I like to play tabletop, board and card games; if you’ve read this blog for more than, say, a month, you might have picked up on the trend. I also like to blog about games I play. Since I play
play-by-email (pbem) games quite a bit, I thought I’d try something different and report on an Enemy in Sight game via Twitter feed instead of just another set of long, overdone blog posts. Some games seem perfect for that kind of reporting; a card game with minimal interaction between players might be perfect for Twitter “battle reports”. We’ll find out.
What I’ve done is simple, really. Thanks to Tom Cundiff’s work (link in previous post) I could isolate pictures of the ships in each player’s battle line. Using Open Office Impress and a screenshot taker, I’ve taken a picture of the cards in the battle line and made a picture of each battle line in play. This is the “Master Game File”… once you make it, it seems pretty easy to keep up. As ships get sunk or captured, it’s relatively easy to move pictures from one page to the next, or delete the card picture when the ship sinks. I make a snapshot of each line, and upload to my twitter account (TheLastBrunch), using a picture service called Tinypic and TwitGoo. Twitgoo automatically posts a “twit” to Twitter.com that will post a hyperlink to each player’s move as they are made.
Why would I bother doing this? Well, I enjoy reporting on games, but giving a rather dry summary of what I did per turn in a long and ponderous blog posts just doesn’t capture the feel of Enemy in Sight, one of my favorite AH bookcase games. Twitter seems like it could be a great way to demonstrate the fluidity and interactivity of a card game.
The Twitter project should be fun. Here’s the specifics.
1. MY account name on Twitter is TheLastBrunch. http://www.twitter.com/TheLastBrunch
2. I am running the Enemy in Sight game using a hashtag, which is a way of making searching for it easier. It is #EnemyInSight. I am also adding a hash tag called #pbemgame. (Though at the moment, neither of these seem to work they are supposed to on Twitter.com).
3. You can view ALL game postings on TwitGoo by visiting here: http://twitgoo.com/u/TheLastBrunch
I hope you will follow along! This seems like a natural to me. We’ll see how easy it is…
Third Point of Singularity 