Seattle Cosmic Live-Tweet

As another part of my social media class, I live-tweeted my weekly game night last night. (Check it out if you wish by going to Twitter and searching for the hashtag #boardgamenight - you'll see tweets from me, @fishwatt, and a spectator or two.) This was a new adventure for me, as I've generally been a diffident tweeter and had never live-tweeted an event before.

A little background: Seattle Cosmic is a board game group begun by my husband and me in 2000. We play a variety of tabletop games every Saturday night, and for the first couple of years we recorded the games we played and a certain amount of commentary, added photos, and published a weekly report to our wiki. This was a fun way to keep track of what we'd been doing, and it really helped to grow the group in our early days as people "tuned in" to see our adventures each week, and it helped to keep members who hadn't been able to attend in a certain week involved by seeing what happened. After awhile, though, we got a little tired of spending so much time each game night to record what happened, snap the photos, write up the commentary, and so on. At various times, different members wanted to revive the newsletter, but it's never really taken back off.

Live-tweeting game night felt a bit like doing the newsletter again, although broadcasting it in real time. As it happened, I didn't end up transmitting pictures because I didn't want to take time out from playing to do it, but it would probably have made the reporting more vivid. As it happened, my husband couldn't attend, but he did follow the action via Twitter and did some "color commentary," including tweeting supporting information about the games we were playing, something else that could really improve the quality of the report if, say, two of us decided to co-tweet and cooperate. I had a couple of reports from acquaintances and friends who watched the tweets from a distance, and they did seem to enjoy them. However, I'm not sure I would want to live-tweet regularly. It felt a little intrusive, both to my game-playing and to the experience of other players in my games, who humored me but seemed a little annoyed at the distraction.

So, the bottom line is that I'm undecided about the utility of live-tweeting game night. In some ways, it was fun, but I'm not sure the distraction of my fellow players, not to mention my own divided attention, was worth the benefit. I may experiment with it again sometime, especially after I talk it over more with local players and those who would like to see further tweeted reports another time. I can see too, perhaps, how this might be a useful tool for discussion at an event where I'm not so directly involved and taking a more passive audience role. In any case, I'm glad to have had the experience and add live-tweeting to my social media toolbox.