Home Page: The Game
This is an idea we discussed this weekend, based on John's mention that a local gaming store carries a wide variety of dice, including dice that generate hexadecimal numbers. Hexadecimal numbers are probably most widely used in the HTML coding system for colors. So, roll for background color: #dfdc09... ooh, a nasty shade of mustard yellow*, and not web-safe to boot. You lose 10 hits. Of course, the point of the game is to get the most hits on your home page. Do you post samples of your artwork, photos of your cat... or free pictures of nude women? Intelligent debate about the news of the week, self-indulgent whining about your comfortably miserable life... or more pictures of nude women? Those naked pictures are worth 500 hits apiece, but if you keep them up too long, copyright holder Playboy will come around and have your page shut down (lose 5 turns (days) while finding a new host and content). Samples of your artwork -- roll for hit value, 10 to 50 hits apiece, but beware -- the better they are, the more likely someone will steal them and repost them (without credit or permission, of course) to boost their own home page hits. Self-indulgent whining and photos of your cat: 250 hits apiece, it's amazing how many people love this. Intelligent debate about the news of the week: 10 hits. Nobody cares about that stuff. Once your page gets above 5,000 hits, you have to start worrying about bandwidth and server costs, are you going to stay on a free server, are you going to carry banner ads... Heck, is this even a game anyone wants to play, anymore?
* Apologies to my sister, but after all, that is the point of that particular web page.