Nice example of using Flash for multi-person interactivity: Someone keeps stealing my letters! So the Flash object must be sending tweening coordinates back to the server and redrawing the screen for all users — very different from the usual Flash model. There were 38 people dragging when I played, and it was very difficult even to write “pontoon,” let alone “obsequious scapegoat” or “Your hovercraft is full of eels.” Any more players and the collaborative writing project would devolve into total chaos.
Title of this post thanks to Matt Mullenweg.
Update: Jeb points out that someone happened on a session there where the users were riffing on Hopkin green frog. Beautiful.
Music: The Pogues :: The Sick Bed Of Cuchuliann
I will not buy this record, it is scratched.
Excuse me, sir, your wife is on fire.
I couldn’t get “anybody” written before somebody stole my “o”. I stole it back and it just went downhill from there. Cute idea though.
This was fun. 39 others playing. I played spoiler on anyone being creative with poop, sex, etc. The group started sorting all letters into color piles. I defied this by mixing colors as quickly as possible. Others joined in, and the brothers of chaos beat out the brothers of order. Someone started creating an alphabet string. I bent it into a circle. Then others started putting all like letters on top of each other. All joined in on this and the 40 of us rapidly created a single alphabet circle. Order won out like a beach full of sand castles.
If you ever wondered what most of the writing of the infinate number of monkeys on the infinate number of typewriters would look like, I think this is a good demo.
The scratchpad is much less fun, invariably someone comes in right after the refresh with bathroom wall style graffiti.
Probably a commentary on net society in there somewhere that the letters are most often just piled in random useless piles and the drawing is most often crude graffiti.
-Jim