At first, I just thought it was Jay Bushman tweeting The War of the Worlds in honor of the holiday, but I see I was wrong. It’s actually a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game taking place via Twitter: see it in action here. Participants are playing themselves in a shared, imaginary world based on The War of the Worlds, which they’re defining and expanding as they play. Gameplay consists of actions declared via narrative tweets of 140 characters or less. All other gameplay restrictions are implied, governed by tone and homage rather than explicit rules, near as I can tell.
What’s really intriguing, to me, is that every player is playing more or less the same game, though each player is her own sharded “server,” her own instance of the game world. No one has to react to anyone else’s alteration of the game-space if they don’t want to. So the worlds merge and separate constantly, connected only by tenuous shared allusions and tropes from the source material.
Update: In a way, a player incorporating anothers’ actions and inputs is a kind of scoring method — you acknowledge another individual tweet (but not necessarily the whole miniseries) as a kind of implicit approval or admiration of it. So that tweet has “scored.” By no means am I implying that this is the only way to score, or that scores should be tracked. It’s an RPG so there might not be a victory condition.
This is fantastic. For more: War of the Worlds v2.0 @Twitter