Vivek Haldar
A Twitter-based Anagram Game
I’ve been fascinated with the idea of using Twitter for slow, asynchronous, text-based games. The kind where a challenge is tweeted out, and you can take your sweet time to respond to it, again with a tweet, sprinkled with some simple game elements like leaderboards.
My initial exploration of the idea led me to develop what was a pretty simple and useless twitter chat bot (in the style of Eliza).
The next step in my exploration is Anagramr, a game of anagrams over Twitter. Here are the rules:
- Follow @anagramr on Twitter. Every couple of minutes, it will tweet out a challenge like: “Give me anagrams for FOO.” (Update: I got feedback this was way too frequent. I’ve turned this down to one challenge tweeted out every half hour.)
- Reply to one of those challenges with anagrams of the the word in the challenge. It must be a reply to that tweet, or Anagramr will not know which word you are replying to.
- Anagramr will tweet you back with whether your reply was a valid anagram or not.
- A couple of times a day, Anagramr will tweet out leaderboards.
A typical run looks like this:
