Word Up

Today in Tedium: I’m sort of at that age in my adulthood where I’m not really a heavy gamer, but my love of word games knows no bounds. So when Wordle became a thing, I became a fast fan as well as that annoying guy on Twitter who shares his playthroughs each morning. (Never really a heavy a Words With Friends player, though I enjoyed Scrabble as much as the next guy.) But in a lot of ways, Wordle one of many obsessions of this type, and I think the real secret is that it’s a fairly simple game, with reasonable restrictions on how it’s played, that has a surprising number of layers that emerge over time. In honor of Wordle’s success, Today’s Tedium looks back at the imprint word games have left on the world of technology in the decades prior. May your brain be teased. — Ernie @ Tedium

An example of Acrophobia in action. The game, alas, has been offline for many years. (via Reddit)

Acrophobia: The great social word game of the ’90s was born from IRC

Sometimes, a format gets a killer app and it takes over the medium entirely. In the late 1990s, IRC looked like it had the real potential to become a mainstream way of interacting online. (It quickly faded out, in favor of what we have now.)

If 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.

A 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. Like Wordle, it had a shared goal; unlike Wordle, that goal leans on creativity, rather than strategy.

It also led to a lot of natural profanity. May God help you if you got a F in your word, because someone was about to make a dirty joke. 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.

From 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.

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.

At its best, Acrophobia takes on an addictive tenor, as you want to create the funniest jokes. 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. It’s an excellent icebreaker game.

Of course, being a game that’s effectively an IRC bot creates complications. 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.

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. The IRC game adapted to gain a degree of polish as it became part of a digital suite of games that included Jack. Given the ease in which the game could transition into dirty jokes, moderation was a key part of Acrophobia post-acquisition. But the IRC roots of Acrophobia created approaches to moderation that were seen as somewhat innovative at the time. As the 2000 book Community Building on the Web explained:

An intriguing approach to member self-management is to empower members to control their environment by pooling their opinions. 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. It’s likely that we’ll see more of these types of bottom-up systems in the future.

Even 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.

“I showed my mother the game, and after five minutes, she got it,” Davis told Wired. “I wouldn’t want to put Command and Conquer in front of my mother.”

As 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.

“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.

Eventually, 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. (In recent years, Davis has worked on the digital trading-card game Gods Unchained, with an expected expansion planned later this year.)

But while Acrophobia the game hasn’t been active in quite a few years—a FAQ blamed a merger that swallowed Berkeley Systems into Sierra On-Line, itself a company swallowed by larger companies multiple times over—a clone of the original, called Acrofever! is still playable today. (I again make the case that someone could build an Acrophobia Twitter bot and have it go viral in a matter of hours. It could potentially get people who argue all day to take a breather and make some dirty jokes instead. Additionally, it could kill global productivity.)

This image has the same energy as this image.

Googlewhacking: The game that got harder to play as time went on

As you probably know, I am a bit of a heavy Googler. It’s sort of my nature, the thing that gives me my power.

And Google, honestly, is a pretty good source for word games. For stumped Wordle cheaters, it’s likely the first place they go if they’re struggling to fit a square peg in a round hole and need a hint.

But what if you treated Google itself like a word game? What would that look like? Well, it’d look like Googlewhacking, a concept that gamed much popularity in the early-mid 2000s.

The idea, as forged by a man named Gary Stock about 20 years ago, was this: What if you could find a two-word phrase on Google that, with no quote marks around it, would bring about a single result? Apparently, Stock had to defend his territory when revealing this idea to the world:

Several people have e-mailed me claiming to have invented the idea of searching for one result. (Oddly, however, no one has claimed they invented ‘Looking up words in a dictionary’ :-) Here’s a hint, folks: some of the decaffeinated brands have all the flavor of the real thing!

Many people—myself included—have done such searches for years. It’s a natural thing for curious people to do. I just named it “Googlewhacking” (better than the Greek approximation, ‘hapax legomenon’).

The problem with Googlewhacks, of course, is that once they’re discovered, they’re almost immediately destroyed. As a man named Peter Dickman wrote on his page about Googlewhacks: “How to destroy a googlewhack: write it down on a Google accessible page.” (Many call SEO a destructive force on the internet. You will find no better example of a smoking gun than the Googlewhack.)

For a time, Googlewhacking had its own official website, since shuttered, that gathered Googlewhacks around the internet … which of course, meant that the Googlewhacks no longer existed. But it also became a great way for some to build some media attention. Dave Gorman, a writer and comedian, was first made aware of the Googlewhack concept when he was informed that his page had a Googlewhack of its own. He then did as many people do, and dedicated a year of his life to finding more Googlewhacks.

That led to both a series of stand-up performances—one of which is located here—in which Gorman described his process of uncovering these Googlewhacks, which eventually evolved into an extended procrastination effort to avoid writing the book he was supposed to write. To cover the advance he had spent in the process, he then turned it into a comedy show, which then became the book.

As The Guardian recalled in 2013, this show was a bit of a narrative experiment at the time:

This is not just a standup show but an emotionally involving yarn with a narrative arc imposed by the looming deadline of his 32nd birthday. Maybe not a big deal now, but a decade ago the idea of a quasi-theatrical monologue like this seemed revolutionary in the comedy world. Gorman, however, didn’t embark on his 91,000-mile adventure to create a show; he did it because he wanted to avoid writing the novel he’d been paid to write. He was 31. He had a beard. He was a grown-up. But he drank too much tequila on New Year’s Eve, made a drunken bet, and was hooked.

Gorman was the perfect vessel for the Googlewhack, because he was well-suited to highlight its absurdity.

Of course, Google is still around, but Googlewhacking is significantly harder these days. Just as an example: If I were to tweet a phrase that had never been used before, said phrase would get pulled in by multiple search engines and APIs, and the automation of the process would ensure that there would suddenly be search results for that two-word phrase. You basically would have to invent a phrase and then share it on a website that doesn’t have an API or an RSS feed—a tall order in 2022, surprisingly.

(You know what doesn’t come up though? Phone numbers, especially spammy ones that call me.)

But what makes it bad for playing elaborate word games makes it good for everything else.