

Ask HN: Buzzword Bingo Card Creator? - jcr

I was responding to Patrick (HN: patio11) in another HN thread and I had
an idea. I've read his blog and many of his insightful posts to HN over
the years, so I know about his startup, www.bingocardcreator.com.<p>The idea I had was, "HN Buzzword Bingo" --an online game based on
reading HN articles. You get a online bingo card with tech buzzwords,
and as you read HN articles and find the terms, you get to cross them
off your card, possibly by giving the URL where the term was found, and
then checking to make sure it's part of an HN article.<p>I'm not sure the idea is even feasible, but worse, I almost never play
games (once every few years), so I'm really the wrong person to even
have such an idea. Most games are structured to entertainingly consume
time, but reading tech and startup news is useful (to some degree). A HN
Buzzword Bingo game would (potentially) be "useful entertainment" so I'm
not sure if people would find it fun?<p>Would you consider if fun?<p>I'm curious if any of you have ideas on how something like this could be
built?<p>frames?  tabs?  mobile? frontend? backend?<p>Thoughts?
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pbhjpbhj
>Would you consider if fun?

Not particularly my kind of thing. I imagine some here might find it fun to
hack together a script to read the articles and mark the card for them ...

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jcr
Sure, (nearly?) all games can be cheated, but that's really not the point of
most people playing them. In this case, the point is reading articles, so a
cheat of browser automation (certainly doable) would defeat the purpose. Also,
if the bingo card used images to display the terms, you'd need to implement
OCR to automate it. Not impossible, but seemingly not likely.

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pbhjpbhj
>Sure, (nearly?) all games can be cheated, but that's really not the point of
most people playing them.

I wasn't considering it as cheating just that I'd expect, even with the
addition of the OCR requirement that such a challenge would meet more
interest. In fact I thought that a competition to create said bot and then a
challenge to produce a winner, the bots could then be dissected by the
community as learning experience. See that sounds fun to me ...

~~~
jcr
Yes, most definitely, a bot competition does sound like a lot of fun. A
separate game server just for bots would be great, and it would allow those
who just want a fun way to keep track of their reading to use the manual game.

