This past week I played skribbl.io, a free multiplayer, online game that features a game similar to Pictionary but adapted for group play. Developed and published by ticedev, skribbl.io offers a quick to understand, intuitive and fun social experience for good friends and strangers alike. This game, even amongst many other social games I’ve played, drew me in exceptionally quick. I played it twice, once with a group of long-time friends and another time as an ice-breaker activity with project members in another class of mine. Interesting social dynamics emerged from both experiences, but one thing that I strongly noticed is:
Skribbl.io creates an easy to approach social experience for strong-ties and weak-ties alike due to the many mechanics and design elements that push for social interaction, as seen from the design of the game’s Player Interactions through the judging system.
In Skribbl.io, players take turns drawing and guessing, each round featuring one drawer and the rest as guessers. After inspecting the game’s point system and win condition, it is not immediately clear how judging is used to facilitate the game. A drawer gains points during their drawing round based on the number of guessers who are able to correctly identity their drawing. Guessers gain points by correctly guessing, gaining more points the quicker they guess relative to the other guessers. While the drawing skill of each player is relevant to their victory, player’s opinions of each others’ drawings don’t really play a role in directly effecting the game’s outcome. Nonetheless, the game still affords players systems through which to judge one another, being the in-game chat window, which is also where players make their guesses, and the ability to “like” or “dislike” a player’s drawing as they are drawing it, which brings a little emote on the screen for all players:
These two mechanics (the like/dislike and the chat) is what creates the judging system of the game, and while this judging doesn’t impact winning or losing directly, it has a huge impact on the aesthetics of fellowship and expression, which become one of the main components of what makes this game fun and worth playing.
As I played with my friends and acquaintances, our differences in drawing abilities became apparent. Sometimes, that led to frustration when nobody could guess somebody else’s drawings. At that point, some of the players expressed their judgment by disliking the drawing or through the chat with messages like “what is that lol?” and “brooo whaaatt”. These mechanics provide players to more easily share their reactions and emotions with each other, creating a stronger sense of player interaction and bonding. The clock is always ticking down every round in the upper-left of the screen, causing a hectic, stressful environment which begets even stronger emotive reactions, creating even stronger and funnier expressions of judgement in these two systems. This affects the group dynamics by creating a social space where strong emotions between strangers are more acceptable.
When I was playing with my close friends, they leveraged other mechanics that I believe the developers had not intended to be a part of the judging system: the votekick button. My friends, almost at random it felt, would press the votekick button while another player was drawing. This creates a very visible reaction on everyone’s screen and is judging the drawer’s drawing as exceptional in some way (probably really bad), with a 4th-wall breaking mechanic.
While the Boundary of the game is not explicitly designed to include voice-communication between players, both times I played this game, I was also in a voice call with the other players. This creates a slightly different experience since now, a new system for “judging” is introduced within the boundary of the game. When I played with my new acquaintances, this space created more awkwardness, as we did not want the game’s judgment to enter this gray-zone where we don’t want to actually strongly affect each other’s emotions with our judgement. However, when I played with old friends, this space became a valuable source of judgement as it it allowed for more expression of one’s opinions (jokes became funnier, strong emotions created emotive reactions).
