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Playing Word Games in Blog Comments

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I just noticed a whole series of word-association and other games going on in the comments of Fail Blog posts. I have no idea if this is a new phenomenon, but I haven’t seen it before. Nor is it clear if any of these people know each other from elsewhere, but there is a whole little community gameplay scene that appears to spontaneously twist and turn.

I always find it fascinating how people will bend almost any activity towards play and communication. Blog comments are of course already set up for communication, but it’s the ability to have them nested on Fail Blog that seems to create a the boundaries for the playfulness.

Is this something new or have I just been in a cave or something? Anyone know of other examples of this happening?

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 at 12:50 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Comments

  1. Bill Mill | November 23rd, 2008 | 7:55 pm

    A similar phenomenon is that of reddit pun threads. A typical example: http://www.reddit.com/comments/6nyrv/someone_tell_me_why/c04eghp

  2. Andy Polaine | November 23rd, 2008 | 10:34 pm

    That reddit one is great. Any idea of where this whole thing started?

  3. Andy Polaine | November 23rd, 2008 | 11:00 pm

    Bill (comment No. 1 above) just mailed me a link to Reddit’s special pun page. Some of them really are very good.

  4. Canaerial links - November 26th | Canaerial | November 26th, 2008 | 2:48 pm

    [...] Playpen » Blog Archive » Playing Word Games in Blog Comments - Word-association and other games going on in the comments of Fail Blog posts. [...]

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