Tired of the Wikipedia Game – Try WikiPiki, An Image-Based game

Many folks have played some form of the Kevin Bacon six-degrees-of-freedom game à la Wikipedia (or for the more mathematical  reader, the Erdös number game). The Wikipedia game generally involves providing the player with two clues, where the first clue is a random “start” page on Wikipedia, the second clue is a random “goal” page and the player’s objective is to find a path of intermediate pages, beginning with a page pointed to by the “start” page.

For example, one solution to travel from Kindergarten to Bollywood on Wikipedia requires two clicks: Kindergarten → India → Bollywood, where scrolling the Kindergarten page to the India section, and leveraging knowledge of India’s movie industry leads us to Bollywood.

Various sites exist to play link-based Wikipedia games, such as The Wiki Game (and its Twitter account), a site that also lets you look up the answer, yet another site that also lets you look up the answer, and not one but two iPhone apps, Wiki Hunt and 3 Degrees of Wikipedia. Other versions of the game include restricted link paths (for example, your solution can only include pages other than the United States, or a preferred end point, such as God, Jesus, or Hitler.

Of course, multiple videos exist that describe the Wikipedia game. You can also become a fan on the official Facebook fan page, which challenges folks to go from the article of the day to a page of choice. If you get behind or want to play ahead, the past & future featured article archives are available.

Yet another variant involves traversing the n^th link until you return to the origin, reach an external link, or satisfy some other condition, along with a corresponding hint hack. The game naturally also has several corresponding formal definitions for folks that like to have a rule book at their side, to include the  Urban Dictionary definition, a summary at About.com, a running thread at Hacker Newsand of course, the complete handbook at Wikipedia.

Of course, we are purely interest in the educational value of the Wikipedia game, and not the potential time waster for office cube farms. A relatively robust implementation is Wikimaze, complete with badges, and one inspired person properly wikified the link-based game as Wikispeedia. There’s also a Wikitrivia game or two [latter doesn’t appear to work in the Google Chrome browser], WikiGroaning, and the Wikipedia Category (catfishing) game.

We suggest the following game in the spirit of such link traversal games that similarly provides a sufficiently flexible definition to also offer the opportunity for social collaboration, puzzle solving, and also leverages Wikipedia’s extensively curated dataset.

For instance, this game can be readily played in party form requiring only access to Wikipedia and at player discretion, perhaps some advanced use of your favorite image manipulator. We  also may be able to play this game online someday, given the skills of some enterprising developer who implements the game we simply call WikiPiki.

The WikiPiki Game

• Have the host team visit a random Wikipedia page (via Special:Random)
• Repeat until hitting page  w/image (hack: set random link to bookmark)
• Zoom in on image (advanced, obscure part of image in image editor)
• Guesser(s) identifies words in image label (bonus, image page name)
• If stuck, the guesser(s) can request clues or hints, such as:
  • links referring to the page with the image
  • links page containing  the image refers to (or skim the page)
  • keywords in  image label (explicitly listed or synonyms)
  • certain word — say, what’s word #92 (hack – use word processor +  binary search word count, or for technical readers, vi / emacs)
  • uncover more of image (advanced, image editor helpful)
  • show different image also on page (or other multimedia)
• Points equal number of guesses/hints to identify words in image description (“easy mode”), or the name of the page containing the image (“hard mode”)
• Low score wins

A related game would be to play an image tagging game using Wikipedia images as the inspiration. For instance, guessers can use slips of paper to share image tag guesses in a manner similar to the Google Image Labeler. The winners are the players who first arrive at a common tag not on some agreed upon “easy tag” list (again, in the spirit of Google Image Labeler).

Other readily accessible party games include picture-drawing, hangman, list-words-in-the-word, or your favorite word-based party game, again, all using a random Wikipedia page (or some element on the page, such as an image). Artistic game-like possibilities include voting for best pic, best recent Wikipedia update, or creating an image collage using Wikipedia image.

So there you have it — lots of random word-based, image-based, and link-based games are possible with Wikipedia. Many of these games can  add an element of fun and social interaction beyond simply visiting random Wikipedia pages during lunch, liven  up a party, or end the afternoon blues.

Several of these games might also be engaging to play in an online environment. For instance, a potential Facebook app might provide an environment where folks can compete for points, badges, or other virtual stuff while playing an arbitrary Wikipedia-based game, while offering a learning-based alternative to gem-busting or pig farming.

A forthcoming post will explore similarly using learning-based games to enrich the value of our interactions within social networks.

Related posts…
1. On getting XKCD about Wikipedia pages leading to philosophy
2. App Discovery – Filter Bubbles and Random Selection
3. Tweet Tributaries – Wiki Waters
4. Bookmark a tweet from Twitter
5. MightyMoRiver Project — Link Roll