Journey Through Game Of Blogs….The Game

As a blogger I happily volunteered to participate in Game of blogs to #CelebrateBlogging organized by BlogAdda

The game was to create a fictional story around five characters created byBlogAdda. It was to be a team effort of ten members where each blogger would post one part of the story to be continued by the next blogger of the team. The race was to create a best fictional story that would materialize into published work.

I didn’t know a single blogger at the beginning of the game but I found myself in a team of six active bloggers. Seven was the minimum entries to qualify, but we were short of four members. We requested for set of ten members and three more members were added to our group after few days who missed the initial introductions.

Everybody was excited and a big confusion followed. A conference call was made between members where the story was discussed in details. I was unaware of the conversations the group had, because I had got disconnected after few words. The real conversation took place between three members where by the story was discussed, team leader of contact chosen, editors selected, blogger judged from the traffic the bloggers recieved on their blogs.

I was happy to interact with my team members and found all of them intelligent and creative. They had great ideas and fabulous stories to share. The only problem was that it was difficult to coordinate with them on common platform because of their own personal busy lives and finding a common timing to communicate was difficult. A WatsApp group was formed for discussion but most of the members were communicating amongst themselves on a private chat.

What was amazing about my group was that in round one, the story was creatively written with no proper planning, no proper storyboard, no clear idea. It was started with one member writing a story from her own personal viewpoint. The story moved forward picking up ends of the previous post to create a new scene. Every segment of the story was made on the spot, where the previous blogger had left the track. I didn’t know where the story was leading or how it would end. But I played along. It started off well, it was a game, after all, when suddenly the story took a steep turn with protagonist having a disease called Munchausen syndrome by proxy. That took members by surprise and sent us on Google search to do the study of the disease, and that was when the confusion began. Some members refused to go with the flow and wanted the protagonist to be efficient and intelligent. There were temper outrages and lots of disappointments, with some member knowing not how to carry the story forward and rejected the story outright..

But luckily, we also had some very talented writers who happily took up the challenge to carry the story forward. The story shaped into beautiful plot and I was quite impressed with the story.  At the end of round one, three of the members, who could not cope up with the challenges and the time that it demanded, dropped out of the game and we were left with six members.

One new member was added in round two (following the story midway, might have been difficult for her, but she turned out to be an excellent story teller) I was very happy with the way the story was unfolding. During this game, I met wonderful people. We chatted, we joked and we had long private chats. Everybody was willing to edit each other’s work, help each other, and the interaction was healthy too and we worked late nights to create a beautiful story. I wish we had time to edit and connect the story well, we could have easily qualified for the final round.

At the end of round two, we reached the position 12, we missed it by just 2 points.

It was great experience. Nevertheless, I feel sad that there was not much ‘updates’ on twitter about this event. I had created a list on twitter of the participating members of other teams on #CelebrateBlogging, to keep abreast of their activities and their challenges, but there were not much feedback. I wanted to know how the other participants were performing, I wanted the organizers to interact with me, but there was lack of communication.

Moreover, I didn’t know it would eat away so much chunk of my time. Participating in such event demands too much concentration and attention. My other blogs were getting neglected too. It was not just writing one post per week, editing and planning the story was tiresome too.

My team wanted to continue through round three too, but I thought it would be waste of time. Winners were already inside inner circle. I had no inclination to go for round three because I had other priorities.

Let the best win. I opted out.

I have learnt that in the game of blogs, coordination and cooperation is very important but it is difficult to demand loyalty from strangers. It hurts when team members walk away midway when their egos are hurt.

I am glad I met some wonderful batch of bloggers and some of them will remain in my friend list for long time in future.