Teamwork
Relive the fun and eye-poking of kindergarten with this little diversion (via Beancounter): it’s a virtual refrigerator with a bunch of those colored magnetic letters. The idea, of course, is to drag them around to form words, just like you would on a real fridge. The catch is that everyone gets to play at once.
It’s an exercise in group creativity, really. Once you tack up a few cusswords and get your giggles, it’s fun to see what you can put together before someone else tears it apart. The best part is when you can get someone else to share in your vision. I tried for a while to arrange a complete alphabet in the top right corner, but people kept snagging random letters before I could finish. Just as I was about to give up, some of the letters started flying back into place, all by themselves. I had a helper! Between the two of us, we held back entropy long enough to finish the job.
It’s not just about words, either—later in the game I contributed to a massively multi-artist drawing of a naked lady. (Someone was making an orange circle, so I put a dot in the middle, then someone else started drawing another circle, and all of a sudden the whole world came running to help.) As soon as a drawing or set of words becomes recognizable, someone else will try to complete it. Sometimes the original artist and the “helper” don’t see eye to eye and try to go in different directions, with amusing results. Symbol recognition, cooperation…I’m sure there’s a sociology paper in here somewhere.
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P.S. This reminds me of a project I saw a while ago in which visitors to a website were allowed to contribute one pixel each to a picture. It started out being a bunch of random dots, but eventually turned into something resembling a cute little park scene with a tree, a lake, and a sun (that’s what I see in it, anyway). I thought I saved the link somewhere, but I can’t find it. Does anyone know what I’m talking about?
Tags: miscellany
December 23rd, 2005 at 3:00 am
Such a strange site. When I went there people where organizing the letters into columns. Somebody tried to type “losers” but they were never able to finish the word. After it was done, somebody asked “What now” … everyone went back to writing whatever they wanted.
December 25th, 2005 at 3:21 pm
Oops…you were right, Shannon. I’m at my parents’ house, and the link in the banner doesn’t work at all, even in Firefox. Pooooop.