Okay, we seem to have enough people lined up for the Lexicon game, and while I haven’t heard from AWB, she does seem to have reliable home internet access now. I propose we start with the first turn on Friday (if AWB isn’t ready by then she can join in later; it’s easy enough to add people). The players we have are me, heebie, snarkout, rfts, ben, and possibly AWB. I’ll be sending out the wiki password either tonight or tomorrow. Everyone who wants to play should read over the rules and have an “A” entry ready for Friday.
Also, a guy e-mailed me asking if we were accepting total strangers for the game. He’s played before, which might be nice because none of us have, but I didn’t want to make any decisions without consulting the rest of you. Thoughts?
Sunlit Water 
I’m moving Saturday and will be in little state to participate on Friday, I think, but I’d be glad to join in later if that’s possible.
Comment by ben wolfson — June 13, 2007 @ 11:59 pm |
No problem. It’s easy to add players later.
Comment by teofilo — June 14, 2007 @ 12:25 am |
Yes, I’ll be ready by Friday! If you’ve emailed me, Teo, I haven’t gotten it, and I’m not sure why.
I’m fine with strangers.
Comment by A White Bear — June 14, 2007 @ 4:26 am |
Yay! I’m also fine with including a stranger.
I have one rules question that I don’t think is covered. It’s brought up implicitly in the comments on that original Lexicon post, but it seems pretty clear that different games could handle it different ways. As you make your phantom citations, are you required to stop producing entirely new phantom entries for a given letter of the alphabet once that letter is “full”? That is, if there are seven players, once there are seven phantoms starting with R, is it poor form to make yet another, or don’t we care?
I’d rather not care, if it were up to me, but I can see why one might disagree.
Comment by redfoxtailshrub — June 14, 2007 @ 5:47 am |
I’m fine with a stranger.
I’m a teensy bit daunted by the one-letter-per-day pace, but if I’m the only one worried, I can suck it up and produce.
Comment by heebie-geebie — June 14, 2007 @ 9:23 am |
3: I haven’t e-mailed you; I just left that comment on your blog.
4: Once there are as many phantom entries for a letter as there are players, no more can be created. Otherwise when we get to that letter, there won’t be enough people to write all the entries that have already been cited. There are other ways to handle this issue, but this seems like the simplest.
Comment by teofilo — June 14, 2007 @ 2:42 pm |
Yeah, I was thinking of handling it by not caring if there were unwritten phantoms left over, but that works for me.
Comment by redfoxtailshrub — June 14, 2007 @ 8:35 pm |
I’m all about completeness, yo.
Comment by teofilo — June 14, 2007 @ 8:38 pm |
What happens if two people write entries for the same dangled entry? Should we check with each other?
Comment by heebie-geebie — June 15, 2007 @ 6:50 am |
Holy crap, you guys! That’s a lot of cool stuff to keep track of.
9: There’s a bit in the rules about that — you should call “dibs” on phantom entries before you write them, by going to the phantom entry page and writing “dibs” and your name next to any entry you plan to write.
Comment by redfoxtailshrub — June 15, 2007 @ 1:19 pm |
Yeah, the entries for the first round have all been really excellent. It’s interesting to see the different ways people approach the project.
Calling dibs isn’t required, but it’s a convenient way to prevent multiple people from writing the same article. If an article doesn’t have dibs called, it’s fair game for whoever gets to it first during the turn in question.
Comment by teofilo — June 15, 2007 @ 4:15 pm |
Teo, with “Targhanism” and “Uzdamalian Empire” did you deliberately pick words that wouldn’t have entries until the end of the game? If so, I think that was a good move. They’ll be so central that if they came early, they might not reflect the revealed trajectory of the game.
Comment by heebie-geebie — June 15, 2007 @ 4:31 pm |
Yes, that was a deliberate choice, for exactly that reason.
Comment by teofilo — June 15, 2007 @ 4:35 pm |
And thanks.
Comment by teofilo — June 15, 2007 @ 4:36 pm |
I am not playing but am interested in following along. I was able to read the wiki until this afternoon, and it now requires a password. Would you be willing to e-mail me a password to let me read the wiki as it develops?
Comment by NickS — June 15, 2007 @ 5:49 pm |
I set the wiki to “private” this afternoon to deal with a problem; I’ll set it back to “public” as soon as I’m sure the problem’s been fixed. Definitely by the time the next entries are posted.
