So I propose that we play an online version of the game What Were You Thinking?, a very entertaining party game invented by Richard Garfield (of Magic: The Gathering fame).
It’s a very simple game. As normally played IRL, one person asks a question, often of the form “name 5 things that are yellow”. Then everyone writes down 5 answers. Then the answers are all compared. You score points for writing down answers that match other people’s answers, the more you match, the better. In other words, if 6 people wrote down “banana”, each would score 6 points. If only 2 people wrote down “bellies of cowards”, then each would score 2 points. If you put down “the sun” and no one else did, you would score 0 points.
So unlike games like Boggle or Scattergories, where you are trying to come up with answers that are as unique as possible, in What Were You Thinking? you actually score points for being as conformist as possible. That is, coming up with the most obvious, most canonical answers that occur to the most other people. Then both great hilarity (laughing at people’s silly choices) and interesting discussion (depending on the question) ensue.
Some typical questions that might be asked:
Name 5 celebrities whose first and last names start with the same letter
Name 4 obscure countries in Europe
Who are the 5 most influential women in history?
Questions can also be of the personal-choices variety:
Which one of the 5 senses would you give up, if you had to give up one?
What are your 3 favorite bands?
Or, in an environment such as the SDMB, they can be incestuous and self-referential:
If you had to survive on a desert island, what 3 dopers would you want to have with you?
What are the 5 funniest threads in the history of the SDMB?
Etc.
So I figure there’s a lot of potential for fun.
To make it work online, I will ask the question, and then anyone who wants to play (including me) will include their answer inside a spoiler box. That way, other people who don’t want to play can just see our answers, and anyone who does want to play can come up with their own answers without accidentally seeing the responses that are already there (unless they want to cheat).
Then after some period (I’m thinking 48 hours), the person running the round can go through the rather tedious process of counting up all the responses, adding up everything, and figuring out who won. Then someone (might be the winner of the round, if they want to), can propose another question, and ta da, there we go.
A few notes:
-All that matters for scoring points is whether you put down the same thing as someone else… it matters not at all whether what you put down is, in fact, a factual answer to the question. So if I ask “who were the 5 greatest US presidents ever” and 4 different people all put “Benjamin Franklin”, they all score 4 points.
-This game’s success kind of depends on the people playing having a shared frame of knowledge. So it will probably be harder for, say, Japanese dopers to compete against the hordes of Americans. 
-Of course, if you want to play, and you submit an answer, you can then immediately look at everyone else’s answers and see how well you’re doing.
Anyhow, here’s the first question, and, if at least 6 or so people want to play, I’ll total up the results Thursday at 11 p.m. pacific time.
Question: Name 5 movie roles so associated in your mind with the actor/actress that you can not imagine anyone else in that part.
(As an example, I might answer “Lisa Kudrow as Phoebe on Friends”, except that that’s a TV role, not a movie role).
Ok, Game on!
Here are my answers:
Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones
Harrison Ford as Han Solo
Arnold Schwarznegger as The Terminator
Ian McKellen as Gandalf
Marlon Brando as The Godfather