Babbling

The one post on this blog that most surprised me in terms of the amount of comments and search traffic is definitely the post I did on Psychobabble. With 86 comments (probably the second most in this site's history) it's become a bit of an ex-Psychobabble player hangout. Since people are still coming here looking for Psychobabble information, I feel a duty to update them in my search for similar games.

Psychobabble was a genre of game I call a "creativity game." You really had to use your creativity and sense of humor to succeed.

Recently, I've been playing a game that taxes the same creative juices. It's an acrophobia game in flash called acroBabble. It's a very well done version and I always have a ton of laughs whenever I play. The players are good and new features are added frequently.

What's more, I heard the site's creator is working on doing a version of Psychobabble. Here's a mini-interview:

What was your inspiration to start the accroBabble website?

I was playing around with some new technologies - Flex SDK, some new Java features etc. I've always maintained that the best way to learn a new piece of technology is to write a real-world app with it. About the same time, there was an article about how traditional games were catching on in social networks. I researched acrophobia to see if it was still around. I realized that there was perhaps an opportunity for an acro-clone and hence decided to embark on the acro adventure.

What are your plans for the future of acroBabble?

I have quite a large list of features to add. There are the obvious - sound effects, game features like private rooms, teams etc. Beyond that I would like to experiment with allowing players to play acro over IM.

Recently, I've added a feature to declare the first person as the room admin with powers to boot unruly players. I've also allowed players to be designated as "trusted." These players cannot be booted by a room admin but they can boot a room admin (gotta keep the admins in check too :)

And what about my precious Psychobabble?

While researching acrophobia, I came across the phenomenon of psychobabble and came to discover its loyal and zealous fan base :) Since acrophobia and pyschobabble are very similar (except for the core creative task), I've been building the code base for acroBabble to factor out the common parts so that I can launch a pyschobabble clone very easily. In fact, I've got a domain for it - http://www.crazybabble.com/ . It currently points to acroBabble.
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Well, I know I'm definitely looking forward to that Psychobabble version. But for now I'll keep playing acroBabble whenever I want to have some creative fun. And I do have a couple more "creativity" contenders that I'll blog about soon.