the hog

i imagine the horse RPG scene started out like most text-based RPGs do—you'd write a couple sentences describing your charater's actions/dialogue; someone else would reply in turn; things were brief and to the point. (i got started out on the neopets message boards this way.)

but something about the scene that evolved on geocities/brinkster+boardhost/voy/boards2go/etc started getting very... literary pretensions.

some of this arose due to a reasonable effort to try and set some minimum bar for quality-of-prose/quality-of-effort (e.g. a lot of games would make you "apply" with a writing sample, to verify that you could write grammatically-correct sentences and that you understood the overall tone of the game)

and some of this arose due to games skewing toward asynchronous formats (e.g. if your RP partner lives in Australia and you live in the eastern US, you probably want to implement something like "posts need to be at least 250 words" so that your opposite-time-zone partner has SOMETHING to reply to in the morning—this was a shift from e.g. Neopets or MUD-based RP, which largely relied on both players being online at the same time)

but imo the big thing that led to WILDLY INFLATED wordcounts was when games started making quality of prose (as judged by, uh, the game staff) a core game mechanic.

see, horse RPGs often had mechanics for fighting other horses (either to steal them into your own herd, to win a herd-vs-herd battle, or simply to gain rank/status), but by the time i came onto the scene, almost no games were using dice or numerical stats for this sort of thing.

instead, you'd challenge a horse to a battle, and you'd each make a specific number of posts in a specific format, and once you'd both finished posting, the mods would judge the outcome of the battle based on a rubric.

e.g., a rubric might be something like: "each post can contain at most 1 attack and 1 defensive maneuver; the combatants will be graded on (1) quality of prose, (2) inventiveness/quality of attacks, and (3) realism of defensive maneuvers"

so you might earn points for having really banger prose, and get points deducted if you were "powerplaying" too much with your defensive maneuvers (e.g. wriggling out of the way EVERY SINGLE TIME, etc), and so on

"inventiveness/quality of attacks" was an excuse to flex your comprehensive knowledge of horse behavior and anatomy—i was actually taking horseback riding lessons when i was in this scene, and you better BELIEVE every other lesson i was asking my instructor increasingly-alarming questions about "what's the most violent thing you've ever seen a stallion do to another stallion," "how sharp are horse hooves really," and so on. there was this incredible book at the library with detailed illustrations of horse skeletons, muscular systems, etc, and i scanned pages from it & taped to the walls of the computer nook at home for quick reference. and "realism of defensive maneuvers" was this very funny "push your luck" game where, if you just took every hit on the nose, you would lose the battle, BUT, if you tried to wriggle out of too much, the mods would Pass Judgment Upon Ye and you'd lose that way

but "quality of prose," well. that's something you had a lot of control over actually! and people went fucking wild with it

—here's a relevant spot to mention that the interquartile range for players of these games was probably, like, age 14 to 17?

so, uh, imagine the kind of prose that pretentious tryhard teenagers would be impressed by, and that's what we were all trying to write. longer = better, pretty much always without question. some games would actually set minimum lengths for battle posts of 500 or 1,000 words, and some games would give more points per word in the post, so you'd have people writing 5k word sagas simply to describe "so-and-so kicked such-and-such in the face," or whatever

and, er, since padding that out ALL THE WAY TO 5K WORDS actually is kind of tricky, we all organically developed... well, the prose style i described above! where you're just sort of free-associating between your character's tragic backstory, and then the weather, and then the dictionary definition of a random somewhat-relevant word, and on and on and on until you were pretty sure you had out-worded your opponent

also we all fucking wrote like we'd swallowed a thesaurus. thesaurus.com was my god. i memorized the dictionary.com word of the day religiously. so i could have my horse beat up other horses better. with purple prose attacks.

and, i mean, once you got used to WRITING in this style, once you'd earned ACCLAIM and HONOR and GLORY for it, you weren't going to go back and write like a normie in your non-battle posts, were you? ABSOLUTELY NOT. so you had this unbounded chain reaction of a bunch of teenagers scrambling to out-flex and out-purple and out-word everyone else all the time and that's what i spent uncountable numbers of hours in front of my computer reading & writing haha

i once explained all this to another friend and he told me, somewhat wonderingly, that this sure sounded like a bunch of online teens had independently reinvented Tang Dynasty poetry battles & the status games associated with them, and like... yeah kinda lmao

anyway i dug a little harder and managed to find a battle post from The 13th Dimension, one of the most popular/influential games in this scene. here are the first two paragraphs. so you can sense the Vibe. enjoy: