I chose Skribbl.io, a free online multiplayer drawing and guessing game played in the browser created by ticedev. Its target audience is broad, but it fits casual players who enjoy fast social party games because it’s easy to learn and does not require strong drawing skill. I played in public rooms with about 5 to 8 players but you can play with 2-12 players. Player count matters because it changes the speed of guessing, the pace of the chat, and the pressure on the drawer. Skribbl.io is a strong comparison for my team’s game, On Display, because both games use fast, imperfect drawing as the core activity, but Skribbl.io turns drawing into a competition about clarity and speed, while On Display turns drawing into a performance shaped by persuasion, interpretation, and curator judgment.
Using formal elements, Skribbl.io is very clear. The players are one drawer and multiple guessers. The objective is to score the most points by either drawing something recognizable or guessing quickly. The procedures are simple: choose one of three words, draw under a timer, and let others guess in chat. The rules reward speed and prevent directly writing the answer. The resources include the drawing canvas, timer, word blanks, chat, and leaderboard. This is shown in my screenshots. One screen shows word choices I had to choose between (I chose slide). The other screen shows players guessing “ladder,” “stairs,” and “climb” before the answer is revealed as “slide.” This design works because the game communicates its loop almost instantly.
Comparing this to On Display helped me understand my own game better. Our game also starts with quick drawing, but it adds prompt cards, challenge cards, a rotating curator, pitching, and ribbon-based rewards like “On Display,” “Avant-Garde,” and “Fan Favorite.” Our prompts are also very different. In Skribbl.io, prompts are usually concrete and universal, like “slide,” where most players already share a clear mental image of what to draw. In On Display, our prompts are broader and more interpretive, like “red flag,” “the meaning of life,” or “capitalism,” so players are not just drawing but deciding what the prompt means. That makes On Display more expressive, but also more complicated. Our playtest notes show that players were confused about which direction to go with, pair mechanics, and scoring. Skribbl.io, by contrast, is a good example of a tightly focused loop. This supports what Lemarchand argues in the prototyping reading where strong designs often center one clear player activity and understand what experience that activity produces. Skribbl.io knows exactly what activity it is building around which is drawing something recognizable fast enough for others to decode.
MDA makes the contrast between these games much sharper. In Skribbl.io, the mechanics are built to reduce ambiguity: the prompt is usually concrete, the word length is visible, the timer is short, and points are tied to how fast other players guess correctly. Those mechanics push players toward one dominant strategy: simplify the drawing until it becomes instantly legible. That creates dynamics of speed, convergence, and crowd decoding. Even when the drawings are messy, the system pressures everyone toward a shared answer as quickly as possible. Because of that, the game’s main aesthetics are challenge and fellowship. The challenge is not artistic quality but communicative efficiency, and the fellowship comes from the group collectively circling around the same answer in real time. Expression is present, but it is constrained expression: players are rewarded for being readable, not original.
On Display uses drawing very differently. Its mechanics do not collapse ambiguity, but encourage it. Our prompts are broader, our challenge cards distort how players can draw, and the curator plus pitching phase means success is not decided by whether the image is immediately understood. Instead, players can recover from an unclear drawing by reframing it through performance. That changes the dynamics completely. Rather than converging on one correct interpretation, players negotiate meaning, justify choices, and try to influence judgment. In MDA terms, that shifts the aesthetics away from pure challenge and toward expression, fantasy, fellowship, and narrative. Expression matters more because players are rewarded for having an interesting interpretation, not just a clear one. Fantasy matters because the curator structure asks players to act like artists presenting work in a gallery. Narrative matters because each round becomes a small social story: a strange prompt, a constrained drawing, a pitch, a judgment, and a reaction from the group. That’s why Skribbl.io is such a useful comparison. It helped me see that On Display is not really a guessing game. It’s more about turning ambiguity into performance.
The dramatic elements also differ. Skribbl.io has very little narrative framing, but each round still creates a dramatic situation because one player is put on the spot while everyone else races to guess. On Display has a stronger dramatic frame because players take on the role of artists presenting work to a curator. That framing gives the drawing a second life after it is made. In Skribbl.io, the drawing succeeds if people guess it. In On Display, the drawing can still succeed even if it is strange or unclear, because the pitch can reinterpret it.
There is also an ethics issue tied to the magic circle. Skribbl.io works because players accept that rough drawings and silly guesses are part of play. But in public rooms, strangers can type rude, biased, or inappropriate guesses, which weakens that playful boundary. That reveals a weakness in moderation and community design. On Display, by contrast, is built for a smaller in-person group, which may create more accountability.
