Sunday, June 13, 2010

The Wikipedia Game

This looks like a real time-waster! It's the online Wikipedia Game. The website gives you a link to a random page on Wikipedia, and your goal is to get to another page, also randomly generated, just by following links from the starting page.

The idea is to get from one Wikipedia page to another as quickly as possible and by clicking on as few links as possible.

It's kind of clever, but the strict time limit makes it less fun than it could be. (I tried it once, and I was kicked into a new game just as I was getting to my goal.) Just as well, though. I really don't need any more time-wasting activities on the internet!

4 comments:

Chimeradave said...

Speaking as someone who went to Grad School for Library Science that's too much like some of the homework assignments I had. Why is that fun?

Bill Garthright said...

Heh, heh. I didn't think it was much fun, but I did think it was interesting. I've done something similar by accident, marveling at the connections on Wikipedia when I've jumped from link to link.

As I say, it looked like quite a time-waster. The time limits turned me off, or I might have messed with it a while longer.

Alex Clemesha said...

Hi there! I'm the guy making http://wikipediagame.org, and first off, thanks for writing the article!

About the "time limits": this is something that we are actively working on improving. Very soon there will be "multiple game types" that will be "time based", "click based", "time+click based", among other specialty types of games, so hopefully there will be a game type that everyone likes :-)

You can see what other improvements and features that people are asking for here: http://wikipediagame.uservoice.com

Thanks again for the article!
-Alex (alex@wikipediagame.org)

indra83 said...

another place to play wikipedia game - wikiaata

you can play individually, create your own 'puzzles' and even create your own rooms and play with your friends!