When I first laid eyes on a screenshot of Shiritori Game, I felt inspired.

When I first tried it out at http://shiritorigame.com/, I felt even more inspired by all the possibilities it hadn’t exploited.

In the online version, players take turn writing a word that starts with the last letter of the previous word. They both begin with the same score and “lose” points at each turn, based on how long their word was and how quick they were. The first player to reach zero point wins.

In the original Japanese game, the link between the two words is a kana, which I guess would be akin to a syllable in English. Maybe the creator of the online game thought that such a version would be too difficult, so they chose to use the last letter instead.

I must say that the user interface of the website is a real success. It’s appealing to the eyes and intuitive to the mind. The information is distilled very clearly and you can start a game with a single click. No need for a superfluous registration or chatboxes or anything of the like: Shiritori Game fulfills its goal in a most effective, streamlined way.

For my part, I first followed the tutorial and then immediately jumped into a multiplayer game. The experience turned out to be as amazing as I thought it would be. The gameplay felt very smooth and natural and the game unfolded without a kink. However, within a few games, I realized that it had some fundamental flaws that were threatening to undermine the whole idea behind it.

Let me explain: every time a seasoned player had to write a word starting with the letter ‘y’, they would write “yachtsmanship”, or “yachtswoman”, and all their derivatives. The same happened with the letter ‘s’ and the word “superminicomputer”, or the letter ‘a’ and the word “antidisestablishmentarianism”. What I want to get at is that you only need to know a long word for most letters and be a fast typer to win practically every game.

This realization made me relegate the game from a revolutionary and fun, competitive and collective vocabulary practice program to a repetitive, dull website with little interest. With a handful of tweaks however, it could easily come back to being the first one… and become even more than that, considering all the possibilities offered by word chains.

For instance, if word derivatives weren’t allowed and if you could only use words once ever, across all games, you would then be forced to rack your brains in search of obscure words you had maybe heard only once or twice in your lifetime. The longer you would play Shiritori, the harder the games would be for you. Even from a technical standpoint, finding out the root form of a word is now child’s play thanks to the various databases that developers can freely use, for example that of Wordnik (http://wordnik.com).

It would also be wise to try and make the task harder for cheaters. Since there’s currently no time limit, no one prevents you from looking up the longest word that starts with a certain letter on the Internet. Of course, there will always be cheaters, especially seeing as it’s a “web game”, but it never hurts to take steps to counter this bane.

Another small useful modification would be to allow you to review the words used by your opponent after the game. That way, you could learn new vocabulary without having to open new tabs hastily during the game.

Another wholly different approach to Shiritori that the online game could take would be the creative one… and this could be done as easily as adding a single new rule: your word needs to have a semantic link with the previous one. Let’s say you start with “waterfall” ; we could then have, successively, “lofty”, “yachtsman”, “nature”, “entomologist”, “termite”, “exterminate”, “erase”, “eventless”, “silent”, “toned-down”, “narcotic”, and so on. It adds a whole new level of reflection to the game.

If this game mode proves too difficult (which it probably is), we could even drop the first letter / last letter restriction and stick to finding the longest word that has a thematic connection with the previous one. Granted, it wouldn’t have much in common with the original Shiritori game, but still, I personally think it would be much more stimulating to play.

Since this game mode with the letter restriction is actually the same as the current online game with an additional rule, you can already try it out by playing “Shiritori Game” and imposing that restriction on yourself, unilaterally. Who knows, maybe your opponent will catch on to what you’re doing and follow suit! As such, you can be your own guinea pig (or your unwitting opponent can be) and you can see for yourself what this game mode would be like.

As a side note, this experiment you could lead reminds me of the article I wrote about the online Pictionary game “iSketch” and the idea of “emergent gameplay” (I discovered yesterday it was named this way). Given a set of simple rules, people sometimes instinctively think up additionnal rules that would make the game more exciting, and before you know it, there are all these underground, tacit games going on. It’s truly fascinating. Just yesterday I played a standard game on iSketch where each drawing essentially narrated a new episode in the life of a flamingo – all this by common, implicit accord.

Anyway…

I like the idea of a multiplayer vocabulary-building word chain game so much that I might just make such a game for the next project I have at school, provided it fits the specifications and I’m matched with like-minded students (thin chance). I could also create it with a friend of mine, but for the moment I’m already working on a personal project, which is advancing at a snail’s pace, so it will probably have to wait.

If you know of any similarly inspiring word game, feel free to share!