Kuro5hin is an excellent, brawling community discussion site, run on a customized version of slash, the moderation system that underpins Slashdot run on scoop, a message-board platform with many features similar to Slashdot's. A user has fielded a (tongue-in-cheek?) proposal to re-make K5 as a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, through which "characters" would advance by posting messages consistent with their guild affiliations (e.g., "The American Government Sucks", "Intelligent Design is a Fraud upon Science") and undertake other traditional MMORPG tasks in the course of being active K5ers:
The ultimate goal of any player is left up to them but I decided that having a few unique goals is the best way to encourage play. Since all content creating players are "trolls" how does one distinguish which players are better than the others? This is where the "Meta Troll" comes in, a player transcends trolldom to become a "Meta Troll" when their content creation cease to look like attempts at trolling. You might say I'm not a "troll" but frankly we all are, just get used to the fact. The other goals are to leave the game. This involves creating content in the diary section about how much the game sucks and you want to leave. This must be repeated over several weeks until you decide to either leave for greener pastures (Husi is just astroturf anyway) or stay on.
Whining is not a goal but rather a subgame. It can be played both ways, causing a player to whine or whining yourself. The most common whines are
* I got modbombed by [insert name]
* My story got voted down you bastards
* [insert name] crap flooded my diary/story/conversation
* Why do people zero my comment then reply to it? It's stupid.While standard whines are ok, repeating them is boring. I believe we need more creative ways to whine.
