Patent Application
20120088583
The invention relates to a game serving essentially to provide amusement to a large number of people without relying on chance (no randomness), but that is nevertheless not a game of knowledge or erudition.
This game is inspired on the “dictionary game” that consists in selecting a complicated or ambiguous word, generally an unusual or old-fashioned word of meaning that is unknown to most people. Each player then proposes a definition that they have made up and that may be eccentric, evocative, or plausible. The proposals of each player are then presented to the other players and each of them votes for one of the definitions, with the winner being the one receiving the most votes.
The starting point of the invention is to transpose the above principle to giving titles to pictorial works.
It can be observed, particularly in the field of modern and contemporary art, that more and more works do not have a title or are merely labeled Untitled XXV or Sans titre No. 9, etc.
For such works that do not have titles, the game consists essentially in finding titles for them.
Players can thus project themselves into the image of the work and propose a title that pleases them, being evocative, humorous, surprising, poetical, surrealist, . . . with no limit other than the players' own imaginations.
The object is naturally to find the title that is the most striking, that will be most appreciated by the others, and that will obtain the greatest number of votes—where voters may be players actually participating in the game or merely spectators content to give their advice.
The game may also be applied equally to works that are figurative or non-figurative, and even to works that already have their own titles. It is usually found, particularly with classical figurative and academic works, that the title given to the work is purely descriptive: Portrait of Docteur Gachet; Still life with flowers; Card game; etc., and as a result the title is just as devoid of meaning as Untitled XXV.
Giving works titles such as:
The game of the invention may be implemented by conventional means with a game board, cards, etc., with players sitting around a table.
However it may also be implemented by computer means between players connected in a network, with displays of pictorial representations accompanied by input fields in which they may propose titles, and also with means for transmitting their assessments of titles proposed by other players.
This computer implementation may most particularly be in the form of a social network application such as a “Facebook” application, etc., e.g. in the form of interactive mini-software of the widget type.
In a social network, games benefit from a huge number of potential players, possibly grouped together in subsets as a function of common centers of interest.
These applications also possess integrated voting functions that are presented to users in the form of a “like” button for clicking, that makes the procedure for voting very simple, and thus enables information to return quickly from players to the central site.
More precisely, the game of the invention comprises at least one game session comprising the steps of: submitting a representation of a pictorial work; making an input field available to each player; each player giving a title to the pictorial work shown; and collecting and storing the title given by the player.
This game may in particular comprise the steps consisting in: submitting a plurality of representations to a first player and having that player give a plurality of corresponding titles; submitting said representations independently to a second player together with the titles given by the first player; making the second player guess which representations match which titles; and giving the second player a score as a function of the number of exact matches found.
There may also be provided a list of words that are banned for use by the players when devising titles.
In a first embodiment, the game is implemented by physical media comprising: a set of cards, each carrying a representation of a pictorial work; a game board on which the cards may be placed; and writing means including said input field, which means are made available to the players.
In a second embodiment, the game is implemented by computer means comprising a remote game site and a terminal accessible to each player, the terminal comprising: a screen suitable for displaying the representation of the pictorial work; input means including said input field; and remote transmission means for exchanging data with the game site.
Under such circumstances, in various subsidiary implementation features:
There follows a more detailed description of two implementations of the invention given with reference to the accompanying drawings.
The first implementation of the invention is provided by conventional means for use by players who are physically together around a table.
As shown in
By way of example, the game may be governed by the following rules:
The rules may make provision to ban certain words or kinds of description: for example the use of colors, the names of shapes, etc. may be disallowed when making up a title, so as to avoid the titles being too simple and so as to encourage the player to invent titles that are not merely descriptive.
The invention is then implemented by means of a network organized about a game site 18 connected by wired or wireless remote transmission means to user terminals such as a computer 20, a digital tablet 22, or a smartphone 24. The game site is also interfaced with a database 26 for handling the proposed titles and the votes of the members of the network.
As explained above, the game may advantageous be implemented in the form of a Facebook type application, in particular a widget type mini-application.
The site 18 displays a representation of the pictorial work for submission on the screen of each of the terminals 20, 22, 24, together with an input field enabling the user to propose a title, and/or a field for displaying some of the titles that have already been given to the work, together with an interface enabling the user to select one of those titles and to vote for it, e.g. by pressing a “like” button.
The proposed titles and the votes coming from the various terminals are centralized by the game site 18, possibly with “moderation” to filter out titles that do not comply with the rules of the game (including words or categories of words that are banned, e.g. comprising colors, the games of shapes, etc.) or titles that need to be prohibited on moral grounds.
The proposed titles are subsequently played back to all of the terminals in order to receive votes from the players.
If a title collects some number of votes (“like”) that exceeds a certain threshold, e.g. more than 1000 votes, then the title is “frozen” and stored in the database 26 together with the pictorial work with which it is associated.
In a subsequent stage, the game site 18 presents players with a certain number of representations of pictorial works and of titles, not in the same order, and asks them to find which works correspond with which titles. The players receive scores depending on the number of matches they manage to find.
In a variant of the game, when presenting a work to a player, instead of asking the player to select one title from amongst several, the player is asked to put the plurality of titles shown to the player in order of preference. The game site 18 then analyses the preference list submitted by the various players and organizes a chart of ranking the titles that have received the most votes.
In a subsequent stage, the work is presented with the various titles that have been given to it, but in no particular order, and players are asked not to give their preferences (i.e. they are not asked to vote), but instead to guess which title constitutes the highest-ranking title as determined by the central site from the votes of the other players—i.e. the site asks the players to guess what the majority of the other players think.
The order proposed by the player is then compared with a reference ranking chart stored by the game site 18 and the players receive scores as a function of how well their proposals match the actual ranking chart.
It should be observed that in all circumstances a player's score depends only on that player's ability at giving the most pertinent possible replies. In particular, there is no random element that can influence the score, since the score is modified only as a function of elements that are known, as constituted by the titles, and voting statistics as stored in the database 26 of the game site 18.
