The Game of Tomes Organization

What is Game of Tomes?

Game of Tomes is, at its heart, a writing game that is intended to encourage different forms of storytelling. Originally inspired by National Novel Writing Month, players join a team (called a House) and write during event months. Word counts are contributed towards a House's overall score. The winning House at the end of an event month gets prestige and bragging rights. This game began on Twitch and uses the Channel Point Reward system to enter words and calculate results. However, we are beginning to expand into hosted events (either in person or on social media) that allow people who do not use Twitch to participate as well.   Over time, we have invented many expanded rules to consider word counts or equivalents. All forms of storytelling are valid projects within the Game of Tomes, from novels to short stories, to filmmaking, to poetry and songwriting, and even such forms of media as video game creation, worldbuilding, and RPGs. For a complete list of how words are counted, please consult our landing page or our article on Game Rules.  

Our Purpose

Game of Tomes exists to encourage writing, creativity, storytelling, and literacy. We believe strongly in the power of the written word. Often, writing can be a lonely profession. We provide incentives, friendly competition, and camaraderie to encourage people in their creative storytelling endeavours, whatever those endeavours happen to be. We do not operate at a profit and are seeking official non-profit status.  

The Lore

To that end, there is an overall collective plotline within the Game of Tomes. This storyline began in 2020 almost by accident. We find that it encourages people to exercise their creative powers, and so we have spent considerable efforts in developing our fictional universe. We refer to this storyline and its fictional elements as "the Lore."   Participation in the Lore is entirely optional, and is not required as a condition of play. Participation is governed by its own set of rules, detailed in A Guide to Joining the Roleplay in the Game of Tomes. Essentially, taking part in the Lore is participating in a massive, freeform roleplaying game with multiple protagonists, in which cooperation with your fellow players to create the story is essential. It also means creating media that is aired on our Twitch and YouTube channels that tell those stories. All videos created by Game of Tomes are released under a Creative Commons, Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives license.   We are, however, working towards creating written works within the universe that will take the form of novels, stories, and possibly licensed RPGs. These will seek to pay the creatives who participate in them.  

Our Impact

We are very proud of our statistics! Using National Novel Writing Month's 50,000 word goal for a monthly event as a comparative, we find that roughly 25% of our participants succeed at writing at least 50,000 words per event, as opposed to National Novel Writing Month's 8-12%. About 10% of our participants, commonly known as "Power Writers" in our community, achieve twice that (or more!) Our average participant will show a 150-200% increase in output if they participate regularly (practice makes perfect!)   Further, while we believe participation can benefit anyone who wants to write, we find it works especially well for neurodiverse participants. The combination of newness in our story plots, a supportive community, the pressure of a monthly deadline and a personal challenge, and the friendly competition, seems to be an extremely effective formula. Perhaps this is because the creators of the Game are themselves neurodiverse. We have a significantly higher percentage of neurodiverse Tome Knights than would be reflected in the average population.   Since the dissolution of National Novel Writing Month, we have found that there are several enthusiasts out there who are looking for something to fill that void. As a similar word count generating event with measurable goals, we provide similar incentives and encouragement, with a few extras, and since we have been around for a few years, we already have a sustainable infrastructure.   Our structure having been built on Twitch, and having been integrated with its platform, has somewhat limited our reach, but we anticipate that will change with our expanded hosting policies.