In improvisational theater, players use a variety of skills and techniques to create interesting scenes. One of these skills is story-telling.

There are many improv games which are designed to teach story-telling skills: One Line at a Time, First Line / Last Line, Conducted Story, et cetera. Improvid is an online story-telling game in which participants create a short story together, line by line, by submitting sentences (or 'offers'), and voting for the best ones to add to the story.

Please read the following instructions, then go to the Story Page by clicking here.

Below is a screenshot of the Story Page, with labels.

The Story Page has three areas: Story Area, Voting Area, and Input Area.

The Story Area displays the story so far. If you plan to contribute, please read the entire story from the beginning.

The Voting Area has candidate sentences which participants can vote for, and messages from the server or administrator. Each candidate sentence is followed by a thumb-up and a thumb-down . Clicking on a thumb-up icon sends an up-vote (+1) to the server, and clicking on a thumb-down icon sends a down-vote (-1). The sentence which gets most up-votes is added to the story.

Please note:

It is not possible to vote for, or against, your own sentences. You may submit up to two sentences to the Voting Area at a time. A candidate sentence must have a positive total vote count to be elected. (If there are two down-votes (-2) and one up-vote (+1), the sentence will not be elected.)

The Input Area is for submitting sentences. After typing in a sentence, type the <Enter> key to submit it for voting. (Before submitting sentences, participants must agree to the Conditions given below.)

When Improvid first starts up, it displays a prompt in the Voting Area.

Next, Improvid will display a list of 'Ask Fors': theme, genre, location, etc. Checking a box in front of one of these items will send a vote to the server. Improvid starts a timer to give other participants time to vote.

When the timer starts, a purple bar appears under the Input Area. The length of the bar shrinks as time runs out.

When the timer times out, Improvid will count votes.

If the winning Ask For is, for example, 'genre', Improvid will choose a random genre from a list, and display it at the top of the Story Area.

Improvid will next ask participants if they want to choose a title.

If participants vote 'Yes', Improvid will prompt for titles.

The winning title will be displayed in the Story Area.

Participants can now develop the story by submitting and/or voting for sentences, one after another.

When a story reaches a satisfying conclusion, participants may click on the End button to send an End request. The End request will appear in the Voting Area, where other participants may vote it up or down.

Stories which end successfully will be saved into the Archive.

After the participant clicks on Send, the Kill request will appear in the Voting Area, where others may vote it up or down.

Anyone may visit the Story Page and vote, but if you want to participate by submitting sentences, there are some conditions.

You must agree to not submit any copyrighted or previously published material. (Copyrighted material will be removed on request.) You must also waive your own copyright (including any moral rights) to sentences which you submit.

Also, please respect the following rules:

No mentions of excrement. No obscenities, racial or sexual slurs. Enter only one sentence for each submission. Do not submit irrelevant junk, such as advertisements. Do not use names from popular culture (eg. James T. Kirk). Invent your own.

In general, each participant should try to be respectful toward other participants. Free speech is a beautiful thing, but this isn't the place for it.

If a visitor to Improvid chooses to cause trouble, by ignoring the above rules or by submitting offensive offers, the best thing to do is simply to down-vote such offers.

The administrator is able to ban input from specific IP addresses, but he/she cannot watch the site at all times.

Improvid is new, so there may be a few bugs. If you find your Input Area disabled, even though you did nothing wrong, you may have been banned by a software error.

In such a case, please try again later. Banning is intended to be temporary.

This application is new and experimental. It might become popular, or it might die out. Certainly, there is room for improvement. If people find Improvid fun or useful, new features will be added. Please send complaints or suggestions to: