Skribbl.io

Skribbl.io is an online drawing game that is meant to be played with friends. You can play with anybody, but it is much more enjoyable when you play with your friends and can talk to them while you play. The basic mechanics are that one person picks a word, and they have X amount of time to draw that, while the other people playing try to guess what the word is. To me, this game isn’t much of a judgement game. The winners are determined by whoever has the most points at the end, and the points are given to who guesses drawings quickest and who’s drawings get guessed quickest. There is a mechanic where people can give a drawing a thumbs up or a thumbs down, but this has no effect on the points given out, and when I played this mechanic was barely used.

There could be an argument made that because you get more points for having more people guess what your drawing is, that the better drawings get guessed more, and will rack up more points, which could be considered judgement. Assuming this is the judgement component, then it could be one of the more objective judgement mechanics in a judgement game. In games like Apples to Apple or Jackbox Games, the judge might make judgements based on what answers they find most amusing instead of the “best” or most relevant answer is. In this game, the better your drawing is, whether some people like it or not, will get the best results. Even if someone is in the lead and you want to tank their score by not guessing, the people guessing are incentivized with points to be the first to guess the word, so tanking the artist’s score when their in the lead doesn’t happen.

From this game, I learned that letting the point system be the “judge” and determine who has the best results, even if it is something subjective like a drawing, you can eliminate any bias in judgement. The challenge for us in trying to apply this is trying to figure out how we can objectify something like a debate. A debate is inherently subjective, and requires a third party judge to truly determine a winner, which could lead to bias that I mentioned. There could be an opportunity to crowdsource voting from the people playing who are neither debating or judging, and penalize the judge for picking the debater that doesn’t align with the “popular vote”. This still could lead to bias, but could reduce it, and make the voting a little bit more objective. We would also need to reconsider the minimum number of players for our game so that the crowdsourcing is more accurate, which we might not want to do this close to the end of the project.