Seasons

This is called Cadavres exquis ("exquisite corpse" in English), a game invented by the surrealists in 1926 that consists in making random verse from words that are written, by different players, unaware of the previous entries. The technique got its name from the results obtained in initial playing, "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau" ("The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine"). Later they used the same technique with drawings. It can be fun to use this principle in bots. I used it for Doll-379, she’s not very developed for the moment, but I hope some day I will find the time do work on this bot again.
You should take a look at this site too:

www.cadavre-exquis.net/eng

Here you can play in French and an English, and see the history of previous entries.

I love playing games like that! In fact, my wife and I invented a new version of that game last night- I cut a piece out of a paper bag, and then she cut something from it, and then me and then her and it ended up being this profile of a face with ponytail, eyes, mouth, etc.

But we also play with drawings- you can each start a drawing, and then trade them after a minute to add something new, and so on. But my favorite is the stories- you can do it where each person adds one, two, or three words at a time.

Oo I wanna check that game out ^^ I remember when I lived in Ukraine we used to play that all the time. Then about five years ago I moved to U.S. and just kinda forgot about it o.o

Yay! I play this game with some friends sometimes (but I never knew it was called 'cadavres exquis'). Usually with 6 categories. It's great... especially when it's 3 AM and everyone's half asleep.

We play a game called "foldover stories" that's similar. Write 2 or 3 lines of a story, leaving 2 or 3 words on the next line, then fold it over so the next person can only see those 2 or 3 words. Much cooler than the "3 word story" thingies. It's also fairly fun to do 1 word at a time stories, when you can see the whole story. Everyone tries to make the story go in a different direction, and it turns out pretty funny heh. I'll definitely hafta check out that site.

Luna: glad you're having fun with it I've seen some of your stuff, you're a pretty decent artist it seems.

Ok, visited the "cadavre exquis" site, and I'm not extremely impressed. For one thing, the "verses" all follow the same pattern. For another, there's severa ppl in there putting in dirty words just because they're "kewl" or something. While I'm anything but a swear word Nazi, I at least prefer them to be there for a reason other than "kewl"ness.

It is, however, similar to a card game we occasionally play. Take some index cards & cut em into 4 pieces. Then, on front & back (if desired), write nounse, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs. (A noun on each side of one card, for instance.) Shuffle the nouns, verbs, etc. separately, and stack them up in the order [adj] [noun] [verb] [adv]. Then you can just flip one from each pile over and add "the" to the beginning. So you end up with sentences like "The masculine submarine gargled halfheartedly."

This game got boring after a while, so I decided to make a version with varying sentence structures. Using mIRC script, I've made 75 or so newspaper headline templates (Dracula seen attacking a tampon in the valley of the shadow of death), 30 or 40 definitions (Burrito: a Spandex cow filled with fiberglass), several song titles (Defenestrate me in the psych ward, lazy crustacean), band names (the Reno churchgoing antichrists), and even mutilated Bible quotes (blessed are the crusty, for they shall sit on the aftershave). (Wow, that was a really long sentence. O.o) Anyway, I made it so I could add words and entire word lists whenever I want to right from mIRC, without having to open text files. So it now has maybe 10k words to plug into the sentences, and is usually grammatically correct. I oughtta put it online for ppl to dl sometime, but then I might actually run into bandwidth limits and stuff.

www.newzoid.com does it with real newspaper headlines, can be quite profound. And how did you recognize me, Onyx

Are you Dracula, or the Spandex cow?

You’re right about the pattern and dirty words, OnyxFlame. But the verses depend solely of the input of the visitors… Usually the phrases in the French version sounds better than the English ones. On their links page I found this other page with crazy, randomly generated, headlines for medical stories: http://chanter.com/yves/medical.htm Very funny! And the phrases are well build. I tried to discover how it’s done, by isolating the building blocks. I think It’s more complex as it looks at first sight (or the programmer cheats and the phrases arte less random than they pretend to be).

I'm not at all surprised that a lot of people here like these kinds of things. We seem to be by and large linguistic enthusiasts with artistic and musical talents. In my writing, I like to explore the bizarre and make people laugh. For example, I wrote a story that you could read without understanding but could listen to and understand it completely. It was something like "Duh Why Lee Focks". It was hilarious to listen to because the reader would make sense but pronounce everything in a strange way.

Then there are ways to write that break expectations, like "He had an apple in each hand and a pear in the other."

I've been playing a sort of game with a few of my poet friends that just involves writing two-line poems. One guy will write about three dozen first lines and pass them over to the other guy (usually by email), who will finish the poems (or pass them to someone else to make three-line poems from). It's surprising what good results we sometimes get.

I've done "3 line stanza" poems with my cousin, similar to what you're talking about except since we're in person we generally make the poem tell a story as we go along. The last one was about a group of 40 sailors who went off in a ship to explore. They were carrying a cargo of kale, and everyone got really sick of eating it, so one night a sailor unveiled his stash of contraband celery. They all got drunk and the one gay sailor on board got sensory overload. Then a deserted and sinister-looking island came in view, but it had a lot of fruit trees so they were going to land anyway so they wouldn't get scurvy or something. Unfortunately, we never finished it, but it could've been really interesting.