Sunday, December 28, 2008

Digital Pictionary

I remember one summer, either 2000 or 2001 or 2002, there was a game online that Kuno and I and some others from UPN played. It was as follows:

1. There are four human players from around the world.
2. They each take turns being the judge (one-fourth of the time) and the contestants (three-fourths of the time).
3. Each round lasts 30 seconds.
4. At the start of a new round, the role of Judge shifts clockwise to the next player.
5. At the start of a new round, the board is cleared from all drawings made by the previous judge.
6. At the start of a new round, the new judge is given the word he must draw for the other players.
7. The three contestant-players for the round would compete to see who could type in the correct word-answer the fastest.
8. The player who submitted the correct answer fastest was awarded a fixed number of points plus the difference in the time it took him to solve the puzzle from 30 seconds.
9. The judge, because he was not eligible to compete for points, was compensatorily auto-awarded a sum of points. (No idea why they did this instead of just agreeing that judges get 0 points and since everyone takes his turn there's no worries. Maybe it was to encourage people to stay in the game and not dodge their turn at judgeship?)

In a nutshell, Pictionary online with 4 players and no gameboard.

I would very much love to be able to play a game like that once again, only
a) preferably with my friends, and
b) with user-submitted words and not words selected by the programmers

In other words, it would be nice if one could sign up for a user account, upload a textfile which contained all of the words he wanted to be used, and that would be the wordbank used in the room he created for his group. For example, if jusklo19pi signed up and made a room called "Jusklo's Dungeon", then Jusklo's Dungeon's wordbank would be whatever words were contained within wordbank.txt as created by and uploaded by Jusklo himself. Dynamically, Jusklo could reupload newer and newer iterations of wordbank.txt to the game, incorporating words that his chums e-mailed or IM'ed him. And in this manner, essentially, one could play Pictionary with friends from around the world over words as crazy and relevant to our interests as:

Hometown: Strom Thurmond, Hamburglar, Seamus, Home Skillet, string hobos, strong hobis, noise (pron. nuh-WAHZ), Night Watch, etc.

UPN Old School: Betty, Ashley Olsen, Tim Tams, furniture pr0n, etc.

UPN New School: mahjong, Ever17, FF11, FB, etc.

My own selfish interests: rasengan, Yami Bakura, Suigin Tou, Chobit, Kaiji, Minami Haruka, Mikuru Beam, etc.

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