Ten Years Ago Today: First Mornington Crescent on Twitter

In August 2007, Twitter was just getting going - we were playing around with the form, what it was, what it might be for. To me it was just a 140 character improvisation game - others took it more seriously, but nobody dreamt that one day it would all be celebrities, journalists and Presidents or that anyone would have a bazillion followers. It was just fun, impro - Everything is an offer! I'd played lots of these games both in real life theatre and online in game servers that sprung up on the early web.

Mornington Crescent is, for the uninitiated, simply the greatest board/panel game ever invented. The rules are few but can lead to highly complex and entertaining gameplay. Games can go on for hours, weeks or even lifetimes.

So it was that on 3rd August 2007 a bunch of (mostly) Brits took time out from the serious business of microblogging and online social networking to play the inaugural game of Mornington Crescent on Twitter. I am proud to have recorded the event on my weblog soon after the final whistle - sadly Twitter's archives aren't a great way to find out what happened. You can see that on Twitter there was obviously some confusion about what we were doing. Arguments about rule sets are commonplace in the game though. My favourite player was Steve Bowbrick who seems to have been channeling an early version of Foursquare.

Back when the web was fun!