The Art Of The GIFWar

Reading Time: 2 mins

Back in my corporate days there was a group of us on a text chain who celebrated every Friday afternoon with a GIFWar.

Promptly at 3:00 someone would send the first GIF and the war would begin, ending at 5:00.

It was something that made any Friday afternoon meetings a bit more bearable as we counted down the minutes to the weekend.

Subtleties started to develop…

• While the first GIF would ostensibly set a theme, people could run with that theme or find some way to subvert it and change the theme together, while still holding a connection to the GIF before it
• The starter GIF was often something innocuous that could be taken in multiple directions and usually didn’t aim to be the punchline in and of itself, it was simply a conversation starter.
• Personalities would shine through in the GIF selection
• Everything was in good fun and as much as you wanted to one up the person before you and contribute something amazing, quiet appreciation would set in as the war waged on
• Inside jokes would develop that would carry forward from week to week, like the time one friend typed the words “11 am hot dog” into what he thought was the GIF search bar but ended up sending those words as a text. Those words would become the only acceptable words used moving forward during the war.

The rules themselves are simple:

• Starts at 3:00 and ends promptly at 5:00 – it’s a fun distraction but heading into the weekend we didn’t want our phones blowing up all evening long
• No duplicate GIFs… that is the only cardinal sin
• Sort of an unwritten rule, but it’s more fun when people treat a GIFWar as a volley back and forth, letting other people have a turn in the conversation. Spamming your own GIFs after every other one is seen as kind of gauche.

I am DISTRACTED today and cannot write. I’m going to put the WIP away until Monday and really hit it hard next week.

Idle hands being the devil’s plaything and all that, I think I’ll start a GIFWar today on Twitter at 3:00.

Anybody want to come out and play?