Overview
Scattergrams is a literary composition toy designed for deployment over social networking websites. It provides the player with a daily delivery of seemingly random words and challenges them to quickly re-arrange those words into an interesting message that will be automatically sent to their friends at the end of each play session. In addition to free-form play, Scattergrams also includes cooperative and competitive multiplayer modes.
Free Form Mode
Free Form Mode - Players
The toy, or free form mode of the game does not feature multiplayer competition or cooperation during play. Because players work alone, but ultimately broadcast their Scattergram messages to all of their friends, the game can be thought of as "Massively Single Player".
Free Form Mode - Objectives
In this mode, Scattergrams is a toy rather than a game, so there is no explicitly defined objective. Free form mode is intended to be a tool for creatively sampling the cultural Zeitgeist of any given day and fashioning it into a bite sized literary masterpiece. It can be reasonably assumed that most players will wish to turn the words that Scattergrams provides them with into something more coherent than randomly ordered nonsense.
Free Form Mode - Set-Up
The free form mode of Scattergrams begins by scrubbing a series of news, culture and gossip oriented RSS feeds for recent articles. The game's back end software will grab the text from each feed, place it into a collective text file and scramble the order of the words. Once this data has been shuffled, Scattergrams will pull the first twenty words out of the file and load them into the current game session. To help the player generate coherent sentences, sometimes the resulting word list will be supplemented by inserting a few commonly used English language articles and pronouns such as "a, an, and, or, the, him, her...".
Free Form Mode - Procedures
Once the word list has been selected, the game will bring up the Literary Composition Interface(or LCI), which is a window which displays all of the words which have been selected during the RSS scrubbing phase. Like all of the other parts of the Scattergrams user interface, it will be implemented as an AJAX-style add on to the Facebook social networking web site. Players can re-arrange the word list using drag and drop techniques. When the player moves their mouse cursor over a word, they can pick it up by clicking and holding the mouse button. When the player moves the mouse, the word that is being dragged will pop up in glowing red letters between whichever two words the mouse cursor is closest to. Once the player has dragged the word to the desired position in the text they may drop it in place by releasing the mouse button. To the right of the composition window are a set of icons marked with various types of punctuation characters (. , ! ? " ;). Once the player has moved the words into the most desirable configuration they can use these icons to insert punctuation by moving the mouse cursor over one of the punctuation icons, then dragging and dropping it into the desired position within the text. At the bottom of the window is a button marked "done" which players may press when they are finished manipulating the text.
Free Form Mode - Rules
Once the player enters the Literary Composition Interface a timer(displayed at the bottom of the LCI window, next to the "done" button) begins to count down. In Free Form Mode, players must move the words into the desired order before five minutes are up.
Free Form Mode - Outcome
At the end of five minutes, the Scattergram composition will be broadcast in the form of a message on the player's wall. This will happen regardless of whether the Literary Composition Window contains an interesting piece of poetry, a string of obscenities, an enigmatic Zen koan, or a load of complete gibberish.
Non Free-Form Game Modes
The basic structure of Free Form Scattergrams will also be used as a basis for three goal-oriented play modes.
Muck Raker
Muck Raker - Players
Muck Raker is played as many single players competing in parallel against a game. Each player completes a puzzle individually, but high scores are posted to a central score list.
Muck Raker - Set Up
Instead of pulling words from an aggregate of many different RSS feeds, Muck Raker's setup phase grabs a complete sentence from the body text or headline of a single news story. The words are still scrambled, but no additional pronouns or articles are added.
Muck Raker - Objectives
The goal of Muck Raker is to re-arrange the scrambled words provided at the beginning of a play session into their original order. The original order of the words is based on how they appear in the RSS news feed that was sampled in order to create the original puzzle.
Muck Raker - Procedures
The procedures are mostly identical to free form mode, but there are some exceptions. The punctuation icons are absent from the Muck Raker version of the Literary Composition Interface window.
Muck Raker - Rules
Like free form games of Scattergrams, Muck Raker is timed. This is so players do not attempt to cheat by googling the news article that their word list has been cribbed from. When evaluating the player constructed sentence during the scoring phase of a Muck Raker play session, punctuation marks are ignored since it is not possible for players to insert them into the text.
Muck Raker - Outcome
Players are given points every time one word correctly follows another. The number of points is small at first, but the score will increase dramatically every time a chain of correctly ordered words expands in length. Players are given bonus points if they are able to win the game by completely reconstructing the original unscrambled sentence from beginning to end.
Vox Populi
Vox Populi is identical to free form mode, except it provides a system for scoring. After composing a message, players can submit it to the Vox Populi sub-game. The player composed message will be fed into the Google search engine and awarded points for every search hit.
Doppelgänger
Doppelgänger is another alternative scoring system for Scattergrams. It is a cooperative game for two players. Set up is like free-form Scattergrams, but both players receive the same list of words. Every time both players create the same combination of one word following another, they score points. Like Muck Raker, chains of multiple matching words earn players increasingly large point counts. In order to win a Doppelgänger game both players must come up with the same message.