Critical Play: skribbl.io

I originally planned to play pictionary for my critical play, but I found myself starting late on this assignment and short on time to bring a group together. So I turned to the internet, searched “Pictionary online” and found the game I played for this critical play: skribbl.io. I even won the game I played! skribbl.io delivers drawing and guessing gameplay similar to Pictionary, modified to work digitally and anonymously right from your browser. The game’s target audience seemingly is everyone, but some design choices in skribbl.io undermine its appeal to a universal audience. Regarding the creator of skribbl.io, I learned they go by “Mel” from their signature on an update note, but nothing more. Both skribbl.io and our game Glyphs share the key mechanic of drawing and guessing, they both aim for fun via challenge, but ultimately differ greatly in their ability to provide fun by fellowship due to their different mediums.

Though the exact details differ, at a high level skribbl.io and Glyphs both share the same mechanic: someone draws something, someone else guesses what they drew. In skribbl.io you create an alias and you join a room to play the game. Each round, a player is selected as a drawer and is given the choice of one of three words by the game. They then get a minute to draw on a digital canvas with some basic tools: brush, fill, and a simple color palette. In parallel, other players are typing their guesses in a game chat while over time a few letters of the mystery word get revealed by the game. Incorrect guesses show up in the chat for other players to see, and you are given points for a correct guess based on how long it took you to guess. As a drawer you receive points from how people are able to guess your drawing. Our game is similar, but we have multiple drawers working on drawing the same word. Our drawers need to draw something specific enough to the word that our “good” guesser can guess the word from a list of four options, but not so specific that our “bad” guesser can guess the word with no options given. So while in skribbl.io there is the incentive to draw your best rendition of the target word, Glyphs incentivises players to draw something conceptually adjacent to the target word but nothing too obvious. 

So despite having the same high-level mechanics of drawing and guessing, due to the additional mechanics in each game, the drawings that would play best in skribbl.io actually play badly in Glyphs because they give the answer away to the “bad” guesser. Both games create fun through challenge via the drawing and guessing mechanic, but due to the different dynamics present in each game, the form of the challenge takes a different shape in each. In skribbl.io, the challenge is around drawing skill and guessing speed. To earn the most points, one must be the first correct guesser for each drawing, and one must make drawings that lead to 100% guess rates. Since the goal of Glyphs is to help one guesser without helping the other, the challenge isn’t how well you draw, it’s what you draw. The goal of the guesser is not to race to be the first correct guesser, each guesser has a single guess, so they are incentivized to think more carefully. Glyph’s challenge is slow and strategic compared to skribbl.io’s more fast and skill-based challenge. The slower pace of Glyphs’ challenge gives it space to let its other source of fun, fellowship, shine. 

Glyphs and skribbl.io differ most greatly in their ability to provide fun from fellowship, in part due to their differing mediums. A game of Glyphs is full of opportunities to see how well you know other players: “What could he have meant by that drawing?”, “What could I draw that would be obvious to her?”. It is played in person and often leads to people laughing, people defending why “tree” should have been obvious from this drawing of a dolphin, and so on. In contrast skribbl.io doesn’t attempt to foster fun via fellowship in its game, and actually has some social dynamics that act against its general appeal. In Scribble.io, you miss out on the fun dynamic social moments which occur when you are all in the same room. In several rounds of skribbl.io, the drawers would just write the word using the drawing tools, despite the no writing rule. Without the social buy-in of being in person or any enforcement online, it was hard to stop others from breaking rules. Also despite being a game that should appeal to all players, I would not recommend skribbl.io to children because of the lack of moderation, primarily in player user names. I even had to redact an inappropriate username from my screenshot. So while skribbl.io and Glyphs share a high-level mechanic, they deliver challenges through different approaches, and are on opposite ends of the spectrum regarding fellowship-based fun.

(this was after already guessing the word)

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