Used to play this game on a forum many years ago. Thought it might be fun here.
It goes like this: Someone makes a wish. An evil genie (or cursed monkey’s paw or what have you) grants the wish, fulfilling it to the letter while making sure it goes horribly wrong in some (hopefully amusing, interesting, and/or clever) way.
(Note: I strongly suggest not wishing for anything you have a real emotional attachment to. Seeing someone trample on it can sting more than you might expect.)
Every post therefore has two parts. You grant the wish above you, and then you make a new wish for the next person to grant. For example, the most recent post ends with:
“I wish I had Superman’s powers.”
The next reply goes like this:
Granted! You now have all of Superman’s powers, and none of his years of training and natural aptitude at controlling them. You can move and think so quickly that everything around you seems frozen. If you twitch even slightly, you’ll irreparably crush whatever you’re holding. You hear every sound on Earth all at once in a confusing overwhelming cacophony. If you lose your temper and glare at someone, you’ll kill them with your heat vision. Everyone is terrified of you, with good reason. You yell in frustration and demolish an entire city block. Just as you wonder if you’ll ever be able to safely be around anyone again, someone discovers that kryptonite now also exists. Good luck…
I wish I could host an episode of MST3K.
Your wish is my command. You host an episode of MST3K. The movie is the worst movie they’ve ever shown. You’re so appalled you can’t think of anything funny to say. They fire you because you’re so bad at your riffing job.
B L A M M O !
You’re now the king of Denmark and, because Denmark runs primarily through the constraints of its Parliament, you spend your tenure attending to groundbreaking ceremonies for shopping malls and congratulating the winners of various eSports competitions. When things go well, you are forgotten; when things go bad, all blame is pinned on you. Depression sets in. You nurse a salted licorice addiction.
I wish I didn’t have to pay a lot for this muffler.
Congratulations! You have a free muffler! Unfortunately, the man who shoved it in your hands neglected to mention that it was stolen. This is the world’s most valuable muffler, a prized possession that thousands would kill to have, and the police tracked it down to you. You have a long and arduous trial that takes up a lot of your time and resources, the exact amount equals the cost of a lot of mufflers.
You are a beloved published author. Your most dedicated fan has sociopathic tendencies, and goes on a multi-state killing spree inspired by your work and hoping to catch your attention. They then take their life in a dramatic and public fashion and dedicate all the suffering they caused to you, leading to your work being associated with tragic violence forever. The burden of this knowledge leads you into reclusion and addiction.
Granted! You lowly bilge rat. You now serve aboard a billionaire’s pleasure yacht. It’s a giant monstrosity that requires its own support yacht so the owner can land his helicopter on the other yacht and then tender over to the bigger one with the masts. You work 16 hours a day doing scutwork below deck, running back and forth across the half-mile length of the ship, never going topside because the yacht’s owner decided he doesn’t want to see you. But at least, once you retire to the tiny cot in the tiny cabin you share with 3 other crew members, you can feel the ship rocking just enough to remind you of what you’re missing.
I wish trees, in addition to everything they do now, had free high-speed WiFi.
Granted! All trees now provide free high-speed WiFi. The password is 17,929 characters long—a mixture of Hebrew and Cyrillic—printed in 2 point type on the back of the last leaf at the end of the highest twig.
I wish I had a mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe.
Bienvenue a Paris! However, you happen to arrive during another lockdown. Enjoy the view of the back of a non-descript building from your mediocre hotel room for the next two week before flying back home.
The dogs are all silent. They died from a canine-specific necrotic plague. Rotting corpses are everywhere, and the horrified screams and heartbroken sobs of their owners are louder than the barking ever was.
Granted! Your balloon pilot tragically dies when an African swallow beans him in the head with a coconut. His last act is to spasmodically yank on the control valve, breaking it. Unable to shut off the valve, your balloon rises higher and higher into the lower stratosphere where you eventually die, possibly of asphyxiation, but more likely hypothermia.
I wish to win the lottery!
Edit: I was too eager with my reference and included a word that made it nonsense. Unlike the rest of my response.
Congratulations. You are now Bart Fargo. Unfortunately, it is not the famous spy but a lesser known Old West outlaw, originally from the Dakota territory, who choked to death on a piece of cuttlefish shortly after his first successful stagecoach robbery.
As your feet lift from the ground, you are exhilarated. You start off on a cross-country tour, awed by watching dolphins play off the coast, and whales breaching. You fly over and under the Golden Gate Bridge, and marvel at the lights of Las Vegas. You are inspired as you fly over the farms of the Midwest. You take a selfie as you fly over the shiny silver Bean in Chicago. You are amazed by all the monuments of DC until the F16’s come into formation around you thus ending your flight .
I wish I knew all the secrets held by the government.
Your wish poof is granted! All of the secrets held by the government suddenly fill your mind. However, the government whose secrets are now open to you is that of Sealand, so your mind is filled with their hidden familial squabbles, budgetary concerns, and what they plan to do if/when Sealand sinks into the ocean. You find that nobody really cares about Sealand’s secrets…including yourself.
You suddenly awake feeling the force flow through you. Congratulations, you are now a Jedi.
However, you are light-years away from other Jedi, and if you use your Jedi powers, you will be ostracized or worse, hunted and killed because people fear you.
Congratulations! No one ever has to go though the horrible pain that cancer ravages. Sadly, the day the cure is approved to be made is the day Jupiter explodes into a star, wiping out life as we know it. So, moot point.