“Acrophobia is not just challenging and fun, it’s also a very social game, which probably explains why people are always commenting on how eventually they are going to have to leave the game to take care of some little chore-like eating or sleeping,” Ottawa Citizen columnist Bill Provick wrote of Acrophobia’s success as a casual game in 1999.Įventually, over time, Davis moved on from Acrophobia and became a frequent developer in the games industry, with a focus on online trading-card games, among other titles. #Out of order game boxerjam full“I wouldn’t want to put Command and Conquer in front of my mother.”Īs a result, at least for some people, it became a little more than just a game like many early casual games, Acrophobia excelled as a way to encourage socializing at a time when the internet was full of new people. “I showed my mother the game, and after five minutes, she got it,” Davis told Wired. It’s likely that we’ll see more of these types of bottom-up systems in the future.Įven with its edginess, Acrophobia benefited greatly from the fact that it was an easy concept to understand, making it a great game for non-gamers. Acrophobia, for example, includes a “complain” feature that allows the people in a chat room to vote an annoying person out of the room-essentially, to function as a “host in aggregate.” This strategy is loosely related to both the Slashdot moderator system, and the eBay reputation system-they all make use of the aggregate behavior and opinions of members. As the 2000 book Community Building on the Web explained:Īn intriguing approach to member self-management is to empower members to control their environment by pooling their opinions. But the IRC roots of Acrophobia created approaches to moderation that were seen as somewhat innovative at the time. Given the ease in which the game could transition into dirty jokes, moderation was a key part of Acrophobia post-acquisition. The IRC game adapted to gain a degree of polish as it became part of a digital suite of games that included Jack. Perhaps that’s why Berkeley Systems, the company famed for its screensavers and You Don’t Know Jack franchise of games, felt inspired to take the game over at some point. Beyond the fact that it’s user-generated content that can get a little salty, IRC was kind of a crazy place back in the heyday of Acrophobia, and then you had the challenges of people getting logged off or booted from the server, a frequent occurrence because it was a famously unstable experience. Of course, being a game that’s effectively an IRC bot creates complications. It would actually be a great game to see a revival on Twitter, because it works well among a group of people who don’t know one another. If you’ve ever played the popular Twitter game Endless Jeopardy, itself built by internet old-timer and early Flash creative force Neil Cicierega, it works almost exactly the same way-which makes sense, because, as Davis told Wired in 1997, Acrophobia was directly inspired by an IRC Jeopardy game.Īt its best, Acrophobia takes on an addictive tenor, as you want to create the funniest jokes. With shades of the card games Apples to Apples and Cards Against Humanity, one of the defining elements of Acrophobia was that it could get blue, fast.įrom a technical standpoint, Acrophobia was essentially an IRC bot: Whenever it was placed in a channel, it played through a script, managed the votes of end users, and the one that received the most votes won. May God help you if you got a F in your word, because someone was about to make a dirty joke. It also led to a lot of natural profanity. Like Wordle, it had a shared goal unlike Wordle, that goal leans on creativity, rather than strategy. #Out of order game boxerjam seriesIf there was a game that could have pushed it over the edge into a real mainstream force, it likely would have been Acrophobia, an IRC game first conceived by Thandrie Davis, a onetime technology journalist, in 1995.Ī chat-driven game driven by creativity, it had a simple conceit: Given a series of random letters, people in a given chat room had to come up with clever acronyms that matched the name. (It quickly faded out, in favor of what we have now.) In the late 1990s, IRC looked like it had the real potential to become a mainstream way of interacting online. Sometimes, a format gets a killer app and it takes over the medium entirely. (via Reddit) Acrophobia: The great social word game of the ’90s was born from IRC #Out of order game boxerjam OfflineThe game, alas, has been offline for many years.
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