You know, “there’s an app for that.”
Since the popularization of the iPhone, and the recent surge in apps available for the iPhone, Blackberry, and Droid phones, digital applications have become the latest in high-tech entertainment. One of the first viral apps was “Angry Birds,” a simple arcade-style firing game that pitted birds against pigs in a war with hundreds of levels.
Then came “Words with Friends,” produced by Zynga, an app that combines friendly competition (literally: you get to play your friends) with the classic word-spelling board game Scrabble.
As users grew tired of the game’s repetitive format, Zynga produced two follow-up games, “Hanging with Friends” and “Scramble with Friends,” which both fell flat. What game would make it to the top of the iTunes app store’s Top 100 Chart and proceed to set the new standard for portable gaming everywhere? Never fear, “Draw Something” is here.
The newest app craze in several months, “Draw Something” has a simple premise: draw something on the touch screen with your finger (harder than you’d think) and let your friend guess what it is.
The game paints itself as an electronic version of Pictionary, a party game that first emerged in 1985. The similarities between this game and other social connection games are apparent, but this game demonstrates a stark difference from the rest because the players are not in competition.
Rather, the game is cooperative to encourage players to draw and guess to the best of their abilities. The app keeps track of how many turns the pair of players has completed. It even features a stats button that allows users to view the most commonly used colors, the average drawing and guessing time spent, the longest streak, and the average word difficulty.
Available in a limited play version for free and currently on sale for ninety-nine cents, Draw Something is definitely an application worth checking out. The cooperative style makes the game more friend-oriented (I guess this is nice if you’re one of those happy-go-lucky hippies out there, although I’m not sold because I live on competition) and it works well in groups because it is untimed.
Draw Something follows in a trend of apps that have risen and fallen with the times. The only question is: what app will be next?
