The idea was to have someone provide a prompt, and then people respond with a drawing, photo, or video to match the prompt. Then, people vote for their favorite submissions. The winner provides the next prompt, which leads to the next round of submissions and voting.

At the time, the social media scene was still fairly young, and I did not have enough programming knowledge to have these sorts of things shared on my own website. Nor, did I want people to reply with such stuff, mainly due to the lewdness mentioned above.

Now that social media incorporates and supports posts with GIFs, videos, pics, emojis, and so on, I think this idea could easily be implemented on top of any of the current platforms. Use Likes for votes. Repost with the winner tagged. I think this type of game could spark a lot of fun interaction. Social media overflows with creativity.

Micro RPGs

One of the most clever forms of fan-fiction I have seen on the internet was someone using a forum for role playing. In this particular use, the forum was essentially Hogwarts. The “students and teachers” at the wizarding school (forum users) would take on a role of a character from a non-Harry Potter source. Maybe Batman taught potions to Shaggy and Princess Bubblegum.

I love the concept of essentially turning the forum into an unregulated RPG. I wonder if social media could do something similar, but I do not know how I would implement this. I imagine the poster acts as the DM for that post’s thread, presenting any responders with a scenario. Responders indicate their approach to the situation. The DM either responds with a given outcome, or prompts them to “make a roll” if the outcome requires a bit of chance.

How the randomization works might take a bit of work. You wouldn’t want responses to either post a 1 or a 20, assuming the best or worst case scenarios. You would almost need to make a short list of acceptable responses and award those responding close enough to the predicted outcome, or creatively knock them down for anything else.

Guessing Games

Guessing games might work well in a social media world. I think I could get games like 20 Questions or Pictionary to work well.

For 20 Questions, I’d start with a vague prompt (Ex. “What I saw today”). People respond with yes or no questions to get more information. When enough info is provided, people can start guessing. But, if it is not answered within 20 replies, the game is lost. Eventually, the poster reveals the solution by congratulating the first to guess it correct or gives the answer after surpassing allotted guesses.

For Pictionary, again I’d start with a vague prompt (Ex. Movie Title). I would post a series of pictures of an on-going doodle. The first is a line or a squiggle. After a while, contribute an addition to the doodle. Keep posting more and more additions to the doodle. With each doodle-post, people reply with their answers. I figure eventually someone will guess it correctly, or the doodle-poster would need to forfeit the solution.

One-for-Ones

At times, I see posts designed to influence activity. Usually, these are prompts for likes, replies, or shares with a promise in return. For every X you give me, I will reply with one Y.

I imagine this type of activity would be good for creative posters. For every share, I will write you a haiku. Or, reply to this post with your favorite animal, and I will reply with a blindfolded doodle of that animal.

These types of posts, I have seen more on social media platforms that rely heavily on gaming the algorithm.

 

What other kinds of games could people play on social media? And, more importantly, would you like to play a game?