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May 1, 2008

XSketch: Play Pictionary Online With Random People

Michael Arrington

29 comments »

XSketch is a new Ajax/javascript game that lets up to seven users play pictionary with each other. One person gets a word and starts drawing, the other users guess. If someone gets it right, both the drawer and the guesser get points.

This is the third game created by Ryan Dewsbury on the Google Web Toolkit (he also wrote a book on the subject). His first effort was a Texas Holdem poker game called gpokr. He then created kdice, a Risk-like online game which was nominated for a Crunchies award last January.

XSketch is addictive and fun - I spent a lot more time testing it this morning than I really needed to for this post. Users can chat with each other during the game, give hints, etc. The tool to draw pictures is hard to use with a mouse or trackpad, leading to some very funny drawings.

You can also add XSketch to Facebook.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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  1. Introducing XSketch! | GWT Site

    May 1st, 2008 at 3:36 pm

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  1. Kev

    May 1st, 2008 at 1:19 pm

    I have been playing iSketch for 5+ years at isketch.net … i think it is cleaner than this one but iSetch us mostly made up of UK folks so sometimes there is confusion with the words.

  2. Gaurav

    May 1st, 2008 at 1:25 pm

    Same as 1. iSketch has been there ever since.

  3. Michael Arrington

    May 1st, 2008 at 1:27 pm

    http://www.isketch.net

    I actually can’t get it to work…what plugin is needed?

  4. Peter Urban

    May 1st, 2008 at 1:32 pm

  5. Jigs

    May 1st, 2008 at 1:36 pm

    It just needs flash, Michael.

    And ditto on the playing isketch for 5+ years. I think flash is better suited for browser games than javascript anyway, but its nice to see that the author was able to write the game in JS.

  6. Jigs

    May 1st, 2008 at 1:37 pm

    oh…um I just went to the site and the game IS in flash. nevermind about all that javascript talk. :)

  7. Tamar Weinberg

    May 1st, 2008 at 1:39 pm

    Yup - another iSketch vote. XSketch doesn’t look much newer or more improved over that much older Pictionary social app that we’ve been using before Web 2.0 became a real term.

  8. TCS

    May 1st, 2008 at 1:42 pm

    Ryan is godlike!

  9. Jeff J.

    May 1st, 2008 at 1:44 pm

    Just checked the page source, XSketch is a hybrid of GWT and Flash. The page itself was generated via GWT, and the portion you draw on in the middle is Flash.

  10. Andrew C.

    May 1st, 2008 at 1:46 pm

    Shockwave has also had a game for at least 6+ years (I remember playing in high school…) called InkLink that is almost exactly the same.

  11. James Paden

    May 1st, 2008 at 1:46 pm

    And Yahoo’s been doing this for years too (Java based)

  12. !Sarcastic

    May 1st, 2008 at 2:01 pm

    Gooddd!!! i’d almost started writting a simmilar app … and wanted to publish it ..thinking it’s an unique idea!! thank god I read this article!

  13. Medical hand

    May 1st, 2008 at 2:01 pm

    This game is somehow silly. I don’t like to play such games but the idea is good.

  14. Karen

    May 1st, 2008 at 2:04 pm

    I never liked Shockwave’s InkLink…

    I do love the Community in iSketch, they moderate themselves very well.. and being Canadian I always found the US rooms easier for the names of stuff, but I do need to remember some spelling differences.

    iSketch does not make me sign up for an account either. And there are no weird glitches where you can’t draw, and you don’t need to pay to play better games.

    hm.

  15. Powell

    May 1st, 2008 at 2:11 pm

    Who is this guy? I keep hearing about him at every GWT forum I go to. Does he work with Google or something??
    I’m really impressed with kdice.

  16. Stephie

    May 1st, 2008 at 2:20 pm

    Cafe.com has the same game up to 6 players… u don’t need to register in order to play, it’s flash based and another good thing also is the ability to use boosts to get ahead of the opponent.
    http://www.cafe.com/Free_Games/Sketch-it!

  17. Ryan Dewsbury

    May 1st, 2008 at 2:22 pm

    I was playing with some kdice friends on isketch last year and we thought it would be great to add this type of game to the statistics and competition structure already set up with gpokr and kdice. So it’s definitely inspired by isketch. However, you’ll find less drawing tools and that guessing ends as soon as you guess a word with xsketch - so the game has a different feel.

  18. siep

    May 1st, 2008 at 2:27 pm

    http://www.collab.nl anyone ?

  19. Peter Cooper

    May 1st, 2008 at 3:06 pm

    Funny how the same ideas come around again. Like some of the commenters above, I used to play iSketch. I was pretty addicted to it back in the day! You can easily waste hours on it.

  20. See-ming Lee

    May 1st, 2008 at 3:15 pm

    @Michael

    It needs Shockwave, not to be confused with Flash.

  21. jim

    May 1st, 2008 at 3:19 pm

    Another iSketch fan. The movies category is the best!

  22. Ryan Spahn

    May 1st, 2008 at 3:52 pm

    Never heard of either service, nevertheless, cool idea!

  23. Andrew Smith

    May 1st, 2008 at 4:57 pm

    This is pretty neat. There are a lot of advanced javascript games coming out now. When a year ago you needed flash for it, now you can do it with javascript. Check out http://www.pattrns.com which is a pure javascript game for matching patterns, similar to set–it is also addidictive

  24. Alex

    May 1st, 2008 at 5:33 pm

    +1 for iSketch.

  25. Andy Triboletti

    May 1st, 2008 at 5:56 pm

    I developed a pictionary like guess the word game for Facebook as well.

    Check it out if you like:
    http://apps.facebook.com/playscribble

  26. Chris

    May 2nd, 2008 at 1:37 am

    isketch almost made me fail my degree course. I love it so

  27. Robert

    May 2nd, 2008 at 5:59 am

    JavaScript is more than capable of producing really amazing games.
    I’m not sure why Ryan chose to use flash for the drawing part when Canvas support (along with excanvas) is available in every major browser (IE6, IE7, IE8, FireFox 2+, Safari, Opera).
    I mean requiring flash kind of defeats the whole purpose of doing it in JavaScript :)

    I’m sure Ryan will continue to create new multiplayer games with JavaScript.

    I’ve done one game so far with JavaScript, but I think it shows off how you can make some really amazing things without using flash at all: http://worldofsolitaire.com

    The future for JavaScript based games looks bright :)

  28. Codeshepherd

    May 2nd, 2008 at 1:05 pm

    another online multi player game done right!

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