Twitter threads, on the whole, can be exhausting — hectoring, multi-tweet throat clearing from people whose entire point could better be summed up in one sentence. Not all of them, though. Some of them are good. Some of them are, dare I say, inspired. Such as this one:
The thread, created by @CORNYASSSBITCH, is a game where you are cast as Beyoncé’s assistant and your objective is to not mess up and get fired. Think of it as a choose your own adventure novel but in tweets. Each tweet presents a scenario and the reply tweets are your options. So, for example, Beyoncé has some downtime. Do you recommend swimming, painting, or drinking wine and gossiping? (Spoiler alert: Don’t let her go swimming. You, like me, will be fired promptly and realize immediately how moronic your choice was. Wet hair? Before a performance? Idiot.)
The game is at once fun — I played several times this morning after initially getting fired for my stupid swimming choice — as well as impressive. Some real thought went into creating the game and its multitude of answer branches. (The level of effort is reminiscent of another Twitter bit where a user secretly tweeted the words to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” slowly over one tweet at a time and then revealed the gag only when completed so the song could be read in full by reading the first word of of each of her tweets in reverse. It was, to be technical, not a true thread, but, hey, close enough.) Each tweet also has a photo to go along with it. So when you choose to FaceTime Blue Ivy, you see Bey FaceTiming with Blue Ivy. It’s delightfully detailed.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a choose your own adventure on Twitter. The style, and its many variations, has been around for a while. Here’s one from BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti back in 2010. For this game, tweets weren’t threaded. Instead, you’d have to copy and paste a truncated bit.ly link for each selection you made. Here’s a 23-step game from 2015 that used individual accounts for each possible answer. (Each choice in a tweet would have a specific tagged account you’d click to make your choice.) Here’s one from earlier this year that opted to use polls instead of threaded tweets. Here’s one that isn’t quite so famous but is also from this week where you can marry off your five daughters a la Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. All of which only serves to make the Beyoncé game even better because it tops all the iterations of this Twitter game we’ve seen before.
Plus it’s just nice to be able to enjoy a thread where nobody is lying to you. The most recent viral threads involved men peddling B.S. stories about things like scamming an MS-13 gang member out of some heroin — that tweeter, Shane Morris, eventually came clean about his lies claiming he feared for his safety — or a seemingly unending saga about a man who met his future wife at the graveyard of her murdered family members after he errantly placed flowers on the murderer’s grave.
None of that today, though. Today you are Beyoncé’s assistant and you must not get fired no matter what. Pro tip: She prefers white lighting over blue. Godspeed.
