For this Critical Play, I played some Jackbox Games games with friends, including Amaru and Elliott (classmates in CS 247G!) in my room one afternoon. Given the themes for this Critical Play assignment, we looked to explore games that had judging as a core mechanic, namely Tee K.O. and Quiplash 2. These games were created by Jackbox Games for an intended audience of causal gamers, which could be a group of 3-8 people (friends, a family, coworkers, etc.). These games can be played on a variety of platforms, but we played on PC this time.
Tee K.O. is a t-shirt drawing game from Jackbox Party Pack 3. Players draw designs, come up with slogans, and mix and match them to create t-shirts that are pitted head-to-head, with players voting on which of the two shirts should win.
Quiplash 2 is a fill-in-the-blank prompt response game where two players have to come up with the quippiest response to a prompt and have all other players vote on which one is the best.
Playing Tee K.O. and Quiplash 2 highlighted aspects of my own decision-making process because by the nature of these being judging games, the player who comes out on top is the one who gets the most votes for their submissions. To a degree, this involves having the creativity and ingenuity to come up with creative responses, but at least in my experience, winning the game requires understanding the audience of voters (i.e. the people one is playing with). In this way, my process for coming up with responses was less about what I thought would be a good answer but instead what I thought everyone else would think is a good answer.
I would also think this experience highlighted aspects of my communication style and role within the group. Within the group of friends that I played with, each person comes in with their own experiences, interests, etc. which oftentimes influence what kind of responses they give in these games. For example, I watch a lot of anime, so many of my responses focused on in-jokes and pop culture references that tie back to anime in some way (such as my mention of the hit anime series, Solo Leveling as one of my responses). As a result, the other players can always expect some sort of anime-related content to appear in our play throughs.
While I always have a great time playing Jackbox Games games, it is important to recognize the context that they are played in. For me, this is almost exclusively played with close friends. As Amaru noted, this kind of game would be hard to play with strangers as there are fewer in-jokes and cultural references to lean into. When I played Awkward Moments with my P1 group earlier this week, it was not as enjoyable because we did not know each other very well nor what kind of responses the other people would enjoy. I imagine that if a stranger came in to play Quiplash 2 with my friends, they may not have a good time since they would not understand any of the random references that are commonplace within my friend group but would sound totally inane to an outsider.
For example, when Elliott pairs a drawing of a person on a bicycle with a text that says “Leaf Ericson” (Leif Erikson), we can laugh at the idea of Elliott feeling like Leif Erikson whenever he makes the trek from GovCo to hang out with us at EVGR. These sort of in-group interactions are what make play throughs of these kinds of games most enjoyable. But for someone who does not have this out-of-game context, they may not understand why this response would receive the most votes and may feel left out.
Games like Quiplash 2 and Tee K.O. do also have a feature that allows players to submit a response generated by the game itself, which can come off as a safer option for when group dynamics among the players is less established. This is something I have only seen in Jackbox Games games, whereas other similar judging games like Really Boring Website do not give players such a crutch. This may be a useful option for players not as familiar with each other, in my experience, these responses never get chosen with my friends because they are too boring and not as stimulating as anything that we come up with on our own. Perhaps one way to improve this would be to have auto-response suggestions pull from bodies of commonly understood pop culture references and memes that a larger population would understand. While this may still leave the opportunity for out-group players to miss out on a shared joke, I think this could better strike a balance between inclusion and enjoyability.
Ethical Reflection
With the nature of judging games, there is some degree of social rejection that players can feel when their responses are not chosen. After all, not every player can be a winner in these games. At the end of the day, the players should be the ones responsible for preventing hurt feelings. As creators, Jackbox Games sets clear expectations that as judging games, there is a zero-sum aspect that players need to keep in mind because a vote for one response means one less vote for the other response. These games often include neat tutorial videos that help frame the players in these games. And as they have laid out all their cards on the table, it is up to the players playing to understand these risks and navigate them responsibly.
Ultimately, a successful play through relies on clear communication of expectations between players. Given that I usually play these games with a group of close friends, these expectations are often unspoken. But we know that we are there to play in good fun, meaning that not choosing one person’s response is not a personal attack against them. In this way, deciding to play together means we enter a sort of social contract that everyone knows what they are getting into. In Tee K. O. for example, the t-shirt that receives the most points is labeled as the “WINNER,” while the t-shirt that does not receive the most points may be cut up, burned, etc. While it would totally be possible for the game designers to make the distinction between winners and losers less extreme so as to not make the losers feel bad, within the groups I play with, we have a mutual understanding that this is all just a game. We spend more time laughing at each other’s t-shirts rather than focus on who wins and who loses.
