For my competitive analysis, I chose to play Telestrations (or rather, an imitation of it online called Drawphone). Drawphone has a laid-back, minimalist, and cartoonish theme — the site is simple, with a handwritten font that promotes a sense of casualness and artistry. The handwritten font, black-on-white colorway, and extensive blank/unused space create the sensation of a canvas, which encourages the player to be creative/expressive. Additionally, the simple design and lack of artistic options (small color palette and no brush sizes) lower the burden on the player — they know they can’t draw something beautiful, so they’re encouraged to draw something simple and silly. This encourages the creation of simpler/more generic drawings, which are harder to guess, which leads to more fun.
The main forms of fun in Drawphone are expression, challenge, fellowship, and narrative. Players are able to express their individual take on the prompt by drawing, and are also challenged by having to draw something easy for the other player to guess/having to guess other players’ drawings themselves. However, the most important types of fun in Drawphone are fellowship and narrative — the fun of Drawphone is telling a story of how each player’s earnest attempt at drawing and guessing failed, leading to the initial, often benign, word being corrupted into something humorous. One mechanic that encourages this type of fun is that there’s no scoring system — each round simply ends with each player presenting their results to the rest of the group, hopefully with ensuing laughter. As a result, players don’t need to worry too much about the quality of their drawing, and thus can focus on giving a good first effort and laughing at other players’ drawings.
One way the game differentiates itself from other games in its genre is the complete lack of a scoring system. While games like skribbl or Pictionary are often played casually, they still have a scoring system. Drawphone, on the other hand, has no scoring system, and its fun is completely derived from the entertainment of sharing your responses with your friends. I think this works well as a dynamic — Skribbl’s scoring system, for example, always seemed flawed to me, as it was often better as a drawer to draw poorly so that none of your enemies could score points.
Drawphone doesn’t handle abuse at all — you can intentionally make a terrible drawing or guess something completely unrelated. This typically isn’t an issue as there are no points involved, and most people don’t want to ruin the guessing chain artificially — much of the fun comes from people giving their best efforts and failing miserably.
One way I would improve the game is by changing the word bank to a phrase bank. One thing I noticed while playing is that a lot of people defaulted to guessing actions, e.g. “driving up a mountain.” Changing to a phrase bank would help people make guesses in the correct tense, at least giving them a chance of “winning”/getting back to the original phrase. However, phrases also have more “variables,” like nouns, verbs, etc. that allow players to mess up and be misconstrued. This would provide more opportunities for the message to be corrupted in ways that it couldn’t when it was restricted to nouns, and thus would lead to more fun.
