The Legend of the Sleeping Cat

The imagination is a wonderful thing, a great way to use up a rainy day, or to make a ten-hour drive fly by. Or is a great way to put off a twenty-page paper. Coming up with reasons why a paper might not be due in four hours can occupy more than the four hours remaining. And if there are more people to help come up with ideas, the game could be played for /years/ before the paper gets started.

Given a group of intelligent people and the bare bones of a plot line, some pretty fun things can happen. A pretty amazing story or theory or plan to take over the world can result, just by hours of brainstorming. Many fascinating ideas have come from such sessions and hours to spare.

Of course, for things to work well, everyone has to be interested in the same goal. The produce something worth producing. Sadly, it doesn't always work this way, sadly people often aren't willing to sacrifice their wild ideas for some sense of coherence. Or everyone at least has to understand the point.

There's a card game, "Once Upon a Time," in which each player gets 7 cards. Each has an word or phrase on it (Spell, Night, Time Passes, etc.), which are used to produce a story. The "goal" of the game is to play all your cards, bringing the story to an end. But the "point" of the game is to tell an interesting story. Alas, as a camp counselor, when my kids wanted to play my card game, they understood the goal, but not the point. Somehow, I never won.

But neither did they.

Once upon a time, a ring found on an island that was at sea went and transformed someone's parent into a sleeping cat. It died. The end.