I'm trying to make a game that is fun for people who are stuck at work with nothing to do.

The game has to have a few parameters:
1)  Asynchronous play for lots of players.
2)  Play does not create "work" for other players.  For example, if you're away from the game for a day you don't have a "workload" of past text building up on you.
3)  A player being away for an indefinite period doesn't hold up the game for others
4)  Doesn't play on themes of drudgery or how much work sucks (needs to be an escapist endeavour).
5)  Can't have graphics although it CAN involve data that goes into a spreadsheet.
6)  Helps flex dying creative muscles.
7)  Minimizes effects of snarkiness and curmudgeonliness (a real problem when you're posting from work). 
8)  Can play on a forum.

Those are my first thoughts.

The player, at their turn, write a X words long paragraph. You can't make 2 paragraph in a row. The OP pick the setting and color (horror thing, sci-fi or fantasy, etc). The OP can make up to 3 paragraphs as necessary to set up initial conditions/mood. The Nth poster must conclude. He is also allowed 3 paragraphs.

The you can top on that a "best post" voting system, a "best overall contributor" a "most original post", etc which in turn grants the winning player points for each awards. You can then spend those points to be the OP of a new story. You could also alternatively allow/require the final poster to spend points too. You may also add an system where people can pay points to edit other people's posts. Maybe no more than replacing/adding/removing a single sentence.

First post has a list of characters with a line or two of descriptive text, and a setting description. Posters are not limited to one character, and can jump between any characters and as many as they want at any time. Posters would describe an interaction between any characters in a couple of paragraphs. The next poster would then find one sentence to quote out of that post and use it as a theme for his post. He can use all of the same characters, or not. If some one posts a different direction than you do while your writing your post no big deal. The story will just branch at that point and go in two different directions at that point. When selecting a theme you may go back up to three posts to do so. I think this would be fun for those posting, and especially fun if someone wants to read along to see how the characters develop differently in the different branches, or see how similarly the end up.

Bastoche, in your game how do you avoid stalling if the original players have bogged off at the scoring stage? 

HDTVDinner, how would yours avoid creating past workload? 

Ryan wrote:
 

HDTVDinner, how would yours avoid creating past workload? 

Building off Dinner's plan,

This probably requires a bit of infrastructure. First create several seed paragraphs, all completely independent, maybe with a theme or predecided characters or something... Now whenever you want to add to the story, the server should pick two paragraphs A and B which are not directly connected (at the beginning, no paragraph is directly connected to any other paragraph) and show them to you. Your task is to write a third paragraph C so that a section of a story might read A -> C -> B. There should also be a reader somewhere that lets you start anywhere you want (or a random place), and pick which story to continue reading (or picks randomly for you).

This satisfies 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. I don't know of any existing forums that would allow anything like this functionality, though.

And it seems to stray from anything I might call a game, though I don't think that much matters.

As I often do, I dove right in and posted this.
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=378065

Just curious to see what happens.

I wnoder if something something with asimpler base structure could handle more intricate superstructure. 

Like... what if it was
"first poster sets up context in 100 words or less and asks a question in 20 words or less." 
"next post answers question in 100 words or less, and asks a new question in 20 words or less.  The question has to be based off of something from the thread so far in some way."

Anyone can take a block of posts and award a "winner" at any time, but it only applies to the last 5 posts, and you can't be in the block.  You can still write a post when you declare "winner" if you wish.

The winner is allowed to do 120 words that wrap any two other posts into one and can ignore the questions, but cannot ask a new question.  You can award "winner" for posts like this, but not for posts that just declare a winner. 

Ryan wrote:
Bastoche, in your game how do you avoid stalling if the original players have bogged off at the scoring stage? 

Well here is a link to the set up if anyone wants to give it a try.

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?p=8434365#post8434365

Ryan, what if you worked a wiki into this equation, as well as (or instead of) a forum? It's hard to be bogged down by the scrollback when the page only has one text with one present state.

Well, it's all about the workload.  I assumed it would be a forum game because if it's a wiki you have to manage traffic - you have to get people to go to the wiki.  I assume this would be played somewhere like rpg.net where it would stay visible enough and visited enough for play to be more than 1 person. 

1 person play = boring. 

Bastoche wrote:
Not sure I understand the question...

Ryan wrote:

Bastoche wrote:
Not sure I understand the question...

Well, it sounds like the game needs the same players who participated in the main game to be involved in scoring, and they "win" something that only they get to do.  So if those players have lost interest the game sits in limbo even if other people want to jump in.