Games People Play… with Flickr
If you do not already have an account on Flickr, even just the free account, just go stand in the corner. And sign up for an account. Flickr handles the pedestrian chore of serving as a handy online photo album for vacation pictures and family snapshots very nicely, but there are plenty of sites that handle this as well. What Flickr adds to the mix is the social aspect of tagging your photos, and the creation of sets and groups, and fairly robust and reasonably open architecture that lets programmers make fun games and toys that you play with Flickr. Here are just a few of my current faves.
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, Flickr-style: Flickrball is neat little solitaire game based on the idea of the old six degrees of Kevin Bacon meme. The idea is to link pictures tagged with Kevin to pictures tagged with bacon, in as few jumps as possible.
If you’re quick, try Fastr. This game (and I think there is some TV game show potential here) can put you head-to-head with another player. You are shown a set of ten pictures, and you have to guess the tag. Quickest time gets more points.
If you can draw, check out Retrievr. This is a clever bit of code that gives you a small, simple drawing window, and then based on the image you draw, it goes and searches Flickr for images that come close. I play this game two ways. The first is to try to actually bring up an image of something deliberately, like a sailboat, or a car or a building. The other way is just to scribble randomly, using different colors, to see what comes up.
If Sudoku is your thing, try Hamster Sudoku. This takes the basic idea of Sudoku (if you haven’t tried this game yet, save yourself! It’s addicting as hell) and pulls Flickr images into the puzzle instead of numbers. The game becomes both more interesting and more challenging, and it starts bringing in different parts of the brain to solve the puzzles.
For some vicarious armchair wanderlust, look at Mappr. This is a handy geographical browser for Flickr photos. Nice if you want to check out a few old haunts, or research an upcoming trip.
The last one for now isn’t really a game, it’s just an alternative way to search Flickr tags. It’s called the Flickr Related Tag Browser, but it’s a more interesting site than the name suggests. You start with a search window, jauntily set at an angle, and when you enter your tag to search, you get a nice array of matching pics, and halo of related tags. Mouse over either one for a closer look. Great way to just wander aimlessly through some really great Flickr photographs.
And that really is what makes these games… and the hundreds of other Flickr hacks out there… worthwhile. We may not all be great musicians, and not many of us can make a great film, but almost everyone has the means and the ability to take great photographs. And Flickr is a great way to share and explore them.
Permalink | Trackback | del.icio.us Digg Reddit
Comments:
Leave a comment
[…] Continuing with the game theme he brings up the Games People Play… with Flickr. What Flickr adds to the mix is the social aspect of tagging your photos, and the creation of sets and groups, and fairly robust and reasonably open architecture that lets programmers make fun games and toys that you play with Flickr. […]