Tiny Japanese soldiers face off over Twitter in DotWar

The heaving ranks of unwashed, unwilling conscripts jostled and stumbled in a Brownian motion facsimile of a pair of armies struggling to hold their formation as @hintman (CNNGo associate editor Chris Anderson) urges his troops forward against another CNNGo editor @ladykarla45 with the ultimate prize of Twitter bragging rights his goal. 

As ever, the cruel puppet master that is DotWar would not be denied, the pixilated bodies piling high in the name of a few minutes of pure work avoidance played out on a Flash-heavy website, accompanied by some very groovy muzak.

When the dust settled, @hintman had won his victory; @ladykarla45, vanquished, lay stripped of her soldiers, her prized in-game crystals and her SNS dignity. 

相手が女であろうと情け容赦ない Hintman。

自動操縦？

And so, the tweets went out, proclaiming this a day for the ages and sharing some very savvy (bilingual) Twitter marketing for DotWar’s Japanese creator. In case you’re still wondering, Tokyo-based programmer Sipo’s DotWar takes two Twitter handles, analyzes their avatars and allocates thousands of tiny soldiers accordingly. 

The colors in each image correspond to gifts bestowed upon the virtual troops -- speed, range, strength and so on. Think of it as Magic: The Gathering or Top Trumps for the distracted.

From that point, there’s a choice of controlling the battalions with your mouse or of letting Adobe Flash do the heavy lifting while you sit back and await the result.

Either way, it’s one of the more elegant Twitter bolt-ons we’ve seen, meaning it’s clearly destined to be clogging up the SNS tubes for weeks to come. Just don't say you heard it from us, OK?