Victory Boogie Woogie

(Your Daily) Victory Boogie Woogie is a collaborative writing game for the web, created in partnership with De Gids, the oldest still active literary magazine of the Netherlands. Over the course of ten weeks, a group of well-known and upcoming Dutch authors created an interwoven network of fiction, poetry, essays and illustrations together with an online audience.

The storyline revolved around the discovery of a second Victory Boogie Woogie—Piet Mondriaan’s famous final but unfinished work, widely considered his masterpiece. A kaleidoscopic cast of characters vied over ownership of the piece and debated, investigated and made claims about the work’s authenticity.

Players signed up to a custom game website to follow along with the developing story and influence the course of things by contributing their own bits and pieces. These were reviewed by a group of editors before contribution. An simple but effective mechanic controlled the distribution of topics available for writing about at any point in the game. At the same time, other rules of the game—such as who could say what about the protagonists—were socially negotiated.