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Comment by spykr

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Comment by spykr

I made a daily game where you try to identify five Wikipedia articles by looking at their infoboxes with the name and picture hidden. You get one guess per article, and afterwards you get a summary and a link to Wikipedia so at least you might learn something even if you get it wrong!

Infoboxing was inspired by the Wikipedia guessing game Catfishing, which my friends and I love. We play as a group, which is probably cheating, but still sometimes only get like 3/10 correct. Part of the fun is discovering each person's niche and comparing our answers to the rest of the Catfishing audience on the stats page.

I've always wanted to make a daily game and I felt there was still room to explore in the Wikipedia guessing space. In my first prototype I picked out four or five rows from each infobox and revealed them one at a time, but making someone guess repeatedly at something they may never have heard of felt slow, especially across five articles. I ended up following Catfishing's approach: show all the clues with one guess or a skip.

My fiancée and I choose the articles. We started out listing everything we could think of, then explored Wikipedia lists like the "Unusual articles" page and also used AI to suggest candidates in areas we'd missed. In my opinion the best articles have an "a-ha!" moment where it suddenly clicks.

The hardest parts to get right are article curation, balancing the difficulty and deciding what counts as a correct answer. Should "Big Jesus" be an accepted answer for Christ the Redeemer? My fiancée thinks so! I've also put in some rules to try and keep a given day from being too difficult but ultimately it's based on vibes because my idea of what "everyone knows" is biased by my age, gender, region, etc.

The infoboxes are captured ahead of time so I set up a daily check to warn me if an article changes, mainly to catch things like ages changing or people dying. My favourite facepalm moment was when it warned me that Spock had died. His date of death on Wikidata? 2263.

Anyway, give it a go and see what you think. If you have an answer you think should count, tell me through the contact page so that we can keep spoilers out of the comments.

Replies spykr · 1d
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