The Wiki Game

Dan Smith writes "A new nerdy Internet activity recently popped up at Amherst College called the "Wiki Game". It works off of Wikimedia's amazingly popular electronic encyclopedia, Wikipedia. The Wiki Game is simple, doesn't require any registrations and gives your brain a thorough workout. Although the instructions suggest at least two people to play it, it's very easy to play solo. The instruction "manual" is (naturally) posted on Wikipedia: The Wiki Game."

Re:Neat...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds an awful lot like "Web that Smut" [ukonline.co.uk] from 1996!

From The January 1996 MacUser..
WEB THAT SMUT! - Andy Ihnatko
How to play..

The object of Web That Smut!:
To proceed from a perfectly innocent starting point on the web to... hang on - I've got the text of the litigation here somewhere. Aha!- "words and/or images of a prurient nature which violate reasonable standards of good taste in the town and/or county of it's source or destination of transmission."

What's with the complicated rules?

[Profane MuthaFucka]

people really like to overengineer their fun, it seems. I play the same game, and what I do is open a browser window, click random topic. Open another browser window, click randome topic. Now, the goal is to get from the article in one window to the article in the other window. No timing, no team play, just clicking. It's like solitaire.

When you get to the goal, just click random topic in one window and keep navigating to get to that topic. The game never ends.

Find the filth

[Kidbro]

This is a bit sad, but back in my web developer days (this must have been 1998) I and a couple of colleagues played a similar game we called Find the filth.
The idea was very simple. Everybody starts at a reletively "clean" site (big corporations or government agencies were normal targets). You were just allowed to click links - never use your bookmarks or type URLs in directly.
The first person to find porn won.

I don't think it ever took more than two minutes ;)

We did this...

[Anonymous Coward]

...with allmusic.com [allmusic.com]. Start at any artist/group, then think of a very different artist. Then see how few clicks on "Same personnel," "similar artists," "influenced by," etc you can make to get to that band. It actually tests your knowledge of music. Those who know more know which bands and artists are more likely to fill in the gaps.