Comment by teofilo — June 15, 2007 @ 5:53 pm |
I put my article back up.
Comment by A White Bear — June 16, 2007 @ 4:33 pm |
Of course, looking at it this many times makes me think it’s dumb. I look forward to doing the B’s so I can correct certain errors of tone and style.
Comment by A White Bear — June 16, 2007 @ 4:34 pm |
We still seem to be having the same problem, at least with the list of all pages (though no longer with the list of changes).
Comment by teofilo — June 16, 2007 @ 10:15 pm |
I have noticed that you have left it private. I just mention again that I’d be interested in reading it this weekend and, if you do make it public, that would be appreciated.
Comment by NickS — June 17, 2007 @ 3:18 pm |
Psst.
Comment by teofilo — June 17, 2007 @ 3:21 pm |
Thanks.
Comment by NickS — June 17, 2007 @ 4:58 pm |
So, any thoughts on what might be best practice for when you’re contemplating an article that isn’t an existing phantom, but you still want to let people know that you’re planning to write on “Elephants” or whatever?
Options include:
– Sorry, just post it when the time comes and let the chips fall where they may.
– Some way for calling dibs on these kinds of pages, but only a little bit in advance — say, one or two letters into the future.
– Something else.
Comment by redfoxtailshrub — June 18, 2007 @ 1:06 pm |
Good question. I’m inclined toward the first option, since I don’t think this will come up very often (the main issue with phantom articles is that they are a finite set of articles that have to get written at some point, which is not true of the set of all possible articles), but we can set up some sort of system if it does become an issue.
Comment by teofilo — June 18, 2007 @ 5:07 pm |
Another question: what happens if by the time we get to P we’ve ill-planned our phantom articles and don’t have enough space left for more phantom articles? ie, we could make problems for ourselves if we filled up the alphabet from z forward.
(we can probably just cross this bridge when we come to it. I doubt it will actually be a problem.)
Comment by heebie-geebie — June 18, 2007 @ 7:57 pm |
Yeah, that seems like the kind of thing that, while definitely possible in theory, would only really happen if we made a concerted effort to fill up the later letters of the alphabet. I don’t think it’ll come up.
Comment by teofilo — June 18, 2007 @ 9:04 pm |
The key is to spend a reasonable number of our phantom citations on existing phantoms as well as new phantoms, all along. (Otherwise we would run out halfway through, since we each make two phantoms on each entry, and we’re capped at only one phantom apiece (averaged out) per letter of the alphabet.) And in fact, even if we do run out of room for new phantom entries towards the end, we can keep spending our phantoms in this way, though obviously it’s a bit less fun.
Comment by redfoxtailshrub — June 19, 2007 @ 6:33 am |
Oh, and Teo: thanks for the yeoman’s work on chronology — that’s going to be really useful.
Comment by redfoxtailshrub — June 19, 2007 @ 6:34 am |
27: Yeah, if we run into the sort of bind heebie’s describing the easiest solution would be to just cite the Y and Z phantoms over and over. But I don’t think that’ll be necessary as long as people cite existing phantoms as we go — my chronology article, for instance, only cites existing phantoms.
28: You’re welcome. It was easier than I thought it would be to tie together in a consistent way all the chronological references various people had left in the previous articles, but it still took quite a bit of careful planning to string it all together.
Comment by teofilo — June 19, 2007 @ 6:57 am |
I’m getting a bit overwhelmed by the breadth of material we’re producing every day.
Comment by heebie-geebie — June 19, 2007 @ 10:36 am |
It really is a lot, isn’t it? I guess that’s what happens when you have this many people; this seems like a relatively large game compared to the (few) others I’ve seen. We’ll be taking a break this weekend, though, and we may slow down the pace if it starts to feel really overwhelming.
Comment by teofilo — June 19, 2007 @ 11:26 am |
If we slow down much, I’m going to wind up having to drop out at the end — I’m going to Europe for a conference and will be out of touch for about July 13-24. Just giving fair warning.
Comment by redfoxtailshrub — June 19, 2007 @ 12:09 pm |
We probably won’t finish by the 13th even at our present pace, so we’ll have to deal with your absence anyway, I guess. We could try to get someone else to join, or someone could write two articles each turn. Since it’ll be near the end, it probably won’t be too difficult to figure something out.
Comment by teofilo — June 19, 2007 @ 12:26 pm |
Oh, good point.
Comment by redfoxtailshrub — June 19, 2007 @ 5:39 pm |