A game from Stephen King

This excerpt is from Misery, imho one of the best books out there about the process of writing. Anyway, the main character, Paul, is remembering a game he played in camp, and I always wanted to try it, because it sounds like fun to me. If a goodish handful of people want to try this in a Star Wars milieu, we could pretty easily adapt it to a web forum format...

Anyone interested? This is the segment in question, from Misery.

In Can You? the counsellor would start a story about this guy named Careless Corrigan. Careless was lost in the trackless jungles of South America. Suddenly, he looks around and sees there are lions behind him... lions on either side of him... and by-God lions ahead of him. Careless Corrigan is surrounded by lions... and they are starting to move in....

The counsellor had had a stopwatch, and Paul Sheldon's dozing mind saw it with brilliant clarity... The counsellor would look around the circle and pick one of the day-campers. "Daniel," he would say, "Can you?" The moment Can you? was out, the counsellor would click the stopwatch into motion.

Daniel then had exactly ten seconds to go on with the story. If he did not begin to speak during those ten seconds, he had to leave the circle. But if he got Careless away from the lions, the counsellor would look at the circle again and asked the game's other question... This question was Did he?

The rules for this part of the game were Annie's exactly. Realism was not necessary; fairness was. Daniel could say, for instance, "Luckily, Careless had his Winchester with him and plenty of ammo. So he shot three of the lions and the rest ran away." In a case like that, Daniel did. He got the stopwatch, and went on with the story, ending his segment with Careless up to his hips in a pool of quicksand or something, and then he would ask someone else if he or she could, and bang down the button on the stopwatch.

But ten seconds wasn't long, and it was easy to get jammed up... easy to cheat. The next kid might well say something like "Just then this great big bird--an Andean vulture, I think--flew down. Careless grabbed its neck and made it pull him out of that quicksand."

When the counsellor asked, Did she?, you raised your hand if you thought she had, left it down if you thought she had blown it. In the case of the Andean vulture, the kid would almost certainly have been invited to leave the circle.

 

hey, I played this at camp! this and the 'um' game (when you said 'um" you had to leave). It's gr8...not sure if could do it for 'net...but it would be fun to try!

 

Hmmm. Intriguing. I'm not sure how it would work here, though.

 

interesting. I love Misery. I figured you'd put up SK.

 

The question being, if some of us only log on once per day, how would we manage the stopwatch thing? It is otherwise the CLASSIC version of a RR, only having to (plausibly) work your way out of a cliffhanger.

Definitely sounds like fun! Tell us more, JG!

 

Well, I think the stopwatch thing would have to go... no way to control the time.

So... one person starts with a post, leaves the central character in a spot, then calls on someone else playing the game. That person does a short post resolving the scenario, then everyone else votes on "Did s/he?" Last person standing wins.

It's sort of RR, but with a competitive angle, and also it could go on indefinitely and has no ultimate plan.