AILOF: Acrobabble is lots of fun

Acronyms have become part and parcel of the Internet world, much to the confusion of latecomers. LOL means "laughing out loud," IMHO means "in my humble opinion," and BRB means "be right back."

Games are also part and parcel of the Internet world. So it's only natural that acronyms would become the focus of an Internet game.

I first became acquainted with a game called "Acrobot" years ago on Internet Relay Chat (IRC). IRC is a dedicated Internet chat application, separate from the web or e-mail. IRC still exists, and it's still in use, but I haven't used it in years. I imagine that Acrobot is still being played on IRC.

Later, versions of Acrobot popped up on the web. The most popular was called Acrophobia; when the company that ran Acrophobia was bought and the game was put on hiatus, dedicated players scrambled for a while, until an individual created AcroChallenge. The interface wasn't quite as fancy as Acrophobia, but the game play was the same.

For a while, I was quite active on AcroChallenge, playing individually and as a member of a team in a sort of league. I lost interest, but still checked in every now and then to see how things were going.

It had been months since my last such visit when I checked out AcroChallenge last week. There just weren't many players online, and none of my old friends. I decided to check and see if maybe some other Acro game had popped up and the action had moved there.

Sure enogh, I found Acrobabble. The interface is much more like the Acrophobia of old, and I almost immediately started seeing familiar user names.

The rules

No matter which version is being played, the basic rules go something like this:

The computer generates a random sequence of letters (as few as three, or as many as seven). For the purposes of this example, let's say that the letters are E G B D F.

Each player in the game then creates a sentence for which those letters would be an acronym. Music students, who would recognize my not-so-random choice of letters, would immediately think of "Every good boy does fine" or "Every good boy deserves favor," but the idea here is to be creative: "Envious gardeners began digging frantically," or "Engineers graded bridge design failure."

In many versions of the game, there's an assigned topic for each round. That sounds like it would make the game harder, but actually in many cases it makes things easier, by getting you pointed in the right direction.

Most of the web-based versions of the game also have "clean" and "adult" rooms, depending on your tolerance for language. (The "adult" rooms, of course, are full of 15-year-olds who think any mention of bodily parts or functions is automatically HI-larious.)

Once time has run out, each player sees a list of all of the other players' sentences. You aren't told which sentence belongs to which player. You must vote on your favorite entry.

Players then receive points based on the number of votes their sentence received. The most popular acro gets bonus points, and there's also a bonus for the first player who completed a sentence, and one-point bonuses for all of the players who voted for the winning acro. (The bonus for voting for the winning acro is designed to discourage "defensive voting," or deliberately voting for bad acros in order to improve your own chances.)

Play continues, round after round, until one player gets to a certain number of points and wins the game.

Acrobabble

One nice thing about Acrobabble is that, instead of creating a new account, you can log in using an existing Google or Yahoo account, or play the game as an application on your Facebook or Myspace page.

Acrobabble does use a Flash interface; it works fine for me at home on DSL, but I have no idea how well it works on dial-up. There are voice messages during the game, such as "Enter your acros now!" and occasional video ads. (You can click on a "skip this ad" button after the first few seconds.)

If you have problems with Acrobabble on dial-up, you can always try AcroChallenge, which requires a (free) software download to work.

It's a fun game, one that's easy to drop into or out of at a moment's notice, and one that I think attracts a literate crowd. Check it out!

--John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government. He is also the author of the self-published novel "Soapstone." His personal web site is lakeneuron.com.