Games - InkLink

	Games - InkLink

Inklink is a multiplayer internet game created by Macromedia Shockwave. It involves many rooms, each with a capacity of eight players. While in a room, players can chat and their comments appear in speech bubbles. Once there are at least three players in a room, a game begins. The first player to enter the room gets a word or phrase, such as stick figure in beginner rooms, carpetbagger in expert ones, or any word from all three levels in a mixed bag. The purpose of the game is for one player to draw, while other players try to guess the word or phrase s/he is trying to communicate with the drawing.

Gameplay

The player's only drawing tools are eight markers–black, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and brown–and an eraser. The markers' lines are about 5 pixels wide, and the eraser about 20 pixels.

As a player draws he can no longer chat, but the other players can chat and guess at the word at the same time. If the word or phrase is contained in a player's guess, that player gets 120 points, minus 10 points for each 10-second interval between the time the drawer receives his clue and the time the clue is guessed. The drawer gets the same number of points.

In most rooms, after the first twenty seconds of the round, a blank for each letter in the word is shown as a hint, which includes spaces and punctuation. Twenty seconds later, when the points remaining for the round hit eighty, the first letter of the clue replaces the first blank. A minute gone, and a minute left, and the last letter falls into the hint. At the forty-point mark, the second letter of the clue appears, and when there are only twenty seconds left, the hint gives the guessers the second-to-last letter in the phrase. If the clock runs out without any correct guesses, no player gets any points and the game advances to the next numerical round. There are ten rounds per game. A drawer can pass at any time during the round. If the drawer passes, the next player up to draw gets a new word and the round number does not change. After ten completed rounds, the game is over and the three players whose points are the greatest are listed in order on the screen.

Cheating

If someone is cheating or being annoying or abusive one can click the player's name and then click a button labeled "boot". This will put a small picture of a boot next to the offender's username. If more than half of the people in the room vote to boot someone, the offender will be booted out of the room and unable to reenter under that profile for a few hours.

The most common act widely considered as cheating is spelling as you draw. In beginner rooms, even if a player writes out the exact word, this is usually tolerated. In intermediate level rooms, however, writing the given word is frowned upon, and you will probably be booted if you do such a thing. Often, you will find a group in the intermediate rooms who do not mind occasional letters or words in the drawings. But in expert level rooms, hardly anyone will allow writing of any kind, even numbers. Anyone who tries spelling very much will soon find himself an outcast.

Another method of cheating is to have a friend also on Inklink, playing in the same room, and having some way to communication--whether over the phone, through instant messaging, or just being in the same house. Whenever either of you gets up to draw, you can just tell your friend the word or phrase. You can make this look obvious by not drawing anything (while running the risk of getting booted in higher level rooms) or you can make it look like you're both just really good by actually starting to draw a picture. However, you could still be found out just by other players observing that you both only guess correctly when the other is drawing.

Known issues

Bugs

All games have their bugs, and there are a couple of easily spotted ones in InkLink. For instance, sometimes (perhaps when two people guess the correct phrase at nearly the same moment) the exclamation point, which always comes up next to the winning guesser's name pops up by one name, but quickly changes to another.

Lag

Inklink has lag sometimes; if you get lag, you will be able to type what you want to say in the box, but when you press enter, it takes a while to come up in the speech bubble. This can keep someone from winning a round, even if they guessed the word first. On a normal day, there will be no lag and the game will run fine. On other days there may be minor lag of up to two seconds. There are also days when the servers have problems, causing lag of up to fifteen seconds. At times, the servers go down completely, preventing anyone from playing. As of late, despite the new design of inklink (it received a complete overhaul in the summer of 2005) the servers have been extremely unreliable. On many days people are unable to connect to the rooms at all due to server issues. If someone scribbles with the marker while drawing, it will cause extreme lag to most players (except the drawer). This lag sometimes lasts all the way through the next round or two. The lagged players usually see the player drawing, but very slowly. They can type the correct answer several times, but it won't show up until rounds later. For this reason, scribbling will sometimes get you booted.

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