Skribbl.io is an online multiplayer pictionary-style game created by ticedev and released by Crazy Games in 2017. While Skribbl.io itself doesn’t appear to mention a particular age range or target demographic, the original pictionary game is listed as being for ages 12+—we can assume this to be similar for Skribbl.io.
Overall, while the core game mechanics and win condition are tied to players correctly guessing the word another player is drawing, Skribbl.io does allow for players to “judge” the player who is drawing on how well they are depicting the work that can. Especially when playing with strangers, this can at times lead to interactions that derail or otherwise distract from the core game.
There are several mechanics that players can use to “judge” other players either. Most explicitly, players are given the ability to either “like” or “dislike” a player’s drawing as they draw it by clicking a thumbs up or down icon respectively in the upper left corner. What’s interesting about this is that when a player likes or dislikes another player’s drawing, the reaction is public, and put in the room chat that all other players can see. Unlike other judging games such as Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity, where the final judgment comes down to a single player, anyone in the Skribbl.io room is free to judge. This can at times lead to what appear to be bandwagon or “group” judgments—once one person disliked a drawing, it wasn’t uncommon for multiple people to jump in immediately afterward with their own dislikes.
When I played, it was also much more rare for players to like the drawing instead. This is likely due to the way judging relates to the other mechanics. Liking or disliking a drawing doesn’t influence player point values at all, so in some sense, the mechanic ends up being simply an avenue to express emotion. Good drawings are easier to guess and derive points from, but this seems like the expectation, rather than something to be praised—players expect that they will be able to earn points and be competitive with their guess. However, bad drawings are harder to guess, which does influence point values and the likelihood of winning. Moreover, drawing on psychology, it’s also possible that being presented with an incomprehensible drawing removes a player’s agency—their ability to make effective guesses—thus engenders negative emotions. The presence and expression of these negative emotions, combined with “pack mentality”, can lead to dogpiling on certain players in the chat, sometimes even in place of focusing on the next drawing, as shown below:
The chat itself is also a place for judgment, even if less formally. Players will often negatively comment about the quality of the drawing, especially when they find it bad or otherwise confusing. While Skribbl.io states it includes moderation features such as muting or votekicking other players, these tools seem to also unintentionally become a mechanism for judgment themselves. Rather than purely for moderating purposes, sometimes players (like Emma from the above example), will initiate votekicking someone from the room over disagreements or arguments in the chat. These features combined end up mutating into a mechanism for judging the character of other players, rather than just their drawings. Moreover, the fact that the game is hosted online and completely anonymously likely doesn’t help. Referring back to Game Design Patterns For Building Friendships, we can see that having persistent IDs is a major way to sustain proximity and begin to build friendly relationships between players. For Skribbl.io, this appears to be the opposite. There doesn’t appear to be any mechanism to create an account or have any sort of consistent identity—username and avatar appearances are come up with on the spot and can be easily changed. This anonymity likely makes it easier for players to be harsher on one another, especially in public rooms where they are all strangers anyways. All of this together adds pressure to players, especially the one who is drawing. This often causes the drawing player to apologize (sometimes preemptively) for bad drawings, or on occasion, to become defensive and begin arguing back.
In sum, the judgment mechanisms in Skribbl.io seem to largely draw attention from the main game itself. Ratherthan spending time on the two core mechanics—drawing and guessing—players in both roles often are in the chat instead levying judgment against each other. While many of these judging mechanisms allow for fostering fun discussions or friendly banter amongst players, it seems like they also make it very easy for tension to arise. However, this may be a risk for all online games that allow anonymous inter-player interactions—but in a game where this type of judgment isn’t strictly necessary, perhaps it would help to remove some of the judgment mechanisms entirely.
