www.criticalmiss.com/issue10/GrammarFascist1.html
Contact Grammar Fascist is a free educational game aimed at improving the standard of literacy displayed on Internet message forums. In reality, Grammar Fascist is a game for everyone who has ever despaired at the pitiful standard of writing displayed on Internet forums. It's a game for everyone who's ever wanted to get in touch with their inner intellectual snob. It's a game for anyone who's ever wanted to visit a Brittney Spears fansite and make eight year-old girls cry. What You Need To Play All you need to play is a group of friends (or at the very least, people you know), a selection of message forums (alternatively, you can opt for an "open" game, where all forums on the Net are in play), and an agreed time limit, together with an appreciation and understanding of language, and a sociopathic desire to inflict that appreciation and understanding on everyone else. Rules Overview The basic format of the game is that you score points for certain posts you make on the selected message forums within the specified time period. Now I find with many games that the easiest way to explain the rules is to describe the passage of play, and Grammar Fascist is no exception. Let's imagine that you've agreed a "five-day Monday to Friday game limited to ENWorld and RPGNet".
You immediately start surfing those forums for badly written posts, and stumble upon the following post. RPGWriter Joined: 29 June 2003 Posts: 4,576 Location: kansas Posted: 4 January 2006, 15:45 Joe57 wrote: Hi everyone, Some people say that it's currently too hard to get a foothold in the RPG industry right now. But others say that it's easy if you just work hard at your writing and make an effort to get contacts. my book is finihsed and redy to be printed if any compeny out their has the gut to put out... It's important to note how the quoting mechanism works on these kind of messaging forums. In this case, the post is by RPGWriter, who is responding to a post by Joe57, and has included quoted text from Joe57. For the purposes of the game, we are only interested in the text written by RPGWriter, the author of the post. We call this post, the target post, and the person who made it, the target. To score points, you reply to RPGWriter, quoting his entire post, and then adding your scoring critique at the bottom. my book is finihsed and redy to be printed if any compeny out their has the gut to put out... You appear to have made a number of mistakes in your post. However, you have now started to refer to publishers in the second person. You have now made a scoring post, with an initial score of 57, one for each error you found. Each footnote in which you pointed out one or more errors is termed a score. In order to remove all subjectivity from the scoring process, Grammar Fascist uses the responses of other, non-playing, forum participants to judge the validity of all scored points. Imagine that having made your post, the following posts appear. RPGWriter Joined: 29 June 2003 Posts: 4,576 Location: kansas Posted: 4 January 2006, 15:58 Your talking crap. Its people like yhou whu mak it so hard to get in to teh industary. if y dont fuk off im gona fuk u off my self Jonny 44 wrote: You appear to have made a number of mistakes in your post.
Peter Pumpkin Joined: 5 April 2001 Posts: 11,934 Location: Bath, UK Posted: 4 January 2006, 16:05 Jonny 44 wrote: You appear to have made a number of mistakes in your post. You appear to be new here, and while I appreciate that you are perhaps trying to be helpful, I think you are going out it in a way that will prove to be counter-productive. Pedro Joined: 18 December 2005 Posts: 472 Location: Madrid Posted: 4 January 2006, 16:12 Jonny 44 wrote: 7Formatting mistake: "rpg" should be capitalised. I can see that you can argue that since rpg is an acronym for roleplaying game it should be spelt RPG But if you leave out the periods then you are clearly saying that it has become a word in its own right, and if so, whether or not to capitalise it would simply be a matter of style - with lower-case being entirely correct. Certainly it's very informal, but in a sense, the whole point of using puntos suspensivos (translates as suspensive points - don't know what the English term for that is) is to bypass the rules of grammar rather than breaking them. The first post doesn't count, because any subsequent posts made by the target have no effect on scoring. The second post does potentially count, since it is in direct response (ie it quotes) your scoring post, and it was made before the end time of the game. However, since it doesn't directly contradict any of the scores you claimed, it doesn't alter your score. The third post, by Pedro (which is also a responding post) does alter your score though, since it claims that two of your scores are incorrect. The important thing to grasp here is that it doesn't matter if Pedro is right or wrong: claiming that your score is wrong is enough to invalidate it. By claiming that score 7 is wrong, Pedro not only removes the 1 point you scored with it, but he also gives you a further penalty of 2 points (ie twice what you claimed). Similarly, claiming that score 40 is wrong eliminates the 2 points you scored with it, and adds a further penalty of 4 points. So your provisional score has now declined from 57 to 48. If another person claims that a score is incorrect, then that causes no further penalty. However, the guiding principle of "a single contradiction by someone else is enough to forever nullify a point" also applies to responding posts. Again, imagine that the following post is then made: RickRick Joined: 29 June 2003 Posts: 4,576 Location: kansas Posted: 4 January 2006, 16:19 Pedro wrote: I don't think that's correct. Certainly it's very informal, but in a sense, the whole point of using puntos suspensivos (translates as suspensive points - don't know what the English term for that is) is to bypass the rules of grammar rather than breaking them. I think they're called ellipses, and according to my professor at college, they are *not* correct grammar. This post cancels Pedro's claim that score 40 was incorrect, nullifying both the 2 point loss and the 4 point penalty, putting the score back up to 54 points. The claim that score 7 was wrong has not been challenged and thus still stands. Note 2:- once a score has been revalidated in this way, it cannot ever be invalidated again, even if someone else comes up with a different explanation as to why it's invalid. Note 3:- you cannot yourself challenge a post which challenged you. Finally, imagine that the following post is then made: Mike Joined: 15 May 2003 Posts: 7,328 Location: New York Posted: 4 January 2006, 16:25 Jonny44 wrote: 19Formatting mistake: The first letter of the first word of a sentence should be capitalised. This poster has found an actual mistake in your scoring post. Again, it doesn't matter whether or not he's correct - the fact that he's made the claim is enough. If this occurs, you get a -5 penalty for each mistake that is found. So in this example, the original score of 57 has now gone down to 49. Note:- just as before, this penalty is eliminated if a single person counters the claim that you had made a mistake. At the end of the time period, each player submits a list of scoring posts (ie the URLs) to the rest of the players, and the scores are tallied up. The four top highest scoring posts made by each player are then totalled. Additional Rules Each player must use only one account to play the game. This does not have to be their standard account, but the name of the account must be submitted to the other players before play starts. Players are not allowed to make posts responding to scoring posts made by other players. Any covert attempt to do so (by creating an anonymous account) is totally unacceptable, and can be punished by the other players by any means they so desire, up to, and including, death by beating. Tactics Grammar Fascist is a more subtle game than it might seem at first glance. This is due to the interactive nature of its scoring system. Attempting to too aggressively criticise posts may provoke a backlash that will actually...
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