Critical Play of Drawize

Overview

Drawize is an online guessing and drawing game where players take turns drawing picking an object from three choices, and drawing the one that they choose. The other players then get to guess the what they are drawing as they draw it, getting more points for correctly guessing more quickly. As such, it can in easily be classified as a race against the clock/other players game.

As seen at the bottom of this screenshot, the game allows users to get hints (the lightbulb) using in-game currency that is acquired by playing multiple games, or after 15 seconds into a drawing, they may use a bomb to eliminate letters that will not be used in the word. This is a zero-sum game where the person with the most points at the end does win. There are also some more or less unofficial rules, such as no writing letters, and the game allows players who are not drawing to actually report abuse of this rule as well as anything inappropriate that would have been drawn. I believe that this is a very useful feature for this social game because in the something like 20 games that I played, I never saw an inappropriate drawing, and I only saw letters drawn once, at which point it was immediately reported. This feature therefore makes it a very wholesome place to play!

Fun

This game offers a combination of fellowship and expression in its fun. Users are clearly able to express the object that they are drawing however they see is fit given many colors and drawing size options, and this allows them a lot of control as to how the game plays out.

Additionally, since this particular game shows incorrect guesses to the entire lobby,  it has the fellowship fun as well since players end up working together to decipher drawings, bouncing ideas off of each other and building ideas from the ground up. I believe that fellowship is also stressed in the graphic design decisions. The interface is really rather playful with bright colors and a ton of fun avatars to choose from. I believe that these choices give the game an overall atmosphere of it being okay to work together and not take it too seriously as a COMPETITIVE, but rather one of simple enjoyment.

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