Game Info
Name: Skribbl.io
Game Creator/Developer: ticedev
Target Audience: People from 12-20 years of age, on average
Platform: Android originally, now a web game
At first glance, it might not seem like Skribbl.io, a “free online multiplayer drawing and guessing pictionary game,” has much resemblance with Ladybugs, the game that we created. The two games are completely different types of games, their dynamics are totally different, let alone the aesthetics, and the platforms could not be more unlike the other. But, in thinking about a competitive analysis, this game repeatedly came to mind, and I believe it is because it has some unique features and similarities that informed for us what kind of game we have made and what we want to create.
Skribbl.io is a judging game, which immediately distinguishes it from our game, which is focused on bluffing. The game works in rounds, where a moderator picks a word, and has to draw out the word without saying it, so that the other people can guess what exactly the word is. Each person’s guesses are seen by all in the chat box located at the bottom right, except for the guess of the right word.People get points for how quickly they guess the word, and the moderator is incentivized to good drawings by getting more points for the amount of players who get the word right. In each round, everyone goes at least once as moderator, and there are three set rounds.
The first thing that stuck out to me with the game was how similar the mechanics were with ours. Even as the dynamics of the games are totally dissimilar, there’s a similar idea of having a moderator with the only knowledge of the word/words, people having to figure out something about the word based on a moderator’s hint, and people getting a nonequal amount of points for every round based on some metric. Along these lines,there were two specific things that I found interesting because of how it aligned with discussions we had had. First of all, Skribbl.io made it such that the moderator gets points for a good drawing – we had thought also of doing that but could not figure out what to incentivize or how to make it fair, so it’s cool to see some examples of doing so. Second, Skribbl.io made it such that players had to choose from a preselected set of words. We had been thinking about making it such that we wouldn’t preselect comparative words, but would allow users to make them themselves, but we weren’t sure if it would make it easier or more restricting to use preselected words. Skribbl.io makes me think that maybe preselection is the way to go, but we’ll definitely have more debates over this.
Guessing a word (here, microphone)
Drawing for a word
With all that being said, there are some important things that I noticed mechanically that made Skribbl.io way different than how we might want Ladybugs to go. First, I noticed a high propensity of slurs and inappropriate words being tossed around as “guesses,” such that every picture I took, including the ones posted here, had to be blacked out in some portion. This, in some sense, is expected for an anonymous online game, and probably why Skribbl.io took care to preselect the prompts. However, it definitely seems that not a lot of content moderation / checking is going on, considering that these words were not even written in some sort of creative way to avoid these checks. Thinking about this in the context of the video we watchedthis week, having this sort of open chat where people can say whatever they want fails along the “Similarity” line, since it is not helping to push some sort of prosocial norms. We definitely hope that these sorts of words aren’t used in Ladybugs, but maybe this might also push us to move towards having a preselected set of words, and also thinking about ways to prevent the sort of words being used that made Skribbl.io shockingly intolerant. Second, I noticed that Skribbl.io allowed players to “kick out” others, which is supposed to allow players to self-moderate as needed. Surprisingly, this worked a lot of the time when players were not following the spirit of the game i.e. just writing out the word for their drawing. In our game, we kind of hope that in-person interactions do the self-moderation, but it’s interesting to see how that might work when thinking about moving this sort of thing online.
Self-moderation in the form of “kicking” someone out.
