All About Bacon

Backstory: I was reading Suppressed Transmission: The First Broadcast by Kenneth Hite, and the chapter entitled "Six Degrees of Sir Francis Bacon" got me wondering:

• What other variants of the Kevin Bacon Game are there?
• What other references to said game in popular media could I think of?
• Is there anyway I could work it into a bill in Nomiblog?

Kevin Bacon game: Everybody knows this one. One player lists a movie. The next lists an actor from said movie. The third lists another movie that actor was in, and so on around the circle. Several scoring systems and variants exist, depending on whether you're trying to cooperatively get to Kevin Bacon or actively trying to stump the other players. If playing with an even number of players, it's often best to have each person's turn be the listing of both a actor and a film.

I hearby propose a new name for an established Bacon Game variant: We'll call it Fakin' Bacon, after that lovely product that looks and tastes like Bacon but is actually made from soy. In Fakin' Bacon, you can count home movies, stock footage, voice overs, actors playing other actors, sound and lighting technitions, etc. As long as it was filmed, videoed, or digitally recorded and shown to at least one person who wasn't in it, it counts. I played a lot of Fakin' Bacon back when it didn't have a name.

To that, we add some other variants I've played or seen in print:

Sir Francis Bacon game: As Kenneth Hite demonstrated quite ably in the above-mentioned book, Sir Francis Bacon is very easy to connect to anything in the field of conspiracy theory: Masons, UFOs, Kabbala, modern-day assassination plots - they are all the fault of Sir Francis Bacon. I mentioned an example elsewhere today.

Hite also quotes Foucoult's Pendulum, wherein Umberto Eco connects "sausage" to "Plato" in 5 easy steps. That sounds like a variant of Kevin Bacon, but with fewer restrictions on what things you can connect and how you may connect them. Probably only a game in the same sense that Sim Earth is - a pleasant rule-less diversion you can never truly win.

The A. Harrison Game is kind of like Sir Francis Bacon, except played via snail-mail and probably dangerous under the current administration. Also pleasant, ruleless and unwinable.

I once played the Eggs and Bacon game, where instead of listing actors and films we listed menu items and restaurants. It was okay for something to do when you're trying to get kicked out of Denny's, but not really a good overall game. Getting from "Faux Chicken with Mangos" to "Kosher Latkes" is an exercise I'll leave to the reader.

The Erdős–Bacon Number involves people who are published academics and appear in films. It's not really a game, not even in the sense that Sims are, as it's just an equation with no decision tree. It's interesting none-the-less: you add your Erdos number to your Bacon number, and the total is your Erdos-Bacon number. The current minimum is a 3. My wife has a Bacon Number of 4 (see below) and co-authored a paper on plasma physics and using lasers to cause implosion (seriously) while working at the Los Alamos Labs, so she may have a non-infinite Erdös-Bacon number, I'll have to do some research to say for certain.

The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon entry on Wikipedia lists plenty of good references to the Game. But it misses my two favorites:

1. The DVD of Season 2 of Lost has an interactive Six-Degrees game that simply shows the links between the characters in the show.
2. "James Bondage, 006.9 in A View To A Clone, Part 2: In The Mouth Of Cloneness" has an extended sequence wherein Bondage and the Clonemaster play Fakin' Bacon, though they claim it's the genuine Kevin Bacon Game.

My Bacon Number would be 4:
Rolfe Bergstrom is in the upcoming Black with Billy Garberina. (I also have a voice-over zombie moan and shuffle in Billy's Necroville, but that may be uncredited)
Billy Garberina was in Gimme Skelter (2007) with Kenneth J. Hall
Kenneth J. Hall was in Fear of a Black Hat (1994) with Nancy Giles
Nancy Giles was in Loverboy (2005) with Kevin Bacon

Therefore anyone else (Jake & Kris Roth, Audie Harrison, etc) who appeared in In The Mouth of Cloneness has a Bacon Number of 5, assuming you count minor video projects.
The original View To A Clone at least appears on the internet so it's perhaps a more legitimate Number 5 link for Jake, X, Daved, Kat, etc.
J. Starr Welty appeared in a couple Pizza Face Death films with me, in addition to writing and directing Black, so her Fakin' Bacon numbers are 4 or 5 depending on how you trace it.

I note that someone I went to high-school with has a Bacon Number (or at least Fakin' Bacon Number) of 3:
Tasha Hardy produced Star Trek: World Enough And Time which starred George Takei
George Takei was in American Summer (2007) with Tom Arnold (I)
Tom Arnold (I) was in We Married Margo (2000) with Kevin Bacon

The Oracle of Bacon determines Bacon Numbers quickly, though it does so only via Actors, so it ignores Tasha, for example. Jerks. Here's a fun fact:

"According to the Oracle of Kevin Bacon website, approximately 12% of all actors cannot be linked to Bacon using their criteria."

I assume wikipedia and the oracle meant all professional film actors when they said that.